This weekend was our near-final obligation to the Fellowship — playing host to next year’s prospective Fellows, who had their interviews this weekend. While they marched in one by one to face the fearsome Committee of Eight, we sat in the living room with smelling salts and cool compresses for their anxious, fevered brows.

Although, I must say, hardly any of them seemed even the least bit nervous, at least not nearly as nervous as I was a year ago. I remember leaving the interview room, getting a plate of fruit salad and a tall cranberry juice, and just staring into space for about 30 minutes. Then I walked around town in freezing temperatures, went to Zingerman’s, bought nothing, walked back to my car and drove home. I ate lunch in Jackson, of all places, at a Cracker Barrel, of all places. I spent three weeks chewing my nails to the quick. Then, the phone call that changed everything.

So the year is dwindling. But there’s still hope for the warp in the space/time continuum that freezes the clock forever on this unseasonably warm April weekend, when I still have a key to the house and I’m still a current Fellow. Not much hope, but you never know.

Speaking of that warmth, is there a better place to watch spring arrive than a college campus? The temperatures go above 75 and the Diag fills with pretty young people, playing hackysack, having class outdoors, proudly showing winter-whitened flesh for the first time this year. (Note to self: Never buy those shorts that have MICHIGAN written across the ass. I’d have room for several more states back there, including NORTH CAROLINA.)