Dust

Going back to the source.

Having trapezed across campus for over a month now trying to get my grant funding figured out, I may actually have a solution.

Basically, I went to NAU Human Relations last week. Here's what they told me: We can't help you. Contact the financial aid office.

Who, as I expected, had never heard of the HURA award.

In addition, HR told me that they could not confirm my present NAU employment without first having contact with the Lumberjack. I then started out to fill out a New Hire application, my fourth, if memory serves.

Luckily, and I write this in the Lumberjack office, I should be able to get the my ambiguity as an employee squared away by Monday evening at the LJ's first ED Board meeting.

I will also probably finish filling out that new hire information.


*

Life feels a bit like camping with my father.

When I was young we would head out after dark. After we had eaten "pocket stews", potatoes, groundbeef, and bell peppers baking over a campfire in tinfoil.

We would head out on foot or in my father's Toyota Forerunner, which exists in my mind, a far off white beacon at the end of our many hikes.

If we head by foot, my father would often stop and attempt to call in owls.

But right now I feel more like those excursions. in the Forerunner. My father would take his spotlight and shine its yellow light out the window of the car and we would the dust swirl in front of us as we drove, very slowly, hoping for an animal that might dart out in front of us.

I feel like that. All night and wind, and one spotlight, a glaring metaphor, shining through the kicked up dust and sand.