The same river twice

My final time teaching A River Runs through It and I realize I don't know how to teach this text. The film, sure--focus on how color, composition, and movement emphasize the connection between people and nature, etc. But the book? Students find it boring, all those words, all those long descriptions of geology and fly-fishing and fish. I put students in groups and ask them to identify what would constitute paradise for each main character; I talk about fallenness, how people are a mess who need grace and strength and art; I read passages aloud, about the rhythms of life and Paul's being encircled by a halo in the water and the moving closing lines:

Eventually all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters.

Norman is haunted by waters because the waters tell stories of loss--of innocence, perfection, and loved ones. The loss of his brother looms large throughout the book, which is why it's so shocking that Paul's death takes up no more than a page and a half of text. The question of how to help Paul, though, suffuses the entire novella, alongside the larger question of how anyone can help anyone else, particularly those closest to us. How do we help those who don't want our help? How do we accept help when doing so requires admitting vulnerability? How do serve as our brother's keeper when our brother resists the very idea of being kept by anyone?

Maybe my students are too young to find such questions compelling, but for me, the questions grow richer and more meaningful with each passing year. I have seen loved ones struggle to help those closest to them, and I've seen the pain that results when someone close can't be helped. I've kept my deepest struggles to myself so as not to burden others, but now I want to--need to--help my son as he faces his most demanding trial, and all I can do is offer money and comfort food and encouragement. He is grateful, but it never feels like enough. 

Now others are stepping up to help me and my family: covering my classes after my surgery, offering meals when I'm in recovery, sending gifts to help with my son's medical expenses. It's all more than I could have dreamed of and more than enough but, at the same time, I wish we had no need for anyone's help and could turn it all away.

And so I read A River Runs through It through different eyes this time, knowing the weight of loss like never before and wondering whether I can get through those final pages without collapsing in tears in front of my students. I may just lead them out into the deep waters and encourage them to feel the mist rising, ensconcing all of us in a halo of waters, and then I'll let them find their way back to shore on their own.    

Overwhelmed? Just a bit

Today I had to explain to my upper-level literature students the meaning of bits in the Zora Neale Hurston story "The Gilded Six-Bits." 

I am definitely getting too old for this.

And too tired. I went home exhausted last Friday, worked all day Saturday and part of Sunday, and have been scrambling today just to avoid falling hopelessly behind on this week's work. To actually get ahead, I'd need a whole extra day in the week--and then I'd probably just sleep the day away. 

Part of this frenzy of activity involves preparation for the three days of class I'll miss after my surgery. I've copied texts, written group work prompts and reading quizzes, provided contexts, goals, and discussion questions for the wonderful colleagues who will be covering for me, and tried to anticipate any problem that might arise. All this advanced preparation will pay off when I spend a few days not thinking about classes, but at the moment it's a lot.

Another task bogging me down right now is the need to pack up my office in the moldy building. Every time I'm in there I fill another box or two, but I keep finding new deposits of ick. Today, a full two months after I discovered mold growing on my carpet and a month after the College conducted in-depth cleaning and installed heavy-duty dehumidifiers throughout the building, I found a row of books on the bottom shelf that were wet to the touch, some of them moldy and some warped from moisture. Working in there more than a few minutes makes me cough and sneeze and stuffs up my sinuses, but I'm only about half done with the packing job. I keep thinking of Thoreau's image of his townsfolk who inherited property and spent their lives "well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing a large barn." That office weighs on me but I can't just set down the load and walk away. Someone has to deal with all those books.

So I truly have no time for blogging or walking or photography or fun, but nevertheless I have shamelessly indulged in all these activities in the past week. It's required. Literally: last week's leader at a campus workshop challenged each participant to write down one leisure activity unrelated to our work that we would promise to do before the next meeting, and then he collected the notecards. Will there be a quiz at the end? At any rate I felt obliged to do some leisure activities, which makes it no so much leisure as work, but whatever. The photography walk I'd promised myself was difficult to squeeze in between thunderstorms, but somehow I managed to get it done, though there wasn't a whole lot to photograph aside from pawpaws and standing waves in my creek where no standing waves ought to exist at this time of year.

But I got out of the house and away from my work and looked at pretty things, and now my whole house smells like pawpaws. They're not particularly abundant this year but the ones we've harvested are fat and juicy, a benefit of our unbearably wet, muddy summer. Maybe the only benefit. 

I mentioned the pawpaws to my students and few of them knew what I was talking about, but if I brought in pawpaws and sold them for two bits each, they'd all go hungry. 

Friday poetry challenge: So bad it's good, but not quite good (or bad) enough

Once again I've found buried treasure while cleaning out old files in my office: 

• my very first tenure-track contract, which offers definitive proof of my nonexistent negotiating skills
• a cache of envelopes, both letter size (bedecked with the college logo) and manila mailers, all rendered unusable because the moisture in my office glued the flaps shut
• expense reports and receipts from every conference I ever attended with College funds, back when I regularly attended conferences (and the College had funds) 

But the most unexpected item I located in the current sweep was the 2002 JAM Anthology, a printed collection of prize-winning poetry from the Julia A. Moore Bad Poetry Contest sponsored by the Flint, Michigan, Public Library. Although I doubt that this fact ever appeared on my Vita or in my tenure file, it is nevertheless indisputable that my poem "Shopping for Words on a Snowy Evening" was a finalist in the 2002 Julia A. Moore Bad Poetry Contest.

And the crowd goes wild!

I had entirely forgotten entering a bad poem in the Julia A. Moore Bad Poetry Contest, but I certainly remember a research project that required me to read a lot of bad poetry by the likes of Julia A. Moore ("The Sweet Singer of Michigan") and James Whitcomb Riley (the perpetrator of "The Happy Little Cripple"). Julia A. Moore is perhaps best remembered (?) as the author of "The Great Chicago Fire," a poem of monumental awfulness that ends with a resounding thud. I mean, go and read it. It's really bad.

My poem included in the anthology is, I hope, not quite that awful, which is why it was merely a finalist rather than a prize-winner. I know I could do better today, which would make me even less likely to win a prize, which is good, I guess? Anyway here it is, fresh from the JAM Anthology that has been nestling within the moist and moldy confines of my desk drawer since 2002:

Shopping for Words on a Snowy Evening

Whose words these are I think I know:
He's listed in the footnotes, though
He will not see me stopping here
To copy sentences--and mo'!

My editor might think it queer
To cut and paste words without fear
Out of that text, from which I take
Whole paragraphs, and move them here.

If caught, I'll say, "There's some mistake!
I never really meant to take
Those words! At least, not take for keeps.
Oh please do not my books forsake!"

The words are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have contract terms to keep,
And books to crib before I sleep,
And books to crib before I sleep.

I don't know which is worse: the badness of this poem or the fact that it wasn't bad enough to earn a prize. But what sort of person wants to win a prize in a Bad Poetry Contest anyway? (That would be me.)

So go ahead--try to do better! 

Doing my breast--er, best--to be transparent, but not too transparent

The next question, of course, is what to tell my students--and when.

Seventeen years ago when I was fighting an entirely different type of cancer with a treatment plan requiring radiation every weekday for a month and chemotherapy every three weeks until Thanksgiving, I knew from the start that I would have to tell my students something. My hair started falling out during the first week of the semester so I couldn't pretend everything was fine. Besides, I had to arrange online activities for chemo days, so from the start I enlisted my students' help in making all the logistics work right.

This time is different. No chemo, no hair loss, and not much chance that I'll look visibly ill before the surgery. Afterward I'll have to take a little time off, but how much do my students need to know about why?

The good news is that the lumpectomy itself will be on October 5--in the middle of our four-day fall break. I plan to stay off campus that whole week and I've already found colleagues to cover my Wednesday and Friday classes. The Thursday capstone students were already scheduled to have a research day in preparation for their annotated bibliography assignment, and I trust them to use the time wisely even if no one is in class taking attendance. 

But I have to tell my classes something about why I won't be on campus and why I won't necessarily be responsive to emails, and I need an explanation more compelling than because I'll be taking really great drugs.

I don't remember how much I told my students last time--did they know what kind of cancer or where? Would they even know the meaning of endometrial? I think I kept it vague, but I don't remember. 

This time I'm telling them that I need to have a medical procedure that will keep me off campus and mostly inaccessible for a week but it's nothing to worry about. Is that too vague? I mean, I don't want students thinking about my breasts, and I certainly don't want them thinking about the fact that one of the pre-op procedures involves inserting a tiny radioactive seed into my breast ACK OOF YIPES. I'd rather not think about that myself so I'm certainly not telling anyone else about it. (Except you. You I can trust.)

Most of all I don't want my students thinking about me at all. I want them to think about poetry and fiction and nature and culture and history, but it's impossible to do that when someone is poking a radioactive breast in your face. So I'll shut up about the breast.  

So we've agreed on a plan: be as vague as possible; focus on the course material; reassure them about the positive prognosis. Don't even breathe the word breast. (Breast breast breast breast breast.) 

Attack of the killer anomalies

I'm sitting in my classroom watching my students take their first exam when I realize that I have once again become a nonperson. My previous laptop used to periodically decide that I was not authorized to access campus resources, especially wifi and printers, but that laptop is dead and gone. This morning I'm using the computer in my regular classroom, which won't let me log in to campus email or Canvas or any other resource requiring a College password. "You are locked out," says the error message. No indication of why or what to do about it.

Can't record attendance. Can't read or respond to email. Can't access course materials. Can't check my employee records to see if that stipend has come through yet. Can't do anything I need to do during class except text a message to the IT helpline.

I emphasize that it's not an emergency but nevertheless the IT guy shows up at the door while my students are taking their exam. After a whispered conversation, he promises to come back after class, but when he does, all he can do is inform me that only one person in the IT department is authorized to unblock me and he's out sick today.

So naturally I panic. 

I've been doing that a lot lately. Because of the anomalously disastrous year we've been enduring, panic hovers so close to the surface that it takes very little to urge it out of hiding. After all our floods and storms and falling trees, I hyperventilate every time a dark cloud rolls overhead, and a night-time storm keeps me awake long after my rational mind assures me that there's no danger in falling asleep. 

So naturally when I get locked out of all campus resources, my mind assumes the unthinkable: I'm getting fired. Maybe the Powers That Be found out that I taught in jeans last Friday while a prospective students was visiting my classroom. (Nice black jeans! On Friday, when half of my colleagues teach in college T-shirts and jeans!) Maybe they finally got fed up with my grousing and decided to show me the door but then forgot to inform HR. Maybe campus police were instructed to escort me off campus but got confused by my dual roles and showed up at the wrong office. It could happen!

But of course it doesn't. It's all just a computer anomaly, the aftermath of a power outage that hit campus for a few hours last night. Why it decided to banish no one but me from the island remains a mystery, but by 1 p.m. I'm no longer locked out of campus systems and I am fully authorized to attend to my usual duties.

All that panic over nothing! Next time, someone should take me to a dark room and make me breathe deeply and listen to whale songs until the urge to panic passes, except I would probably panic over the possibility of whales invading my office and thrashing my books to smithereens. 

But no time to think about that now. I've got exams to grade and attendance to record and stipends to hunt down and I'd better get it all done before the next anomaly wrecks my day.

Friday poetry challenge: Ordinary heroes

Sept. 11 is a good day for appreciating heroes: the first responders who run up the stairs of a burning building when everyone else is running down, the airplane passengers who disable a hijacker intent on terror, or the workers who sort through piles of mangled metal to retrieve barely recognizable bits of bodies. We salute them and rightly laud their extraordinary actions.

But sometimes a perfectly ordinary action can feel heroic, as I reminded myself yesterday while running through my mental list of friends who would be willing to answer a phone call at 5:30 a.m. and drive clear out to the middle of nowhere to lend me a car. It's a short list.

"I'll call Tom," said my husband, and within minutes neighbor Tom, barely awake, was parked at the end of our driveway in his Subaru, which he kindly allowed us to drive to Columbus for a many-test medical marathon.

Why couldn't I drive my own car? Because a violent thunderstorm in the wee hours of the morning had dropped a tree across the top of our bridge. 

The bridge was fine, and the newly repaired part of the driveway was fine, but some gravel had washed away at the end, leaving a one-foot sheer dropoff that my car couldn't have managed even if there hadn't been a tree on the bridge.

So off we went in Tom's car, leaving when it was still so dark that I had no idea what color it was. I had visions of wandering around a parking garage clicking the key fob toward random vehicles until the right one responded.

My son did the dark morning driving, dealing ably with road debris, standing water, and slick silty lanes, not to mention rush-hour traffic in Columbus. We had something like eight separate appointments in three different buildings but somehow we made it through everything. My son stayed in Columbus for the night so he can have more tests today and meet up with his sister, who will drive down to take the next step toward donating the bone marrow he'll need--another kind of ordinary heroism.

And I drove home in Tom's car, relieved to have learned that a lumpectomy and radiation ought to take care of my little health problem and it can all happen within the next four weeks. The logistical challenges of scheduling the surgery and covering my classes will be nontrivial, but having a plan in place is half the battle. 

It was a long, exhausting day that brought relief and results--but none of it would have happened if neighbor Tom hadn't answered his phone. 

O sing with me of neighbor Tom
Who took a call with pajamas on,
Brought a Subaru when all hope was gone--
my neighbor Tom! 

Who are your ordinary heroes?

The end is near(ish)

Well that is absolutely the LAST time I'm teaching on Labor Day, harrumph, and you'd better believe I reminded my colleagues of that fact repeatedly yesterday. Laboring on Labor Day is such a tradition here that it's not worth noting its oddness, but I'm definitely eager to abandon the tradition when I retire.

Also: that moment when I'm standing in front of a room full of students attempting to draw a connection between today's reading and something we discussed last week, but it suddenly occurs to me that the previous reading I'm referring to was discussed in an entirely different class. Oops. Never mind. It's nice to make connections across classes, such as when one of my capstone students brings up an example of witty repartee from the Jane Austen class, but when I'm the only one in the room who has been present in both discussions, the connection is broken.

I will not miss that feeling of never getting caught up, the knowledge that the to-do list never ends because the minute I cross off one task, two more will crop up to take its place. And I won't miss the regret that arises from the sudden realization that I've required students in two different classes to turn in a major assignment on the same day. What moron wrote this syllabus?! Oops, that would be me.

I won't miss the necessity of mastering new classroom technology. We now have access to Respondus, a lockdown browser helpful to faculty who want to allow students to use laptops in class but don't want to hand over their writing process to AI. We will all need training on Respondus--except for those of us who will be sashaying out the door at the end of the semester. I long ago exceeded my quota of new technologies to master. Time for someone else to pick up the baton.

But first I have to get through this semester, and we've barely begun the third week. How many days left they ask me, but who's counting? I'm a word person, not a number person, so the answer has to be something like not enough days to complete everything I need to do. 

Ask me again after I've crossed a few more tasks off my list. The end isn't quite near, but I can feel it getting closer by the minute.