Random Thoughts on a Sunny Sunday

Random observations on a Sunday afternoon.

I'm a blogger-lite on weekends, normally, but having self-medicated on a heavy dosage of sunshine and exhorted my skin cells to produce Vitamin D, I am now inside with the window wide open, and a gentle, cool breeze pushing out the staleness of several weeks of "conditioned" air. I can smell the fresh-cut wild onions next door where a neighbor of a neighbor is attempting to cut grass that is three times taller than it should be.

Ah, spring!

I was in Norman on Saturday to attend the graduation ceremony for a niece. The flag was at half-mast at the Lloyd Noble Center, which threw me back for a moment until I remembered that Wayman Tisdale had passed the day before. During the event my eyes kept drifting upwards where his number is "retired" and his name remains in the memory of the Sooner faithful. At a school where athletic prowess is legendary, it's weird to realize just how long it took for basketball greatness to arrive there. Wayman was young. I guess we'd have to say, "Wayman, we knew ye, but then we hardly knew ye."

Could someone please warn visitors to Norman to stay off I-35! I managed to get caught in a construction traffic jam -- in which no actual construction was occuring -- that delayed my departure nearly 30 minutes. That stretch of interstate between Norman and Oklahoma City has been under reconstruction of one sort or another for at least 18 years. That should tell us something. It tells me to take the back highways in from now on.

The Saturday convocation of the College of Arts & Sciences was a rather low-key affair where the speechifying was kept to a minimum. I guess the big shebang was the night before at the football stadium. With two people introducing the graduates in rapid-fire, they managed to get through the proceedings in two hours flat. Dean Paul Bell Jr. kept has remarks to an absolute minimum. The other speaker was a graduating senior from Mannford who wasn't quite as brief but let us know that nothing has changed in the University curriculum. He gave us a laundry list of all the troubles of modern America -- crashing economy, rampaging unemployment, exorbitant health care costs, "global warming that's not cooling as fast as it should be" (I kid you not) and government that is not responsive to the needs of its people.

But no need to fear, he reassured us, as he launched into a short but oh-so-familiar polemic on how this graduating class would join the current leadership in solving all these problems, even helpfully ending his speech with "Yes, we can! Yes, we can!" The students applauded vigorously; the audience was somewhat more restrained. It's nice to know our tax dollars are still reliably churning out the annual quota of progressive minds at our leading universities.

I would suspect that most of the graduates are more worried about getting a good job and driving a nice car than they are saving polar bears and making sure we all suffer under a single-payer health care system. For the rest, reality will hit home soon.