Not that folks want to know what the last eleven months has been like for those of us who are the ground but…

and of course, many Antiochians are cerebral and depending on your vintage ..not into pop culture….

the metaphor or example that works for me is the original pilot for the TV series STAR TREK…..this was pre-Shatner even… (Jeffrey Hunter)

As the pilot episode starts out there is what is left of Captain Pike……and he is being court martialed.

All that is left of Capt Pike is from the chest up and he can no longer even talk. There are just blinking lights at the base of that bust…to respond to questions….

He had crashed on some far away planet..and the intelligent life there tried putting him back in one piece…but didn’t really understand human anatomy in its totality….they also

experimented with him….having the ability to provide him with their versions of alternate reality…so they played virtuality games.

In joking with peers here…one co-op professor laughed and said…” I know what the blinking lights are…just what we have been going through all year. The answers are for YES, NO, and MAYBE.”

So one day last week all college employees received two letters at home. The first saying this is the sixty day countdown to closing and your are being terminated. The other was

please try to be patient and hold on to some hope …..from a liason group of the AC3 and the AUB.

About 3:40 my phone at the Big Olive rang and it was my other half…who said…I am coming up for a hike.

I had actually tried taking a hike the day before but felt anxious and unfocused.

So my other half came up and we read the two letters in the library parking lot ….(Yes, No and Maybe?) and since it was an outrageously beautiful day we headed to the Glen (after a brief

pit stop at the Non-Stop office at 716 Xenia Ave. )

On the way to the Glen..the campus never looked prettier…crabapple, lilac, dogwoods, redbud, violets and spring beauties and as we were heading by Pennell House (formerly the Infirmary or

AASI..depending of your vintage) there was a marvelous cascading Wisteria in full bloom… I would bet that that wisteria has been there for decades. Of course I stuck my nose in there too.

Once we went down the Glen steps…..there were may-apples. trilliums, lavender and yellow flowers everywhere. After having had a snowy March and a cool April everything

seems to have popped out at once. The canopy above was starting to leave out but was still spring yellow green. I thought…about… well years of Antioch….we headed to the

Springs and then the cascades and then to the stagecoach road. Someone must have gotten warm… an abandoned sweatshirt was hanging on a fence post. Lots of watercress below the cacscades,

As we got near the eco-camps we saw bunches of elementary school kids sitting in a circle..some were undergoing face painting…..inner city kids…one of whom looked like a member

of the blue man group. ……and saw garlic mustards and honeysuckle, ugh those invasive species…and plenty of mushrooms, like Chicken o the woods…and something a friend of mine calls

pheastback…because its speckled look is reminiscent of the bird……….

We almost got to the pine forest but headed down the Traveller’s spring path back to where the swinging bridge used to be and then crossed the creek on stepping stones and

finished up by traversing the Talus slope…. What a commuter I have become!!!!….at the end of the day I have been hitting the freeway when I should have stopped to enjoy the Glen…

so wrapped up in everything I forgot to enjoy our giant backyard……

So I guess I took a slightly less than traditional Maywalk….too bad we don’t have a leader to take us on one.

When I lived in town and was a runner I always ran the Glen, John Bryan and the the Gorge. I used to run around the country roads as well and discovered where Joe Cali lived

and once caught him in madras seer-sucker shorts and a white tee-shirt while mowing his lawn. a sight for sore eyes.

Joe always chuckled too…he always made references about my running to sweet-water Clifton’s..but in reality I think Joe was making some mention to some baseball or basketball player ]who was named sweetwater Clifton …….his sports references always sailed right over my head.. Ocassionally.. since I moved to Dayton (now 22 years) I have still hiked sometimes to get away from the city of Dayton…and once even found a dead body at the base of the Horace Mann statue by the pine forest..on a pretty February Saturday .

A person had bicycled all the way from Dayton and shot themselves in the head right under “Be ashamed to die”…

I called 911 and wound up being there half the day and the sheriff even swabbed my hands in case they had gunpowder on them. we read his suicide note and teher was 250 in his wallet.

A few years later when I was on another hike some vandals had dipped Horace’s feet in red paint…sure did give me flashbacks.

Another Glen memory is that of a misty moonlight night during the last full moon of summer. many of my friends were YS folks and Wilberforce and CSU students…. Once we all

decided to have a full moon picnic in the pine forest…. a boombox, a bottle of wine and thou, eh?

I guess that we were the wrong combination of men and women…..white and black.

There were six of us…and two of including me had taken a moonlight hike in the Glen….

while we we gone I guess some good ol boys had passed by the group and asked Melvin, a townee, could they hang with us. Melvin..sais something like “Your momma” to them.

We had no idea that that conversation had taken place. and just as we were about to crawl into ther sleeping bags and call it a night….we hear a voice from the darkness iun the

pineforest say one of the most aweful things I have heard. “We oughta take those niggas —– and stuff them in those white whores’ mouths”

Needless to say that was about the last thing I would have expected to hear on a pretty moonlight night. It sort of made my heart pound. But I got up and said “It ’s almost

Sunday morning, shouldn;’t you be thinking about getting ready to go to church/” By that time the other group realized there were at least six of us instead of four… so, they

thought we had guns of something..so after a short calm we packed up and headed back to John Bryan Park road. Melvin, whose mouth had gotten us into that mess…

was so frazzled he put his shoes on the wrong feet. The next day we took what was left of that jug of wine and sat on a platform on ther Golf Course ( the platform

had been erected during some summer rock concert)…and we sorted out our feelings. At the time the campus had extra security guards hired through CETA? Jimmy Carter

grants. All our nerves were extra sensitive..so when those security guards bothered us…we went and complained to Steve Schwerner, who was dean back then.

We complained to him of two perceived racist encounters..one in the in pine forest and the other on the Golf course…. I remember Steve saying…”your concerns are not

falling on deaf ears” (I didn’t know at the time much about Steve at all, oh well)……

Anyhow so much for Glen wildlife ..of all sorts……..

Yours from a beautiful and dormant place………

Hey Irwin P…..as I travelled the Talus slope looking at the blue bells hanging from the cliffs I thought about you and yer walkin stick.

Don’t forget to register for reunion … Don’t forget to vote for your alumni board directors…

Don’t forget to take time to smell the flowers. After that two hour hike and right before heading to the car there was a large white crab apple near the library in full bloom and smelly. BTW it ws planted for George Crowelll but the dedication sign had rotted and no one has had the energy to replace it. Unfortunately my other half has raging hay fever so was uanable to smell it…and then said after I said get in there are smell this…… :”thanks a lot…now there’s bees buzzing around my head:”

Take care

and take a walk on the wild side. Duffy ‘77