My spring classes began today. I actually started my assigned reading yesterday. The Christmas break (which I’m sure the school calls Winter Break) was nice, though I spent it mostly working at this and that. I think of myself as a lazy man, but I do manage to keep busy.

Before me stretches a year of academics. If I keep on schedule, I’ll be done with classes in December, and then there’ll only be the final testing (or whatever) to convince them I deserve my degree (a Master’s degree, I’ve learned, entitles you to put the suffix Esq. behind your name. I don’t think I’ll avail myself of that).

So it’s a matter of doing my time, like a convict. Each day I do the designated work, and I’ll tick the days off one by one until I come out into the light at the end.

On an unconnected note, I bought my first pair of loafer shoes on Saturday. I suppose you’d call them loafers, though they don’t look quite like what I was taught to think of as loafers back in the ’50s. They look a little dorky to my eye, but not as dorky as walking around with my shoes untied (I have complained about modern Teflon shoelaces in this space before), and way less dorky than stopping to kneel down on my old man’s limbs to re-tie them. These are the small indignities God gives us, in His mercy, so that the Angel of Death, when he appears at last, won’t look like such an unwelcome guest after all.