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here he was, in the hallway outside the locked Bessey Hall
office of Dr. Rachelle Zannes, waited for someone, anyone to arrive.
    Dressed in white painter pants, black flight boots (remnant of his Air Force
tour of duty), and a black T-shirt, he held, in his right hand, the admission
form that would permit him to take Com. 501. The course, briefly described as Communication
of truths through the arts, seemed like a natural. Only problem: not open
to undergraduates, he had to get special permission.
    Office hours posted to begin at 8:00 A.M., a round mud-brown clock
hanging on the wall read 8:06.
    “Figures,” he said.
    An undergraduate, to get into graduate class, he had to have signature approval
from five people in “descending order”–course instructor, student's advisor,
department chair, dean of graduate studies, and associate provost.
    Seth had sidestepped the “descending order” instructions. All
signatures except Zannes' were on the form. Never available, never in her
office, out jogging or running around, phone calls unanswered, probably some
air-head professor, he had concluded. But he wanted this course and when he
wanted something he usually found a way to get it.
    Killing time, Seth recalled a more personal reason for his interest in
this Com 501 class, maybe the most important—the untimely death of his sister
Natalie at the age of nineteen. An only sibling, she had wanted to become an
author. He often wondered what wondrous things she would have written,
discovered, offered. He remembered, living a Huckleberry Finn life in Traverse
City Michigan, the special relationship he had with Natalie. She, throughout
Seth's childhood, between smatterings of Mother Goose and Hans Christian
Anderson, read him poetry. To her soft voice he would fall asleep to the words
of Keats, Shelley, Dickinson, the poet's words were imprinted on his memory
like grain in drift wood. But it all ended when, just past Seth's sixteenth
birthday, Natalie, excited about majoring in English, studying literature,
becoming a writer, scheduled to begin classes in the fall at Central Michigan—a
drunk driver crossed the center line. She died instantly.
    Beautiful Natalie's kindness, love, lost, never to be. Whittier's words
in Maud Muller : For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest
are these: tt might have been, haunted Seth to this day and he,
experimenting with alcohol at the time of her death, had not touched a drop
since.
    He remembered, at the news of Natalie's death, his mother, Martha, a
high school English teacher, reciting Lord Byron:
    “Whom the Gods love die young, was said of yore, And many deaths do
they escape by this: the death of friends, and that which slays even more—the
death of friendship, love, youth, all that is; and since the silent shore
awaits at last even those who longest miss the old archer's shafts, perhaps the
early grave which men weep over may be meant to save.”
    Then there was his father, a Methodist minister, Reverend Walter C. Trudow.
At Natalie's funeral—a raw March day, the ground cold, brown, tears freezing on
Walter's raw cheeks, Seth remembered thinking, If Lord Byron was right, God
sure doesn't love old dad? He has dumped him living in the garden of dead 'what
if' agony.
    Months after the funeral, Seth could never forget his father's rage-filled
anger at the senseless death allowed by an absentee God, mumbling in his study,
fists shaking at the ceiling: “YOU, asleep at the wheel, huh? The damnable hair
in the soup. You could have prevented it if You had wanted to. The conclusion, YOU
didn't want to!”
    Then, as it is when love is smashed in fate's chopper of lies, Walter
died.
    Not suicide, never, he was a Christian, but self-inflicted
nevertheless, as if to please his God, drawn out death, purging original sin,
gold's dross puked to the surface; more cruel than a bullet in the mouth.
    Seth was there when Walter came finally face to face with the master he
had served for a