The joys of winnowing

Yesterday I looked out my big picture window and saw the back end of a U-Haul blocking the view. Today the truck is gone, having disgorged its contents into my house, my son's apartment, and the Habitat for Humanity Restore, where our excess furniture will find a new home, provided that someone out there wants a 30-year-old particle-board computer desk or a wobbly side table.

We still have a huge task ahead of us, emptying boxes and rearranging the contents of cabinets so everything fits, but just at the moment I'm letting it all sit. I woke up in the wee hours with shooting pains in my shoulder from all the lifting, so today I intend to focus on less strenuous tasks, like thinking about beans. Where are we going to store all the varieties of dried beans we kept in the pantry at the Jackson house? The one cabinet here that still has space is susceptible to mouse invasion, so I can't put anything down there that's potentially gnawable, if that's a word. 

My favorite part of the process of combining two households is winnowing out duplicate items. We now have an excess of cake pans, so let's toss out the old dented ones! I can't tell you how delighted I am to get rid of a broken floor lamp and an ugly table lamp and replace them with the newer, nicer ones from the other house. Too many coffee mugs? Let's take everything that features an advertising logo and throw it in the Goodwill box.

Or one of them. We have three boxes full of things to take to the Goodwill, and we're not nearly done yet. Anyone need a microwave? I'm keeping the newer one but the old one still works. I'm not getting rid of the extra iron, though. Given the volume of ironing my husband does, it's only
a matter of time before our iron wears out. I'll keep the other one as a backup.

We probably could have made some money on some of the things we gave away, but who has time for a yard sale? Let someone else get some use out of my old worn-out stuff and I'll put my time to better use, like thinking about beans and drinking tea and enjoying the unobstructed view out my front window. At some point all these boxes will have to be unpacked, but for the moment I think I'll just sit and enjoy the absence of trucks. 

 

 

Boxed in and matchless

From where I sit in the living room the view is more eclectic than usual: a weight bench next to an empty bookcase next to a barren Christmas tree next to a pile of boxes, because yes, we spent Boxing Day boxing things up so we can reunite our two households into one, although I'm a little worried about where everything is going to fit. Who needs two crock-pots or three cheese-graters or several superfluous floor lamps? I foresee some visits to Goodwill in my future.

I spent most of the afternoon packing up the kitchen and I feel it in my back and shoulders. The easy stuff is done, so the kitchen island is piled high with all the things that don't fit well anywhere, and I don't want to think about where they're going. When I look at the pile I'm tempted to burn it all, so it's a good thing I can't remember where I packed the matches.

Last year I spent Christmas vacation painting the entire interior of this house and this year I'm packing everything up, so this house has certainly given me a whole-body workout. I will miss the kitchen (except for the ovens with their incomprehensible controls), but more than anything I will miss our neighbors and Lake Katharine, which has been my reliable happy place through all the insanity of the past three years of commuting between households and that one bizarre semester of online teaching. I know Lake Katharine and our wonderful neighbors will call me back to Jackson for occasional visits, but I can't think about that until we get outta Dodge.

More packing and cleaning tomorrow, and then we'll pack up the truck on Wednesday and head home. If everything goes according to plan, by Thursday I'll be sitting on a different sofa in our own house contemplating a view very much like the one I'm seeing now--piles and piles of boxes that need to be unpacked, and not a clue as to which one holds the matches.

That's my jam

When life gives you fancy jams--make thumbprint cookies. Especially if life is demanding that you pack up every single item in the fridge and move it across the state a few days after Christmas so you're motivated to empty as many bottles as possible.

And if life gives you a few blessedly free hours before the arrival of the son and the holiday services, why not do some online training for the new course management system, even if it is Christmas Eve? Because I'm an academic and that's how we roll.

This won't be my most memorable Christmas ever--that would be the one when I had to cancel a massive Christmas Eve party to deliver my daughter a month early via emergency C-section--but it's certainly unusual. Because of the timing of this move, I will have to take down the Christmas tree and pack up all the decorations in the next couple of days, maybe even tomorrow evening. 

On that fateful Christmas of 1986, when I went into the hospital not expecting to deliver my daughter for another month, we weren't able to take down the Christmas tree for a full six weeks, by which point the seven-foot-tall had dried up and dropped every needle. This year's tree is small and artificial and won't take long to undecorate, but it seems wrong to pack away Christmas so quickly.

But we'll be happy to pack on the pounds, thanks to three kinds of Christmas cookies, lots of lovely fruit, and a great big ham in the fridge. Because that's how we roll, that's our jam, that's my kind of Christmas.

 

Kitchen confusion, with capers

Yesterday I found treasure in the freezer: two quarts of frozen blackberries from our summer bumper harvest. I'll bake a blackberry pie for my husband's birthday tomorrow, which will be suitably celebratory while also clearing some food out of the freezer in preparation for moving.

I've been taking stock of what's in the pantry and fridge in hopes of eating as much as we can so we'll have less to pack up and move next week, but it's not easy. We'll be eating a lot of canned soup and we may even break into the instant mac and cheese I keep on hand for the grandkids, but the pantry also offers all kinds of ingredients that won't mesh well into a meal: capers, alfredo sauce, almonds, butternut squash, and lime jello. What am I supposed to do with that?

I also need to strategize on packing up the kitchen things, but I've already made some serious errors. We have a bunch of local jellies in the fridge that would work well for thumbprint cookies, but I never brought the stand mixer back from our other house after Thanksgiving so I'll be working with a flimsy hand mixer, which makes cookie-baking much less fun. I can't pack up the pie pans and rolling pin until after the blackberry pies, and I can't pack certain pans and dishes until after Christmas dinner. 

At some point before next Thursday we'll need to switch over to paper plates and get everything in the kitchen packed up and ready to go, but choosing the correct moment will make a big difference in our quality of life over the next two weeks, which explains why my brain is working overtime to solve these logistical problems. I wake up in the wee hours nearly every morning with an urgent need to solve a piece of the puzzle, which makes me a little cranky the rest of the day.

I've lived in limbo so many times that I ought to find the place familiar and comfortable, but every time I stand on the bridge between dwellings, I feel a desperate desire to jump off. But instead I think I'll bake a blackberry pie, which will remind me of one of the things we'll miss most about living in Jackson: the big patch of blackberry bushes just behind the house, a reminder that even the most challenging situations offer opportunities to find treasure.

Something old, something new

The other day I watched my daughter cut some shimmery red velour and sew it into a beautiful Christmas dress for my youngest granddaughter, who wore the dress the next morning in her preschool Christmas program. From fabric to dress in just a few hours! I may have had that kind of energy in my younger years when I annually sewed matching holiday outfits for my kids, but these days I'm happy to watch the young people get creative.

This time of year my husband likes to wear the holiday ties I made him from the same fabrics I used for our children's festive clothes. Ties get less wear than children's clothes and he's never going to grow out of them, so they'll be around a while longer. My daughter, on the other hand, used leftover fabric from her daughter's dress to make new Christmas stockings for my husband and me, since ours are so flimsy that they can't even be hung up any more. As much as I value holiday traditions, I won't be sorry to see those old chintzy stockings go and replace them with stockings decorated with a chickadee and a chili pepper.

On my Christmas tree I can see some of my late mother's delicate porcelain ornaments hanging near twirly plastic ones my daughter produced with a 3-D printer, a lovely juxtaposition of old and new. Today we're looking back on the day 39 years ago when my husband and I tied the knot and drove off into the sunset in that 1970 Dodge Dart, while we also look forward to the day two weeks from now when we'll move out of the Jackson house and reunite under one roof back at Hogue Wild. 

Old and new, past and future come together at the holidays. We might not have known where the journey would take us when we hopped into that Dart 39 years ago today, but we gained something new at every turn in the road, and it's delightful to see the next generation continuing some of our traditions while always bringing new things into our lives. Here's to the next turn in the road!

 

 

Adventures in Customer (dis)Service

After my latest foray into fighting debit-card fraud, I had to go out for a therapeutic haircut--and instead of just getting the usual cheap trim, I actually asked the stylist to shampoo my hair. Because I was just that angry.

Faithful readers will recall (read it here) that two weeks ago I learned that some moron had swiped my debit card number and charged hundreds of dollars in lottery tickets in a town I've never visited. As long as ten days ago I thought the whole situation had been cleared up, but what a fool I was. Since then I have had several tense exchanges with people at my bank, both in person and on the phone, and I have learned a number of interesting lessons:

1. If the phone system in the Customer Service department regularly disconnects callers who get put on hold, it's time for some truth in advertising--call it Customer Disservice. 

2. If you tell the clerk that your old eyes can't handle tiny print and politely ask her to explain what you're being asked to sign, she will sigh deeply and treat you like an imbecile.  

3. The reason my new debit card that was supposed to arrive by mail last week has not yet arrived is that (and I still can't quite believe this) the person responsible for ordering the new one just...didn't. No reason. It just didn't happen. But if they order a new one today, I can have it in hand by the end of next week! Or they can put a rush on it and have it delivered by Federal Express tomorrow! Provided that I'm willing to stay home all day awaiting the delivery, and provided FedEx doesn't pull one of its previous delivery stunts (like putting the package in a plastic bag and tying it to the bridge at the end of my driveway because they can't be bothered to drive up the hill)!

4. I never thought I would be the kind of person who would name-drop the bank's CEO and promise to mention the teller by name in a letter of complaint, but push me far enough and you never know what might happen.

In the end the bank agreed to get my new debit card issued by tomorrow and allow me to pick it up in person at the bank. By the time we'd reached that point this morning, though, I was in no fit state to concentrate on any of today's campus tasks, so I hied me on out to my regular cheapo haircuttery and got my usual trim PLUS a soothing shampoo. I'm gonna wash that bank right outta my hair--as soon as I get my new debit card.

Final exams: the gift that keeps on giving

People keep telling me it's just a number, and I guess they're right: Today I'm only one day older than I was yesterday, but 60 feels centuries older than 59. Then again, twelve years ago when I was undergoing cancer treatment I wasn't sure I'd make it to 50, so I guess I should rejoice over becoming a sexagenarian.

For more than 20 years I've regularly spent my birthday preparing for final exams, proctoring final exams, or grading final exams, and this year is no exception. A student is sitting in front of me taking a make-up exam right now, and I'm giving two more final exams later in the day, for a total of seven and a half hours of proctoring (provided that students take the whole exam period, which may not happen). And then I have a search committee meeting today to interview a candidate, and I'll finish the day with a celebratory supper with my son and some colleagues at the local Indian restaurant--socially distanced, of course. I don't want to create a superspreader event on my birthday so I felt a little guilty inviting people to eat out with us, but we can spread out at separate tables and still enjoying being in the presence of wonderful people.

I ought to be grading during all those hours of proctoring, but I've been grading papers all week and I'm tired. What I need is a face mask that makes me look wide awake while I sleep in front of the classroom. Now that would make a great birthday gift! Except I'm afraid my snoring would give it away.

A nice surprise at my department's holiday lunch.

 

Of hats, masks, and splendors

Last night at the community performance of Handel's Messiah I noticed a group of teens wearing unusual headgear--floppy knit hats with floofy things hanging from them--but I did not scoff because (a) the hats weren't any more ridiculous those I often wore in public during my own ridiculous-hat stage; (b) these adolescents' presence at a long baroque musical event more popular with the white-haired crowd is something to celebrate; and (c) in addition to ridiculous hats, they wore face masks, which is more than I can say for many others. 

Masks were required for the event, but many in the crowd interpreted "required" loosely. Way up front I saw a group of about a dozen Mennonite teens covering their heads with tiny white bonnets and delicate white scarves, but not one of them was wearing a mask. Maybe it's a religious thing? Mennonites are supposed to avoid personal adornment, but a plain drab mask doesn't seem like much of an adornment. (Neither does a ventilator, but let's not go there.)

It felt really good to be out amongst people enjoying the kind of performance that provides an emotional boost at the start of Advent. I kept thinking of the hymn we sang in church Sunday morning, "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear," which looks forward to a time "When peace shall over all the earth its ancient splendors fling." That's just what we all need right now: a bunch of ancient splendors being flung about as we run around with arms stretched out to catch them. 

I caught some splendors the other day from my amazingly talented Jackson neighbor Judy, whose hobby is making beautiful quilts for family, friends, and strangers. Yes, she's the sort of person who entertains herself by crafting hand-made quilts to donate to needy children she'll never meet, but this time she'd made a quilt featuring 60 friendship stars in honor of my upcoming 60th birthday. I wrapped myself in that quilt and felt surrounded by love. I wish I could walk around wrapped in that quilt all week long, but it's a little unwieldy and I would hate to drag such a splendid gift in the dirt.

Instead, I propose that we all put on our most ridiculous hats, crank up the holiday music, and run around catching splendors wherever they are being flung, because what's the point of flinging splendors if no one's around to catch them?

I love the backing fabric just as much as the pieced top.

 

Remarks on unremarkability

Final day of classes for the semester but who has the energy to celebrate? Today my students are submitting papers, viewing the last bits of films, and preparing for final exams, but all I want to do is lie down and sleep for a week or two, which is not consistent with the need to grade all those papers and proctor all those finals.

This has not been the most exhausting semester ever: I haven't been trying to teach while competing for a tenure-track job in my own department or undergoing cancer treatment or serving as faculty chair, nor have I been shackled to Zoom while teaching during a lockdown. It has, on the whole, been a pretty unremarkable semester, with a few difficult spots but no more stress or heartache than might be expected of a normal year. Last year, surviving a full semester under pandemic conditions felt positively heroic; this year it's just business as usual.

But how do we celebrate business as usual? Congratulations on having a mostly unremarkable semester! Hope your next semester is even more unremarkable! I'm just not feeling it. What this semester needs is a theme song:

Call me unremarkable;
call me so forgettable;
and it's unregrettably true
that business as usual won't fit in this meter--boo-hoo!

Yeah, that's bad, but not bad enough to be memorable. Just unremarkable, like this semester, which appears to be winding gently down, going out not with a bang but a yawn.  

Since when do Mario and Luigi work at my bank?

After spending half an hour on hold with my bank's fraud detection division, I had one question: How am I supposed to have confidence in your competence when your hold music sounds like the Super Mario Brothers theme?

But I didn't ask that because I had more pressing issues: How did some moron get access to my debit-card number, and how many lottery tickets did he buy with my money? If he wins the jackpot, do I get a cut? How long will my account be frozen? When will my new debit card arrive? And how am I supposed to get access to my funds in the meantime?

Two days, four phone calls, and one lengthy visit to the bank later, I still don't have all the answers, and a bank clerk informed me that my situation is not at all unusual. Apparently this kind of thing happens every day, but this is the first time it's happened to me so I think I'm allowed to be a bit befuddled. 

I mean, how do people get access to funds when an account is frozen? "They have multiple accounts," said the helpful bank clerk, which sounds like a grand idea that I'll be certain to pursue as soon as I get access to my funds. Meanwhile, I guess I can just stop spending money.

But will the hundreds of dollars that moron spent on lottery tickets ever get refunded? I have to make one more visit to the bank to sign some papers so they can pursue the fraud further, and then it's a waiting game, accompanied by the kind of hold music that makes me wonder whether Mario and Luigi can be trusted to rescue my treasure.

Another edition of Unsent Letters

To students of my seriously ill colleague: Trust me, your professor is in no condition to respond to emails demanding instant information about your grade, and acting as if he got sick on purpose just to inconvenience you isn't going to help him recover.

To a student confused about what "revision" means: I started reading the revised draft you sent me but it immediately became apparent that you hadn't revised any of the problem areas I marked on the earlier draft, including such simple issues as incorrect spelling of place names. Surely you're not asking me to mark all those errors a second time, right? So why don't you go ahead and revise in response to my previous feedback before asking for more?

To the most non-responsive class I've ever encountered: Honestly, I could stand in front of the room and offer a hundred-dollar bill to the first person who speaks, and I wouldn't be a penny poorer by the end of the class. If you're so terrified of wrong answers that you can't risk saying a single word all semester long, and if you perceive every friendly attempt to elicit responses as intimidation, then I hope you someday own a restaurant that gets reamed out by Gordon Ramsay so you can see what real intimidation looks like.

To the student who educated me: I confess that I initially perceived you as a big dumb lunk, but you've shown such an eagerness to learn, a willingness to take risks, and a persistence in the face of difficulties that I'll be reluctant in the future to dismiss anyone on the basis of a poor first impression. 

To my students preparing final papers and exams: Go ahead and panic if you have to, but do it quickly--set aside five minutes for a full-on panic attack so that you can get it over with and move on. Hit something soft that won't hit back, or run around campus waving your arms and yelling all the names you'd like to call your professors--whatever you have to do to get the negative energy out of your system. Then sit down and do all the things that stand between you and a successful completion of the semester, because winter break is on the way and we all want you to get there in one piece.

Post-Thanksgiving thanks

Yesterday some of us were coloring at the dining table while my oldest grandchild drew up a chart to record data about an interesting rock she'd found down at the creek, and she said, "I can't wait to take this home and put it on my spreadsheet!" Yes, we now live in a world in which eight-year-old girls create spreadsheets to record data about rocks. There's something to be thankful for!

When she got bored, I threw open the cedar chest and the basket full of scarves and she got busy putting together some very creative combinations from all the old fancy-schmantsy clothes I've inexplicably saved over the years. My old prom dress has never looked better, and we all enjoyed the fashion show.

We've all colored and played Legos and gone for walks together, but I'm most thankful for a family that knows how to work together to prepare a feast. I don't know where my daughter learned to make such fabulous pies--certainly not from me--but every hand played a part in putting a turkey and all the trimmings on the table (and cleaning them all up afterward).

Last night while all the men took my grandson to Columbus for his first hockey game, my daughter and I introduced the little girls to Singing in the Rain, which made them laugh their little heads off and express a desire to see it five million more times. Now their chirpy little voices are going around singing Moses supposes his toeses are roses, a pleasant sound to hear in a house that is normally way too quiet.

Now it's time to clean up the Legos, wipe up the syrup smears, pack up the muddy boots, and send everyone home. But we're not packing up the thankfulness. I need to make room for that in my house every day of the year. 

 

The right time for running out of steam

"You can spend the final 20 minutes of class working on the reading assignment for next Monday," I told my composition students, "But I don't care whether you do it here or elsewhere." So they all left the classroom, possibly to find a comfortable place to do the reading and possibly not. Who knows? They'd turned in their major research papers this morning so we spent some time in class doing some preliminary work to prepare for the final essay exam, but I won't see them again for a whole week and who's going to remember anything I tell them today?

I've reached the point in every class when I've just about run out of steam. Sure, I'll lead discussions of reading material and provide feedback on drafts, but two of my classes are spending the final week of class watching films and I don't feel the least bit guilty about that. They all have major projects due in the next two weeks, so they're working hard enough--and so am I. It just doesn't always look like work.

Frankly, I'm too tired to stand in front of class right now. I've been awake since 4 a.m. because my subconscious mind decided it was really important to find out whether we had any yeast in the kitchen, which we did not, so I had to add that to my shopping list for Thanksgiving food, although why I had to do that at 4 a.m. is beyond me. How am I supposed to stand in front of four classes and be coherent when my subconscious mind is waking me in the wee hours obsessing over yeast?

So for now I'll do my work sitting down. Today I'm providing feedback on a pile of drafts from the African American Lit class plus a pile of Works Cited drafts for the Honors students' research projects. And then I have all those composition essays to grade and a bunch of interpretive maps from the Postcolonial Lit class, where students did some really impressive work on the meanings of Maori tattoos and folk tales and where one student illustrated Peter Cowan's short story "The Tractor" by creating an image of a garden growing plants shaped like dollar signs. Amazing work, and I enjoyed watching them explain their findings to classmates while I sat and watched from the sidelines.

If I've done my work well, my students should be able to take the lead at this point in the semester while I observe and encourage. It may look like I'm loafing, but it's evidence that learning has happened and work has been done, and after all that effort we all need a bit of a break. And so we'll take it, with thanksgiving.   

A well-earned reward for a powerful poet

I had dinner with poet Martin Espada a few years ago before he gave a reading on our campus. A power outage knocked out our favorite local restaurants so we took him across the river to West Virginia, which caused some trepidation--he'd never been to West Virginia before, and he knew Appalachia only from the popular stereotypes. 

It was an odd dinner. He was a lovely man but low-energy, almost morose; I worried about how he would reach the audience at the reading. 

But then he stood up and started reading. What a remarkable transformation: he performed his verse, chanting and swaying and sometimes shouting. Poetry that was pretty impressive on the page swept through the room like a cleansing fire. And I thought: powerful poetry--from a powerful poet.

And so I was delighted to hear that Espada's latest collection, Floaters, has won this year's National Book Award for poetry. The title poem (read it here) responds to a photograph of a man and his small child who drowned while trying to cross the Rio Grande. The poem reminds us that

... the dead have names, a feast day parade of names, names that
dress all in red, names that twirl skirts, names that blow whistles,
names that shake rattles, names that sing in praise of the saints...

Espada is an expert at making us look at the world around us and see beyond the surface. A few years ago he wrote an essay responding to Shelley's claim that poets are "the unacknowledged legislators of the world," Espada writes,

Poets should have no trouble identifying with being 'unacknowledged.' They grouse about being ignored, about paltry attendance at readings and royalty statements that would cause most novelists to jump off a bridge. Yet poets also contribute to their marginalization by producing hermetic verse and living insular lives, confined to the academy or to circles of other poets, by mocking themselves as childish and unworldly, by refusing to embrace their role as unacknowledged legislators. The only antidote to irrelevancy is relevancy. The British poet Adrian Mitchell famously said: 'Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.'

Espada's poetry does not allow us to ignore people, even the nameless, faceless people whose tragedies are so easily overlooked. His poetry is an antidote to poetic irrelevancy, and for that he deserves all the applause he is now receiving.

A surprisingly easy week, despite everything

On Monday I excused myself from a class so I could go to the ladies' room and cough vigorously without alarming anyone, and today I had to figure out how to handle a nosebleed in front of a class while wearing a mask. I know what caused the nosebleed--the nasal spray that I generally use only during the height of spring allergy season but that I've reached for far too many times in the past week. No more! Today I feel nearly normal so I'm putting away all the over-the-counter remedies and sticking to hot tea to get me through the day.

And what a lovely day it is: warm and sunny, with a chance of gorgeousness this afternoon. It was a sudden shift to unseasonably warm weather that precipitated my allergy attack a week ago, so here's hoping that this week is different.

On the too-many-meetings front, things are going well. I've been reminded of how much fun search committees can be when they allow me to spend time with really interesting people who are passionate about their work, and the real advantage of Zoom interviews has become clear: I'm not stuck trying to eat a meal in a nice restaurant with a pedant who won't shut up about Foucault.

Most of my classes are having writing workdays this week, so I'm spending a lot of time wandering around classrooms checking on progress and answering questions. With little to prep, I'm working ahead on next semester's syllabi, which ought to be really easy since I'm teaching three repeat courses that require only minor adjustments. The fourth course is a new prep, but I had to produce a full syllabus to submit with the course proposal in August, so it just needs a little tweaking. 

On Friday I'll be inundated with drafts requiring swift feedback, and then over the next two weeks I'll be collecting piles of papers, exams, and other assignments to grade. Right now, though, I'm taking it easy, trying to be helpful, and celebrating every class period that passes without the need to cough.  

 

When students pursue the nuclear option

"We need to get together and share war stories so I won't feel like I'm the only one," said a junior colleague this morning. He's in the middle of a kerfuffle caused by a student who, upset with a particular classroom policy, sent a long angry e-mail to the President, Provost, the Associate Provost, and just about everyone in a position of authority at the College except the professor himself. Because why start small when you can jump right to the nuclear option?

I told my troubled colleague about the freshman comp students who told a former Provost that I should be required to teach in long sleeves because the big hairy mole on my arm was interfering with the students' ability to learn, and I also shared the then-Provost's helpful suggestion on how I should remedy the situation: "Why don't you just have surgery?" 

And I told him about the time I told a plagiarizing student that I didn't hear his own distinctive voice in his paper and he went and told everyone on the planet that I said his writing wasn't "Black enough."

These incidents and others like them happened when I was still wet behind the ears, not yet tenured and uncertain whether my career could survive. Incidents like these require time and resources from many people and tie everyone up in knots emotionally, with long-term impact. I mean, I still think twice before putting on short sleeves on a teaching day, and I've certainly become more careful about how I confront students about plagiarism. But here's the thing: I could have learned those lessons less traumatically if the students had approached me first instead of employing the nuclear option.

But outrage seems to be the order of the day, so complaints and concerns that ought to be worked out on the classroom level are instead making their way straight to the President and Provost, who, frankly, have one or two other things on their plate. Their response to the students is simple: "Have you talked to the professor?" But by that time the outrage genii is out of the bottle and it's often hard to shove him back in.

My colleague is doing okay. He'll come out of this just fine, and then someday he'll have a war story to share with a junior colleague who needs to hear that we're not alone, that we've all been through our battles, and that, if we pull together, we will survive.  

Can't hit the steps without a soundtrack

I'm in a panic after looking at next week's schedule. In addition to teaching four classes on MWF, I am also either encouraged or expected to attend meetings at the following times: Monday at noon, Monday at 4 (two different meetings!), Monday at 5, Tuesday at 12:15, Tuesday at 4, Wednesday at 4, Thursday at 4 (two different meetings!). Friday is my only meeting-free day, but by then I'll be too exhausted to celebrate. This week I backed out of two meetings because I was sick, but that excuse will only stretch so far--and besides, some of these meetings are kind of important. Not important enough to inspire me to be in two places at once, but important all the same. Good thing I'm not trying to, like, have a life or anything.

Someone needs to put this disastrous song-and-dance to music. Call it the Priorities Polka, the Too-Many-Meetings Blues, the Academic Hokey-Pokey, or whatever will put enable me to waltz from one conference room or Zoom call to another without tripping over my own fat feet. And a-one, and a-two--hit it, boys!

(You first.)

 

Is there anything we can't blame on the weather?

Is there anything we can't blame on the weather? There's lots of misery going around this week and we're badly in need of a scapegoat, so let's give it a try:

I'm behind on my grading because I got sick and stayed home feeling miserable for two and a half days, drugged up and surrounded by billows of used tissues because an unseasonably warm spell put some sort of allergen in the air that made my nose run like an open firehose, and yes, I blame the weather.

And I nearly had a face full of spider web this morning because the spiders that recently retreated to winter quarters have re-emerged in response to warmer weather but I don't expect spiderwebs across my front door in November so BOOM there it was, yuck, and yes, I blame the weather.

A committee meeting this morning was held in a room so hot and stuffy that people felt stifled and tempers simmered until they boiled over, and the room was hot because our HVAC system finally got switched over to heat last week in response to below-freezing temperatures and it's not feasible to switch it quickly back to air conditioning so yes, I blame the weather. 

Can I find the way to blame the weather for the fire that badly damaged a campus sorority house, displacing 15 students and destroying their possessions? No one knows what caused the fire yet and I guess I'm glad that the weather was warm so they didn't freeze to death when they fled the house, and nobody was hurt and the house can be renovated and the students have been re-housed (ugly word for a comforting concept) so no, I can't blame the weather for the fire, but I can't find anyone else to blame either so all that misery is just floating around loose, mingling with the heat and the allergens and all that leaf mold being blown into the air by the battalion of leaf-blowers all over campus, and the leaf-blowers wouldn't be blowing if the leaves hadn't fallen, so yes, I blame the weather.

The good news, though, is that my nose has stopped running and cooler temperatures are on the way this weekend so the spiders should beat a retreat from my front door and the committee meeting rooms will be just normally stuffy instead of unbearable. And for that, we can thank the weather.  

Buoyed up by future fun

It's amazing how little it takes sometimes to improve my mood. I was feeling stagnant, tired of teaching the same texts over and over, wondering whether it's time to pack up the office and call it a career, when suddenly, out of the blue, I was offered a chance to teach a special topics literature course, and now I'm all excited about choosing a theme and picking out texts and designing meaningful assignments--for a class I'll be teaching in Spring 2023. 

You know what this means, right? It means I can't retire for at least two more years and I also have an excellent response for all the people who keep asking me when I'm planning to retire: I'm too busy designing a new course to think about retirement.

It's a small thing, really, but thinking about this course has reminded me that I haven't used up all my good ideas and that I still have something to offer students. Sure, I teach a lot of the same texts over and over, but I'm not teaching the same students, and each new group brings something a little different to the table. And in 2023, I'll bring something new to the table too--and if I'm not quite certain right now what that something will be, at least it's giving me a reason to believe in a bright future.

 

 

Friday poetry challenge: Haiku, out on a limb

Creekside sentinels,
sycamores raise mottled limbs--
camo in the sky.

Everybody's good at something (I hope)

My student rushes into class flustered, says she's nervous about doing her presentation and It's not as good as the ones you do and I want to give her a big hug and say Oh sweetheart--I've been doing this since before you were born, but instead I help her get her file set up and I sit down and listen as she does her best not to collapse in sheer terror in front of the class.

And it's true--I've been doing presentations since overhead projectors were considered cutting-edge technology; I've juggled slippery transparencies and notes while trying not to knock the lens out of focus and I rejoiced when digital technology made the overhead projector obsolete. I've never claimed to be a master of PowerPoint but I've been honing my skills for a long time and I'm generally pleased with the results. I've seen talented students create slides that looked far more polished than anything I could hope to produce, but even the less flashy presentations are generally competent enough. I try to hold high expectations for student work, but I hope I'm not making students feel as if they'll never measure up.

Last week I watched a student presentation that made me marvel: the background looked clean and original, and the information was clustered to make the relationships between ideas especially clear. Two words were spelled wrong, but these students had designed something far beyond my skill-set. I expect to see more of this kind of excellence as my tech skills stagnate while students keep exploring new methods and programs. 

I give a loud hurrah to students whose presentation skills surpass mine, but that doesn't mean I expect every student to excel in that way. They're students! They're still learning! If they do their best to fulfill the requirements of the assignment, conveying helpful information clearly, then they'll be fine. And if oral presentations really aren't their strong suit, then they'll just have to grit their teeth and survive to move on to more comfortable territory.

Everybody is good at something, but if the something they're good at isn't on display in my classroom, then I may never know what skills my students possess that I could never hope to equal. So when my student said I know it's not as good as what you do, I was reminded that I get to get up in front of people and do what I'm good at every single day--and I can only hope that my students will reach a point when they will get to do the same.

A walk in the wet fall woods

I keep waiting for one of those crisp fall days when the brightly colored leaves stand out against a vivid blue sky, but alas, the good weather comes only on days when I'm tied up in meetings. I drive to work in the dark every morning and no matter how clear the skies may be while I'm inside teaching classes, the clouds start to gather the minute I leave the building. Soon the leaves will fall and we'll be black to bare brown woods, so if I'm going to enjoy the fall colors, I'd better do it now regardless of the weather. 

And so we went out for a hike at Lake Katharine this morning, walking through constant drizzle over paths covered by slick wet leaves. Occasionally the dim woods would open up onto vistas of yellow and red leaves alongside the lake shrouded in mist. I walked through shooting pains in my hip and hobbled back to the car both refreshed and exhausted. Conditions were lousy and I wondered if we'd ever see the sun again even as the lovely fall colors pulled me onward. Light at the end of the tunnel! I just wish the tunnel weren't so wet, dark, and cold.

   

Getting comfortable with discomfort

Another day, another news story about an attempt to remove from schools or libraries any book that might make a student "uncomfortable."

You know what makes me uncomfortable? Reading news stories about people trying to remove books that might make other hypothetical people uncomfortable.

Also peach skin--the fuzziness makes me uncomfortable. Big trucks barrelling down the highway right on my tail make me uncomfortable. Overuse of boldface in a document makes me uncomfortable, and a document that combines underlining and italics makes me deeply uncomfortable.

Learning the new software we're using for student advising makes me uncomfortable. Students who think anything that happened before the year 2000 is prehistoric make me uncomfortable, as do those who refer to prose written in 1921 as "Old English." 

This is just the tip of the iceberg of things that make me uncomfortable, but you know what? I'm still gonna eat that peach and drive on that highway and read that document and use that software and teach those students, because sometimes the rewards are worth a little discomfort.  

A little monkey business

I just found myself writing a comment I don't recall ever before applying to a student project: Effective use of monkeys. It's a relief, really, to see such adorable monkeys cavorting all over an assignment, and it's a relief to be able to write something more interesting than italicize titles of books or the period comes after the parentheses.

I've been reading drafts of annotated bibliographies, the most loathsome type of assignment to grade because so many elements require attention beyond the clarity of the annotations themselves: alphabetical order, title formats, hanging indent, punctuation, and a host of other niggling details. So then it was a pleasure to shift to the interpretive maps produced by my Postcolonial Lit students, whose use of monkeys was, as mentioned, highly effective. How can I encourage the use of colorful cavorting monkeys on other assignments?

 

 

 

A lot of brouhaha about vagueness

Autumn leaves lack subtlety, but while the colors screams for attention outside, I'm stuck in my office writing "vague" on recent literature exams. I appreciate subtlety in word use and argumentation, but these responses are not subtle or understated or oblique; they're just plain vague. There's no there there.

Many questions on my literature exams don't require a specific right answer, but that doesn't mean there's no such thing as a wrong answer. Writing that the Odyssey portrays the Cyclops as an example of good hospitality demonstrates a lack of understanding of the text, as does the assertion that Inman is a war hero in Cold Mountain. But I'd rather see a student draw an inaccurate conclusion about a text than avoid drawing any conclusions at all.

My guiding rule is simple: Could the student's statement be applied indiscriminately to every work of literature ever written? If so, it's too vague. Literature means different things to different people: vague. Poets use different methods to get their point across: vague. These works are similar in some ways and different in others: vague. Music is used for many purposes in the text: vague.

These statements are salvageable; all the student has to do is provide specific examples from the texts to support broad generalizations. In fact, almost every question is accompanied by a request to support claims with specific examples from the text. What's so difficult about mentioning, for instance, the scene where Stobrod plays his violin for the dying girl and discovers that there's more to music than just hitting the right notes? 

Unless, of course, the student hasn't read the text. I would guess that 99 percent of vagueness in exam responses is a result of simple ignorance: the student hasn't read the text and so throws down a tangle of verbiage in hopes that I won't notice the absence of substance. But if I have one superpower, it's the ability to spot an absence of substance on an essay exam. I can see what's not even there, and its absence will result in a Very Bad Grade.

Fortunately, this semester I have very few students suffering from the vagueness disease. I try to nip the vagueness virus in the bud on low-stakes reading quizzes; once students see how much disaster the word vague can wreak on a 10-point quiz, they tend to work a little harder on specific examples. But a few are immune to the reading quiz vaccine--or maybe they're just immune to reading. Whatever the reason, I could definitely find use for a rubber stamp with the word vague in a big bold font.

I used to have a rubber stamp that said brouhaha (thanks to a friend who worked in a print shop), but I never found much use for it before it disappeared during one of my moves. I would get plenty of use out of a vague rubber stamp, but I would get depressed every time I saw it in my desk drawer. But imagine getting through a whole pile of exams without saying vague! That would be cause for some brouhaha. 

Just a brief midweek happy dance

I had the strangest feeling while driving home yesterday afternoon, an overwhelming lightness as of my whole being trying to smile. Could this be--happiness? For no good reason? In the middle of a ridiculously busy week?

Let me count the reasons I ought to be unhappy right now: student intransigence, campus shenanigans, financial stagnation, personal frustration over the zillion ways it's impossible to live in two counties at once. And yet I feel happier than I have in months, maybe years. 

It's true that yesterday a colleague shared with me something a student told her about my class that made me feel like Super Professor, but a solitary student comment shouldn't be enough to offset the gloom that has characterized the past year and a half of pandemic teaching. Last year at this time we were all dutifully putting one foot in front of the other to get through the day and the week and the semester, spending so much time wrangling technology for Zoom classes that we had no time to hope for happiness. This week I'll need to turn on Zoom to accommodate one student in quarantine, but the relative absence of Zoom from my daily life has lifted a curtain and let in some light.

And this semester I've also spent more time interacting with colleagues face-to-face, most meaningfully as chair of a task force charged with producing a bit of verbiage for the College's strategic plan. Sounds deadly, right? But here's the thing: this group worked really well together crafting a statement that bears none of the hallmarks of committee-produced prose. It's succinct, elegant, profound, and perhaps even inspiring. I was delighted to lead a mixed group of colleagues through the process and especially pleased to see the rookies step up to make significant contributions, suggesting hope for future campus leadership.

And I've also finally found an avenue for my own future research and writing. No one has been doing much professional development during the pandemic--I mean, who has time to write conference papers or journal articles? I've been shepherding the comedy volume through the editing process and I finally submitted the Natasha Trethewey essay to a journal, but for a long time I haven't been able to visualize any future research or writing beyond these projects. I've been wondering whether I might be reaching the end of the road as a productive scholar, but then this week I started sensing a pathway opening in a new direction, an area adjacent to my previous work but different enough to arouse my curiosity. I'm not ready to go public yet but it's exciting to see that what looks like a dead end might instead be a sharp turn into really interesting territory. 

It came to me in the middle of a long walk up the Big Horrible Hill, a hill I haven't been able to climb in months. I could blame the weather, my ridiculous schedule, or my aging joints, but the result is that I've fallen so far off my usual exercise routine that I couldn't make it all the way up the hill the first time I tried this fall. But I've been working at it--one foot in front of another, a little farther each time--and this morning I made it clear to the top and back home again without too much trouble. I'll be living on Aleve today, but there's no doubt that getting out for a challenging walk through woods suffused with autumn gold nourishes my body, mind, and soul. 

And so I feel happy--still!--despite joint pain and piles of grading and more committee work. I'm going to hold on to this feeling as long as I can because if nothing else, pandemic teaching has taught me how ephemeral happiness can be, how easy it can be to lose hope. I know it's not over and there are more challenges ahead, but just for today, let's raise a glass to happiness.

All the ways I'm being horrible today (or most of them, anyway)

First, I'm making my first-year composition students find books--actual books!--to use as sources for their problem papers, and I'm even requiring that they find at least one book published by a University Press, and when they asked why, I told them about previous students who used children's books written on a third-grade level as sources in a college research paper, and when my current students pointed out that they would never do such a thing and it's not fair to make them suffer because of bad acts by past students, I said I know it's not fair--but you'll have to do it anyway.

And if that's not bad enough, I'm making them find--and read!--articles from peer-reviewed academic journals, and I even devoted time in class to showing them how to use our library research databases to find articles, and then I gave them 20 minutes of class time  to find academic journal articles, during which time I walked around the room answering questions and offering guidance--even to the student who had kept her hood pulled up earlier in class to hide the fact that she had earbuds in and therefore didn't have the first clue what she was supposed to be doing--and before the end of the hour I made each student show me a peer-reviewed academic journal article relevant to their topic, so that when their annotation and citation are due on Friday, they can't claim that they couldn't find any articles. 

And then when I received an email from a student wanting to schedule time to make up a midterm from two weeks ago, I agreed to do so provided that the student could provide some documentation excusing the absence, because the class attendance policy clearly states that while I do not take roll in that class or penalize students for absences, I also do not permit make-ups without an acceptable excuse, and I forgot that there was a midterm is not an acceptable excuse even in the current environment when we are being encouraged to cut students some slack because life is so darned difficult right now, and every time I hear that I have to bite my tongue to prevent myself from growling You want to talk about difficult? I taught a full semester while undergoing chemotherapy and radiation! If I could do that, you can remember to check the syllabus once in a while.

And the day isn't even half over! Who knows how horrible I'll manage to be by the end of the afternoon? 

Advising the advisor

I asked my students this morning what they like about autumn and they mentioned the cooler weather, colorful leaves, and decorated pumpkins, but I notice that none of them brought up the joys of scheduling courses for next semester. Good thing this time of year offers us so many lovely rewards because pre-registration season is upon us and it's terrifying.

For years I taught the first-year seminar every fall, which brings with it the task of serving as advisor to a whole class of brand-new college students, and then I've generally picked up a few English major advisees along the way as well. But I haven't taught the first-year seminar for a few years now and all our English majors seem to be finding help elsewhere. Last year I had exactly one advisee, who how now moved on to an advisor in her major. This year I have thirteen.

Which is nothing, really, compared to the huge advising load some of my colleagues carry, but here's the complication: last year we moved to a brand-new online program for advising students, but I didn't go to any of the training sessions because I didn't have advisees. I was quite adept with the previous setup, even able to troubleshoot problems that arose while students tried to register. This new program is better in every way, offering a more user-friendly experience, more helpful options, more ways for students to take charge of their registration experience, but the problem is that I don't know how to make it work. I haven't used it enough to know where the potholes are hiding, and I'm still fumbling to figure it out well enough so that I can help my students.

Fortunately, all my advisees this semester are honors students, so some of them have already mastered all the intricacies of the new program. Maybe I'll ask them to show me how it works. As an advisor, I'm supposed to have all the answers (or know where to find them), but at this point I'm full of questions, and maybe the best place to find answers is among my students.   

Friday poetry challenge: Apostrophizing apostrophes

"The apostrophe is your friend," I told my freshpersons, but they seemed skeptical, preferring to eschew apostrophes altogether or use them incorrectly to form plural nouns. "That's called the grocer's apostrophe," I told them, just in case the question ever comes up on Jeopardy or something. They don't need to know how to identify a grocer's apostrophe, or even grocers' apostrophes; they need to know how to use apostrophes to form possessives, a topic that has no doubt been troubling students since the invention of the apostrophe--but not enough to motivate them to finally learn the rules of apostrophe placement. And so I gave them the whole song and dance, all the while wondering when the Apostrophe Dance will be featured on Dancing with the Stars. (Not Star's.)

Apostrophes dance across the page;
in plural nouns they're all the rage.
They do-si-do and stick their feet
in "it's" when "its" is needed. Beat

the big bass drum for proper nouns:
"Charle's" keeps on swinging round,
racing to keep up with "Jone's."
Prancing into forbidden zones,

these marks dance on with steps so errant
I fear I'll never cure their tarrant-
ism or constrain their gams
to Arthur Murray diagrams.

Step one: write the plural noun.
If at the end an s is found,
add an apostrophe. If not,
add 's. Apostrophes gavotte

in graceful, orderly progression
when used to indicate possession.

My next pet peeve?

What makes a word repellant? Novelty, sound quality, redundancy, or some other factor?

While grading midterm essays over the weekend, I saw some really good papers but also the usual pile of mediocre writing demonstrating the usual problems: comma splices, spelling errors, difficulty in forming possessives. One of the essays my first-year students analyzed was written by a fellow named Kohls, and when it came to making the name possessive, I saw every possible variation: Kohl's, Kohls', Kohls's, Kohlses', and just plain Kohls. None of this provoked any response other than the usual bland marginal comments.

Only one word in the whole pile of papers made me feel as if I'd been kicked in the gut. I've seen my share of awkward constructions over the years, but few cause the kind of visceral response I felt when I encountered Nextly.

What an ugly word! Next is such a neat little bundle of meaning, entirely inoffensive and useful in indicating progression, but add that little -ly and suddenly it grates on the ear. Was my reaction to the word based on its redundancy, its novelty, or something else? 

I recall when I first started seeing relatable oh so many years ago and found it vague, unnecessary, and lazy. I fought it at first, but it was a lost cause: relatable filled a need so neatly that its general adoption became irresistible. I still bristle when students use it to say something about themselves when they ought to be saying something about the text they're analyzing, but no amount of bristling is going to send relatable back where it came from.

But I can't help bristling at nextly. Is this one instance just a harbinger of change to come? Will nextly be the next relatable? What niche does nextly fill that can't be filled by next? And why does the simply addition of -ly make the word so stinking ugly? 

I hope this was just an isolated error and not the lone cockroach you see in the night kitchen--a visual manifestation of a much larger infestation. Stomping on the cockroach may solve the immediate problem, but it has no effect on the vermin still hiding under the cabinets.

Who says there's no rhyme for "midterms"?

I'm tired and the weather is lousy and I've been up to my eyeballs in committee work all week but I still feel like writing a poem. Problem is, nothing rhymes with midterms. Interns? Infirm? Lid perms? I'm just not feeling it.

In fact I haven't been feeling particularly poetic all semester. I'm well aware that the verse I write barely qualifies as poetry, but playing with words in a rhymey way feeds a particular part of my psyche. As a child I somehow came into possession of a decrepit rhyming dictionary with the front cover missing, and I used to pore over that bedraggled volume by the hour trying to put together words to make them sing. My first publication, in fact, was a set of rhyming quatrains called "Love," published in Wee Wisdom magazine when I was in fourth grade. Everyone has to start somewhere!

Then in my turgid teen years I tried to give up rhyme and write Serious Poetry, but alas, lugubrious best describes my swerve toward free verse. Nobody encouraged my efforts, and I missed the way that comfy old rhyming dictionary fit into my hands. Did it finally fall to pieces or did someone donate it to the Goodwill? If I had it in my hands right now, would I find a rhyme for midterms?

Well I've got some time to kill while my students write their midterm exams so nothing's going to stop me from trying.

When I handed my students their midterms,
they all squirmed in their seats (like a squid squirms).
Students wriggled and writhed
like fresh bait--It's alive!--
or a bucket in which you have hid worms.

But they soon settled in, fingers flying
over keyboards, their minds clearly trying
to respond to the prompt
with aplomb. They all chomped
up the question and wrote without crying. 

Now I'm the one crying and squirmin'
(like a squid) over piles of midterms in
my inbox for grading,
so there's no more evading
the task: it's my turn for midterming!

Let 'em eat pawpaws

I'm sitting in my office scarfing down chunks of fresh pawpaw, thanks to my finicky Honors students. Our pawpaw harvest was not great this year but I had just enough to peel and slice and divide into little cups for my Honors Lit students, so they could get a taste of the sort of thing Inman might have eaten in the wild during his long trek to Cold Mountain. 

They were underwhelmed, to put it mildly. The pawpaws were ripe, fresh off the tree, soft and delicious, but two students didn't have the guts to try it, and many others took one bite and then dumped the rest in the trash. Did they at least have the courtesy to say thank you? No they did not. So I took the two untouched portions back to my office and ate them myself--yum!

Earlier, a student in my composition class told me that I'm the nicest professor she has, which inspired the response, "Great--now I'll have to do something mean just to prove that I'm not a pushover." Maybe I'll make them eat pawpaws.

In another class, students stare silently at their desks when I ask a question, avoiding eye contact as if it were lethal. That's the class where I have the most trouble remembering names, primarily because I never see their faces and they all appear to be variations on the same person--skinny athletes with long straight hair. Funny: overall, we have pretty good gender balance this year, but I have one class that's 75 percent male and another that's 90 percent female, and the women speak up so rarely in class that in my mind they've all merged into the same person. 

It occurs to me that I've broken one of the primary rules of pandemic teaching: masks required at all times inside buildings, and no food or drink in the classrooms. My students would have been happier if I hadn't brought them fresh pawpaws this morning, but chalk it up to a learning experience. At least they know what pawpaws smell like--and by the end of the day, so will everyone else in the building. 

Making mistakes into opportunities

A first-year student asked me the other day whether I'd actually used a typewriter back when I was in college, and I admitted that yes, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth I did indeed use a typewriter, and in fact I made enough money typing papers for classmates to pay for the 800-mile drive home for winter break, but then the student asked, "But what did you do when you made a mistake?"

Well of course there was Wite-Out if you didn't mind big blobs of glop smearing all over the place, or I could slide some correction tape in and try to make the error disappear, or I could pull the page out and start over to create a pristine page, or I could challenge myself to edit the sentence on the fly so that the error was no longer an error but simply a new pathway for the sentence to follow. And there's a joy my students may never experience--adapting a sentence in response to a hard-to-correct typing error.

And now they've made me feel old again, these energetic young people who can't imagine hauling a bulky electric typewriter down to the lobby of the dorm to type late into the night without disturbing roommates--but hey, at least that was better than the manual typewriters I'd learned on back in junior high, those clickety-clackety masses of metal with keys that required the strength of seven men to press and here I was one wimpy little woman, or not even a woman yet but a wimpy girl pounding painfully on those reluctant keys because typing would surely be a useful skill in whatever career I could conceivably pursue.

I recall sitting in a room full of these manual typewriters--because yes, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, a junior high could justify devoting an entire classroom to typing instruction--trying desperately to hit the right keys called forth by my teacher's dictation. I don't remember his name, but I recall how he would stroll slowly up and down the room calling out, at an ever-faster tempo, "a, s, d, f, j, k, l, sem," and he said it just like that, "sem," because life is too short to waste time on all the syllables of "semicolon." His voice is seared into my memory but I can't picture him doing anything other than dictating text, so maybe that was his entire life, pacing the room and calling out letters and words and, eventually, sentences, but you know what? He taught me to type quickly and accurately, and if I could do 40 words per minute on a manual typewriter, just imagine how my fingers could fly across the keys of an electric typewriter!

Too fast and I'd make more mistakes, which is why I developed the ability to transform error into serendipity. It didn't always work, of course; there's nothing anyone can do with hte or brng or Tmmy. But if I caught an error while it could still be turned into a real word, and if I could adapt the sentence to the presence of that word, I'd do it just to avoid the annoyance of grabbing the Wite-Out or pulling out the whole sheet and starting over.

I was a good typist but mistakes were made, and if occasionally I could turn a mistake into coherent prose, that felt like a triumph. Typing introduced many rewards into my life but also many small miseries, and sometimes--when I was working toward a deadline and the error was far down on the page and the thought of starting over filled me with gloom--what I really needed to keep my fingers moving was a small triumph, a little mistake that could suddenly be transformed into an opportunity.    

 

Hot under the collard

I was reading a student essay that referred to "blue collard workers" and I suddenly recalled the fabulous collard greens served alongside equally fabulous smoked brisket in North Carolina last week, but sadly, my student wasn't writing about greens but about collars. Spelling errors aren't as nutritious as collards and brisket, but they're my bread and butter.

Ah, academe! With your annoying notices about late-afternoon Zoom meetings, your advisees reluctant to heed good advice, your bottomless pit of bad excuses! Yesterday afternoon I overheard a tutor trying to explain the function of the semicolon to another student and I thought there's no place like home! Sure, it's fun to be whisked away on a colorful adventure that tastes like brisket, but there's nothing more comforting than the gentle drone of professors' voices emanating from rooms full of sleepy students.

As of this moment I am finally caught up on the grading that piled up while I was away, so now I can look toward the future--classes to prep, essays to edit, meetings to schedule, and on it goes. I've been back two days and already I'm wondering when I can get away again. Last year at this time I was contemplating a semester with no breaks, no opportunities for travel, no enticing prospect outside my home and office and piles of work; this year we get a brief break two weeks from now and a longer one at Thanksgiving. Covid transmission is dropping in the area and campus case numbers remain very low, so things are starting to feel more normal.

Last year all I wanted was a return to normal, but now that I've tasted the brisket and seen the sights, I'm bored by normality and I want to get away. Unfortunately, the only way to break away is to work really hard to earn that break, so off I go once again to stamp out ignorance, one blue collard at a time.   

A full and colorful life (but now I need a nap)

In just five days we managed to drive seven hours (twice!), stuff eight people into an AirBnb, eat way too much junk food, attend my nephew's wedding, watch my adorable granddaughter dance with Daddy and Grampa, eat a slice of the world's best wedding cake (apple spice!), sing Happy Birthday to my dad, hang out with both of my brothers for the first time in years, watch the grandkids splash in a pool that set their teeth chattering, and even teach an online class--and then come home to a new concrete front-porch slab! I'm having a full life over here, so full that I don't have time to write about it, and now I need to try to catch up on all my course work so you'll have to make do with photos.

 

With my brothers.

I guess we clean up well.

Cousins!

Great-Grampa had lots of help with his birthday gifts.

Taking Grampa out for a spin.

Dancing with Daddy

A feat of cheese engineering.

Some handsome dudes.

Beautiful wedding venue.