If all the days of the year were thrown into a department store bin for a half-price sale, I'll wager the only things left at closing time would be an assortment of Mondays.
It's not a popular day, after all--not a day in demand. Maybe that's because it's not a day when things come to fruition; rather, it's a day of new beginnings and rebeginnings, a day of hard work and preparation, a day of deferred gratification. It's a blue-collar day if ever there was one.
As months go, November is no bargain either. It's something of an in-between--too late for the glories of fall, too early for the glitter of the holidays.
So Monday, November 8, 1999, seen from the vantagepoint of the previous summer, seemed like the most ordinary of days. And that's exactly what I had decided I wanted for my day in the life of Pomona College--a genuine, blue-collar, average, ordinary day.
Of course, that's not where the story began. When I launched this project, what I wanted was a superstar among days--a day with sports and music and theatre and events, a day with something for everyone and happy endings all around. But somewhere along the line I had a change of heart. After all, everyone knows extraordinary things happen on extraordinary days. What I wanted was to shine a light on the extraordinary things that happen here on ordinary days.
Of course, when dawn broke on my ordinary day, the illusion of ordinariness went swiftly down the drain--washed away by the first rain to strike the campus in more than six months. All day--with only a brief respite in the afternoon--the dark clouds blocked the sun. People searched closets for long-lost rain gear, and the campus sprouted umbrellas like gaudy mushrooms. We seemed suddenly to have been transported from sunny Southern California to the soggy Northwest.
So much for my average, ordinary day.
The truth, of course, is that nothing is ordinary when examined closely enough. Everything is as distinctive as a snowflake--every day, every person, every event in your life. In fact, that was the real point of this exercise. The first rainfall in six months was simply part of what made November 8, 1999, a day unlike any other in the history of the Pomona campus. And that's what I really wanted--a glimpse of the College in that miraculous process of inventing itself anew each day--through the relationships between teacher and student, through the transcient glories of its ever-changing campus, through the dependable but unpredictable serendipity of the events that define our lives during our sojourn in this very special place.
What follows, then, is the story of an ordinary, extraordinary day in the life of an exceptional college, shortly before the curtain fell on the old millennium.
--MW
