Year in review, or why the world needs more doggerel

If I had a time machine today, I wouldn't go back decades to kill baby Hitler or tackle Lee Harvey Oswald before he pulled the trigger or demand that Dickens reveal the ending of Edwin Drood. No, I'd do something entirely selfish: go back to January 2025 and give myself a good sharp kick in the shin while delivering some pointed advice: Don't stop walking in the woods! Buy a new telephoto lens! And for heaven's sake write some poetry once in a while!

I've just spent a couple of hours reviewing the past year's blog posts and while I admit that it's been an odd year, a frustrating year, a year that taxed my annual quota of futile tasks, nevertheless I can see points where I could have made the year more bearable just by doing more of the things that bring me joy. I know why I cut down on long walks in the woods--knee injury plus broken telephoto lens plus enervating malaise--but I also know that walking in the woods with the camera provides an ideal palliative for futility and oddness and malaise, and it might have helped my knee recover more quickly too. 

And that's another thing I'd kick myself about: I injured my knee in early August but didn't seek medical help for two months, months of pain and misery and lack of sleep. What was I thinking? Granted, the cortisone shot took a while to work, but if I'd gotten it earlier I could have avoided two months of agony and perhaps even motivated myself to spend more time in the woods.

And what made me (mostly) stop writing poetry? I've never suffered the delusion that the weekly doggerel I used to compose was any good, but at least it provided an excuse to have fun with words while distracting from the surrounding chaos and, yes, futility. Maybe part of me thinks that doggerel is far too frivolous for times like these, but if I give up doggerel, the terrorists win. Or something like that.

I'm venting, but I'm mostly mad at myself. So many opportunities to connect with thinking people everywhere but mostly I've been griping about my aches and pains, my foundering career, and my impending retirement. Who wants to read all that? (Here's another kick! And another!)

Now that I've got that out of my system, let's take a look at some of the more memorable  moments of 2025 as recorded on this blog. 

My favorite blog post of the year happened in November after I drove home from my daughter's choir concert while pondering what happens When Wordsworth visits Wendy's. Another pair of holiday concerts inspired a post highlighting Angelic voices, eclectic spaces. 

Literature, like music, feeds my soul in more ways than I can measure, so it's a good thing that (Some) visiting writers rock! In November my soul gorged on visits with two visiting writers: Mary Roach, who taught us A little more than diddly, and Jonathan Johnson, whose homely poems made penultimate Friday fabulous.

It's no surprise that my classes inspired many blog posts in 2025, but I was surprised at how few of them deal directly with Artificial Intelligence. I may be obsessed with AI-induced paranoia and the awe of the Oracle, but I wrote more frequently about other teaching topics. I saw evidence of the continuing decline of intellectual curiosity in my first-year seminar class, where students got Pig-headed about Pygmalion while eluding illumination about "Illuminati." I applauded students willing to ask awkward questions, though some of them hit a bit too close to home.

In my upper-level writing classes, I pondered The tragedy of TL;DR and gave students Some practice in probing for the story as well as A step-by-step guide to writing a step-by-step guide. And my students taught me a thing or two, from the existence of a hybrid sport or elaborate prank to a novel suggestion for constructing a nap rubric.

But a whole host of posts dealt with frustrations endemic to higher education that go far beyond teaching. Some of these frustrations arise from this peculiar cultural moment, when higher education is being undermined and attacked from a variety of angles, requiring career academics to spend far too much time dealing with the Department of Aggravation, Obfuscation, and Angst (the AOA department). Federal Budget cuts hit home while cancelled grants undermine valuable projects.

Other stresses arise from my own peculiar situation: my skills are being underutilized so I'm Twiddling the time away, dealing with malfunctioning campus systems, tiptoeing around topics too sensitive to write about, and banging my head against the wall. My administrative role(s) often leave me Clambering through the claptrap and wondering why academics are often compelled to Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. On the one hand I'm agonizing over how far I should go to keep students comfortable, and on the other I'm devoting hours to trying to find sexier names for my courses so students might actually enroll--and all this leads me to echo a lament from a Douglas Adams character: Brain the size of a planet and they've got me pushing piddling paperwork.

And yet I found some things to celebrate in academe. I enjoyed Celebrating second chances while Turning up the sound on the symphony of learning. Students inspire me, which is Why I'd like to retire--but not today. As I enter my final year of teaching before retirement, I assure myself that I'm not just Mailing it in and I wonder what happens When the door swings back. There's no doubt that I'll need a new challenge, but where will I find it when my students are gone?

Maybe I'll be the type of old person who rambles on about my aches and pains, like the knee injury that cramped my style during fall break or the vertigo attack that helped me make the world a better place or the dreaded polyps that inspired a TMI alert.

Or maybe I'll charge full-bore into Grandma Mode, rambling on about my intelligent and talented grandkids ad nauseam or describing in great detail all the joys of Grandma and Grampa Camp: the wild times, the Things I had forgotten about having a house full of kids, the answers to questions no one asked, and the rare moments of Peace, quiet, and nothing to do.

Or maybe retirement will give me more time to focus on the joys of nature and travel: the Road trip back to winter, the bootless endeavor in the snow and the coming thaw, the encounters with Bird people, with Spring ephemerals, with Summer sunshine and sweet corn season and Pumpkins, peppers, pawpaws, pizzazz. At some point I need to get more closely acquainted with the chickens, who landed in the spring and eventually suffered a close encounter with life (and death) in the slow lane, and whose diminished numbers were enriched by the addition of Guineas in the mist.

Or maybe we'll find the funds for more home renovation projects, like the bathroom renovation that first required Excavating the family landfill. I wished for a self-demolishing bathroom, praised a project that's going well, and eventually found myself Flush with success, with a room that sparks a frisson of satisfaction every time I walk by.

The new bathroom provides tangible evidence of a job well done, but this was also the year that brought kudos for a writing job well done, when an academic journal editor's praise inspired me to beg readers to Stop me before I get "brilliant" tattooed on my forehead. It may not be as visible as a renovated bathroom, but that close and careful reading of my work reminds me that futility need not be the overarching theme of this past year, or of the next either. 

In fact, what this brief and perhaps agonizing plunge into my personal time machine tells me is that I don't have to settle for futility. I can carry on, fight the fight, grapple with boondoggles and conquer the claptrap--but to make it bearable I'll need to I buy a telephoto lens, go for walks in the woods, and make a regular date with doggerel.

Carrying the castle through stormy seas

"World's largest medieval cog found off Copenhagen" proclaimed the headline, but at first I couldn't make any sense of it because I was thinking of a cog as a tiny wheel essential to keeping machinery going, which doesn't sound like something happening in medieval times, but then I clicked and found out quickly that a cog is (or was, I guess) a type of ship, in this case a 90-foot-long cargo ship of a type known as the "draft horses of maritime trade in medieval northern Europe," carrying hundreds of tons of cargo from Point A to Point B and beyond.

So not a tiny but essential bit in a larger machine but a massive, strong, and sturdy bit of an even larger machine. Built around 1410, the shipwreck also features a brick galley well equipped to provide hot meals for the crew and "the first archeological evidence of a cog castle ever found," and before you get all excited about floating castles, in maritime terms a castle is a covered platform where the hard-working crew could shelter from the weather. (And where else am I going to flaunt my new vocabulary if not here?)

Just yesterday I was complaining (to a retired colleague and a couple of cashiers at the grocery store who got drawn into the conversation) about being nothing more than a cog in a machine, a tiny (but essential!) part that struggles to keep spinning silently even when gunk gums up the works, but now I wonder whether I ought to think of myself as a different kind of cog--a massive workhorse that carries a lot of weight to connect distant points, well equipped to weather storms while providing food, shelter, and comfort for my crew. 

Sure, maybe one day I'll flounder in one of those storms, but in the meantime I get to carry a castle. (No tiara, though. It's not that kind of castle.) 

Winter snooze-fest

As my prosthetic memory insists on reminding me, one year ago today I was on Tybee Island, Georgia, in the presence of egrets and skimmers and sunshine and seafood, and two years ago today I was doing about the same on Cedar Key, Florida. But winter break is not all sunshine and shorelines: 17 years ago today I'd just arrived in San Francisco for the MLA convention three time zones away from home, where my paper was scheduled so late in the day that I felt like I was sleep-walking through the whole presentation. Was it a brilliant paper? You'd have to ask the half-dozen listeners who bothered to show up. 

This year I'm at home for the holidays, being entertained by the photos sent daily by friends who are enjoying a cruise to Antarctica. Kayaking amongst whales and penguins and beautiful sunshine looks fabulous, but I am not the least bit envious of their good fortune because I know I could never take such a trip, thanks to a tendency toward severe seasickness. It's hard to watch whales through a constant scrim of vomit. (Trust me--I've tried!)

Yesterday I took my car out of the driveway for the first time since Sunday for a trip to the grocery store. That's about the extent of the excitement going on in my life right now. Not that I'm complaining: I received a pile of great books for Christmas plus a couple of beautiful jigsaw puzzles and I have some low-stakes administrative tasks I need to tackle, so I'm not going to say the days are just packed but I'll admit that they're not without incident. The incidents just don't make for interesting reading.

So I'm grateful for a gift my daughter gave me, a gift that shows how well she knows me. It never would have occurred to me to seek out a rack of Scrabble tiles spelling out THANKFUL, but when I unwrapped it on Christmas, it was exactly what I needed, a reminder of h0w much I have to be thankful for right here at home: word games, family, puzzles, chickens, so much more.

But still: would a little sunshine be too much to ask? 

Father and son working on a puzzle

Now who's going to help me eat all these cookies?

Two weeks ago I spent a Saturday morning baking two kinds of Christmas cookies and shooing the resident cookie-eaters away from the results: Don't touch! They're for a campus event! Finally I promised that I'd bake some more as we got closer to Christmas.

Both kinds of cookies earned praise at our campus cookie event, but I brought home a lot of the Russian Teacakes. They're well loved by many different names but no one ever asks for the recipe.

However, several people wanted the recipe for the other cookies I baked: Chocolate-Covered Cherry Cookies. I know exactly how long I've owned the recipe because it came inside a holiday recipe box we received as a wedding gift 43 years ago. Since then it's been a regular part of my holiday repertoire, along with Santa's Whiskers, Nick-0f-Time Cranberry White Chocolate Drops, cut-out cookies, and Jam Thumbprints. But I've never shared this recipe here--until now.

These cookies are rich and chocolatey, with a burst of yummy cherry in the middle. I always make a horrible mess assembling them, but you won't lack for volunteers to lick the spoon. 

Chocolate-Covered Cherry Cookies

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 cup butter, softened
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
10 oz. maraschino cherries, drained (but save the liquid)
6 oz. semisweet chocolate pieces
1/2 cup sweetened condensed milk

Stir together flour, cocoa powder, salt, baking powder, and baking soda; set aside. In mixer bowl cream butter and sugar. Add egg and vanilla; beat until well blended. Gradually add dry ingredients; beat until well blended. 

Shape dough into one-inch balls; place on ungreased cookie sheet. Press down center of each ball with thumb. Place a cherry in the center of each cookie.

In a small saucepan, combine chocolate pieces and sweetened condensed milk; heat, stirring, until chocolate is melted. Add 4 tsp. of reserved cherry juice. (If it's too thick to spread, add a little more.) Spoon frosting over each cookie, spreading to cover cherry. 

Bake at 350 degrees about 10 minutes or until done. Let cool before removing from pan.

 

Because that's how we roll

For our 43rd anniversary, my husband gave me a massive book on the history of Maori art, a gorgeous compendium I've been wish-listing for ages. I gave him a tomahawk steak the size of his head at the Bears Den restaurant in Cambridge, Ohio, part of our annual holiday trek to visit with the taxidermy, view the courthouse light show, and eat the best beef on the planet--or at least our part of the planet.

The book weighs 8.9 pounds. The steak weighed significantly less. A good time was had by all, except maybe the elk that appeared to be looking for the rest rooms.

Not photoshopped. That bone is at least a foot long.

Fingers to show scale. The pages are thick and glossy and covered with beautiful things.

Doing my small part to make the world a better place

I staggered like a drunkard while walking into Wal-Mart would be a great line in a country song, but for me it's just another Wednesday. Plagued with vertigo connected to an inner-ear problem, I nevertheless headed out to do some holiday errands but found myself reeling through the parking lot and reaching out to strangers' cars to maintain balance. Kind of embarrassing, especially since the entire population of Washington County had apparently decided to shop at Wal-Mart yesterday. I saw a woman trying to push a shopping cart crammed full of all manner of stuff topped with a huge wide-screen TV box while eleventy-seven small children trailed behind not very calmly. She's the one who should have been staggering, but there I was holding on to the battery display so I wouldn't fall over. I needed to buy five small items--why did I have to wait behind a half-dozen people in the self-checkout lane while suffering from a vertigo attack? Sure, I could have stayed home, but where's the fun in that? 

Every day this week I've had to do some dumb errand on campus, and every day I've vowed that that's the last time I'm visiting campus until January. But stuff comes up. I needed to do some prep work for the workshop I'm leading on January 13, which seems a long time off but if we don't order lunch now, there won't be anyone on campus to take the order for weeks. And someone has to buy door prizes, so someone has to check out a college credit card, which can't be done after the business office closes for the holidays. And then someone else wanted to meet me on campus to give me a gift (very nice!) and I was on the way to deliver some freshly laid eggs after my annual glaucoma test (no change--all good!) and I knew the person I was meeting has been ill and can eat a very limited diet that happens to include eggs, so I let her take half of the very beautiful blue and green eggs and took the other half up the hill to my retired colleague, who had admired the eggs when I'd posted a pic online and wondered where she could get some green eggs (unaccompanied by ham). No wonder I'm dizzy! 

It's probably the weather change, which can set off a vertigo attack, or it might herald an impending migraine. In a masterpiece of poor timing, I've been reading Mary Roach's excellent book Packing for Mars and I happened yesterday to read the chapter on the problem of motion sickness among astronauts. Just reading about the Vomit Comet made me want to puke. It was interesting to learn, though, that I'm not the only person in the world who can suffer debilitating vertigo as a result of (takes a deep breath) sitting on a rocking chair, sitting on a swing, getting a glimpse of a rotating fan, spinning in anything resembling the Mad Teacup Ride, reading in the car, looking in the wrong direction while riding on a boat, turning my head to the side quickly when my head is stuffed up, or any number of other ordinary experiences.

Which is yet another reason why we're once again not going on a cruise for our anniversary. My husband used to lobby pretty heavily for going on a cruise, but he has seen me seasick enough times to have given it a rest. The closest I've ever come to suicide was on a three-hour whale-watching boat out of Monterey Bay. Even our little canoe can sometimes set me off if we're sitting still and bobbing. Yesterday, though, I didn't need a boat or a swing or a fan or any mad teacups: something shifted in my inner ear and boom, I was making a spectacle of myself in front of the entire county in the Wal-Mart parking lot.

Well if my antics made a few people laugh, if I lightened the load for just one overburdened shopper, if I provided an object lesson to a parent encouraging a teen not to drink and drive, then maybe my vertigo attack made the world just a teeny bit better for someone. It's literally the least I can do, short of actually puking.

43 years ago today

Our chickens are little artists

Angelic voices, eclectic spaces

Two holiday concerts one week apart:

Last week I enjoyed Handel's Messiah sung by a heavenly host of singers, including my husband, accompanied by orchestra and harpsichord in the historic Basilica of St. Mary of the Assumption, an ornately decorated worship space where hundreds of listeners sat on rows of pews surrounded by statuary, stained glass, imported marble, and angels, lots of angels, including cherubs hovering around the ascending Mary up front and, above our heads, a phalanx of carved angels holding torches on their heads.

Yesterday we watched five women (including our daughter) singing Christmas music in close harmony, without accompaniment, in Cuyahoga Falls at the historic Jenks Building, in a converted garage where a spattering of observers who had braved the horrible weather sat on mismatched chairs surrounded by decor I can only describe as eclectic: an industrial-size coffee roaster on one side of the performance space and a canoe hanging from the ceiling on the other, plus piles of used books and vinyl records, unusual light fixtures and barking dogs sculpted from scrap metal and fish trophies and framed covers of Time magazine featuring Kennedys and a drill bit the size of my oldest grandkid and an anvil and a small statue of a man playing saxophone and, above our heads, a bust of a man wearing on his head not torches but what looked like a small satellite dish.

During the final leg of our two-hour drive to yesterday's concert, the weather was awful enough to prompt me to ask out loud, "Is it worth killing ourselves in a snowstorm just to get to this concert?"

Reader: it was. Spending a couple of hours surrounded by music so lovely it makes me smile clear down to the soles of my feet is worth any effort, whether it's Handel in the basilica or "The Holly and the Ivy" in the garage.

I rarely carry much cash but, thanks to an unusual series of events, last week I ended up with a fifty-dollar bill and a twenty in my wallet, and after the Messiah performance I decided I would put my hand in my purse and pull out a bill blindly to put it into the plate, and then yesterday the other bill went into the tip jar. I'd do it again in a heartbeat. You can't buy holiday cheer, but those experiences were worth every penny.

Voices of angels.

Coffee roaster the size of a locomotive

The singers in the family

Not a clue. Seriously, I've got nothing.

Snoopy in his Sopwith Camel?

Sn

Junkyard dogs

Deck the halls with bogus sources

So I'm sitting in the waiting room while my car undergoes routine maintenance and I'm feeling rather virtuous. Why? Because instead of watching the television tuned to the Sky Is Falling Channel, and instead of doomscrolling on my phone, and instead of playing the vintage PacMan game in the corner, I'm writing Christmas cards. So much to do in the holiday season and here I am providing a shining example of efficiency! But really it's just another way to put off grading research papers.

How do I procrastinate? Let me count the ways: I grade all the little things that don't take much thought, respond to a million not-so-urgent emails, bake cookies, write cards, shop for gifts, attend concerts, visit the holiday tree display at the park, mail packages--but I still haven't started grading research papers.

On Tuesday in our Center for Teaching Excellence I spent five hours hanging out with colleagues while eating cookies and laughing my head off (at this link, among other things), which was very therapeutic--but I really needed to be grading research papers.

I could have postponed mailing packages until the weather cleared up but instead I drove to the horrible downtown post office, made a futile circuit of the overstuffed parking lot, drove around the block in the pouring rain, and finally parked at the only available spot down the street--but that was just the first half of my Adventures in Package-Mailing. Then I had to toddle up the hill in the rain while juggling an umbrella and two bulky packages that blocked my view, and I didn't have enough hands free to manage the umbrella and the packages AND open the door so I got thoroughly wet in the struggle while an older guy in a gentleman's cap stood nearby laughing at me. Not the highlight of my holiday season--but it was better than grading research papers.

To be clear, these are not traditional research papers at all. My Nature Writing students wrote a persuasive essay that required a minimum of five sources, but some of those sources could be interviews with experts. Only nine papers--maybe I can finish them today (if I ever stop blogging and start grading).

The first-year seminar papers are more challenging. I'm down to sixteen students (from a high of 19 at the start) and I believe one of them never turned in a paper, so there's one down and 15 to go. They had to write something I call a researched persuasive memo, trying to persuade a specific person or group to take a specific action in order to improve education (however the students want to interpret that). They were required to use at least three sources, which ideally would all be academic sources drawn from our research databases but I'm not holding my breath. I had a dickens of a time trying to get students to understand that quoting from the online abstract is not the same as citing the article itself, but even those abstract-dependent essays are easier to grade than the ones that provide only vague references without actual citations. 

Because I'm going to have to check sources. Maybe not all of them, but at least one per paper and more if things don't add up. Some students won't provide sufficient bibliographic info so I'll have to try to find the sources myself. Some students will misunderstand or misrepresent sources, through either sloppiness or intent (though it's hard to tell at this stage). And some sources will be entirely imaginary, invented by an anonymous AI. 

Here I am enjoying the heck out of the holiday season; I'm wearing a holiday sweater and festive socks and I'm fully equipped to spread holiday cheer at a moment's notice, but instead I have to force myself to read a whole bunch of research papers.

So I'm giving myself a stern talking-to: no more holiday cheer until the papers are graded. No more cookies or cards or packages or errands. It's time to turn aside from fa-la-la-la-la and pick up the research papers. 

If you don't hear from me by this time next week, send in the Saint Bernards. (Extra credit if they're carrying eggnog and cookies.)

 

 

 

TMI alert! (Seriously, go read something less icky)

I'd been sitting half-naked on an examination table for about 20 minutes with nothing but a flimsy paper blanket to cover my nether parts when a bright young thing in surgical scrubs poked her head through the door and asked, "Are you ready to get your IUD inserted?" Which would be a neat trick considering I haven't had a uterus since 2009. I don't know where you'd insert an IUD in someone lacking a uterus--or, for that matter, why.

My experience at the gynecologist's office this morning may look like a comedy of errors in retrospect, but it didn't feel particularly funny at the time. I've been suffering from a serious case of IPNBLRSTTBS Syndrome (It's Probably Nothing But Let's Run Some Tests To Be Sure), and this is where you'll want to close your eyes and cover your ears if you're allergic to ick. 

There's a bit of scar tissue, see, where my most private regions had endured massive amounts of radiation 16 years ago, and my new gynecologist wanted to do a biopsy on a polyp located there, which looked like a cervical polyp, but no insurance company is going to approve a biopsy on a cervical polyp for a person who lacks a cervix. So when I arrived today I signed a release form allowing removal of an endometrial polyp, but then someone in the chain of command noted that a person lacking a uterus probably doesn't have endometrial tissue either. In the end they had to tear up the signed release form and get me to sign a new one allowing removal of a vaginal polyp, which, on closer inspection, turned out to be two vaginal polyps, which were eventually removed. 

But first I had to spend a full 30 minutes waiting (and sweating and breathing deeply to try to keep my blood pressure under control), wondering what kind of wild party was taking place out at the nurses' station and why all the new medical staffers look like they just got out of the seventh grade and why I always carefully fold my clothes at the gynecologist's office so that the person poking around in my most intimate regions won't be exposed to my ratty old granny panties. What else was there to do but think, and fret, and sweat? 

I'm not proud of it, but eventually I got tired of waiting (and sweating, and fretting) so I used my cell phone to call the front desk and ask whether I'd been forgotten. What did they want me to do, walk out there in front of everyone and demand satisfaction while wrapped in a flimsy paper blanket? I had sweated so much that the paper was starting to disintegrate anyway, so I made the call.

"Don't worry, she's on the way," they said, and indeed she was, and within moments I was on my back enduring a procedure that was less painful than I'd expected but also more bloody. My longtime gynecologist--the one who did my hysterectomy and found the cancer and got me through all the horrors of treatment--was a dapper gentleman with the kindly gravitas of a modern Marcus Welby, and the new one who replaced him is on maternity leave, so I was dealing with someone I'd only just met who seemed caring and competent despite looking about twelve years old. She spoke like an intimacy coordinator, asking repeatedly, "All right if I touch you here?" Not sure what would have happened if I'd said no. I suspect it would be difficult to remove a vaginal polyp without touching some sensitive parts--er, tissues. Why does the word tissues make everything ickier?

But now it's all over but the waiting. Three to five days for biopsy results, 72 hours with no sex. (During my birthday week! Ah, the humanity!) I wondered about the propriety of writing about all this ick, but the advantage of having entered my Crone Era is that I'm allowed to write about whatever I want, and what I want right now is to wonder what happened to the woman who was expecting to get an IUD. Did some bright young thing poke her head in the door and ask, "Are you ready to get your polyps biopsied?" 

 

Errant u's, invisible emus, and other news

I have reached the point in the semester when little annoyances evoke outsize responses; for instance, yesterday I may have publicly threatened to employ a flamethrower against students who spell my name incorrectly. (Fourteen weeks into the semester and they can't figure out how many u's are in my last name?) 

PowerPoint slides with very small white text on a black background! Students who insist that they've "fixed" everything I marked on their drafts when they've corrected small errors but ignored the big stuff! A classroom thermostat that hisses, loudly, throughout a two-hour event! A new light fixture in the library that makes me want to distribute green visors to everyone forced to work under those harsh conditions! All these things have earned my ire in the past couple of days.

But probably my time would be better spent on a wild-emu chase. Actually I don't know whether the emus in question are wild or domesticated, and in fact I'm not entirely sure that emus respond to domestication, but I do know that people I know and trust, people who inherited a big chunk of my DNA, claim to have spotted emus in a fenced enclosure along a particular stretch of my daily commute. Every day since Thanksgiving I have looked for emus along that stretch of highway but I have not seen so much as a feather.

Well, I have seen some feathers, but they weren't on any emus. Yesterday a Carolina wren got into my house--who knows how?--and kept fluttering from room to room trying to find its way out. At one point it flew into our bedroom and hid behind a framed photograph of a ruby-crowned kinglet. Nice choice, but hiding in my bedroom is not a viable lifestyle for a wren.

So despite the cold weather we opened the back door wide, but the bird wouldn't come close while we were nearby. My husband left for an early meeting so I sat quietly, as far from the cold as I could get while still maintaining a clear view of the door, because otherwise I'd never know whether the bird got out of the house. (Once, years ago, we found a dead bird in a large plant pot downstairs. Who knows how long it had been in the house without our knowledge?) In the dead quiet I could hear the bird flittering here and there until finally it flew right out the back door, which made me happy because I'd had enough of letting the winter freeze invade my space. 

Meanwhile, deer hunting season has started, prompting one of my students to comment on what a great sacrifice he was making just to be in class on Monday. Others didn't bother trying. I hope they'll bag their deer, but local bag limits were severely reduced after a disease ravaged the local deer population this fall. I told a colleague that some of my students seem to have deer flu and she asked, "What are the symptoms?" Look for massive outbreaks of camouflage and hunter orange.

Finally, my adorable daughter, who shares my interest in holiday music and punctuation, sent me a link to a charming YouTube video attempting to answer a burning question: Where does the comma go in "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen"? Who can maintain an air of annoyance with such silliness about? Forget about the spelling errors, errant students, and emus; let's play with punctuation!

When Wordsworth visits Wendy's

I'm tempted to begin it was a dark and stormy night, but the icy rain has stopped and the road is clear and the wind is growing less gusty. The last night of November of a cold, dark year, and I'm the only customer sitting in Wendy's just off the interstate in Nowheresville, Ohio, eating chicken tenders and fries and wishing I could go back in time just one hour and sit instead in an acoustically perfect performance space that had seemed apparelled in celestial light, where my daughter's choir, accompanied by a small orchestra, sang a lovely arrangement of Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality" with the glory and the freshness of a dream. 

By the time I've driven an hour down the road, though, the music has faded and my eyes are tired and I need to get off the highway, so here I sit eating my solitary supper to the accompaniment of random clangs and the murmurs of kitchen workers and the continuous shooshing of passing traffic, and with Wordsworth I concur that there hath past away a glory from the earth.

William Wordsworth probably wasn't thinking about the mundane squalor of modern fast-food dining when he wrote the poem that's made me so pensive. Its full title, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," immediately reveals that it's not a young person's poem, but I'm surprised to find that Wordsworth was just thirtysomething when he wrote it, significantly younger than I was when I studied it during my second stab at grad school. I don't remember being particularly impressed with the poem at that time, but perhaps I wasn't yet ready for the kind of nostalgia the poem evokes--or maybe the poem is improved by the presence of ethereal sopranos and a French horn.

Double vision: what I experience when I've been driving too long without a break, and what Wordsworth experienced when he visualized the world through the eyes of his childhood self while viewing his childhood self through his jaded adult perceptions. My heart is at your festival, he tells the youth, and The fulness of your bliss, I feel--I feel it all.

Or maybe he just wishes he could feel it all again, feel the child's innocent joy in nature unmediated by the knowledge endowed by experience. He reaches for the joy (while I reach for another French fry, dip it in ketchup, try to savor the crunch and saltiness as if I haven't tasted it a thousand times before)--he reaches for the joy, I say, but gets distracted by a Tree, of many, one, / a single field which I have looked upon, / Both of them speak of something that is gone, and he's not talking about French fries: Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

The door opens. A gust of wind blows in a tiny old man accompanied by an even tinier older woman. They step up to the counter to squint at the small print on menu board, so the minimum-wage worker behind the counter patiently recites a litany of sauces--honey mustard, sweet chili, barbecue, ghost pepper ranch--but the old folks don't strike me as the ghost pepper type. They settle for ordinary ranch. I chose the sweet chili sauce myself. Why not take a walk on the wild side for once?

Trailing clouds of glory do we come, insists Wordsworth, but I don't see any glory following behind the little old couple, or behind me either. Where did it go? If we come into this world with bits of star-stuff stuck to our ankles, it seems to rub off awfully quickly. Sure, Heaven lies about us in our infancy, but in the very next line Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing Boy. I wish I could remember the tune the choir sang, the rhythm and the harmonies that made these words lodge in memory so that I couldn't shake them through miles of busy city traffic or the roar of passing trucks. The music trailed clouds of glory, but At length the Man perceives it die away, / And fade into the light of common day.

The light in Wendy's is common enough but harsh and garish, illuminating exhausted faces of customers and workers. We should be at home but the road stretches ahead of us as we act out our daily rota of obligations. Wordsworth sees the child eagerly assuming roles of responsibility with costumes and customs that stultify his creative soul. Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight / And custom lie upon these with a weight, he warns the child, so why so quickly constrain freedom behind a mask of conformity?

Outside, a semi-truck makes a sharp right into the truck stop next door, trailing clouds of diesel exhaust. Does the truck-driver cherish within his soul the fugitive embers Wordsworth wrote about? Is it possible that, Though inland far we be, / Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea / Which brought us hither? I'd like to hear the mighty waters rolling evermore, but all I hear is traffic, and more traffic, and more.

The French fries are gone, finally, and so ought I to be. I've had a long and lovely visit with the family and I have to teach first thing in the morning, so now it's time to pick up my tray, trudge toward the trash can, and head out the door for another hour of driving. I wish I could remember the music, feel again the joy and peace I felt as I sat in the pew surrounded by people as my beautiful daughter lent her voice to Wordsworth's words. By the time I've fought my way through the dark, cold night traffic, I will have forgotten everything.

What though the radiance which was once so bright / Be now for ever taken from my sight, and who really cares if this Wendy's melds in my mind with every other fast-food joint I'll ever visit, Though nothing can bring back the hour / Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower, of music and light and beauty, good fellowship and friendly smiles and fierce hugs from my youngest granddaughter, We will grieve not, rather find / Strength in what remains behind--and here I'm certain Wordsworth wasn't talking about Wendy's. I walk out the door to my car, echoing the litany of the poem's closing lines:

    Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Goodnight, Wordsworth. Goodnight, Wendy's. Goodnight, kitchen workers and little old couple and truck drivers. Perhaps there has past away a glory from the earth, but despite the dark we still can find strength in what remains behind.

"To be thankful for just the one day"

Just after sunrise on a cold fall day, my oldest grandkid is down in the meadow helping Grampa with the chickens--but if you'd asked me sixteen years ago whether any part of that sentence would ever describe my life, I'd have laughed myself silly.

Grandkids in my house, chickens in my meadow, four pies in my kitchen--all made by my adorable daughter sleeping (with her husband) in her old bedroom. Later our son will arrive, the capable man who supplied the turkey that's been smoking out back all night long. He'll get to do Fun Uncle duties as we all pitch in to put together today's feast. At some point we'll all take a walk and I'll bet Grampa will ask the kids whether they want to help him pull beets. They'll be delighted. They love to get their hands dirty in the garden.

So much to be thankful for! I never could have predicted these particular circumstances, but it's funny how the normal course of life produces unexpected blessings: family, turkey, chutney, pie, chickens, gardens, pumpkins, beets--the list goes on. Sixteen years ago this week I survived my final round of chemotherapy, the last leg of a journey that left me wondering whether I'd survive long enough to have grandchildren, and now look at this.

There's a moment in Charles Frazier's novel Cold Mountain when Ruby, the backwoods girl who knows little of the wider world but nevertheless possesses depths of wisdom, expresses some contempt for the Union cause in the Civil War because they had "invented a holiday called Thanksgiving, which Ruby had only recently got news of, but from what she gathered the features to be, she found it to contain the mark of a tainted culture. To be thankful for just the one day."

In a few minutes I'll need to get into the kitchen and put together the dough for the pumpkin yeast rolls so it can start rising, but first, while the turkey smokes and the family sleeps and the husband and grandkid are tending the chickens, I want to sit in the quiet house and be thankful--but not for just the one day. 

Flexing flabby writing muscles

I tell my students all the time that failure to exercise their skills will lead to atrophy, and now I've become a prime example of that phenomenon. My first-year seminar students have been doing almost all of their writing assignments by hand in class this semester, which means my ability to decode student handwriting has developed to Olympic gold medal levels while my ability to write coherent comments on freshpersons' drafts has suffered. Now I'm facing an online dropbox full of drafts that need detailed responses, but just looking at them hurts my brain.

If I were teaching first-year composition, by this point in the semester I would have read and responded to at least four drafts by each student. In this seminar, on the other hand, writing assignments have been entirely handwritten, with no opportunity for revision, so my comments are brief and minimal. It takes far less thought to write a comment justifying a B- than it does to explain to a student how he can develop his evidence more thoroughly or write a more effective thesis or organize ideas so they make a compelling argument. And then I have to decide whether to insert suggestions about all those little niggling details, like comma usage and citation format and paragraph indentation.

In a perfect world, I would focus my efforts on the big-picture issues and rely on peer reviewers to pick up the niggling details, but how many first-year students can provide really useful feedback on their classmates' drafts? I see some students making good specific suggestions, but I also see the comments from the student whose mission in life seems to be forcing everyone to use Times New Roman. Frankly, I don't care which font students use as long as it's readable and consistent, and I have no idea what I might have said to make the Font Enforcer think his efforts are helpful.     

And here's further evidence of atrophying skills: If I'd been requiring students to engage in peer review all semester long, maybe they'd be better at it. A few are pretty good, but far too many think it's helpful to tell a classmate that his draft is fine when it doesn't fulfill the most basic requirements of the assignment.

So here's where my effort to discourage reliance on AI comes back to bite me: students who do most of their writing in class aren't accustomed to submitting essays online or providing useful suggestions on their classmates' drafts, and I'm struggling to come up with meaningful comments to insert in those tiny boxes in the margins. The brain cells balk, the words wither, the fingers fail to fly across the keyboard.

But I can't enjoy Thanksgiving break until I've responded to all these drafts, so here I sit trying to flex writing muscles that would prefer to continue their nice long nap. Nothing to do but to put one word in front of the other until some meaning coheres out of the haze. 

Wish me luck. It's going to be a very long day.

Poet, pie, penultimate

It's P-day, Pie-Day, Penultimate Friday--someone ought to write a song. 

I remind my students that today is the penultimate Friday of the semester and they look as me as if I'm speaking Swahili, until I define penultimate, which they promptly forget.

Doesn't matter when there's pie. On the Friday before Thanksgiving, all College employees are invited to eat pie together, one of our few social events where the President can mingle with the janitorial staff. Once upon a time when we had healthy budgets, people would try several different types of pie--blackberry, pumpkin, apple, you name it. Last year the ongoing budget crisis led to portion control, with enforcers watching to be sure no one took more than one piece or tried to smuggle a slice of pie out under their shirt. (It is a mistake to put blackberry pie in your pocket. Trust me on this.) This, of course, means that people stand around agonizing over which piece to take. Sure, that apple pie might be great, but choosing apple means no blackberry or pumpkin or coconut cream! Decisions, decisions.

No afternoon classes, so after pie I can spend the rest of the day responding to drafts, many of which won't take much time. The final project for the Nature Writing class calls for research, sources, and at least 2000 words, but the drafts aren't quite there yet, ranging from a 200 to 1500 words, with most hovering around 1000. I wouldn't worry much about the word count if the content were persuasive, but the content isn't entirely present yet, which is a problem since time is running out. Well, these are good students. They'll pull it together eventually.

Students, of course, complain about having major projects due in so many different classes at the same time, but if a project is supposed to be the culminating experience for a course, drawing on skills the students have been working to master all semester long, then it's hard to assign it much earlier in the semester. They're going to have a crazy couple of weeks, and their profs are going to have a differently crazy couple of weeks, with all those drafts needing feedback plus finals to construct plus all kinds of extra events to plan and attend.

Yesterday we had a different type of P-day when a visiting Poet spent time on campus. Jonathan Johnson met with an 8:00 a.m. creative writing class, had lunch with English department faculty members and students, and read from his work in the evening, all with great energy and enthusiasm. (Click here to see three poems I'm tempted to label "homely," but only in the original meaning of the word.) Judging from the way he connected with students, responded to their questions, and offered sage advice about writing and life, I'd guess he'd be a fantastic teacher. We had a casual talk about trees early in the morning when I introduced him to the gorgeous sweet gum tree outside our building, and after he'd spent some time enjoying our beautiful campus, he urged his audience to "keep telling these gorgeous trees 'hi' for me." 

Jonathan Johnson titled one of his poems "When something's good, keep it," as good advice as any this time of the semester. I suspect, though, that he wasn't talking about that extra slice of pie. 

On needing a new challenge

Thirtysomething years ago when I was contemplating switching careers from journalism to teaching, my wise and wonderful husband told me something like this: "It won't be much of a change since you're always teaching anyway--you'll just be teaching a different type of student."

He was right: Even while working as a small-town journalist covering all manner of mundane news, from school board meetings to Eagle Scout ceremonies to wheat futures (and this is true--I once won an award for my coverage of innovations in farming), I was always looking for ways to educate readers about the issues that mattered to the community. For instance, when a company wanted to open a new local plant to process petroleum-contaminated soils, I didn't just report on what the two sides said but I read deeply about the process and consulted experts. I had to educate myself before educating my readers, and while I didn't think of them as students, many readers demonstrated a dedication to learning that made my job worthwhile.

Now I'm wondering whether it's time to once again seek out a different type of student. Let me explain:

For some time I've been indulging in what turns out to be a ridiculous fantasy about my final couple of semesters as a college professor: teaching my favorite classes, imparting well-earned wisdom to a horde of eager English majors, going out in a blaze of glory, the whole shebang. 

But no. My favorite classes keep getting cancelled due to low enrollment (or, in the case of the Colson Whitehead class I'd planned to teach next semester, no enrollment) while our supply of English majors steadily declines. The way things look right now, next semester I'll teach one class, American Lit Survey, in which only ten students are currently enrolled. That's right: my entire teaching load will consist of ten students taking a class I've taught so many times I could do it with with my eyes closed and both hands tied behind my back. Where's the challenge in that? I mean, I love the class, but I hope I'll have something a little more rewarding in my final semester next fall. 

Unfortunately, demographic trends suggest otherwise. It's possible that my final semester teaching will be much like this one, in which I'm teaching no literature classes at all.

So I'll admit that I have not been a lot of fun to be with as I'm trying to adjust to my continued irrelevance. Sulking is what I've been doing. Trying to find someone to blame, as if the bad academic weather is aimed directly at me and no one else. 

But then yesterday I had an epiphany: Maybe it's time once again to find a different type of student.

I don't know what that means right now but figuring it out might provide the kind of challenge I need. I'm not interested in seeking another teaching job elsewhere since I know other colleges are struggling the same way we are, and there are good reasons that I need to retire at the end of next year. But if teaching still makes me happy but I can't seem to attract students where I am, maybe it's time to find a different kind of teaching--and a different type of student. 

What could this mean? Starting a Substack, teaching Learning in Retirement classes, serving as a writing consultant or mentor for struggling writers? Writing more pedagogy essays or pulling together all my previous pedagogy essays into a book proposal? Volunteering in local schools? Writing PR pieces for local nonprofit organizations? Or maybe something I haven't even thought of yet--I'm accepting suggestions.

Mostly I just need something positive to work toward so I don't focus so intently on the current situation. Decades ago one of my college English profs told me, "You seem like someone who always needs a challenge to keep you going." He was right, but what do I do when all the challenges dissipate? 

Find another challenge--and another way to keep teaching--and another type of student. 

Why couldn't I bring back a bison?

Of course it would be ridiculous to buy a pair of pants just because they happen to match some particularly wacky socks, but I'm the one who once sewed an entire wool skirt suit and silk blouse to match a set of antique buttons I'd found at a yard sale.

And I didn't buy my lovely new moss-green corduroys just to match the Meerkats in Love socks my son brought home from South Africa, but when I saw these green cords on the half-price rack at Macy's I immediately thought, Meerkats. And then I saw a lovely soft v-necked sweater in the same color and now here I am ensconced in warm moss green from head to toe, except for the orange stripes on my Meerkats in Love socks. No one ever sees the orange stripes, but I know they're there and that's all that matters.

I was at Macy's as part of a two-day junket to Columbus, Ohio, the ostensible purpose of which was to buy a new winter coat. I didn't buy a coat (because I prefer not to look like the Michelin Man if at all possible) but I bought some other things and also visited two friends who always make me smile, plus a herd of bison. The bison were standing around placidly at Battelle Darby Creek Metropark, where the peace and quiet were balm for my soul. Why are bison more soothing to watch than cows? I barely notice the cows in the pastures along my commute but the sight of a few bison standing in a restored prairie fills me with peace.

The friends I visited were more talkative than the bison, reminding me that the issues that irk me aren't confined to my campus. I'm not the only one whose life's work is being rendered irrelevant by AI, nor am I the only one struggling to find a reliable foothold in our current cultural moment. Friends who can help me laugh in the midst of all the horror are a priceless gift.

And getting away from campus for a couple of days was a gift as well. No one gave me the time off; I just took advantage of a Thursday with no meetings and a Friday when I didn't need to be in class because my students were otherwise occupied. Call it a mental health break. I've been working like a maniac to complete important campus projects (with no thanks from those whose bacon I'm saving) and I had to get away, to fill my eyes and mind and heart with something other than trouble.

Today I'm back at work on campus, rejoining the mad race toward the end of the semester, but I feel more equipped to keep moving toward the finish line in my new green cords and meerkat socks and a mind refreshed by my time away--and a new career plan. If the whole academic thing doesn't work out, I'll remake myself as a professional appreciator of bison. Do you reckon there's any money in it?

 

Gotta love Meerkats in Love

 

Mary Roach: A little more than diddly

Just before we walked onstage in front of a packed house last night, the director of our campus speaker series asked me, "Do you usually get nervous before doing things like this?"

Things like this? What, like sitting on stage for an hour tossing questions at the author of eight best-selling books? Not something I do every day!

The answer is: yes, I did get a little nervous before I had that very public fireside chat with author Mary Roach last night, but it was the most fun I've had in ages. Aside from being a terrific writer, she is a warm and funny person who can talk intelligently about just about anything. Here's part of what I said about her in my introduction:

Early in her new book Replaceable You, in a chapter describing treatment options for people suffering third-degree burns, Mary Roach tosses out the phrase exuberant granulations as if it's precious treasure. In Fuzz, we learn about pronking and stotting and frass and kerf, and we encounter people who work as Danger Tree Assessors or Falling Safety Advisors. This is what I love about Mary's writing: she takes such great joy in language, glorying in the weird and wonderful nomenclature of science and nature while she's looking at interesting topics in granular detail--exuberantly. Near the end of Fuzz she writes about scientists' attempts to genetically alter mice, admitting that she "knows diddly about how it works but wants to become someone who knows a little more than diddly." Well we all know diddly about a lot of things--but by the time we're done tonight, I hope we'll know a little more than diddly.

And we did! We all now know much more about how Mary Roach writes her books and what she's learned along the way. The first question I asked was How far will you go to get the story? I've read only two of her books, but I've seen her get mugged by monkeys, get trained in wildlife attack response, climb inside an iron lung machine, get a hair transplant on her calf, and travel all over the world to track down scientists and other experts so she could observe their work while peppering them with questions.

I wish I could have written down her responses, but I had my hands full with a microphone and lists of questions, some of them written by my Nature Writing students, who had read a chapter of Fuzz. They wanted to know why she writes about serious topics humorously and why she tucks so many little gems into very funny footnotes. Her answers made us all a little smarter while keeping us laughing. 

But then she'd been doing that all day. Because of an unusual convergence of events, I was in charge of getting the author where she needed to go all afternoon, so we spent a lot of time talking while tootling around town and having dinner before the show. She is just as warm and interesting offstage, so by the time we got on the stage, I felt very comfortable asking questions.

And then after the show, she sat and signed books for a long line of people who wanted to keep the conversation going. It was pretty late when I dropped her off at her hotel, where she had arranged for a 3:30 a.m. wake-up call so a car service could drive her to the airport in Columbus. Maybe that's why I woke up at 3:30 this morning--in sympathy with the author who'd kept me so well entertained all day. The whole event wore me out but I'd do it again in a heartbeat. Maybe next time--if there is a next time--I won't be quite so nervous.  

Snow trouble

So I'm sitting in the audience at a big campus event while five distinguished men (and three women!) in expensive suits give speeches one after another after another, and I'm trying to listen very closely to what they're saying but I'm distracted by what I can see through the great big rec center windows just behind them.

Snow. Lots of it. Coming down so thickly that it's hard to see the trees right outside the window.   

The problem with working in a historic city full of picturesque brick streets is that it's very hard to remove snow from bricks, and the problem with white-out conditions is that there's a limited number of snowplows and salt trucks and they can't hit every road at once, and the problem with working in a city squeezed between two rivers and a steep hill is that there's really only one route that will take me home.  

Which is why I was stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic feeling its way along the highway at speeds up to six miles per hour yesterday afternoon. The line would inch up to a traffic light, stopping carefully to avoid skidding, and then more traffic would spill in from a side road, clogging the intersection so that no one could move even after the light turned green.

It was a long drive home and a stressful one. I was about halfway home when the snow stopped falling and the sun burst through the clouds, so that when I turned right on my country road, the snow-covered trees were in the spotlight. After taking close to an hour to drive my 17-mile route, the light and beauty made me want to stop and applaud. 

Snow creates all kinds of problems in the world where I live, but every once in a while it offers a lovely reward.