THE SPACE BETWEEN

Thanks to those of you that contributed to the latest dialogue. It has been an intense week or so. She went home last weekend. She's doing well. She left the hospital with a steel plate in her jaw and a halo brace holding her fractured neck together. What a tough young woman. I pray that she is able to deal with her emotional wounds as well as she has dealt with her physical condition.

Some of you raised some meaningful and provocative questions. Sorry I didn't engage all of them with my typical vigor and verve. The last few days have been filled with final exam prep and an enormous load of papers to grade. I am always a little stricken with malaise at the end of the spring semester. Don't know why. Perhaps it's the stress. Perhaps it's a little like post-partum depression: separating from something you have nurtured for months. We don't finish finals until the end of this week; then I get to sit through a commencement speech by Majority Whip Roy Blunt.

Huh. Whip Roy Blunt.

Whip Roy Blount.

Me like the sound of that.

I have been escaping paper-grading by watching an occasional film. The first escape was My Dinner With Andre. If you haven't seen this 110-minute film about a dinner conversation, you must. Do it now. I'll wait.

Wasn't it great? Can you imagine having another "So, how was your day?" kind of conversation after that?

If you weren't delighted by the dialogue, at least you had to love the fact that Wallace Shawn actually says "inconceivable" like his Vizzini character in Princess Bride.

The next was a revisitation of Amadeus, the film about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, that is really about Antonio Salieri: "the patron saint of mediocrity." He's my saint these days.

Speaking of saints, yesterday it was Luther that spoke to my internal and ongoing catholic-protestant struggle. As Protestant-like Catholic author Walker Percy wrote, "One dead, the other powerless to be born."

Was that random enough for you? Back to grading. Oh, hell, everybody gets an A.