For the past two weeks we have been on vacation and, try though we did before we left town, we were not able to get to all the material we had on hand for the paper. We also had the misfortune to be out of town the weekend of graduation and the senior frolic. We hope to give belated coverage to both of those events, just for the record, but we heard an audio tape over the weekend by a favorite poet, Ogden Nash, that seemed singularly appropriate to our present state.

In his poem, Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man, Nash says that everyone knows that all sin is divided into two parts--sins of commission and sins of omission,

"And everyone from Billy Sunday to Buddha

Knows that sins of omission means not having done something you shoulda."

He goes on to advise his readers that sins of omission are the kind that get you into trouble and give you no pleasure. You don't get a kick out of not paying bills or not answering letters. Quite the contrary. Similarly there's no fun in not getting news into the newspaper. It's quite the opposite of our best intentions.

So mea culpa for those stories we missed and be assured we're back from vacation and ready to cover what happens next.