Waiting for an Audience with Harry

**Only two more weeks of ESL class! . . . As much as I love teaching, I really need a break. My students could use one too.

**My mind is going . . . documents I thought I put together ages ago, I can’t find in their proper network folders . . . stuff I thought I sent out, I can’t find in the “sent” box . . . What the heck is going on? Am I slowing going bonkers or what?

**Started the Harry Potter book last night. Got only a hundred pages in, because I had a few other things to deal with . . .

**I have a very good friend that I met at a previous job. She’s a bright young lady who put herself through a very well-regarded women’s college and has been trying to put herself through law school. Her family has been of no help to her – in fact they have been sabotaging all of her efforts to improve herself. I wish I could tell you all of things that have happened, but I do want to respect her privacy. Now, because of her family’s careless actions, she may not be able to secure another loan to go back for her last year of law school. She called me in tears last night. She is very, very distraught about this . . . she has been working double shifts all summer in order to pay for the housing, and had some exciting internships lined up for the school year. It breaks my heart not to be able to help her and to hear her anguish on the phone. Some people get all the breaks in life, and some people who work hard as the dickens and never seem to get a break . . . I wish I was independently wealthy and could help her out with a loan, but we are pretty on the edge ourselves. If she can’t find a way in 4 weeks, she is going to have wasted two years of law school along with being 100K in debt.

**I’m rather tired today . . . didn’t get to sleep until late, thinking about things . . . so my output today is rather wanting. However, I found a pretty appropriate poem for today, since it is SO muggy-hot. Enjoy!

Very Hot Day
Michael Ryan

I know what's going to happen
to those two plastic produce bags of crushed ice
I perched atop the garden wall:
one's floppy, droopy, flabby,
its overhanging pooch of ice-melt
already about to pull the whole bag down
into the dirt, bursting it, turning it
into a fistful of filthy gummy polyethelene;
the other's centered, poised — even
its ice-melt seems to know where to settle
so the bag stays upright and stable:
if it were a person, he'd radiate
smiling confidence and good health,
a team player wanting only to be useful,
to stand as an example of how to adjust
conflicting parts of himself for the general good.
His effortless balance and bright red twisty-tie
might seem flashy and arrogant
were he not so persistently mindful
that he shares the other bag's fate.
How could he not, since they're almost touching?
He'd have to be completely oblivious
not to witness the moment his twin
plops into the dirt.
He'd have to know he's heading there, too,
no matter how solid he feels at present —
that even now he's really broken and helpless
and destined for the recycle bin
where like an omniscient god I throw
useless used bags for crushed ice
the butcher gives me to keep my raw meat
safe while I drive home on a very hot day.