College of the Desert.....start of fall semester....the late-August-humid shuffle through unbelievably long distances in suffocation humidity/high temperatures....the fountain at mid-campus drained, and the rest of the place torn up, fenced off, construction and expensive new buildings in the midst of state economic collapse....unable to get cash from the ATM machine in cafeteria building....and brightly, a stack of Solstice 2006 with cosmic, vibrant, orange painting by a talented student and portrait artist from Thailand. It was exactly ten years ago, August, 1999 that I walked into a classroom filled with English 50 students, my first session at COD. Tarah was entering 6th grade at nearby Marywood Country Day School. I was renting a house on Silver Moon Trail in the Silver Spur neighborhood in south Palm Desert from my friend Bob Kretschmar, where I lived for three years.
"A Philosophy of Buddha and Three Daughters of Buddha" by Chusit WijarnjoragijBest of all, a new adjunct instructor, waiting to meet with the dean, sitting in a chair and thumbing through the book with great interest....flashback to my job interview at Cochise College in southern Arizona in 1998, when I was in a similar seat and waiting for my interview and was lured in by a copy of Mosaic, their lit-mag....my inspiration for generating the Solstice lit-mag program at COD, in fact! A beautiful repast.
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