Thank You, Dr. Freud

It's a quiet Sunday in Bloomington, Minnesota, and I'm very, very tired. I travelled to Birmingham, Alabama, on 7/16/07 to visit with my youngest child and her four children. I'll write about that trip later.

But yesterday, 7/21/07, I attended the graduation of my only son from Walden University at Walden's Thirty-Eighth Commencement Ceremony. He took an M. S. in Psychology, a very nice complement to his B. S. from Auburn University. The title of his M. S. thesis is Effects of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Gambler's Anonymous on Pathological Gamblers. The ceremony was held in Northrop Auditorium on the East Bank Campus of the University of Minnesota, and it's a good thing not all graduates listed in the graduation program showed up. The Northrup wouldn't have held them. Northrop is a lovely, old theatre which looks as if it was built during the W. P. A. It's being prepared for remodeling and will lose the incredible pipe organ on which a woman played the relevant graduation music during the afternoon. A recent article in the Star-Tribune lamented this loss, which apparently can't be avoided if the remodeling is to be completed properly.

My son turned 45 years old on 6/29/07. When I celebrated my 45th birthday in 1985, I had had my M. A. in English for only about 20 months. I guess you could say that we're late bloomers, but we're persistent. I remember that after finishing my thesis in November 1983, I went to bed for about 2 days, alone. The title of my thesis is Prosody as Meaning in the Poetry of E. E. Cummings, and what's interesting to me is that when I was an undergraduate, I took all the core courses to prepare me for graduate work in Psychology, which I first entered before returning to the study of literature. And my son writes well above average poetry. What does all this say about genetics? I don't know, but my son and I obviously have similar interests. And now we both have advanced degrees, though he has a decade + experience working with disturbed youth.

I remember a Psychology professor telling our huge class at the University of Alabama at Birmingham many years ago that other than psychology, a quite effective method of studying human behavior was the study of literature. And I learned over the years that if one wants to find out what really happened in a particular society, he should read that society's fiction, not historians. In any case, yesterday was a wonderful , blue-skied day for graduation, and my son strode across the stage, all 6' 3", 240 lbs of him, as if he were striding across the world. Congratulations, young man!

Finally, if this post seems somewhat disjointed, so am I! Have a wonderful work week!