By Walter Moore,

The Samford campus grows peaceful. The last classes have been dismissed with a "Good luck on the final next week." The last professors have whispered about the patriarchy down by the water fountain. The last golden heirs of fortune have drooled away a morning on their dorm-bed pillows before eventually rising to dream up pitches for extra-credit. The snap and sizzle of the fry-table in the snack-bar slows and fades to its final, barely-heard, pop.

Only the maintenance personnel remain, making everything work, invisible, effiicient, an unseen army of magic elves camouflaged in their uniform of blue shirt and brown skin. They will remain all summer. The campus is truly theirs.

We have had our final picnic for the language majors. During the long afternoon, the sun and the potato salad disappeared at the same languid rate.

I am walking taller. When I signed my full-time contract for the '05-'06 school year, it finally became real. It didn't hurt to see that my salary would double, all this at a job where I could conceivably be done every day by lunch, and then do more of something else.

Like work on a house. My plan is to find an old house in a part of town that many white people would be scared to live in because there aren't lots of other white people there. Get myself the melanin discount so to speak. Work on the house 4 hours every afternoon as my second job while living in it. Then eventually keep it, sell it, or rent it as seems best.

I found an abandoned four-bedroom mansion a couple blocks north of the Civic Center going for $19,000. Might have possibilities once you tear out all the 1970s panelling, carpet, and drop-ceilings. I have fun telling my friends about it just to watch them twitch with epileptic fits brought on by their egalitarian ideals warring with their gut fear.

It's probably not the one I'd go for though. I need a smaller house to learn home-repair on, and another bad thing about the mansion is that it is surrounded by boarded-up empty houses that will soon be either parking lots or else the lairs of vampires fleeing Anne Rice's next novel.

Not to mention, it *is* scary. There's a difference between being brave and being crazy.

Anyway, that's about it for the famous Spring Semester of '05. I will wind down here at the market, then go to Texas for about a month. There is money to be made in Texas.