MARCIA BAER THURMER

It ain't entirely about the material world is it? So despite the mostly interesting and sometimes gruesome and excruciating details of yea now 38 years post h.s., and adventures leading here there and lots of places but not too many stops at any banks to drop off bags of money, what I've been up to has been a fervent search for the answer to the eternal question "Is God a Lutheran or a Catholic?" Well and actually I've concluded that God - whatever God is - well that's about it, isn't it, what Gerhard Teegarden said, "A comprehended God is no God at all." But I will go so far as to posit that God might be a Dadaist (God the Dada), because existence certainly is absurd sometimes, wouldn't you say? Laughing is the best. Remind me to tell you the joke that ends, "What's time to a pig?" Did you hear the one about the agnostic dyslexic insomniac who stayed up all night wondering if there really is a dog? Jeez m/b I should have read what other people wrote before I launched off on this, except that with this slow-speed dial up we've got that would take all night. I'll do it at work tomorrow while looking really busy and intent.

Well yeah but it's about me so I hope it doesn't sound too self-centered. Mr. Paulsen leaned a bit to the right, politically speaking. (Was he an ex-Marine too, like Mr. Nelson? More later.) You may remember that VietNam was going hot and heavy by 1968 and despite that I kept myself pretty ignorant back then I was vaguely aware of the spasms of discontent and identity breakdown the country was experiencing by the day Mr. Paulsen lectured yea verily not on physics in his physics class but on why we should twist our parents' arms to vote for Goldwater in the coming election. I had something I wanted to say in response and, sitting in the front row, I raised my hand straight up, which Mr. Paulsen handily ignored, even though very shortly I began waving it. ("Call on me, call on me. CALL ON ME!" I was thinking.) But no. I have a heart murmur. Or something. I dunno. M/b a brain tumor. Anyway, I get easily overamped and sometimes faint. M/b I was fasting. Jeez I used to eat so weird. So I slumped down out of my desk, right there, at his feet. And Paulsen looks at Randine, sitting right next to where I had been sitting, and says, "Now what's she up to?" (I did hear that, Mr. Paulsen. I was coming around. It was cooler down there and I've always been into being cool. I'm cool, aren't I?) Warren Nelson became a lake association president and major clean water activist, very political, on Eagle Lake up by Monte and Big Lake.