I guess I drank a lot of beer on Wednesday night. Got to Grinnell and my brother was there. Had dinner, Ransom came over. We all laughed. Things were good. Exactly as I expected. For once everything was exactly as I expected and it wasn�t a letdown or a ruse. It just was.

Went to the bar. Lots of people were there. Ben McCune, Hannah, Dave McClelland, Ben Jones, Amanda Crotts. The list goes on. Jenny Hunter showed up with her new boyfriend and the first thing I said is that she and I used to take baths together when we were tiny. I�m an idiot.

Mark showed up. Jenny Johnson. The list goes on. I talked with Tanner Smith, who used to be little and pudgy and is now a very handsome man. He is a youth pastor and came across as the nicest, most down to earth guy in the history of the world. I talked with people whose names I couldn�t remember, assured them that I�d always liked them in high school even if we never really got a chance to know each other back then.

Everything is tiny, in the details. The way my family eats dinner. The inside jokes amongst us. The bacon I make when my brother and I return home at three a.m. The conversation we have at the kitchen table reading Newsweek (him) and the comics page (me). The items in my room, sorted and stacked by my mother into something resembling an order, having been dumped there over the course of the past seven years. What does she think of while she�s straightening my room? A room no one sleeps in three hundred and forty-five days out of the year? Does it bother her?

My father used to tell my brother and me that someday, all this would be ours (and he�d make a sweeping gesture with his hand to indicate the house). It was a little joke, but it�s starting to dawn on us that it�s true. And what will we do then?

There�s a brightness in my old bedroom that keeps me from sleeping, a small window with no shade. There used to be a large, regular-sized window but it was replaced by a smaller one when they renovated the kitchen below. Now bright winter light screams through it, tempered only by a bit of condensation but otherwise a constant reminder of the white Elm Street day outside.

Started You Shall Know Our Velocity. Already it makes me want to do good things. Be better. Write better. Speak better. Live better.

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