Category: Reflections

Off to the Races

“I had no time to consider their relative merits because, at that moment, Mr. Discipline barked “Begin!” and we were off to the races.”

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Sugar and Spice and Nicotine

“What is that thing?” I watched in confusion as Anna exhaled a thin stream of what looked like smoke into the cramped air of her bedroom. With only a few weeks left in our senior year, we had spent the afternoon trading high school reflections and speculating about the mysteries of college, now only months away. Real schoolwork and the anxieties of the application process now behind us, these last months of spring had begun to feel like a sort of limbo, a time of licensed aimlessness before the fall brought new routines.

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Anna Berghuis

It’s okay, I can’t pronounce it either.

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Forget Me Not

It was my freshman year of high school, and I was at my first Model UN conference, walking out of the dining room of the Hilton hotel where the conference was being held. I had just finished lunch with my friends and was heading back to my committee room, when I saw a face I hadn’t seen in several years. My best friend from grade school was getting onto the escalator in front of me. I started slapping my high school friend, Margaret, in excitement. I pointed to my old friend and whispered loudly, “I went to elementary school with that guy!”

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The Spirit of Curling: Vignettes

Reflections on an author-athlete’s relationship to her sport.

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Reality Check

If there were a billboard advertising you, what would it say?” The final question of the Residential College Adviser application was the one I thought about the most, and I was actually rather proud of my answer. While the application was … Read More

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Thomas Farrell Markham

As the firstborn in my family, I was a unique challenge for my parents. Of course there were all the new issues of how to raise a child, but first and foremost, what would they call me?

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I Am Not What I Be

“I’m NOT!” I bellow. Not going to school, that is. My homework isn’t done, it’s already 9 am (school started at 8), and I’ve yet to shower. But my mother is up and worried, and my father is done yelling, and I’m about to break. Soon, I’ll remove myself from self-isolation and go down to breakfast. I’ll wash my face, talk to my father, and head to fourth period photography.

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A History of Silence: Elision and Destruction in the New Mexican Landscape

“There’s power in not having to care. As Inez Guzmán remarks, the film Oppenheimer can leave New Mexico just as its subject did: apparently without a second thought. But there’s also power—more ambivalent, yes, but also more lasting—that comes with needing to pick up the pieces.”

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My Clouds

A writer finds comfort in movement.

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A Mother’s Love, Lost in Translation

When the mother tongue is tucked away to make room for other languages, what becomes of it?

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Robert F. Goheen

Robert Francis Goheen ’40, the university’s 16th president, died of heart failure at PMC, Tuesday, March 31. He was 88.

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