. . . Speaking of risks, some people friendly to the mission of Arethusa, and even some not so friendly, have said that it required some rebelliousness to take the risks that resulted in the kind of history the journal has had. I do not think of myself as a rebel, far from it, but when I play the historian, and search for the remote cause of the trait they must be referring to, I think I find it in the most unlikely of places.

I take you back--humor me: it's a Felliniesque, sentimental journey-- to Sister Carmelita’s second-grade classroom, St. Columba’s school, Ottawa, Illinois, the year 1940. The assignment: to color a familiar picture of a guardian angel guiding a young child safely along a precarious cliff-edge path. It was my first introduction to real work--work in the most satisfying sense of the word: it was hard, it was intense, it was focussed, and it was fun! It gave me pleasure! Problem: scarlet-fever had kept me from nearly a third of the first grade, including the time when I would have been taught the acceptable, conventional iconography of angels, limiting the range of allowable colors to white and pink and perhaps, as a concession, a little light blue, but, you know, not too much. In invincible ignorance of these rules, I set myself the task of using every crayon in my box and, for the angel, to give it wings as beautiful as the most beautiful bird in my experience possessed: which just happened to be the redwing blackbird that flourished in the sloughs and backwaters of the Fox and Illinois rivers, my childhood haunts. Almost finished, and proud of my work, I still had six unused crayons. So I added a not very realistic rainbow in the background. Yet more heterodoxy was there: I was doing all this, scandal of scandals but by then irremediable, with my left hand. Sister Carmelita’s critique was devastating; it quenched the fires of my artistic pride and brought me to the edge of tears. But at that moment, the principal, Sister Andrea, was passing in the hall and from the doorway witnessed the scene.

Now Sister Andrea, stern as her name, had never been seen to smile. We called her the great stone face and averted our eyes from her beetling, untrimmed brows and mannish jaw. When she entered the room, no one moved, not even Sister Carmelita, diminutive as her name. I froze as she approached my desk and cast her deadly gaze on my garish rainbow and redwinged blackangel. Sister Andrea crammed an eternity of expectation into a moment. And then, “I like this,” she said, and for a mere nanosecond flashed me what I still believe was a smile. Then, fixing Sister Carmelita with a gorgon glare, she added, “When it’s finished, I want it pinned on my door for all the school to see.”

That moment still glows in memory, Sister Andrea merges with the black angel, and if I could say I have one regret on leaving the editorship of Arethusa, it is that, in all the twenty years I served in that post, I could not find a decent pretext to grace its cover with that dark angel, for she broods everywhere over its pages.

For those pages, I have you to thank, you, all of you, who conceived them and wrote them.