A parting note

By
Friday, September 28, 2012

FIRST VOICE

Time passes. Listen. Time passes. An owl flies home past Bethesda, to a chapel in an oak. And the dawn inches up.

[One distant bell-note, faintly reverberating *

It’s our last bleary-eyed morning in New Haven, stumbling over aching limbs out of 202 York. There were nights we rued such mornings. There was the night when, the last story checked in at 3:30 a.m., we looked out the window to discover a city transformed, one that had wrapped itself in a cloak of white during the hours in which we had lost ourselves in our labor. That was a beautiful walk home, trudging in thin sweaters and sleek shoes through fairytale October snow. But what illogic, that we were tasked with representing the living and breathing of this our community, the student corpus at large, when we were too caught up in our own publication to notice much of anything else. We, the hermits of the fourth floor of 202 York, know not of the goings on outside our very window. We’ve been told many tales by our valiant writers of WEEKEND, and have read of many things which now beckon. It’s time we once again see for ourselves.

We covered protests of nationwide inequality, got fartsy with the artsy, and nearly succeeded in changing Harvard’s official color to magenta. And there was the first night, when we sent out pages to the printer just one minute before the absolute deadline of 5:35 a.m. That was a victory all its own.

Look, we know this sounds highfalutin and self-aggrandizing, but these pages are what we’ve dedicated our year to. We probably didn’t work as hard as we’d like to believe, we probably didn’t pour blood, sweat and toil into this publication whenever and wherever possible. Every day wasn’t really WEEKEND, was it?

But, in its own way, it was. We took so much from this publication, learned so much from the people who made it possible to produce the thirteen-odd stories we put out every week. We take so much from this year, from each issue served up Friday morning and each Thursday night spent piecing it together. We hope we gave back just as much as we put in.

MRS CHERRY OWEN.

Remember last night? In you reeled, my boy, as drunk as a deacon with a big wet bucket and a fish-frail full of stout and you looked at me and you said, ‘God has come home!’ you said, and then over the bucket you went, sprawling and bawling, and the floor was all flagons and eels.

All we can say is: we think we’re leaving you with a new WEEKEND generation twice as good as we were at best. We hope we’re leaving you with one hell of a lot.

*Italic passages excerpted from Dylan Thomas’s “Under Milk Wood.”

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