Sometimes people ask me what my son took in college. I say "he majored in English". "Oh cool", they say or something like that. "What's he gonna be" is often the next question. I say, "He's gonna be an EnglishMan."

How cool is that? An Englishman. Perhaps a master of the English language. Not an easy language to master either.

My father said something to me once. He said if you can get up and speak in front of other people, you can do just about anything. He made some other statements like that over the years. Hyperbole I thought. When I was a teen I'm afraid I dismissed his aphorisms as over the top, therefore inconsequential. I look back now and think that the longer I live, the smarter he was and the more I should have listened and taken his comments to heart. My loss; maybe I can make up for it somehow.

I watch my son pick up a piece of paper tomorrow(that is, if we've finished paying his bill) and that paper will imply that he got an education in the English Language, no small thing. I'm tempted to drop my father's advice on him and tell him that if he masters it, spoken and written, he can do just about anything. Maybe I will, maybe I won't. But one thing I do know, whether I state it or not, He can be a great EnglishMan, and that is no hyperbole. Congratulations Michael my friend.