Well, it's another mid spring morning in Indiana. The sky is blueing and the clouds are white. There's a heavy wind. True to form it's cold as anything after a Sunday when even at ten o'clock at night, the fan needed to blow on me to keep sweat from coming. A woman at my church told me, "I love Indiana because if you don't like the weather, it's bound to turn change tomorrow." What Alice left out is that the weather is usually likely to change to something equally dislikable as what you have now. When a perfect spring days blows by everyone is grateful. And everyone is surprised.

Well, I've had my birthday and the surprise was how much I thought I would 1.) hate turning twenty-seven and 2.) be paradoxically unchanged by it. Both are untrue. I feel like I've grown into something, and I actually enjoy saying, "I'm twenty-seven." Since college when people have called me sir or kid I've been offended on both scores. Now I'm grateful for both. If this makes any sense I don't feel like I'm old. (Everyone around me is much older.) I feel like I've matured into a proper youth.

I'm so excited about this upcoming summer. I'm listening to the Sheryl Crow CD "Com'on Com'on," the bright sunshiny one that always reminds me of two summers ago. There is a sort of summer in my mind, and I always think of that summer and that record and the novel I was working on in one bright moment. But looking back, that summer and the time afterward was actually a time of thwarted promises and misguided ambitions. A time when I depended on too many people and counted on so many factors that, in the following year were painfully taken from me.

Now it seems like THIS summer, this moment, this time in life, is the ACTUAL moment of happiness I was only sort of dreaming of back then.