ting bong goo

I'm back in Cambridge for the first time in eight years. A bunch of my friends and I are converging on the old alma mater for a big retirement celebration weekend for our college conductor. The celebration is being called "Ting Bong Goo," which is the kind of thing my conductor routinely said when he was explaining finer musical points to us. This man brightened my entire college career with his skill for non sequiturs (and his ability to squeeze beautiful music out of us). I can't imagine having gone through college without someone yelling at my friends and me to try to imagine a palm frond falling on Cool Whip, or describing a padiddle coming through the night in the Gobi desert, with an armadillo scurrying across its path, or making borderline obscene gestures to prevent us from going flat. Now that I think about it, I'm not sure how I've gone for ten years without that, except that the memories have sustained me in a world that, for my tastes, is often lacking in random weirdness.