Spring keeps springing

If my memory files can be believed, every year at this time I go to the same places and photograph the same things--trilliums, trout lilies, dutchman's breeches, buckeyes bursting wildly into leaf in the woods. After 21 years you'd think I'd have enough photos of pawpaw blossoms, which aren't even all that interesting, but no: I hear the call of the pawpaw and out into the woods I go, except that this time I forgot to take my walking stick and slipped on a muddy slope and had trouble getting back up again and had to scootch down the hill on my bum. But I don't care. It was worth it. In times like these we need to grab hold of every ounce of beauty that comes our way, even when it hurts. I hope I never get tired of photographing spring.

Buckeye

Twinleaf (above) and trillium (below)

I love how the bloodroot leaf embraces the stem

Trout lily

Dutchman's breeches

Tiny spider inside the trillium blossom

Pawpaw blossoms

Twinleaf

Things that go "Um...." in the night

After all the fuss and bother, the alarmed phone call to the sheriff and the trailcam and the rush to make sure all the doors were locked, I took comfort in the unlikely fact that it could have been a bear. 

It could have been a person, too—an intruder in the night skulking about in the woods near our house. That's what my son thought he saw, and that's the reason we were all alarmed.

Why, we wondered, would anyone be lurking in the woods near our house at night? When we lived in town youngsters would cut through our lawn to get to the high school, but our little house in the not-so-big  woods isn't exactly on the way to anywhere. You have to walk two-tenths of a mile up a hill to get to the house, and then the only thing to do is turn around and go back down to the road again or go further uphill into the trackless woods. Why would anyone do that on a cold dark night outside deer season?

So my son called the sheriff's office and they sent out some deputies just to take a look around, and my husband fetched the data card from the trailcam at the edge of the woods. We saw deer, raccoons, possums, squirrels, foxes, and turkeys, but the only people recorded on the card were immediate family. 

But then the person, if it was a person, could have gone another way--for what reason I could not imagine. We sometimes hear about thefts of tools and equipment from garden sheds and garages in our area, but what would an intruder hope to find in ours? If you want to walk off with my vintage collection of broken weed-whackers, be my guest. In fact I wish someone would.

The deputies, of course, found nothing, but what did we expect them to find? Nothing was disturbed and nothing was taken, so we're not expecting CSI to come out and collect DNA samples. "Better safe than sorry," said the deputy, and we all went back to bed.

But not to sleep. Well, I can attest that one of us slept—I heard the snoring. I kept drifting off and then jerking awake again—What was that noise? Raccoons disassembling the birdfeeders again, or maybe a deer ambling past or a possum or a groundhog or a fox, or maybe an intruder!

At the back of my mind was the murder case that came before me some years ago when I served on our county's grand jury. A twelve-year-old kid took the hinges off the family's gun cabinet, grabbed a shotgun, and shot his grandmother and aunt at point-blank range. As grand jury foreperson, I had to look at the crime-scene photos, and I had to look at the aerial photos of the route the kid took when he fled from deputies and hid in woods that looked very much like our woods. Who but a fugitive criminal would be running up into our woods by night?

Well, a drunk person might, or some wanderer who thought he'd found a shortcut. Or perhaps nobody at all. 

In the cool light of day, it all felt like an overreaction. My son saw or heard or experienced something running through the woods, something human-sized that sounded like  a person, but it makes no sense for a person  to be in our woods at night.

But it could have been a bear. Granted, we've seen no bear tracks, so it could have been  an incorporeal bear, a great big wad of imaginary animal lumbering through the woods and into our nightmares. I'd rather be haunted by an imaginary bear than by a thief or a fugitive or a lost hunter so drunk he doesn't realize deer season is over, but unless the CSI guys take an interest, I guess we'll never know.

Pay attention--there's a quiz at the end

The problem, they tell me, is that my course needs a sexier title. My Later American Novel class has been cancelled due to low enrollment the last two times it was on the schedule, and now it's on the verge of being cancelled again. If you ask some of my colleagues, students' rejection of the course has nothing to do with the fact that they'd be required to read six novels--it's all about the title.

Now I'll be the first to admit that Later American Novel is not the most compelling title, but it has been in the catalog under that name for decades and serves as a nice parallel to Early American Novel. What else would you call a class focusing on twentieth- and twenty-first century American novels? 

Someone suggested calling the course Sex and Death, and there's plenty of both on the syllabus. We start with a book in which sex creates much of the conflict--or a dearth of sex combined with inaccurate rumors about who is having sex with whom, followed by a death that may be suicide or accident. So maybe Not Enough Sex and Ambiguous Death.

But the course covers so much more! Sex and death play a large part in the war novel in which bloodshed is overshadowed by red tape, violence veers toward comedy, and mindless bureaucracy creates absurd consequences. So maybe we can call the course Sex and Death Go Kafkaesque. 

But that wouldn't do for the short novel in which swimming substitutes for sex and death. A lovely narration of communal consciousness gets fractured by a crack in the bottom of the pool and a crack in a woman's mind--truly a lovely novel, but any accurate course title would reek of chlorine.  

A title that covered the important concepts in all six novels would have to include a hurricane, mad dog, and blossoming pear tree; Dylar and Hitler Studies and an Airborne Toxic Event; a peacock and children's songs and a misidentified bag of bones; women named Pilate and Babette or nothing at all, guys named Teacake and Milkman and Major Major Major Major.

A course title covering all that would have to be encyclopedic: 

Sing a song of sex and death
doused with chlorine--Kafkaesque,
guns and peacocks, courtship rites,
billowing clouds and bombing flights;
swimming pools, mad dogs, and mules,
flying Africans, useless tools,
deaths in wartime, deaths at home,
death and sex in every tome.
(But whichever name you chance, they'll
never take a class that's cancelled.)

(Gold star to anyone who can name all six novels.)

Ephemeral beauty--blink and you'll miss it

Hiking conditions are treacherous today thanks to the massive rainstorms transforming our hillsides into mud. One year ago today the entire area was under flood waters, but this week's rains have been spaced out enough to keep creeks and rivers mostly within their banks. Campgrounds along the Muskingum are under water, but the roads are passable and our driveway hasn't been washed away, thankfully.

Spring ephemeral season is upon us and I can't miss the opportunity to see what's blooming, so this morning we took advantage of a brief break in the rain to trek up the wet and muddy hill behind our house and visit the spot where the earliest bloodroot blooms. I took my walking stick and my husband lent his arm on the slippery spots but still we couldn't get very close to some of the blooms on the steep, muddy slope, and then the moisture in the air kept fogging up my glasses and the camera's lens. 

But we still saw some beauties worth seeing: grape hyacinths livening up our lawn; trout lily leaves spreading over the forest floor but producing, so far, only one blossom; rue anemone brightening up the dark, rotted leaf cover; a blossoming pear tree my husband planted 20 years ago standing alongside the dying crabapple that probably dates to the earliest inhabitants of our property.

And bloodroot, of course. I don't know why I'm so enamored of this tiny white blossom poking up next to a solitary lobed leaf--a blossom so delicate it's easy to overlook, a leaf so unassuming that I can't quite believe it will grow nearly as big as my hand long after the blossoms are gone.

Yesterday my American Lit students encountered the word ephemeral and I found myself compelled to urge them to go out in the woods and look for lovely little spring flowers that bloom for a brief moment and then disappear. There's all over the place in April, I told them, but you'll miss them if you don't make an effort to look.

My students may be too young to be awed by the world's ephemeral beauties, but maybe one day one of them will step out into the woods with eyes wide open and gasp at the loveliness hiding in plain sight. At that point, my work here will be done. 

Grape hyacinths

Blossoming pear and crabapple

Buckeye leaves bursting forth

Trout lily

Rue anemone

Bloodroot

A patch of club moss I'd never noticed before

Some practice in probing for the story

How to give advanced writing students practice at conducting interviews? In my Life Writing class, we've worked on asking good questions and following up to clarify details, and we've spent some time practicing interview skills on each other and then writing up mini-profiles that integrate quotations in interesting ways. But my students know each other too well already--they need to practice interviewing strangers.

So I invited a retired colleague to visit my class. (Let's call her Dr. M.) I told my students very little in advance aside from her name and the fact that she's led an interesting life, and we devoted part of Monday's class to writing questions designed to probe for information that the interview subject might not volunteer all at once.

When Dr. M visited class on Wednesday, each student was required to ask at least two questions; for the first round I drew students' names randomly, and we got started off on the right foot when the first student asked our guest how to spell her name--which she did, slowly and clearly. Dr. M walked around the room engaging students individually and told some great stories about her 42 years as a professor, but she followed my instructions to the letter: if a student asked a vague question, she gave a vague answer. If Dr. M mentioned or even hinted at an interesting story, it was up to the students to follow up and tease out the details. Sometimes they did, but they let some great opportunities slip right by.

And then they had 20 minutes to write a mini-profile, one or two paragraphs based on what they'd learned. Considering the time constraints, some of these profiles were quite good--setting the scene, describing the subject's bright smile and abundant energy, selecting and incorporating quotes that revealed her voice and personality. One student started her mini-profile by stating that Dr. M "may carry the name of her mother and her mother before her, but she has made a legacy of her own." Nice work on such a short deadline!

But about half of my Life Writing students chose to use no quotations at all. Dr. M spoke slowly and clearly (as one would expect from a longtime professor of Communication) and my students were scribbling notes or typing on their keyboards throughout the interview, but somehow many of them had trouble turning their notes into quotes or accurate information. I saw Dr. M's name spelled five different ways and her hometown spelled incorrectly or connected to the wrong state. And then there was the gaffe about her favorite childhood book. I doubt that today's students are at all familiar with The Bobbsey Twins, but how could a student have misinterpreted that as The Bootie Twins?

Today we'll take a look at some of the great examples and I'll try to get some insight on their reluctance to use quotations. I've seen something similar in my American Lit Survey class--in-class essays for which students had full access to their textbooks, but about half of them didn't use any quotations at all. How do you analyze literature without attending to words? And how do you interview a bubbly, dynamic person for thirty minutes without capturing a single phrase worth quoting?

They can learn from this, I'm certain--and so is Dr. M. "You give me hope," she told my students, and those students able to recognize a great quote made certain to write that down.  

The tragedy of TL;DR

I swear I'm going to SCREAM the next time a student tells me she didn't like a reading assignment because it's too long. If the server put an extra scoop of ice cream on your sundae, would you complain about getting too much of a good thing? If a visit to a national park overloaded your senses, would you gripe about being intoxicated by too much beauty? Why, then, complain if a really lively, informative, thought-provoking article provides more good stuff than you can squeeze into a life crowded with so much doomscrolling and video gaming?

It's not even a difficult text--"Stone Skipping is a Lost Art. Kurt Steiner Wants the World to Find It," an excellent piece from Outside magazine by Sean Williams (click here for a fun read, and don't neglect the jaw-dropping videos of stones flying across vast lengths of water in apparent defiance of the laws of physics). Several students in my Life Writing class told me this article was their favorite assigned reading so far this semester, but those who didn't like it said it was just too long to read.

I pointed out that the author and editors could have chosen to cut any number of passages, such as the bit about the history of stone-skipping and its various monikers in other parts of the world. ("Czechs throw froggies, while Swedes say they're tossing sandwiches.") They could have cut details about Kurt Steiner's hermetic cabin, mental health struggles, and failed marriage, or they could have deleted the lovely passage about the search for the Platonic ideal of skipping stones. In fact, why didn't the editors demand that the author transform the whole amazing article into a simple series of bullet points? So much easier to read!

 

But so much emptier. Like many other aspects of life, stone-skipping is inherently futile--I mean, in the end all you've achieved is tossing a bunch of stones into a lake. How, then, can the subject of the article, Kurt Steiner, claim that stone-skipping is "a means for the redemption of mankind"?

 

Well you'll have to read the article to find out, and when you do, you'll note that the first five paragraphs provide a master class in introducing readers to a complex subject. The author starts from the outside and draws us deeper into the topic until we're well and truly hooked. 

 

First paragraph: Description of physical surroundings and Kurt Steiner's appearance, including the word "Rasputinesque," which we had to look up in class.

 

Second paragraph: Description of the man at work, relying on such vivid comparisons that it's worth quoting in full: 

Steiner stared across the creek and raised his right arm into an L, clasping a coaster-size sliver of shale the way a guitarist might hold a plectrum during a showstopping solo. But rather than fold his torso horizontally, as you might expect somebody skipping a rock to do, he stretched his five-foot-nine-inch body vertically, and then squeezed down like an accordion and planted his left leg to crack his throwing arm, placing the rock under so much gyroscopic force that it sputtered loudly as it left his hand, like a playing card in a bicycle wheel.

Third paragraph: The stone acting as the subject of one sparkly verb after another.

 

Fourth paragraph: Steiner's reaction to the toss, a passage that begins unveiling the subject's personality.

 

Fifth paragraph: Statement of purpose. "Kurt Steiner is the world's greatest stone skipper" plus a clear indication of why stone-skipping matters. I don't know about you, but if the Rasputinesque dude with the accordion body insists that stone-skipping will save the world, I want to know how.

True, it takes a while to get to the answer, and it's not so much an answer as a series of questions about how damaged people find meaning despite--or perhaps because of--the inherent futility of their actions. The article ends at a moment of indecision and uncertainty, but also a point of possibility, when just about anything could happen but there's only one certainty: any time is the right time to throw.

 

And any time is the right time to read a sparkling article about stone-skipping, as long as we don't reject it as TL;DR.

April's got game

What did April ever do to T.S. Eliot? Maybe he had a schoolboy crush on a girl named April who teased him and pleased him and then flounced off to leave him meditating on death and despair--why else would he describe April as "the cruellest month," a month "mixing / memory and desire" and "stirring / Dull roots with spring rain"? Eliot slaps cruel April across the face in The Wasteland, but Chaucer had other ideas.

In the Prologue to Canterbury Tales, April bring sweet showers and devotes itself to piercing, bathing, engendering, and pricking Nature in the whatsit. Chaucer's April inspires fertility and growth, awakening "smale foweles maken melodye" and quickening Nature's spirit, but April also inspires folk of all classes to go on pilgrimages, ostensibly to seek spiritual growth but also to indulge in a whole lot of eating and drinking and making merry with sundry tales both demure and bawdy. For Chaucer, April's got game!

For my students as well. Everyone engaged in academe knows that April is indeed the cruellest month, showering students and faculty alike with projects and deadlines, pricking the conscience with regret for every prior moment of procrastination, engendering songs of despair among students who see their gpas plummeting and profs who see their grading-piles growing. 

Everyone's a fool on April first, but my English majors and Writing Center tutors have come up with a clever way to ease into April's craziness: they're hosting a word-game party featuring Scrabble and Boggle and Poetry for Neanderthals. 

I suspect that T.S. Eliot would have spoken more kindly of poor April if he'd welcomed the month with a raucous round of Poetry for Neanderthals, and Chaucer would have killed at Scrabble--if only the other players could be made to accept his spellings. 

I've lived so long with Eliot's cruel April that now I'd like to cheer on Chaucer's. "So priketh hem Nature in hir corages"--Autocorrect wants to change "corages" to "corsages," but Chaucer wasn't talking about prom dates. He was talking about the heart, the temperament, the center of emotion. Take courage, April! It's you and me, maken melodye! 

Batter up!

This afternoon at 4:10 when my Cleveland Guardians start their Opening Day game against the Kansas City Royals, I'll be sitting in a classroom listening to a presentation about college issues that are, granted, Very Important, but the whole time I'll feel in my bones the passing radio waves carrying the voice of Tom Hamilton, the voice of the Guardians and 2025 recipient of the Ford C. Frick award from the Baseball Hall of Fame, the man who has the best home-run call in baseball (and if you don't believe me, listen here), the man whose voice provides the soundtrack of my summer, and I'll be wondering what kind of idiot schedules a meeting at 4 p.m. on baseball's opening day?

That would be me. I am that idiot. 

At least I'll be able to listen to the rest of the game on the radio on the drive home, I tell myself, but it's not the same. And if I need to hear Tom Hamilton's home-run call at any time, I can just press the button on the Tom Hamilton bobblehead my adorable children got us for our anniversary in December, a bobblehead equipped to play recordings of several of Hamilton's trademark calls.

A few weeks ago I attended Marietta College's home opener, but bad weather and schedule issues have prevented me from attending any other games. I probably won't get to a Guardians game until midsummer. Rumor has it that my department chair, now on sabbatical, will be attending the Guardians home opener, unless one of us tackles him first and steals his tickets. Today, though, we should all be glued to the radio awaiting the first pitch--except for those of us stuck in late-afternoon meetings.  

Reason number 4,722 why I should retire right now.

Marietta College home opener

 

Chernobyl, engineering, and imagining the unimaginable

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away--scratch that. Back in the 1980s, a time my students consider concurrent with the Jurassic Era, my father was a safety and reliability consultant doing work for NASA and several U.S. government agencies. He couldn't tell us much about his work, but I do recall that he analyzed the safety hazards inherent in training firefighters to fight fires within airplanes and nuclear submarines. He was an expert at predicting every possible source of catastrophe and failure and uncovering all the ways whatever you were doing could damage, maim, or kill you. He was good at what he did, and many people valued his expertise.

But when Russia--then the USSR--came calling, he always said no. I don't know what he told his potential clients when he turned them down, but I distinctly recall what he told his family. First, because of some family history, he was afraid that if he went to the USSR they wouldn't let him come home. (Paranoid, maybe, but those were the times we were living in.) And second, he was dedicated to upholding strict standards of safety, but he had no confidence that the Soviets were similarly committed. "Look at Chernobyl," he said. "That's just the tip of the iceberg."

I thought of his words this morning when I read an article in the New York Times about the recent drone strike that cut a hole in the protective shell over the failed Chernobyl nuclear power plant. "For people of a certain age," says the article, "the explosion at Chernobyl in 1986, after years of heightened fears of nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States, was the stuff of nightmares."

Indeed it was--and, for some of us, still is. But what struck me most about the article is this paragraph:

"We did a lot of safety analysis, considering a lot of bad things that could happen," said Mr. Schmieman, 78, a retired civil engineer from Washington state who was a senior technical adviser on the project. "We considered earthquakes, tornadoes, heavy winds, 100-year snowfalls, all kinds of things. We didn't consider acts of war."

And there, in a nutshell, we see the problem inherent in the pursuit of safety. Even if you put the best minds in the world behind the task of predicting every imaginable problem, they're not going to be able to protect against the unimaginable ones.

Who imagines that any good can come from attacking a defunct and decaying nuclear plant? Where are the safety and reliability experts who could warn against such a rash act? Dad could drive me crazy sometimes with his detailed explanations about how every choice I made was bound to end in disaster, but if we don't have people like him taking the time to analyze potential hazards, who can we count on to keep the rest of us safe?

This, too, is the stuff of nightmares.  

Swinging out over the ravine

"Is there an artist in the class?" I asked, and fortunately there was, which is a good thing because when I try to draw anything on the whiteboard, no one can tell what it's supposed to be. This is true: On a handout I use regularly in composition classes I drew a picture of a cow, but students always ask what it's supposed to be and one of them guessed it might be an olive floating over a pool table. 

But today before class a student complied with my request and drew on the whiteboard a nervous-looking boy swinging on a grape vine over a dark ravine. Would the vine hold? Would he go flying into the unknown or land on solid ground? The boy is Sarty Snopes, the story is "Barn Burning" by William Faulkner, and the references to liminal space get more extreme as the plot progresses: the boy is suspended between blood and justice, swinging on a vine over a dark ravine, torn in two by teams of horses, and finally stepping alone into a dark wood with no idea where he's going.

I love teaching "Barn Burning" even though Faulkner poses problems for most of my students. "It's just confusing," they tell me, but I ask them why Faulkner didn't work a little harder to clarify the situation. Why not employ an omniscient narrator to explain exactly what's happening at any given moment? Why reveal the story through the eyes of a ten-year-old boy who often hasn't a clue? That's where we start the discussion. We follow a meandering path through the story but always end up lost, facing that dark wood, alone but together.

But as much as I love teaching "Barn Burning," this morning I made the difficult decision to cut Faulkner out of my American Novel class in the fall. The class focuses on narrative innovations so I've always included The Sound and the Fury, but I fear that even my English majors lack the patience and reading skills to tackle the Benjy chapter. I needed to cut the reading list down from seven books to six just to accommodate the kinds of reading and oral communication skills I'm supposed to emphasize under the new Communication Proficiency designation, and after much consideration, Faulkner seemed like the right book to cut.

And the thing is, I made that decision without even knowing whether that course will earn the Communication Proficiency designation. I hope those decisions will come down before students start registering for fall courses, but meanwhile, I have to submit my book orders, which means I had to make decisions about the reading list based on incomplete information. Which seems, at the moment, to be the way we do things around here. 

I'd like someone to draw a diagram of how our campus systems are functioning right now with so many changes and so many offices remaining unstaffed, but I fear we don't have an artist skilled enough to produce something legible. Instead, I hold tightly to the grapevine as it swings out over the dark ravine and hope it doesn't drop me into the great unknown.

Spring Break souvenirs

I saw a student this morning with arms so sunburned that if she stood outside on a dark night people might mistake her for the Blood Moon. She brought back a memorable souvenir of Spring Break, but I don't want to be around when the sunburn starts to peel.

A student in my American Lit class brought back an impressive record--ten straight wins in softball! What a way to start the season. I watched the baseball home opener last week before I left for my Spring Break road trip and while our baseball team isn't winning ten straight anything, they played a gem of a game, pulling a victory out of nowhere. It was a gorgeous sunny day and I could have ended up with sunburn if I hadn't sat in the shade. 

What souvenirs did I bring home from Spring Break? Three boxes of Girl Scout cookies and some photos of my granddaughter competing in the regional spelling bee and my grandson in the Pinewood Derby. And photos of herons. Lots of herons.

Mostly my Spring Break souvenirs are intangible--feelings and memories and random wishes. I feel happy about how we've managed to maintain a satisfying relationship with our adult kids, and I cherish the memory of the youngest imp reading me the story she wrote and illustrated in which three friends pursue a quest for adventure and bring back treasure--but only after asking their parents' permission. I loved to see her trying to read a book and practice the piano at the same time, although I know that's not the textbook way to develop piano skills.

And I wish I'd done a little more work last week so I wouldn't be rushing around trying to print out documents and prepare for meetings this morning. I wish I had answers to questions people keep asking--not just the big questions about the future of the College but the niggling little ones like am I allowed to talk to a coach about a student's academic performance if the coach is also the student's parent? 

And I truly wish I did not have to stand up in front of the faculty meeting this afternoon and tell them that the magic wand they're asking for doesn't exist--the software that will reliably identify Artificial Intelligence with 100 percent accuracy so that we don't have to rely on our own instincts and reasoning skills.

More than anything, what I wish for after Spring Break is more Spring Break, but I would probably feel differently if I'd brought back the kind of sunburn I saw on students this morning. Some of us have clearly had enough leisure. Time to get back to work! 

Bird people are my people

Stand beside a road with a camera in hand aiming at the great blue heron rookery across the way and someone is bound to stop and chat, and if that someone is a camouflage-wearing dude in a pickup truck full of fishing gear, he's likely to bear news about the location of bald eagles and buffleheads, and if you're having a lively chat about beautiful birds while herons flap overhead carrying nesting materials to a nearby nest, then you'll know you've found your people.

Let's leave the rancor off the menu, please

My goal was simple: take a leisurely drive a few hours north, stopping at a wetland along the way (no eagles, sadly) and then visiting a nearly empty mall (new bedsheets!) so as to arrive at Alladin's Eatery just in time to treat myself to lunch--the Taza Chicken Salad, which may well be my favorite salad on the planet (grilled chicken! pine nuts! apples! grapes! and a honey dijon dressing to die for!). But when I walked into the fast-casual restaurant, one obstacle stood between me and my salad: a waiter giving me that look. 

Probably every adult woman who has ever traveled solo (and maybe some men, too--how would I know?) is familiar with the look. You walk up to the counter and tell the attendant that you'd like a table for one, and the attendant gives you a look dripping with disdain and says, "Just one?"

Now the waiter who served me the look this morning appeared to still be learning the ropes, fumbling to fill a role that was still unfamiliar. Maybe she needed a more experienced waiter to remind her that while a solo diner might not be the most lucrative party in the place, one customer at a table is better than zero customers, especially when the restaurant is practically empty. 

It's been years since I worked in food service but even I know that you can't treat customers like lepers just because they happen to be eating alone. If I were my father, I would have taken the opportunity to teach the waiter a lesson involving a great deal of yelling and demanding to see the manager and withholding of tips. But my father never worked in food service.

"Just one," I calmly told the waiter. "Is that a problem?" I may have given her a quiet look of my own, but it was not nearly as loud as my father's yelling would have been. 

In the end she was very attentive, and the salad was really good. I may have eaten it extra slowly just to assert my right to take up space at a table, but I left a pretty good tip. Maybe the lesson would have been more memorable accompanied by yelling, but a tantrum would have left a bad taste in my mouth. It's rare that I get an opportunity to eat a Taza Chicken Salad at Aladdin's, and I would hate to have that lovely taste tainted by rancor.

Baseball, writing, and heron rookeries

Yesterday I spent some time posting all of Marietta College's home baseball games on my calendar, an activity that fills me with hope and joy even though I know I won't make it to many actual games.

Baseball means spring, means sitting in the bleachers on a warm spring day (or a cold spring day, or a snowy spring day, or a spring day so windy that everyone has to literally hold on to their hats), means hot dogs and popcorn and temporarily banishing work from my mind. Sometimes it means triumph, but frankly, it doesn't even matter whether our team is doing well--when they're on the field, I want to be there.

This morning the gray clouds are spitting hard pellets of snow, but on Tuesday I saw snowdrops blooming on campus and daffodil buds swelling. Harsh winds sent my car sliding over ice this morning, but soon I'll meet with a former colleague inside a cozy coffee shop to talk about writing and look over delightful drafts. All my students will be turning in writing on Friday that I'll need to read and evaluate so I can post midterm grades, but Spring Break starts on Saturday and I'll be free for a week.

Well, relatively free. More free than usual. Free-ish. Not quite free as a bird--and did I mention that yesterday after the Ash Wednesday service I took a little detour to see if any great blue herons are staking out nests at the nearby rookery? With the ashy sign of penitence on my forehead, I struggled to keep the car on the road in sharp wind under an angry gray sky, but when I saw a lone heron standing tall and serenely on a nest atop a tree that was being battered by the wind, my smile was wide enough to break through all the darkness. It's been a rough winter but spring is on the way and I, for one, am ready to applaud its arrival.

 

 

I don't remember buying a ticket for this ride

Once upon a time my family got stuck on a log flume ride, all five of us, Mom Dad and three adolescents crammed into one big fake log that came to an abrupt stop halfway up a steep climb. I don't recall how long we sat there before an attendant came along to release us from our uncomfortable stasis, but I remember wishing the ride would just for heaven's sake get moving--I didn't much care where.

It is the nature of roller coasters to swing from extreme highs to gut-dropping lows with a lot of wild whirling in between, so I guess I should be delighted that the roller-coaster my emotions have recently been riding keeps moving, even if some of the places it takes me are uncomfortable.

Just in the past week I have emerged from a class after teaching "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" so exhilarated that I felt like I was floating down the hallway, and I later entered another class so full of despair that I could barely keep from crying in front of my students. I had made the mistake of watching the video of Zelenskyy's visit to the Oval Office just before class. (My maiden name was Zelesky. My grandparents left Lithuania to flee the Bolsheviks. I hate to see the underdog get bullied.)

Last week I met with a student who admitted that he did not recognize many of the words in the writing he had submitted as his own, and later I read a set of student essays that filled me with awe over my students' creativity (goslings that look like lumps of dryer-lint!). I need to read some mediocre pieces just to provide a bit of respite between the highs and lows.

On Sunday, in response to a challenge from a former colleague, I finally put on paper a draft of a personal essay I've been gnawing over for years, which took me to a very dark place where I once felt hopelessly stuck, but writing about it provided a liberating sense of accomplishment. It's an early draft with a chunk missing from the middle, but it says something I need to say and opens the door to further exploration, further highs and lows. 

And today I face a pile of administrative claptrap related to a new project that will either make a significant difference in our campus culture or turn into a massive waste of time and energy, but even as I was kicking myself for getting dragged into this thankless endeavor, I received an email message full of praise for an academic essay I published last year, the kind of praise academic writing rarely receives, and the praise is going to be published for everyone to see. (You'd better believe I'll share the link when it becomes available, shameless self-promotion or not.) I promised myself I wouldn't cry but I'm keeping the tissues handy.

And the hits just keep coming--the ups and downs, the long slow climb before the endless fall, the twists and turns that keep me wondering where I'll end up next, but at this point I'm just glad the roller-coaster keeps moving forward. Better to keep moving than to get stuck. After all, it's not the twists and turns that kill you--it's the sudden stop at the end. 

Maybe we can make a metaphor

This week for the first time I'll be introducing students to Nicole Piasecki's remarkable essay "Maybe We Can Make a Circle," constructed as a letter to a beloved high school English teacher but with a twist I don't want to spoil. (Go read it first--it's worth it.)

I love so much about this essay--the way Piasecki evokes the conventions of the gratitude-for-an-influential-teacher letter while blasting them to pieces, the way she arouses strong emotions without swamping readers in gloom, the way she metes out essential information little by little and then all at once. But most of all I admire the gaps, the things she doesn't say or can't say, the questions she can't answer or maybe no one can answer. The heart of the essay beats in those gaps, in the unspeakable, incomprehensible, ineffable absence around which the essay circles.

I have not suffered the kinds of losses Nicole Piasecki describes, but I feel the anguish involved in tip-toeing around gaps. So much I can't write about right now, so many feelings I'm tamping down into a wad in the pit of my stomach, where they sit there and fester and wait to kick me awake in the middle of the night. 

And of course the worst part is that I can't even write about what I can't write about. I want to stay employed for another three semesters and I want to remain on speaking terms with friends and family and I want to continue to encourage students and colleagues to fight the good fight, but opening the door to the dungeon might loose the ravening beasts and endanger everything I care about. 

Over the decades my mother developed the habit of silence, biting her tongue and nodding in agreement until she lost the ability to speak for herself. She lived out the dictum don't rock the boat until the boat became stranded in a becalmed sea with no hope of ever reaching land.

(Why am I always transforming pain into metaphors? It's impossible to say just what I mean! And yes, I'm teaching Prufrock today, a poem more relevant with each passing year.)

One thing I'm certain of: it's impossible to eat the peach while biting my tongue. And yet here I am, dancing delicately around the gaps and wondering why I'm so darned hungry. 

Can't quite believe in the coming thaw

My relaxing Sunday afternoon was interrupted repeatedly by what sounded like artillery shells exploding on our back deck. This is the longest and snowiest cold stretch we've experienced since we got our new roof in 2021, so we'd never before witnessed what happens when the sun finally warms up the metal roof enough to release all that accumulated ice. Big chunks fell all afternoon, THUNK THUNK THUNK, and every single THUNK made me want to take cover. 

There was no sound at all to herald our power outage early Saturday morning. In fact, it may have been the lack of sound that woke me at 3:30 a.m. to a very quiet, very dark house--a house getting colder by the minute. Thirteen degrees outside and the power stayed off until 8 a.m. but we never learned the reason, only lit a bunch of candles, tried to avoid flushing the toilets (because no power = no well pump = no water), and huddled under the covers to stay warm.

A day that starts with a power outage at 3:30 a.m. is not going to feel normal. All day I felt as if I was trying to catch up with myself, trying to understand something that my brain was too dull to absorb. I looked outside and saw the same snow I'd been seeing all week, snow that could have played a starring role in Robert Frost's poem "Desert Places": A blanker whiteness of benighted snow / With no expression, nothing to express.

The resident woodsman retrieved the data card from our trailcam and I looked through photo after photo of squirrels cavorting in the woods and not much else--a few juncos, a mess of raccoons, a possible rabbit, and finally a few deer, including the big buck we've seen only on the camera, never in person. How do the animals feel about this long, cold winter? I'm sure the birds appreciate the seeds, suet, and peanuts we put out for them, but the other animals seem to be in hiding.

Facebook tells me that at this time last year I posted photos of crocuses blooming on campus, but so far this winter the campus has been covered with nothing but snow and ice. Yesterday, though, the sun stayed out long enough to warm the roof and send ice exploding onto our deck, and today the forecast calls for highs in the 50s. I may just go out and look for crocuses, and if I can't find them today, there's always tomorrow. I feel the thaw in every bone in my body--so why do I still feel the need to huddle under the covers and keep my eyes tightly shut?

Students inspire me--but what happens when they stop?

My student put her blue book in the pile on the desk with a big smile. "I love this prompt," she said, and my first thought was I need to write about why this prompt is so great, but then I got distracted by an uncomfortable question: What will I write about after I retire, when I no longer have students to feed me clever lines and cool ideas?

Maybe I'll try to resurrect the past, wallowing in nostalgia for bygone years, or maybe I'll provide up-to-the-minute breaking news about the state of my kitchen, how many socks need darning, or how high the grass has grown (with updates at 11!).

Or maybe I won't write at all. It could happen. Retirement might transform me into a barely sentient lump on the sofa, perusing a never-ending supply of British murder mysteries and heartwarming episodes of All Creatures Great and Small. I'll go around the house humming peppy TV theme songs while wondering why I ever spent so much time playing with words and ideas. Maybe I'll slowly lose the ability to put words together in meaningful ways, or maybe one day I'll just decide that I've written enough.

Or maybe not. When my teaching days are over, maybe I'll find inspiration elsewhere instead of relying on my students to inspire me. But who will step up and slide me some great writing prompts?

Academic annihilation: hybrid sport or elaborate prank?

It's always a treat when my students teach me something new, but sometimes I wonder whether I'm being pranked. Chessboxing: hybrid sport or elaborate hoax? There it is in Wikipedia, big as life--grown men in silk shorts cavorting around a boxing ring to beat each other senseless with, alternately, boxing gloves and chess moves. What's next, Scrabble Bass-fishing? Jump-rope Jarts? Nuclear Fission Badminton?

Ridiculous juxtapositions were the name of the game in my Life Writing class last week when I asked students to bring together unlike elements to suggest a connection without naming it. According to my students, writing is like cooking or woodworking, anxiety is like lousy weather, and an elementary-school playground has a lot in common with the monkey house at the zoo. Every writing assignment they submit gives me something to smile about, a much-needed reminder that creativity continues to thrive despite the harsh winds swirling around all of academe.

One of the topics at yesterday's faculty meeting was the "Dear Colleague" letter released by the Department of Education last Friday, which gives colleges two weeks to comply with federal anti-DEI guidelines or risk losing federal student aid (read about it here). Principles in the letter are vague and ambiguous but the threat is real and terrifying. Tomorrow some of my students will be writing in-class essays addressing how certain literary works relate to the College's core values, one of which is Global Perspective and Diversity. How do we uphold those core values if we're not allowed to promote diversity--or perhaps even use the word?

I keep hoping to wake up from this horrible nightmare and find that someone was just having a laugh, but if Chessboxing can be real, anything is possible. If my job gets rudely yanked out from under my feet in the next couple of weeks, maybe I can take up a second career in Cross-stitch Archery, or Chainsaw-juggling Yahtzee, or Defenestration Yoga. I'm about as well suited for those pursuits as I am for the coming academic apocalypse. 

Raise a glass to sheer survival

I could count up all the things that made this an awful week, from the snow that slicked up my road again to the deer that ran in front of my car and caused me to slam on the brakes in a way that wrenched my back, not to mention the all-day rain and gray skies and the impossibility of sleeping through my husband's night-time coughing fits, plus an annoying allergic reaction that made my ankles feel like they were on fire all day long for two days straight, but it's Friday so let's think about happier things. 

Snow-covered trees along the icy river made for a beautiful drive the other morning. Despite my three (!) separate encounters with deer this week and my close encounter with a cliffside during a dangerous skid, I am still alive and kicking--which is easier now that my ankles are done burning and itching and swelling up until they feel as if they'll burst.

The skies may have been gray for a few days but in our house the Christmas cacti are blooming beautifully--again!--and my husband brought home a lovely bunch of tulips to brighten things up. The tulips echo some hues on our current jigsaw puzzle, a collection of colorful succulents challenging our puzzle-solving ability--and what a great feeling to insert a piece that transforms a chaotic blob into something beautiful.

This has been a cupcake-and-cake intensive week, with campus gatherings for a teaching workshop, the installation of our interim president, and the College's 190th birthday party, where I cheered on colleagues earning prizes for good work and took home a little bling myself. Most of these prizes were cancelled last year but the nominations were resubmitted this year, which is how I ended up walking home with a Research Prize for the Teaching Comedy book. Plus a cupcake!

And now all I have to do is get through two classes today and this complicated week will finally be over, so let's raise a glass to anti-lock brakes, anti-itch cream, tulips, cacti, and cupcakes.