God's In Her World and All's Right With This Heaven

There is absolutely no place on earth I'd rather be on a beautiful day like today than a college campus. You know, the old part of a college campus, the part that has grass in a quadrilateral shape among old buildings made of brick and stone, the assurance that knowledge really does pass from one generation to the next, is not blown away with an easy puff of whimsy or a vicious blast of fate. On the UW campus, it's Bascom Hill, and I have the privilege of working in a building right on top of that hill, my office overlooking Lake Mendota, my students overlooking my weak and warped sense of humor and my predilection for poppish music.

I love being here, there, on this campus that once did its best to educate me. When I was interviewed for the job I now hold last October, I left the second round of interviews on a gorgeous Fall day, perhaps the seasonal equivalent of today's Spring perfection, and vowed to myself that I would be forever happy if only I could walk up Bascom Hill every day. Arguably, I could have done so, I suppose, whether or not I got the job, but somehow the feat seems more likely when there's a reason to make the trek up the big hill. Because it is a big hill. And I have been happy every day when I walk up that steep hill; it has now been six months.

Tomorrow I get to run up that hill Tomorrow is Crazylegs, the biggest race in Madison's busy race season. I'm running in it for the second time, hoping to beat last year's time by at least a few minutes, which I think is very possible if my recent injury doesn't flare up again. This is Madison's closest approximation of Boulder's great 10K, the Memorial Day Bolder Boulder. The fact that Crazylegs is only an 8K is a fairly good comparison of the two events; Crazylegs is maybe 4/5 the race that the BB is: MAYBE. The two biggest things they have in common are wave starts and stadium endings. That, and thousands of runners.

And all this brings me back to the enormous beauty of this perfect Spring day, a day to make everyone happy, except the young man fron Nigeria who was in my office twice today, wearing long pants and a heavy sweater and both times perspiring profusely from his march up the difficult hill. You never want to be so maternal or personal as to suggest in a kind tone of voice, "You might feel better if you removed that heavy sweater, dear," especially when the person you're addressing is from a foreign culture; I mean, who knows on what customs or circumstances you're trouncing? But for everyone but him, today Madison was absolutely perfect. By the time I rode my bike home from work, all the restaurants had set up their outdoor dining areas for the season and they all were full of happy, sunburned people.

And it makes me think of Ann Patchett's fifth novel, "Run," which came out last year. I can't cite this exactly, because I promptly sent off my copy of the book to a friend I thought would like it and am still waiting for it to return to me, but there's this wonderful secondary character in the story, Father Sullivan, I believe was his name, who is at the end of a long and devoted ministry of Catholicism, about to face his own death after administering the Last Rites to many others. And he wonders if he was wrong. "What if this is Heaven, right now, right here?" he wonders, in effect (I can't be sure since I don't have the book any more). "What if I've missed the chance to enjoy Heaven right here because I was so focused on life in some hereafter?"

That is all paraphrased and probably not very accurate. But in the proper context and language of Patchett's book, the agony of the dying priest is acute and moving, and resonated loudly enough that I am still trying to quote it though I only read it once and perhaps never will have the book back to read again. This earth is heaven, for me at least, and on no day is it more clearly heaven than on a day like today, when the first fleet of sailboats zips across the white-capped lake, and earnest TAs are gathering their crops of young undergraduates around them in circles on the lawns next to all the classroom buildings, and everyone's in love and everyone feels sexy, and God is in this very heaven and all's, for this one moment on my son's twenty-first birthday, all's right with the world and with me.