Notstalgia Friday: Days of Hope

It's somewhere between 2 a.m. and sunrise on a Wednesday morning in Boston during April-ish of 2006. My classmate and friend, Dominick, and I are up late again, preparing for the weekly meeting of our History of the Civil Rights Movement class with Professor Teele at 9 a.m. It's a demanding syllabus - a book a week on average, and both of us keep ourselves busy enough behind the camera and in front of the bar to make Tuesday nights an inevitable cram-fest. 

So, we've been down this road many times before and have no plans for a detour. Sabotaging one night a week is far preferable to sacrificing parts of every day in the name of comprehension and completion. I took this picture after I looked over from my own chapter of the book to see that Dominick has once again dozed off while tackling Patricia Sullivan's Days of Hope (a very, very easy thing to do, even when upright and on a park bench and wide awake in the sunshine).

My grade may not have had much hope of being anything, my class performance was less than inspiring, but in the times surrounding that class - beyond the monotonous lecturing, outside and upright, wide awake on a park bench in the sunshine - my days were growing very much full joy and anticipation. Graduation was approaching, life was inviting and I couldn't have cast a better crew of friends. They were indeed Days of Hope.