That was the wording in bold, cursive 38 point script, scrawled diagonally across the letter-sized envelope. The exterior was a glossy affair, with a photograph of the UC Irvine administration building. Inside, a crisp .097 caliper single sheet of white paper with blue letterhead, had an opening that read:

Dear Ms. Holden,

I am pleased to offer you admission to the University of California, Irvine (UC Irvine) as a Dance major in the Claire Trevor School of the Arts for fall quarter, 2008. Your admission reflects recognition of your accomplishments and our belief that you will thrive as a member of the UC Irvine community.

As admissions letters went, this one was rather impersonal. If not too generic, then certainly positively dry. Whatever accounted for its lack of spark, It certainly must have accounted for my daughter’s lukewarm reception of the news.

By contrast, Sarah Lawrence’s acceptance—which came fit within a thick, texture-ful accordian-style binder, with embossed, colored stenciling etched across it—was penned in forest-green font, on cream-colored .157 bond paper. It effused:

Dear Maya:

Welcome to the Sarah Lawrence College Class of 2012! The Admission Committee was impressed and delighted by your application. Your vitality as a student and your compelling personal qualities distinguished you among a remarkably strong group of candidates this year.

Talk about your hard sell. (And don’t you believe that flattery won’t get you anywhere!)

(continue...)

—tjmHolden

John A. Wheeler passed this week. If you haven’t heard of him, he’s the physicist who coined the word “black hole”, along with “worm hole”. Rumored to have invented the liver loaf on whole wheat, topped with quantum foam. Actually, that part I made up (although he is associated with the foam part).

Part of this peripatetic life we live is trying to keep up with the passings. Our lives are so full of the lives of so many others. They come and go each day—to our great good fortune, filling our lives, making us wholer-than-before; unfortunately, many of them never return, leaving voids which, though not quite black holes, can still suck some of the life from us.

Because our world is so vast and because there are so many passings, trying to make note of which passing is noteworthy—and why—can be a full time activity. I don’t know if you have the time, but I generally don’t. Fueling my ever-accreting sense of insensitivity and sensory overload. Thus (I guess) in the case of Wheeler, I will invest a few seconds—registered in these sentences. I can begin (and nearly end) with the obit, as physics is not my field. According to the text, Wheeler was among the major players of his age. Tabbed as physics’ “most imaginative adman. He was also science’s Zelig, seeming to be present at every important event or discovery.” Consorting, did he, with Niels Bohr, Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, and Albert Einstein.

Pretty heady stuff (pun intended?) if you think about it.

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—tjmHolden

Where can a dead man go The question with an answer only dead men know . . . Nickel Creek, When in Rome

“Don’t expect any favors out of life, but . . . enjoy the hell out of ‘em if they ever happen to come your way . . . sometimes that is the thing that reminds you what makes life worth living.”

There’s a motto in there, somewhere. A philosophy. A means of surviving—if not thriving. At the very least, a peripatetique‘s creed in the making.

At this point, though, all of you form-freaks out there are busy scratching your heads wondering how that aphorism-in-gestation has anything to do with this entry’s title . . . come on, admit it, you are. Also puzzling through how favors and expectations have anything to do with the shots of the heavens or the lyrics from a Nickel Creek ditty. Well, brace up: it gets even less scrutable than that . . .

‘Cause flying Business Class gratis from LAX to Narita figures in. As does Serena Williams.

Care to find out how? Whether you do or don’t, here’s how it all goes . . .

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—tjmHolden