Don't worry, kid, I did the same thing...

Another sign of summer at Holden: the past week or so has seen us attempting to mitigate the crushing flow of people through the dining hall at meals by setting up two buffet lines, instead of just one. Things are still pretty hectic. Soon I and much of the inner "winter community" will abandon the project of eating in the dining hall altogether because it will get too crowded. Those days aren't quite here yet, but there's still a certain pressure to navigate the food line efficiently, get your dishes to the dish pit, free up your chair, etc., etc. This is the only excuse with any semblance of adequacy that I can come up with for how I resolved a fierce inner debate about whether to cut in front of a three-year-old girl in the line for lunch.

Now what actually happened was this: mom had the little girl's plate and was moving along, selecting food for the both of them, with Little Sally in tow and periodically peering over the table's edge to contemplate a lettuce bin. Not a huge obstruction; in fact, no more than forty and a bit inches of obstruction, so in the end I resolved the situation by simply reaching over the girl's head for the lettuce tongs.

Except while I was piling up my salad, she backed up and climbed onto my feet.

I thought, Okay.

And then I announced, "All right, we're going to move now." Efficiency, after all. I needed to get in reach of the cucumbers.

Little Sally grasped the edge of the table and walked right along with me, her feet on my feet.

We did this twice before mother looked over and child looked over and child realized she was NOT standing on mum's feet after all.

And you know, part of me felt bad -- because I can remember that day, that instant, looking up and realizing the navy suit pant and the leg inside it I was clinging to was not my father's, but the man my father had engaged in conversation just outside the church. I can remember grabbing a perfect stranger's hand at a theme park and hearing him explain in heavily accented English, "Child, it's not me -- it's not me." I can remember those things because they were jarring. Little brushes with a world I didn't know was out there, where people live and die and go to church and public schools and theme parks and yet unforeseeably, unaccountably aren't in my family. Good heavens.

I have a secret. When you get to be roughly grown-up-size, which I am -- it still happens, you're on the other side, it's hilarious, and you stop feeling bad for terrorizing the young person almost immediately.

Almost.

Image of Early Summer

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

AND ALSO THE WOODS HAS REALLY FREAKING CUTE FAWNS.

It's June at Holden, and the does are giving birth. I spent a few days being unduly mad because everyone was seeing the fawns except me, but in the past few days, I've seen my share. One frisking about mum's legs on the lawn below Lodge 1, puppy-sized and awkward. And two this morning as I ran west -- I had only just passed the wash-out when I came across a doe with two fawns, days old, the pair of them, staring at me from around her knees. A word about my mornings. Yes, I run, and I use the Hart Lake trail, and I pass the foot bridge and Middle Earth and get a few steps up that really unforgiving hill just before the lake itself, and then turn around and jog back to the Village. This takes 90 minutes altogether, and I was really proud of that and figured I was the only person in the world who could do it, until I overheard Mark Schwehn explaining exactly the same running route to Fred Niedner. So I've only lately joined the fit-Valpo-professors club; I was deflated, but maybe I should go back to being proud about this.

I digress. Cute fawns.

This morning I had the luck to come across one when I had my camera with me. She was behaving instinctively: mothers often leave their fawns alone, even for hours at a time, while they go and feed, and in the meanwhile the fawn knows to curl up into a tight little ball and wait quietly in the grass. The goal here is not to attract a bear, who would -- welcome to nature kids -- find an easy helping of protein. The mother always comes back, too, as long as there isn't a crowd of humans blocking her child. Which is why I only took the one photo, and then headed off to Fred's bible study.