Naturally, today of all days I needed to be at work a bit early – the day after the time change, the day that the temperature dipped significantly, the day that *should* have been the beginning of March Break but isn’t. And a Monday to boot. No wonder I ran out of the house with books spilling out of my bags, a half-steeped cup of tea & my jacket only partly zipped. I managed to get my fingertips around the door handle to open the car and, mercifully, got everything into the car without dropping anything. I’ll take any Monday miracles I can get, I thought as I slid into the driver’s seat – so cold! – and turned on the car. Please warm up fast, please warm up fast.

My husband drove last, so I started punching buttons to get things back to my settings: heat on, rear defrost on, radio… Whoa! Just as I was about to choose aux instead of fm – because I’m a podcast person in the mornings and Andre’s a radio person almost all the time – a voice came through the speakers.

What was this? A deep voice, quick, confident… what station were we on? It didn’t quite sound like CBC, but it didn’t not sound like CBC. I shook my head, glanced again at the console, and realized I was streaming a podcast from my phone. But what podcast? I didn’t quite recognize the voice. When I realized that somehow my phone had decided to play one of my student’s podcasts, I actually laughed out loud. He sounded so good! Here he was talking about Zen Buddhism and Japanese society and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being – and he sounded for all the world like the real deal.

What a delight, to realize just how good the podcast was – so good, in fact, that I listened to student podcasts almost all the way to work. I’ve even downloaded a few to listen to on the way home. These kids… even in the middle of a pandemic, even when I ask them to go out of their comfort zone and try new forms, think in new ways… even then, they amaze me.

A student podcast – who would have thought? There’s a morning miracle that I can’t wait to repeat.