Kansas--My 15 year old daughter's prom tonight. Here, in this small village on the central Great Plains, proms are all-school affairs. Her dress is long and reddish pink. Her hair is all prom. I spend 90 minutes at her friend Taylor's house where there were eight high school girls and three adult women in a state of advanced makeup mode. Subway sandwiches and chips on a long counter. Styro cups and soda everywhere. Every girl in flip flops and sweats--all rushing to get the perfect look before rushing home to suit up.

Then over to Catherine's mother's house, where two girls, my daughter and her friend and housemate the Japanese exchange student, awaited their dates. The dates appeared in outsized rural America pickups. Awkward corsage and boutonniere ritual. I gave a 21st century version of the father's dire warning to the young men, who looked completely responsible as far as I'm concerned.

So now they are at the dinner. Later I will catch up for the grand march. After that it's a long evening and night, for in the manner of rural America there is an after-prom party at the last picture show theater. I don't expect to see my child until ca. 4 a.m. She'll sleep in endlessly tomorrow, of course.

I'm so proud of my child. She is smart, grounded, sensible, funny, careful, healthy, pretty. She doesn't take things too seriously, but she is totally alive to the joy and adventure of life. She knows this is not her final zipcode, and she is making her decisions with her long term interests in mind.

And yet on an evening like this I remember when she fit snugly in my arms. I used to sit on a rocking chair with a pillow on my lap, and she fit entirely onto the pillow. Now she is a young woman. I know it is merely a matter of time before she walks through all the doors of adulthood. And I want her to make that walk, but not impetuously.

So I will spend the evening working. In my mother's day, the parents gave the daughter a dime so she could call for a ride if she needed one. Now I'm more likely to get a text than a call, and the text is more likely to be in a "chill out, dad" code than anything that would feed my anxious spirit.

Today I did not stir from the house. I am entering a period of very serious economic retrenchment. Moreover, I am using the spring to get my body moving again. After reading a manuscript all day, and doing a pleasurable interview on KFGO, I ran three miles and then walked another 5.6. The air was spectacular. The countryside is still brown and gray, dead and lifeless, but the hint of spring is definitely in the air. My middle aged body is creaky and stiff, but after that mild workout I felt marvelous--alive again. The chemical high from breathing seriously and calmly and drinking in the wonders of North Dakota, was magnificently satisfying. Now I am reading in that way that comes so seldom--when we can read steadily and without fatigue forever.

Clay

Is it possible to remake one's life? My former mother-in-law, a wonderful woman, used to say, nobody every changes, we just get more and more what we are. I want to believe that is not true. I want to believe we can step back from the ways we see, the habits we cling to, the ruts we are in, the ways we ingest and digest, the ways we hold our bodies, the ways we respond to others, the ways we think about ourselves and our lives, the way we write English sentences, and rewrite the software.

What I'm trying to do, at 55, is to ask myself--what man did you expect to be? What did you hope to do with your big life and your daily life? How well are you living up to your dream of yourself?

55 is a kind of magical number. I'm make 66 baring a catastrophe. Whether I make 77 or 88 is a very different question. So I am going to use a numerical coincidence to ask the tough questions before it is too late. It may already be too late.

I've made some big resolutions in the last two days. I won't retail them here until they erase the habits I wish to erase, but I know that it is now or never.

Meanwhile, I am not ready to leave my child and return to North Dakota--but that is inevitable this afternoon.

csj

Kansas

I'm with my child in Kansas. A day of tremendous wind, gray most of the day, sunny later, but windy the way Kansas can be windy. I have a friend who was in Fargo today at the Democratic Convention. No surprises: Tracy Potter for Senate, Earl Pomeroy for the House. I would have loved to have been there to hear Earl Pomeroy's speech, which was said to be fiery. I would have liked to have seen Darrell Dorgan's tribute film to his brother. It is a time of hope for the party, but a time of great sadness for North Dakota, i believe, because we are losing our extraordinary senator Byron Dorgan.

Tomorrow I fly home. The time I spend with my daughter is the happiest of my life, without any exception or qualification. She is now a young woman. That pleases me mostly.

My daughter is doing facebook catch-up and texting, while we sit in our room at the Holiday Inn Express decompressing from a long interesting day.

I would have liked to have seen the parade-demonstration for Earl Pomeroy.

Lunar Lucubrations

Tonight, Wednesday, March 16, My wedding anniversary.

The new moon tonight is one of the most beautiful I have ever seen. I like the new moon best of all moons, much more than the full moon. I love to see it at minimal crescent, when it is all but swallowed up by the shadow of the earth. Tonight the crescent in like a saucer, a little more than the quarter of the circumference of the moon, perfectly poised with its horns up as if to cup the rest of the moon, which makes a perfect ghostly appearance. It makes me ache. For some reason the new moon has always had a powerful gravitational pull on my spirit.

I like this unusual up-pointed crescent, poised on the bottom of its concavity, holding the rest of the moon in embrace. I'm sure I have seen it this way before, but I actually don't remember when.

I like the more common new moon wherein it is open, slightly upturned, like a tilted parenthesis, and I particularly like it when the new moon virtually embraces Venus.

It is a perfect night in North Dakota. I came home from a long day of work, recordings, and meetings, and stood out on my deck looking at the perfection of the moon, and saw my front yard for the first time in four months.

Today we recorded two Jefferson Hours at Makoche Recording Studios, one on the Texas school book fiasco, and the other on what the world needs now to be Jeffersonian. They were two of the most passionate and hard-hitting programs in the history of the Jefferson Hour.

csj

I feel as if I am coming back to life after a sustained hibernation. Got home from Minneapolis and immediately suited up and ran and walked five miles in my neighborhood, first listening to the white album (Beatles) and then reading a book about the Anschluss in 1938--hitler's absorption of Austria. Now I am sitting at my kitchen table in the best lit room in my house. The light is exquisite. It was virtually windless out on the road. The snow is hanging on but it is dense with ice crystals. My back and shoulders hurt in the way they should hurt after sloughing off ennui and car-restlessness. The streets are bare except for the lines of icy water running down along the gutters. I was able to read 20-30 pages as I walked. Now I will clean up and put on crisp clean clothes, and make rice and shrimp for dinner. And read. And work on my Roosevelt signage project.

csj

Now back from Minneapolis and St. Paul, where I saw Macbeth, saw the Dead Sea Scrolls, saw the St. John's College bible manuscript, visited Louise Erdrich's bookstore, met with a fellow North Dakotan who wants to help us realize our dream of a Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University, visited the Eric Sevareid Library at the University of Minnesota, walked a good deal, bought books, and gifts for my dear friend Sheila Schafer.

How fortunate for us North Dakotans that just 8 hours away by car and 90 minutes by flight is one of the nation's great cities. It is such a pleasure to walk the campus of the University of Minnesota, to walk across the Washington Avenue bridge, which I walked across at 7:45 a.m. five days a week for two full years when I studied Latin on the East Bank and lived on the West Bank--always outside, never within the bridge shelter. And then when you are standing precisely where John Berryman threw himself off that bridge, thinking about the hypnotic power of poetry and rivers, and the lives of the great thinkers, writers, poets, artists, and students who have spent part of their lives at the University of Minnesota, to look to the west and see the skyscrapers of Minneapolis looming over the prairie.

I was thrilled to spend time with my favorite professor of all time, the man, in Jefferson's words, "who set the destiny of my life." And to realize that though he has mellowed a little, he is still as brilliant in my soul thirty years later as he was when I was a callow youth.

I'm tired but full--the best way to return from a journey.

csj