Today is always a wonderful day, although I feel as if I have been rolled down a hill. Today is the day the faculty arrives at GHP.

In so many ways GHP is like Brigadoon: we only exist once a year, and for a very brief time. (Weird thought popped into my head here: what happens if the village’s land has been developed into a strip mall or “lifestyle center” in the intervening 100 years?) The difference is that we don’t go to sleep and wake up a hundred years later. We actually live the time in between.

So we don’t just wake up and go about our business with our friends and relations. We haven’t seen them in 10 months, and today is the day we get to pick up our “other life” and continue with those who live it with us.

And it is an “other life.” Sometimes I feel like the mice in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, members of a race of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings who poke only a tiny bit of their being into our universe (a bit that looks just like a mouse to us). I don’t think I am different at school or around town, but that most of who I am and what I do is never seen, or sensed, by people outside my immediate circle.

Here at GHP, however, we’re all pan-dimensional mice. We get to stretch our legs a bit without worrying about scaring the earth people. And it’s wonderful as people start showing up and checking in with me. It’s like a fabulous family reunion with a family that you actually look forward to spending six weeks with, if you can imagine such a thing.

Another difference between us and Brigadoon is that the villagers simply lived their everyday life. Our whole purpose, as pan-dimensional mice, is to set up an environment where extraordinary things happen. That makes for a certain anticipatory excitement in our gathering: what kind of students will we get this year? What kinds of wonderful things will they accomplish? What kind of spectacular crashings and burnings will we witness? How high will we fly, and how low will we go?

And so it begins.