Let me go around armed with my camera and my binocs and all I get are starlings and mourning doves…but let me go for a walk in Forest Park without these, or even drive on the way to the Balaji Temple in St Louis, and VOILA! Each time, there is a magnificient, large bird of prey sitting on, the first time, the large branch of a huge tree, and the second time on a telephone pole with something in its beak…and both birds, I swear, grinned evilly at me before lifting off and soaring into the bright sunshine before I could even begin to id them.

CRAPOLA!!

Yesterday I arrived in St Louis minus my luggage, in just the clothes I was standing up in…if I had not sent off one nice formal dress earlier with my daughter I would have had to wear jeans to the graduation ceremony of , who finished his MBA program from Wash U (and dry you too)..and who was very proudly taking photos of his son, whom I called the MBA-BY.

After the fairly impressive ceremony (there were awards for students that fellow-students had voted for, and for teachers that other students AND teachers had voted for), we went to the St Louis temple. During our visit, told us that he had found someone's watch and had handed it over to lost and found.Then he and his family went off home. We sat around the canteen eating and as we left, I realized....no prizes...that my nice dress watch was missing! We went and got it back!

NOT crapola!..God was indeed kind to me…

Why do we don these arcane robes and peculiar hats (they were not the regular mortarboards this time, they looked rather like what a Reneissance painter would wear in his studio)…do they lend some meaning or stateliness to the occasion? This whole thing of “appropriate dress” has me thinking hard. Certainly I would not wear jeans if I was giving a concert…dressing up for a wedding IS nice!