Word: patchings
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...last October I walked out over a patch of prairie with my father, who was 80 years old. It was undulating land between the great rivers Mississippi and Missouri. We looked for an old friend of his-a red-tailed hawk with one of his tail feathers missing. He had perched for years as a sentinel on a tree on a far hill, crying his protest to intruders who entered his domain. Gone, mused my father, who had once carried me on his shoulders through these fields (now he needed my hand). Another friend swallowed by time, my father said...
...sure, Harvard still has many "other-directed" individuals who are genuinely committed to serving rather than attaining and to whom law and medical education means far more than security, status and the chance to rise above the rabble. But the patch is not an easy one to hoe for these individuals, both because of the pressures imposed upon them in specific academic situations and because of the criteria emphasized by professional school admission committees. Many of these other-directed individuals who make it through the pre-professional maze face intermittent disillusionment, many compromises and the knowledge that they...
...Marine. His father was in the corps, and his uniform still fits. The time is 1943, and a young man's honor is at stake. Waiting for an eastbound bus. Marion buys a drink for a full-fledged Marine Raider, who wears a skull-and-cross-bones patch on his sleeve and stares fixedly ahead, as if trying to make out messages on the liquor bottles. Marion listens to the Marine's reminiscences of battle, envies all his medals. The Raider is of a rather different frame of mind. He gets Marion drunk, clobbers him and steals...
...face and funds just when the other candidates would presumably be starting to wear out. He has adhered to that strategy, but at this stage he finds Jimmy Carter still looking remarkably bushy-tailed and shrewd old Br'er Rabbit Hubert Humphrey poised to jump into the brier patch of presidential politics...
That is what one remembers: a rectangular patch of green engulfed by a sea of confusion and anticipation...