Accommodatingly

It’s official, and exciting, and a bit scary: this fall I’ll be leaving Macalester for Harvard.

I’m grateful to Macalester, which has done everything it possibly can for me, and grateful to Mac students, who are creative, attentive and amazing, and grateful to the Twin Cities– to our friends, to the Hennepin Avenue Bridge, to Rain Taxi, to the Triple Rock Social Club, to the Lynx, who might be headed for their best year ever (even better than 18-16).

There’s no place I would rather have been for most of the past seven years. But our families are in the Northeast, and for that reason, among others, it’s time for us to go.

I’m still at Macalester this spring, of course, and still chair this term. We expect to stick around for much of the summer: it’s going to take a while, we hope, to say goodbye to all our friends who live here. (We hope it doesn’t take long to sell our house! Getting ready to sell a house turns out to be more time-consuming, and perhaps more anxiety-inducing, than getting ready to buy one.) We think we’ll be leaving in August or in late July.

On a slightly less life-changing note, the new Arcade Fire is grimly splendid: it sounds a lot like Bruce Springsteen circa “Racing in the Street,” or “The River,” or even “My Hometown.” I thought their first album was pleasant, eclectic indie-rock– then Jessie brought this masterpiece home. There’s even a saxophone: to my surprise, it works!

Also grimly splendid, and also a big step up over previous efforts: David Wheatley’s latest book of poems.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 13th, 2007 at 2:17 pm and is filed under Family, Music, Poetry, Steve's Writing Elsewhere, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.