Last evening from about 4:30 until about 9:00, Josh and the fourteen other students from his summer school class gathered in our home. The students in this field biology class (both young boys and girls) spent about three weeks in classroom instruction at the high school, and then traveled under the supervision of two brave teachers to Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado for two weeks. This trip was Joshua's second with this class, a group of kids that has become very close knit.

While I retreated upstairs to grade papers and the other boys and Jami headed downstairs to watch TV, Joshua and his guests spread out in the living, dining and computer rooms. They were a quiet, comfortable group, sprawled across sofas and chairs, and eventually on the floor. They drifted occasionally over to the side table to sample snacks we had made for them as well as some that they had brought to share. They didn't leave many treats behind. Like locusts, they consumed almost everything on the table. A plague of teens? Only in this respect tonight.

In contrast to the hard-driving, alternative rock that Josh listens to most of the time, the music Sunday night was softer -- Christmas music from tapes and CD's from Joshua's childhood, good background for their quiet conversations. No Perry Como, of course, and no Jose Feliciano for that matter. But plenty of Christmas tunes from John Denver and the Muppets, Willie Nelson, Garth Brooks, and other performers whose voices have filled our home during the Christmas holidays of Joshua's childhood. I think he staged the evening as a deliberate nostalgia trip for himself and his friends. As college-bound high school seniors, they are spending what could be their last Christmases at home.

Today was otherwise unremarkable.

No, that's wrong. I know better. No day is unremarkable. It was a day in which I completed the current batch of grading, and generally recovered from the weekend's flu. An easy day, an early night.

Joseph Heller, an icon from my adolescence, died today at age 76.