Dear Readers:

The fall of 2007 I was in a pickle. I had promised Patsy I would get started on her manuscript but was mystified how to write an interesting story. What to do? I searched the internet for local colleges offering creative writing classes and decided to start easy with a journal-writing class. My timing wasn’t great. Registrations had closed and I feared I would have to wait until winter quarter to get started.  I did not realize that any state or community college would have “made room” for me because they were desperate for students. Enrollment had dropped precipitously when a 2005 referendum passed by voters stipulated that students needed to prove citizenship to qualify for in-state tuition rates or face a much more expensive proposition. Of the estimated eleven million illegal immigrants in the country, a bunch of them had to be young, residing in Maricopa County, and wanting to go to school. I was pleasantly surprised when I called Phoenix College to cajole them into letting me register to find they were more than happy to take my application. But first, I had to send a copy of my driver’s license or birth certificate or passport to the registrar’s office. That process took several days. Then the good news arrived: I was enrolled. And the bad news struck me: it was time to hit the college campus at the ripe old age of 63 and compete with teenyboppers. The plot thickens.