January 14, 2007
Page 17
On waking Wednesday morning, we'd stroll through a grove of trees onto the ICU campus and stop by the cafeteria for lunch. In the afternoon, we'd drink weak coffee in the lounge and, if the weather was nice, lie down on the campus lawn and look up at the sky.
She called it our Wednesday picnic.
"Every time I come here I feel like we're having a real picnic."
"A real picnic?"
"Yeah, a wide-open space where lawn extends everywhere you look and people look healthy..." She lowered herself onto the lawn, smoking a cigarette while idly striking matches.
"The sun rises, and then it sets. People come, and then they go. Time flows away like air. What's not a picnic about it?"
I was 21 then and a few weeks away from being 22. At the time I didn't have any hope of graduating from college but I didn't have any good reason to quit. Through a series of strangely related hopeless circumstances, I hadn't made any progress in several months.
Posted by tim at January 14, 2007 11:37 PM
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)