Friday, May 30, 2014

Swan Song



                A colleague I met on the day of the departmental final greeted me with, “Tina, I hear this is your swan song!”
                “La!” I sang out, hitting a high C or perhaps blungeoning it, in an effort to emit at least one note of my swan song. 

            This seemed very appropriate, this talk of a swan song, because with every day closer to retirement, I was following the San Francisco Chronicle’s articles on the fate of our school, with headlines like these:

“CCSF’s dealine could be extended/Accrediting panel can give time to shape up, feds say” and
“Supporters want CCSF deadline extended,” reports by Nanette Asimov, May  14 and 15, 2014, respectively.

“Extenstion allowed for CCSF, feds insist/Accreditation panel’s deadline approaching,” report by Nanette Asimov, May 21, 2014

“Give City College time to improve,” editorial and “Put woes in context,” letter to the editor by Mike Solow, chariman of the CCSF chemistry department, both on May 22, 2014.  

          City College was not ready to sing its swan song.  

           But even more fitting was the report on a family of swans at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco.  Apparently the caretakers knew that there was no point in the female swan's hatching her eggs because the ducklings would be killed by their father in the mating season, when he saw them as rivals.  So the caretaker had put ceramic eggs in the place of those the mother first laid, but they hatched anyway, and on May 21st there was an article with photo of the swan chicks on water.  This was followed by  the sad news that the baby chicks, called cynets (pronounced sing net, as in sing.net according to the Internet), had disappeared, which was what I was going to be doing though not, I hoped, victim of a snapping turtle, big-mouth bass or an owl, the suspects in the case of the gone-swans.

            Now they are part of my retirement collage. 

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