Packing

Soap, shaving kit, beard trimmer, frying pan, olive oil, and, oh yes, clothes, and computer and printer and paper and on and on.  As I pack to go to Pacific U. for my first of five residencies, I didn't expect my heart to be beating faster today, but it is.  Tomorrow will be my first time in about  fifty-five years to set myself up in a dormitory, in effect rooming with three other guys for ten days.  It's a short time, really, but I discovered that I needed my stuff, my amenities, my mini-immersion tool for mixing and my olive oil for cooking eggs at breakfast time.  My wife and son went together and bought two new frying pans for me, a gift for Fathers Day and a little personal support for my time at Pacific U.  I think it was the description of the kitchen that I received in the mail from the MFA program that moved them to action.  That description said the kitchen had "1 pot and 1 pan."

My wife had my 10-year old VW Jetta with a hundred thirty-four thousand miles on it detailed yesterday, another Fathers Day gift, and today it's beautiful.  I enjoy my car, a really dependable one that followed on after another Jetta I had for fifteen years and about a hundred sixty thousand miles before the current one.

I'm full of anticipation, wondering what my dorm suite, and those three other guys, will be like, wondering what the tone of the residency will be like.  Shelley Washburn, the Director of the program, is certainly congenial and informative.  And I'm still stunned at the faculty power that the residency will expose me to--about 35 faculty for the week.  This will be intense; still, I expect to enjoy it all.  Even in graduate school,  I wasn't in a situation like this--so many workshops, craft lectures, readings, and classes in so few days.  I want to absorb it all, and I'm optimistic about the way it and the advisor, whoever he or she will be, will get me on a good footing for making better poems and better revisions. More later.