“I am haunted by waters.”

This phrase from one of my favorite books, Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, haunts me. Growing up at the ocean’s edge, the ebb and flow of tides always have both consoled and inspired me. I am drawn by the rhythm of waves, rising, cresting, breaking, and then rising again. I am never more alive than when I am immersed in one of them, surrounded in the foam, its bitter taste on my tongue and its brine stinging my eyes, hurtling toward the shore.

“I am haunted by waters.”

Arches, Summer 2006

For many reasons, I have been thinking a good deal about time lately about what changes and what remains. About beginnings and endings, and what comes next. During the last week of fall-semester classes, I made a guest appearance in Professor Nancy Bristow’s class on the 1960s (I was exhibit A) and was interviewed on KUPS about Woodstock (yup, I was there); a few days later, over the holiday break, I took a nostalgic stroll on the boardwalk back home—a place that was once the glittering pleasure paradise of the Jersey shore and is now a shabby, hollow skeleton of what once was.

By Ronald R. Thomas

Special to The Times

Guest columnist

The same administration that seeks to leave no child behind has proposed a budget that will leave many students without higher education access. At the same time, it significantly increases spending on security.

President Bush has proposed budget cuts of $773 million in pre-college education programs, in addition to earlier changes in the Pell Grant college-aid program that left 80,000 students no longer eligible for such grants.

This is not a lost picture of the ground-breaking for the new Science Center. Neither is it the start of a new landscape plan, tree planting, or irrigation project (although we have several of those going on). And, thankfully, the ground here is not being prepared by a band of merry grave diggers for the internment of the guy in the suit.

I didn’t even know George Eliot was a woman. Not until graduate school, at least. I had studiously avoided reading any Victorian novels in college, mainly because the professors who captured my imagination at the time drew me into exploring the mysteries of other books.

I have been trying to figure out why I found Her so compelling. I mean the recent Spike Jonze movie by that title. Then I heard a recording of the Beatles singing their simply perfect 1960s hit single “If I Fell,” and it all became clear to me:

If I give my heart to you
I must be sure
From the very start
That you
Would love me more than her

It wasn’t pretty: The torrential rain that seemed to burst without warning through what had been a brilliant, sunny sky. The sudden, bone-chilling drop in temperature that shivered through every cap and gown, high heel, and sports jacket. The mysterious swoosh of wind through the stadium swept the mortarboards off the graduates’ heads. It lifted the pages of the speech delivered (with such indomitable spirit) by our student speaker, Haley Andres, into the air and out of sight.

Further cuts to Washington's higher-education system would be a huge mistake, write these leaders among Washington's public and private universities and community college system. Education provides important opportunities as the state strives to recover from the recession.

By Ronald R. Thomas, Rodolfo Arévalo and Charlie Earl

Special to The Times, December 8, 2009

Every May, around 600 amazing-stories-in-progress dress up in long black gowns and square hats, march through campus, are awarded sheepskins, and go out into the world to live out their tales of adventure. Here's just one of them.