Irma

Less than an hour before setting foot into Pray-Harrold 414, a section of WRTG120: Composition I (still with the Roman numerals? Really?) I’m teaching this fall, the first first-year students I’ll have had in class in five years, three years since I’ve taught undergraduates in class, walkcrawling the WPA walkcrawl by teaching the class I prepare others to teach, but more than teaching I’m thinking about Irma’s gnashing waterteeth windteeth at Dominican Republic rn, alternations of calm panic calm panic at knowing Ph.’s being set up in Santo Domingo, uncanny is Brandi Carlile’s The Eye shuffling to iPod airwaves as I showered earlier, though can you really dance in the eye of a hurricane?, no, Brandi Carlile, no, I don’t think so, I think that’s bullshit, but that line about sturdy souls is pretty spot-on anyway, and the skies are blue somewhere upsky, and maybe it’s because I went to college in the nineteen-hundreds, but there is lightness, even a little bit of distracted lightness in considering for a twisted minute the usefulness of this extended version of “Trouble” as a way to talk about on-time attendance expectations with these twenty-five eighteen-year-olds I’m soon to meet, who, if they’re late because they’re dancing in the eye of a hurricane, I hope step in with this much groove.