A great day, beginning with the speakers’ breakfast, extending into an intensely inspiring opening session with Doris Kearns Goodwin (I read her Team of Rivals this summer–can’t recommend this book too highly), a great meeting devoted to online learning, at least two wonderful conversations in the afternoon … such a feast.

But aside from Goodwin, whose talk was really sui generis, the two high points today were Brian Hawkins’ valedictory address, “How I Learned To Drive,” and my dinner with my Frye 2005 colleagues this evening. Brian’s talk deserves a post of its own, and it will get it, too. But before I go to sleep tonight I’m driven to try to say something about this evening’s dinner. I’m tired and I won’t get this exactly right, but I want to blog it in the moment to see if the “iron-fresh odor of discovery” will emerge despite my fatigue.

My account begins and ends with a comment left by a Frye colleague on a blog post dated Thursday, June 16, 2005. This simple act has touched my heart in ways I cannot begin to describe. In this moment the long tail, the remembrance of things past, and the knowledge of a community still vital and essential, all combine to help me find what I never lost.

I know these words will be cryptic to some of my readers, and I am sorry for that, though I think that the 2005 blog post gives enough context for most to understand at least something of what I’m saying. Or trying to say. What I mean is that I’d forgotten I wrote that post, largely because I had a hard time dealing with the way in which that moment of utter clarity I had over two years ago, a clarity I have felt only a few times in my life, seemed to have turned to murk.

But of course it had not. Now I see that my own merciful former self wanted to tell me something tonight. Writing in that moment two years ago, that self committed its moment of clarity to me. And I could honor that commitment only when a colleague, a fellow time-traveler with the marvelous gift of encouragement, wrote a comment recalling this moment and looking out to the next ones.

The imperative was never clearer. Remember this. But to hear myself speak, I needed my gifted colleague.

One comment, one moment, one timely memorial. Thank you, Helen.