A visiting parent of a newly admitted student recently asked each member of a faculty panel to identify both a joy and a frustration in their lives working with Proctor students. In response to "joys," Dean of Students Anne Swayze observed, "I love how they keep us young." This caused me to pause, but on reflection, I know what she meant. She means the "young at heart" stuff that comes with relationships with teenagers. Like Eric Viandier, who is forever young.
Physically, however, some us are aging rapidly, and I can show you why. Let's start with this: the last we saw of Whit, he was rolling his ankle playing rugby (see Dangerous Play.) It turns out the sprain is pretty bad, and he needs crutches to get around campus.
The image above was captured an instant before he aggravated the injury when he dismounted very unexpectedly and couldn't hop fast enough on one foot. Here's Whit again, in Natural Resource Management with Joe (left) who is stunned by his prowess with a range stick: a kind of yardstick they're using to calculate the amount of wood potentially harvested from a nearby larch:
Last night, my wife and I hosted our advisees for a chicken barbeque at our home.
