Time to stop and smell the wildflowers (but not the poison hemlock)

Note to self: it is a mistake to try to identify roadside wildflowers while driving past at 55 mph. Better to walk up at a leisurely pace, or at least pull the car over and snap a picture and enlarge it later to identify the unknown species.

Nothing terribly special: just a bunch of patches of white mullein blooming along the state highway. I love yellow mullein, which I will happily mow around whenever it pops up beside our driveway, but I don't recall seeing white mullein before. This year it's all over the place, its sturdy stalks hoisting white blossoms above roadside weeds. Really quite lovely up close, but not so easy to get close to on a road with an insufficient shoulder.

It's the season of tall wildflowers, from the gangly Queen Anne's Lace to the spindly chicory to the invasive and poisonous wild hemlock. Ironweed and Joe Pye weed stalks are poking up everywhere but not yet blossoming, and it's a banner year for daisies. I haven't been up the hill this week to see how the milkweed is doing--too wet and muddy--but my bottlebrush buckeye is getting ready to bloom and then there will be pollinators.

At home and on campus I'd dealing with various types of claptrap related to the project I'm working on for the provost (writing a manual and designing workshops for academic department chairs)  as well as the new role I'm taking over in August (chair of the Art Department, which will work fine as long as they don't ask me to produce any art). I could spend 25 hours a day writing notes to myself, revising drafts, sending emails about workshops, or fiddling with paperwork, but going outside and taking a look at what's blooming helps clear my head and straighten out my priorities.

Taking the camera along calms me and helps me notice details, but my Nikon is exhibiting signs of age or moisture or too many tumbles or overuse in marginal circumstances--or maybe it's inhabited by gremlins. At any rate it took me two days to find a way to download photos this week and then they weren't very good. Maybe time to start looking for a new camera? 

So I drive past tall stands of wildflowers alongside the highway and wonder whether I ought to stop and take a closer look and snap some pix, but the shoulder's too narrow and I don't trust the camera and then I've gone too far to feel like turning around. 

It's better, anyway, to walk slowly up to the wildflowers. Otherwise, all this beauty passes in a blur.

 

New hummy feeder--a Christmas gift--working well!

Leadership drama invades my dreams

Any change in leadership, however welcome, is bound to spawn some anxiety--which may  explain the bizarre nightmare from which I struggled to extricate myself last night.

I dreamed that the soon-to-be-ex-President of the College paid a surprise teaching-evaluation visit to a Latin class in which I was trying to teach a bunch of bored students how to form the instrumental case--and he fell asleep in my class.

How ridiculous is that? Let me count the ways:

1. By the time classes resume in the fall, this President will have no authority over me. He's leaving! I saw the moving van hauling away all his possessions just the other day!

2. The President plays no part in evaluating teaching, and in fact I've never known him to visit a class except as an invited guest speaker.

3. Class visits for the purpose of evaluating teaching are arranged in advance--no surprises!

4.  Unless our new leadership institutes post-tenure review for full professors nearing retirement, it's unlikely that anyone will visit my class to evaluate my teaching ever again.

5. Latin? The only Latin that has been taught here in this century is the one-credit-hour online Medical Latin courses offered for pre-med students.

5.  Me, teach Latin? I took one semester of Latin around 1985 while my husband was in seminary because spouses could take a certain number of classes for free and I thought Latin would be useful in my graduate studies. I was both the only female and the only non-seminarian in the class, and I still vividly recall the wave of titters when I incorrectly translated a sentence thus: "Do not expect my arm to be around you or yours to be around me." I don't recall whether Latin has a separate instrumental case or how I would teach such a thing, but the question is unlikely to arise in waking life because I'm never going to teach Latin.

6. He fell asleep in my class. Wait, that could actually happen.

Our new President and Provost begin work July 1, and if I'm accounting for all the interims, I think this will be my eighth Provost and my fourth President, which suggests either that we're tougher on Provosts or that it's more difficult to dislodge a problematic President. I've seen a wide range of leadership styles and skill levels, and on the whole, I prefer a leader who is competent but prickly to one who is incompetent but kind. Add a little evil to the mix and it gets more complicated: an incompetent but benign leader may be annoying, but a competent but malignant leader can be downright dangerous.

I've met the new Provost and heard great things about the new Interim President and I am  confident that they're the right people for the job, but the path of change is rarely without its potholes. If my subconscious mind feels the need to wrestle with some underlying anxiety, so be it. 

Besides, this nightmare scenario isn't really all that scary. If you really want to hear me scream, wait until I dream about visiting a class to evaluate someone else's teaching--but this time, I'm the one who falls asleep.  

Of donkeys and distance and faux erudition

This morning, for the first time in ages, I walked up the big horrible hill near our house, puzzling all the while over two questions: What happened to the donkeys? And what am I going to do with Edith Wharton? The two are not entirely unrelated.

Slogging up the gravel road, waving away clouds of gnats and mosquitoes, wandering past the meadow where the red-tailed hawk swooped and the creek where the kingfisher called and the woods where the pileated woodpecker cackled, I kept wondering whether I'd find donkeys at the top of the hill. 

For years our top-of-the-hill neighbors kept expanding their paddocks until placid donkey faces poked expectantly over fences on both sides of the road and far back into the woods. I enjoyed seeing the baby donkeys toddling toward adulthood, but I haven't been up there in a couple of months and hadn't thought about the donkeys until our neighbor's obituary appeared in the paper.

We didn't know our neighbor well enough to go to the funeral, but we knew he was old and in poor health and frankly, I don't know how he and his wife managed a large herd of donkeys on their own. The obituary didn't mention the wife--a mystery!--or the donkeys either, although that didn't surprise me so much. On our small country road where houses hide in the woods at a good distance from one another, we know our neighbors by their cars, their tractors, and their animals. I don't have any curiosity about what happened to the neighbor's tractor after his death, but I do wonder about the donkeys.

As I got closer to the top of the hill, it was clear that big changes were afoot. A section of woods and a dirt road had been cleared; pink flags marked the path of something or other; a pile of twisted metal debris sat alongside the road; and the larger paddock had disappeared entirely. The smaller paddock was still there, though, and four or five mini donkeys stood together in the shade, looking like a group of stolid neighborhood gossips leaning in for a tasty nugget of news. I wished they would turn and spill the scoop, but I had to carry my unanswered questions down the hill. If only I knew my neighbors better!

This dearth of intimacy between people is a central theme of Edith Wharton's fictions, where questions unasked or unanswered doom characters to painful isolation even in the midst of crowds. But that's not why I was thinking about Edith Wharton this morning. I've been re-reading some of her works in preparation for our upcoming visit to The Mount, the home Edith Wharton built in the Berkshires, which provided the impetus for her book The Decoration of Houses. Both house and book served as a declaration of Wharton's independence from her mother, while finding a place that felt like home made possible Wharton's early forays into authorship. The Mount eased Wharton's path toward literary production, and even on repeated readings her fictions never fails to enthrall, which makes me wonder: why do I so rarely put Edith Wharton on any of my syllabi?

I've taught The House of Mirth in the American Novel class, where it makes a nice accessible prelude to more challenging works like The Sound and the Fury or Their Eyes Were Watching God. And I've taught The Age of Innocence in the literature-into-film class, but I could imagine replacing it with Ethan Frome because of the way the 1993 film (with Liam Neeson!) makes cold and distance so palpable. But I don't include any of the wonderful short stories in American Lit Survey--and, even more surprisingly given Wharton's gift for social satire, I've never put any of her works on the comedy syllabus. What's wrong with me?

Part of the problem is that the world in which Wharton asks us to immerse ourselves can feel very distant from the world my students inhabit. Why should they care about the social niceties of the upper crust in nineteenth-century New York? Rich people problems! Why can't those tortured characters just drop their pretenses and say what they mean? (I can precious porcelain teacups shattering on the drawing-room floor...)

And the problem is even more complicated when it comes to Wharton's satires. Consider the opening lines of "Xingu," a short story that never fails to make me laugh out loud: "Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet alone. To this end she had founded the Lunch Club, an association composed of herself and several other indomitable huntresses of erudition."

Here Wharton invites us to observe the foibles of a group of women who aren't as smart as they think they are, but before we can observe how she skewers their pretensions, my students are going to run up against "indomitable" and "erudition," words that will inspire some of them to seek out the dictionary and others to give up on the story entirely and read an online summary.

And what a shame! Because they'll never get to know the priggish Mrs. Plinth, who issues stern warnings against discussion of topics she doesn't comprehend; or the striving Mrs. Leveret, who carries Appropriate Allusions as a hunter carries ammunition and whose greatest fear is that a visiting author, Osric Dane, might use a different volume; or Osric Dane herself, the author of The Wings of Death, a book the club discusses at some length without having actually read it. 

And worse yet, they'll never encounter the marvelous Mrs. Roby, whom the other women dismiss as an intellectual lightweight because "At Miss Van Vluyck's first off-hand mention of the pterodactyl Mrs. Roby had confusedly murmured: 'I know so little about metres--'" (How many of my students are equipped to get that joke? By the time I've explained about dactyls, how many will care?)

And if they aren't willing to follow the subtle stabs at pseudo-intellectualism in Wharton's book, how many students will appreciate the irony when the lightweight Mrs. Roby is the only huntress able to pierce Osric Dane's defenses, puncturing her arrogance and exposing her flaws? I picture a classroom in which I am the only one laughing when Mrs. Roby asserts that Osric Dane's novel is "immersed" in Xingu, which causes the other women to marvel and issue their own commentary on Xingu without any understanding of what the word means.

Here Wharton brutally satirizes non-readers who sit around trying to impress each other with their erudition despite their unwillingness to take the most basic steps toward learning, like doing the reading or looking up unfamiliar words. Yes: she's satirizing my classroom.

But my students will never know that unless I add "Xingu" to the syllabus.

So why don't I do that? That's another unanswered question I had to carry up and down the big horrible hill, without a single donkey to share the burden.

Writing in the round; or, random bullets of pie

Come to think of it, pie bullets are not a bad idea. Imagine: in the heat of the summer, in the heart of the city, tempers flare and guns are pulled but instead of bullets, they shoot pie. Or: two warring countries propel pastries at each other and then all the soldiers have to put down their weapons and sit down for a kaffeeklatsch. There are few problems that cannot be improved by pie.

Here's how you know I'm on summer break: if you ask me what I've been doing this week, I'll say, "I baked a pie." That's about it--but goodness it was a great pie, maybe the best pie I've ever baked. But it wasn't easy: usually at this time of year the local farm stands are overflowing with fresh Georgia peaches, but the Georgia peach crop failed miserably so we're seeing a big pit of emptiness where peaches ought to be. But last week I snagged a basket of South Carolina peaches--tiny, hard, not entirely ripe--and let them sit a few days until they were soft enough to put in a pie. It's a pain peeling very small peaches, but I'm willing to put up with the pain if the end result is a fresh peach pie. And then the crust: After all those years of watching my daughter make perfect pie crusts, somehow I got it right. Tender, flaky, golden crust; luscious peachy filling with cinnamon and nutmeg--best pie ever.

Writing about pie makes me think of John McPhee, who allegedly once said, "Everything I write about is round." This was back in the last century, when he was busy writing about oranges and basketball and our whole beautiful world, and when I was busy writing a paper demonstrating the impact of the circular structure in one of McPhee's books, though I do not at this point recall which one. Did he ever write about pie?

My favorite Cormac McCarthy book is sorely lacking in pie but also many other food items, since it's set in a post-apocalyptic world where food sources are rare. The Road is a remarkable book, pithily devastating and beautiful, and the author, who died this week, should be applauded for that accomplishment as well as others, but in my mind he will always be associated with one of the more miserable experiences of my grad-school career, when a professor assigned Blood Meridian but then wimped out of teaching it and required the few  who had read it to defend the book. I've written about this incident previously, but the fact that I can still feel that trauma after 25 years shows the power of petty grad-school political shenanigans.

I look back at that sad past self, ganged-up-on and forced to defend a problematic but beautiful book, and I want to reach back in time and hold out a piece of peach pie. In fact, why not offer the whole pie--everyone would have to move their chairs closer together to get a piece, and then maybe we could men the broken circle and have a real conversation without anger or rancor or bullying.

So whoever you are, whatever you're doing, stop for a few minutes and pull up a chair and let's enjoy the peace of pie.

A little shameless self-promotion

After four years of work with some really fabulous writers and the terrific editing staff at the MLA, I finally got to hold this book in my hands. I'm still impressed by the variety of perspectives and topics on using comedy to teach many kinds of classes--but don't just take my word for it. Check it out for yourself!

 

Season of green

Strange spring so far: first cold and wet, then very hot and dry, and now just right, except we could use some rain. The garden looks great but we haven't had any significant rain in the past two weeks and watering by hand gets tiresome. Some woodland creature ate all the leaves off the purple basil, but this morning I see some new foliage coming up. Otherwise, everything is beautifully green.

For the past two years we've avoided mowing a section of the lower meadow, hoping to encourage a pollinator habitat. Last year it just looked scruffy but this year it's taking shape.  mostly tall grass and clover right now, but I see some asters and ironweed coming up. Later I'll try to establish some milkweed and bee balm down there and see what happens. It's an experiment. Nothing much at stake unless you're a butterfly.

 

 

Magnolia blossom

Redbud is pretty even when not in bloom

Potential pollinator habitat

Dandelion clock

 

If the car fits--drive it!

I was sitting at a car dealership waiting to see some numbers when I heard a gravelly voice say, “I’m looking for a truck that fits my big butt.” I had to fight the urge to turn around and gawk, but it made me wonder when car manufacturers are going to offer the kinds of special features today’s customers really need, like Enhanced Rump Capacity.

It took me a week and some travel and a lot of test drives, and let me just say that it’s a little disconcerting to drive an unfamiliar car in an unfamiliar neighborhood full of one-way roads packed with traffic, especially so soon after my head-on collision with a deer made me a little more jumpy than usual while driving. But I bought a car! I’m almost afraid to drive it because I still see phantom deer leaping from the woods every time I hit the road, but my slightly-used Honda HRV sure looks pretty parked in my driveway.   

(The rental car I’d been driving, a black Kia, did not look pretty, and I couldn’t figure out what bothered me about it until I realized that it looked like one of my grandson’s Matchbox race-cars. It would be just my style if I were an eight-year-old boy.)

One car salesman asked me to call him Pappy and another made me want to ask whether his mommy knew he was out of the house.  A finance guy conversed intelligently about David Foster Wallace while printing out a sheaf of papers for me to sign. One portly middle-aged salesman dashed around the freezing showroom and roasting car lot without a pause for the whole two or three hours I sat there waiting to sign my life away, but he sold me the car I wanted without pressure or fuss. 

I spent the better part of a hot afternoon at this dealership because they were short-staffed and I'd driven an hour to get there so I couldn't exactly go home and come back. But then to make up for the long wait, the dealership delivered the car to me directly the next day so I wouldn't have to drive an hour to pick it up. Helpful!

In fact, every car salesman I encountered was pleasant and respectful—a far cry from the days when a car salesman could look me in the eye and say, “Well now honey, why don’t you come back when your husband can come with you?”

Also, none of them quibbled over my special needs. My arthritic hip demands something that sits a little more upright than my old Camry, and I also wanted decent gas mileage, heated seats, a rear backing-up camera (how did I ever live with it?), four-wheel drive (because of where I live), and some color. One salesman pointed out that most buyers these days prefer what he called “neutral” colors, but I don’t think I should have to defend my preference for colorful cars. If I’m going to spend that kind of money, I don’t want to drive a gray car. Or a black one. Or whatever you call that shade of green that can make a brand-new Rav-4 look like it’s being consumed by slime mold.

I decided a few years ago that I’ve reached the age when I’m allowed to drive a red car, but good luck finding one today. I would have settled for a nice blue or a woodsy green or just the right shade of orange, but I had my heart set on red. So you can imagine how I felt when I called a dealership an hour away and asked if they had any low-mileage HRVs available for a test drive and they said that one had just come in but hadn’t been cleaned up and didn’t even have a price tag on it yet—but it was red!

Well it’s my car now. It’s sitting out front looking pretty while I’m trying to motivate myself to sort through the pile of stuff I pulled out of my old car--phone charger, chapstick, tissues, stadium blanket, sunscreen, hat, reusable grocery bags, bird-call identification CD, hiking stick, expired insurance cards, a small fortune in quarters, and all the miscellaneous detritus that attests to a well-loved car. That Camry took me to a lot of interesting places before meeting its sudden end, but at the moment my spiffy red Honda holds nothing but possibility. It may not feature Enhanced Rump Capacity, but it suits me to a T.