She wondered if the note had reached him. She scolded herself for not handing it to him in person.

She
trusted her friend, but so much could happen. She waited impatiently for word.

Josh had spent year and year accumulating the information. He knew it inside out and if there was ever
anyone looking for an expert in the field, Josh would be the one to call. The problem was that there was
nobody interested in the information besides him and he knew it. Years of information painstakingly
memorized and sorted with not a sole giving even an ounce of interest in the topic.

I recollect that my first exploit in squirrel-shooting was in a grove of tall walnut-trees that shades one
side of the valley. I had wandered into it at noontime, when all nature is peculiarly quiet, and was
startled by the roar of my own gun, as it broke the Sabbath stillness around and was prolonged and
reverberated by the angry echoes.

She sat down with her notebook in her hand, her mind wandering to faraway places. She paused and
considered all that had happened. It hadn't gone as expected. When the day began she thought it was
going to be a bad one, but as she sat recalling the day's events to write them down, she had to admit, it
had been a rather marvelous day.

He wandered down the stairs and into the basement. The damp, musty smell of unuse hung in the air. A
single, small window let in a glimmer of light, but this simply made the shadows in the basement
deeper. He inhaled deeply and looked around at a mess that had been accumulating for over 25 years.
He was positive that this was the place he wanted to live.

I guess we could discuss the implications of the phrase "meant to be." That is if we wanted to drown
ourselves in a sea of backwardly referential semantics and other mumbo-jumbo. Maybe such a
discussion would result in the determination that "meant to be" is exactly as meaningless a phrase as it
seems to be, and that none of us is actually meant to be doing anything at all. But that's my existential
underpants underpinnings showing. It's the way the cookie crumbles. And now I want a cookie.

There was nothing to indicate Nancy was going to change the world. She looked like an average girl
going to an average high school. It was the fact that everything about her seemed average that would
end up becoming her superpower.

According to the caption on the bronze marker placed by the Multnomah Chapter of the Daughters of
the American Revolution on May 12, 1939, “College Hall (is) the oldest building in continuous use for
Educational purposes west of the Rocky Mountains. Here were educated men and women who have
won recognition throughout the world in all the learned professions.”