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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