YOUR Swan Song

          “Tina, I hear this is your swan song!” a colleague greets you as you enter the area where final exam packets are dispersed to the instructors, the proctors.

               

                “La!” you sing out, hitting a high C or perhaps bludgeoning it, in an effort to emit at least one note of your swan song. 

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

“CCSF’s deadline 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.

Today, May 16, 2014, on A 13 there’s an editorial headlined, “Give CCSF time to succeed.” 

            City College is not ready to sing its swan song, but its neck is being rung. 

            Also in the news to create the perfect swan-song metaphor is a family of swans at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco.  Apparently the caretakers know that there is no point in the female swan hatching her eggs because the ducklings will be killed by their own father in the mating season, when he sees them as rivals to their mother’s affection.  So the caretaker has put ceramic eggs in the place of those the mother first laid.

            A swan song still-born to Blanche and Blue Boy.  A Chronicle writer described this two weeks ago as a “slasher version of ‘Swan Lake.’”

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Dark-secrets-of-swan-soap-opera-at-Palace-of-Fine-5446449.php

 

to be continued