Weekend Snapshots

Even if we are occupied with important things and even if we attain honor or fall into misfortune, still let us remember how good it once was here, when we were all together, united by a good and a kind feeling which made us, for a while, perhaps better than we are.
-Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Rainy Saturday morning. One of those perfect ones. Not the kind in February when it's too cold to be alive so you crawl back under your covers and pray that time stops until the sun comes back out. The June kind, when you wake up and the only thing on your agenda is brunch with 35 of your closest friends. And then, why not?, you all decide to caravan up to the Michigan dunes. You pile into cars and spend the next hour singing "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" at the top of your lungs, and everybody knows it and you all do the voices and the pauses and the background music. And an hour later it's all blankets and stolen dining hall fruit and frisbees, a painfully, beautifully freezing Lake Michigan, a race to the top, jumping and rolling all the way down, spelling out "ND" and "Vision" in the sand [naturally].

And then the sun comes out.

Burgers, shakes, a showtunes and falling asleep ride home. The most incredible be-still-and-know-that-I-am-God St. Mary's Lake sunset of all time. "Airplane" and a dozen-point-five friends on couple mattresses, sprawled out, spooning, laughing, falling asleep. Perfect. Perfect, perfect, perfect.

Knowing there will always be someone to sit with at brunch, which means you never have to bring a book or pick up a pape on the way. And there's grapefruit every day in the summer. Laundry [makes me feel like I deserve to wear clothes]. Cantor arms and the Gloria and the return of the ridiculous flower dress, the redpinkyelloworangegreen one with pleats and pockets, the one that makes my family pretend not to know me when I wear it. A perfect homily. Milkshakes at midnight and one too many people in the car, the walk back and the Grotto at night, five of us praying all in a row, side by side, a little walk-back-from-D6 heaven on earth. One of those best ever late night conversations about relationships, everybody on the floor in a circle and it's got to be 1 in the morning by now. There isn't a single place I go all day in which someone isn't humming "How Can I Keep from Singing?" Not a single place. Not a one can keep from singing.

And the completely undeserved and wonderfully surprise gift of a pad of new music staff paper from Jessica.

2:30 a.m. The full moon sits directly over the Dome - we pause a second to take a picture [Matt Cashore couldn't have taken a finer one]. We line the edge of the dock, hand in hand, our glasses and room keys and superfluous layers of clothing abandoned on the sand behind us. One... two... three... JUMP!

Summer Folk Choir practice. I don't think I've ever had to try to not burst out laughing for more consecutive minutes than I did tonight. [75 minutes, to be exact.] Followed by packing up the cars for tomorrow's camping trip extravaganza, followed by Operation: TunnelVision '07. Visiting Dillon, Sorin, and the Knights of Columbus building. Under the cover of darkness.

From underground.

Afterwards, we collapse on the South Quad grass, drenched in sweat and covered in dirt, all of us in our black and with our flashlights and headlamps and individual descriptions of just how boiling hot it was down there, laughing at the pictures on Jennie's camera and pinpointing the location of the pipes we signed. We pass around the map; along the righthand side, all in a row, it's one dozen signature, comma, secret agent name.

If life were any better, I wouldn't even think it was real.


Eric Buell can make the grossest noise in the world.