Opening convocation

For the past few years Saint Joseph's College has had an opening-of-the-school-year convocation to welcome the freshman class. Each year the faculty dress up in their ridiculous academic apparel and march into the chapel, and they did it again on Thursday. I was not among them, though as a professor emeritus I could have been.

Seven different people addressed the new students. For me, the most interesting thing on the program was not a speaker, but a performance of the Alma Mater arranged by the new director of the choir. I liked it a lot and now am looking forward to see what the choir, which has had a lot of talent during the past few years, will be doing this year.

The keynote speaker was an alumna who graduated in 1990, which was a couple years before most of these freshmen were born. It is a bit disconcerting to realize that the first president that they would have remembered would be Bill Clinton, and maybe some of them only remember George W. Bush. This speaker had a list of ten things that she thought the students should do during their stay in Rensselaer, and the one that caught my attention was to go out and see the Moody Lights. I have never done that and probably never will. Any of you Moody Lights fans? Am I missing something that really is worth seeing?

The students seem to want to believe that there are ghosts on campus because there are a number of stories that circulate among the students about ghosts in various buildings at SJC. They were never happy when I told them that all these stories were nonsense.

After the faculty paraded out, a couple of friends asked me how I was handling retirement. I told them that I had cried all day on Monday, all morning on Tuesday, an hour on Wednesday, but only five minutes this morning. Neither of them believed me.