That mortarboard always just out of reach

Due to a few unanticipated client glitches I am left with that most wondrous gift - the month of August, largely free of work demands. As a freelancer that is not always good news, but in this case the timing is perfect - the kids are out of camps, and we are hosting a very sweet French exchange student for the month. If ever I needed some more free time, it's now.

One might think that I could fill my time with the painful resurrection of long-dormant French skills, and that is certainly tempting...the whole family plus Camille is sitting around the table after dinner each night with three dictionaries, quizzing each other: "Comment dit on 'walnuts'? How do you say 'cranky'?"

But I have also spent the past two days poring over writing classes to take this month, from WritingSalons, Book Passage, UC Berkeley Extension, and MediaBistro. It's been about 18 months since the last one I took on novel writing, with the wonderful Junse Kim and Karen Bjornby at Writing Salon. And I find that just reading the class titles fills me with excitement: Find Your Writer's Voice. Advanced Personal Memoir Writing. Writing and Editing for the Web.

At my age it takes more to convince me there are still roads untraveled, goals just out of reach...I've tried and achieved a lot of different things (and failed at a few too.) I have a pretty solid sense of who I am and what I'm capable of.

But something about a nice chunky course catalog has always ignited my soul. The same logic that had me jump into an Anthropology course at Penn holds true today: maybe if I try it, I'll find out I'm a natural at something! Of course, I dozed through most of the Anthropology lectures and struggled through the reading, so that one didn't pan out. But hope springs eternal, at least when there's a registration fee involved.

I'll close with my favorite George Eliot quote: "It is never too late to be what you might have been."