Last class yesterday. Students got me a card and a chocolate bar. They even bought some candy for my daughter. Nice people. There was nothing due for the last class only seven showed up. We just gabbed about the class and the future. One girl asked what was my favourite moment of the semester. There are too many. There were a couple with mental health issues who had social workers reach out to me to address their needs yet they seemed fine and active, never presented any difficulty that the social workers alerted me about. There was a guy who was Sikh and very proud of it. He created pieces almost every time that had to do with how lovely it was to be Sikh. It was interesting because I like my Jewish background but cannot imagine when I was twenty like him, getting up in front of thirty people who aren’t Jewish and talking about how great it is to be a Jew. There was a guy originally from the Philippines who played guitar and piano and each time sung with an Irish accent and when asked replied his teacher trained him in Celtic music. There was a nineteen year old who wrote a poem addressed to her ten year old self assuring her she still plans on owning a condominium one day. There was a guy who studies have nothing to do with music but rapped with surprising rhymes and I believe had a thousand hours of hip hop studies under his belt and when he elaborated about his process shared shocking stories like when his family intruded upon his diaries and threw them out because they disliked his private thoughts. There was another guy, small and polite, who wrote gentle guitar songs and I still like him even after saying his hero was Ed Sheeran. There was more than one young woman who wrote emotionally about boys that profoundly disappointed them or abused them. And another who wrote about her lover and and how amazing their life together seemed to be. There was a guy in his forties who I would have thought as young as all the others who told me his daughter is twenty and also studying in the same college. There was a moody girl who one time waited until the class was over and everyone gone before approaching me in confidence to inform me about her pronouns. One guy offered that this course was group therapy and I think in a way that there was the nicest ribbon tied around the tree. Studying art and artmaking is healing whether I articulate it clearly or not, it is why I am here enjoying how it rubs off.