college

Wednesday Witness: Take a Minute

/ J. Thorp / Leave a comment

In last week’s Wednesday Witness column, I described one of several homeless men and women who frequented Yale’s campus when I attended in the 1990s. I worked for the graduate School of Music all four years, and one of my first and primary duties was walking the entire campus, distributing or hanging concert flyers and posters at various buildings, businesses, and kiosks. I made the rounds at least once a week; as a result, I saw the local homeless frequently, and they saw me.

During my first year, one man, in particular, kept his eyes open for my brown leather ballcap and black poster portfolio. He was an older fellow, creased and grimy from years on the street, with lank and thinning gray hair, well-worn workman’s clothing, and the unmistakable aroma of body odor and booze. Whenever he saw me, his pale eyes would pull into focus, and his mouth would break into a smile that was equal parts crooked yellow teeth and no teeth at all. He would rise (if seated), reach out to shake my hand, and start the same conversation.

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Wednesday Witness: Hard Choices

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The coldest I have ever been was during a late-season, black-powder deer hunt. I was sitting atop a ladder stand in the dark in January. The morning was bitterly cold following a storm that dropped more than two feet of fluffy snow, leaving clear skies and wind in its wake.

I had dressed for a long, cold sit while a friend attempted to push deer toward me from the other side of the section. I had not dressed for the half-mile march through knee-deep snow and buried brush that preceded my climbing the stand. By the time I was settled, I was also sweating, and once I was stationary, I shivered beneath my layers.

Even after sunrise, the air was frigid. My fingers ached as I held my rifle, and I clenched and unclenched my toes inside my boots, trying to maintain some semblance of feeling. (It was weeks before they lost the pin-prickly feeling from that morning.)

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Byline: J. Thorp

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I was doing some work for an old friend and former employer today and found myself reflecting on the wide variety of writing I’ve undertaken for pay in the past 30 years. Beginning as an undergraduate working in the Yale School of Music Concert Office, I’ve been creating marketing materials and writing profiles, features, articles, and speeches on everything from interior design to kung fu to the public impact of higher education.

So, just for kicks, here are a few recent bylines I’ve rediscovered. For those that are available online, I’ve included links.

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Book Break: Second Nature

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I received a somewhat uneven education at Yale University, primarily because I was a 17-year-old kid when I arrived, and given a smorgasbord of courses and little guidance. Yale’s approach was to require a certain number of courses from each of four groupings, plus the prerequisites for your degree. With that as my framework and anthropology as my major, I had plenty of room in my schedule to take whatever caught my eye, from Herpetology to Polish to The History of Jazz.

The history course catalog, in particular, lured me down a rabbit hole: I took two History of the American West courses back to back, essentially two semesters following the colonial frontier westward over the history of Europeans on this continent, then a course called North American Environmental History, which traced our peculiarly American views and impacts on land, nature, and the environment over that same period.

That’s a long preamble to a book review.

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Autumn Update

/ J. Thorp / 1 Comment

The older I get, the more I repeat myself, so you may have heard this before: I would take six months of October. A half year of crisp, cool, color-filled autumn; about six weeks of snowy white winter between Thanksgiving and roughly New Year’s Day, and the balance a long, blooming spring that turns green but never quite gets hot.

If ever I find the right combination of latitude and altitude, I’ll be gone. You’re welcome to visit.

We’re currently blessed with a beautiful October here in Minnesota. The leaves turned from green to gold, red, orange, and bright yellow in a few short days, it seemed; a thunderstorm stripped the top two-thirds of one tree across the street, but left the others intact, and even a sticky, wet snowfall earlier this week served only to make the color pop before vanishing into the soil before noon.

This morning the rooftops are coated in pale frost, but the ground is wet and smells like year’s end. Indoors, coffee’s in my cup, bluegrass is on the radio, and a whiff of the furnace’s first burnings is blowing up from the registers. It’s gonna be a good day.

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