I have been typing furiously on behalf of the University of Portland for twenty years, which is a hilarious and terrifying sentence for all sorts of reasons, but after some four thousand days on The Bluff, I find myself more absorbed than ever before. How could that be? Is this not when I should grow weary and cynical about the corporation, and shriek at the shocking price tag for the product, and note testily that you cannot even define the product, except with such ephemeral gossamer murk as epiphany or awakening or shiver of the heart? And yet, try as I might, I cannot achieve a healthy skepticism. For one thing I keep meeting the kids here, the endless river of lanky gracious generous verbs who sizzle your heart every time you talk to them; if theirs are the (enormous) hands which will soon run the world, what a lovely world it will be, I keep thinking. And then there are so many cheerful nuts among the staff and faculty and alumni and donors who insist that this place matters in mysterious ways, that there is no place like it in the world, that some odd combination of passion and poetry and vigor and vision opens miraculous doors in our students, doors through which their extraordinary gifts come pouring out and the ocean of complicated grace pours in, doors that perhaps never would have been opened without their years here. And also without fail every time I slough toward despond a story comes and thrums on my heart until I am bruised with joy. I see a child’s face when the best soccer player in America shakes her hand and asks her about her world. I see the face of a man who survived seven hells in the war as he tells me he huddled in a sandy hole thinking of his professors here, they’d have been after me to use my foxhole time to practice my Latin, he says, grinning. I see the face of my late friend Becky Houck, who when I asked her how in heaven’s name she could possibly stay in her office until midnight talking to frightened freshmen every night, said, with real surprise, why, they’re all my children, of course, wouldn’t you do that for your children? And I read the letter I received one day years ago from a woman never to be named. There had been an essay in this magazine, she wrote, that broke her and opened her, and she was writing to tell me about it, because I should know that a door in her heart had opened, and it would never be closed again, not ever, and this magazine and this university threw it open, and she had cried and cried, and then sat down to write this letter with a pen she found in the kitchen drawer. God had given her a son, she wrote, and her boy was blind and deaf and crippled, and he never even sat up, let alone walked, and soon he died, and her heart was so torn and shredded that she locked up his memory and hid it away, for years and years, but then this magazine came and thrummed on her heart, and she began to cry, and remembered a moment when she was bathing him, and a bar of sunlight hit his face, and he turned into the light as he felt the light caress him, and he smiled and laughed at the kiss of the light, and she had not thought of that moment in years and years, and now she would never forget it ever again. This university did that. This university does that a thousand times a day in ways we’ll never know. When I have dark days, when I have days I think the University of Portland is a muddled corporation no different than a thousand other colleges, when I have days I shriek at the cost, and snarl with fury at all the kids who should be here and can’t afford it, I think of that letter. We did that. We open the most stunning doors, through which the most stunning light gets in and out. No one can count the number and nature of the doors we open. Isn’t that great? n Brian Doyle is the editor of this magazine and the author most recently of the novel Mink River. For the full panoply of campaign glories, see rise.up.edu.
PHOTO: JOSEPH DOYLE
BRUISED WITH JOY
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