What is it about November and the week before Thanksgiving that creates so much momentum to the end of the year? Day by day the ODU campus brightens as it gets ready for the holiday season. Foliage and buildings light up and decorations go on like warm clothes. There’s a perceptible shift all around as students see their semester coming to a finish. At Ohio Dominican, we begin to see the fruits of our labor—a student theatrical performance, a holiday art market, classroom and honors theses presentations, an Angel gradebook full of scores. The stunning Bishop James A. Griffin Student Center juts into the landscape ever closer to completion and Panther basketball enters full season. We can now savor a good ending to this year and anticipate a rewarding future for 2009.
Our early fall vacation has come and gone. Mostly gone. Trees are gone, food is gone, and most precious, time has gone. An adventure for most of us, the outage has been a set back nonetheless. How can you make up for three lost days? What we gain though is perhaps a better appreciation of our day to day blessings, a revised sense of our helplessness as well as our resourcefulness, and a glimpse into what real disaster victims have lived through. Still, it’s good to be back to normalcy. The fallen trees will be renewed, the spoiled food will be replaced, and maybe, we will value time and its opportunities just a bit more.