Goodbye UC

So I am officially through with all the ceremony of the degree. Family here. Pretty red robe, periwinkle velvet hood and a dress beneath: peacock blue velvet and shoes with little blueberries at the toes.

I am a tangle of feelings. Missing one someone surprisingly-much. Grateful for so many someones, family not the least of that, and that bird and all of the help to get me this far, and that bear, whom I have always known and never long enough.

This day contained another magic, as out of the blue as the chicken that dropped onto our windshield on a North Carolina highway late one night. As out of the blue as the connections that I feel years and years later to people and that I imagine are one-sided until a day like today when a woman I admire so and think of often, but whom I have not spoken to in over a decade and at last hearing lived in North Carolina, calls out to me and is there, Cincy, both of us in our robes and time just circled forward, reared up and kissed me gently on the forehead as if to say: some things are worth it, some are not, and time, like a dutiful child learning arthrimetic, carries over the surplus and reminds you when you hit the next column, just how much you still have to figure in.

I'm saying it felt a little miraculous.