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.

 

 

Guineas in the mist

I totally understand why no one goes trick-or-treating on my road: it's narrow and twisty, with lots of blind curves and no streetlights or sidewalks, and you never know when a critter might skitter across the road in front of you. Houses are far apart, and a child in a mask that limits peripheral vision would be taking his life in his hands walking up my driveway. And of course the guineas' alarm call makes it sound like someone is getting murdered in my meadow. Scary place! But beautiful too, especially in the early-morning autumn fog.

 

Guineas in the mist, and chickens too

The resident woodsman has been working hard.

Smiley Friday

Late on Friday afternoon at the end of a complicated week, I walked into a room in the science building feeling tired, grumpy, and entirely out of energy, but within minutes I was laughing and by the end of the hour I felt refreshed. The room was full of exhausted professors eating finger foods, drinking wine, and sharing stories, gathered to listen as two of our colleagues presented the results of their sabbatical research projects. I don't know much about scanning tunneling microscopes or microbial films on reefs, but my colleagues took such joy in explaining their work that the joy seeped into every corner of the room and put a spring in our steps as we left the building. 

But that's not the only reason I'm smiling this Friday. In no particular order:

At the student creative writing event yesterday, three of my Nature Writing students read short essays they'd written for my class. Beautiful writing read beautifully--they made me very proud. 

Earlier in the day--at 6:30 a.m., when it was still dark out and I hadn't yet ingested my morning quota of caffeine--I arrived at our first-year student registration breakfast to find a host of students eager to press the big blue "Register Now" button promptly at 7, plus faculty from various disciplines helping them troubleshoot scheduling problems. At least half of the students present were first-year football players, whose coach had insisted that they walk over to the registration breakfast right after early-morning weightlifting. Best of all, the coach came along with them. It's refreshing to see a brand-new coach impressing on students the importance of academics. 

One of my first-year seminar students got the rest of the class laughing so hard this morning that we all felt like one big happy family. Sometimes one student can be a catalyst in a classroom, making good things happen just by being there. I'm going to miss this dude next semester.

I had to run an errand to a bleak strip mall in the middle of the day but I stopped along the way to look at the Ohio River, where the light was gorgeous during the calm before an ugly storm. Calm water, lovely light, refreshing breeze--just before the sky fell.

And a colleague reminded me this evening that the sky is always going to be falling, but it's good sometimes to focus instead on the lovely light. 

An elevating topic

This morning I rode in an elevator with a student who had recently broken his ankle in two places. "This is nothing," he said. "Last year I broke my neck."

I think I would have quit playing football after the first injury, but whatever. I certainly wasn't planning to gripe about my bum knee in the presence of that kind of pain. He can't put any weight on his ankle for at least a month so his knee was propped up on one of those little scooters, which has to be a horrible way to get around campus. Historic buildings full of charm and character aren't necessarily easy to retrofit for the differently-abled. (I keep casually referring to myself as a cripple but people flinch. Too Dickensian?)

Yesterday I was halfway down a flight of stairs when I realized that I had forgotten to take the elevator and then I had to make a decision: continue down to the next floor or walk back up and use the elevator? In the past couple of weeks I've spent more time in campus elevators than I had for the previous 25 years combined. Elevators in campus buildings are, variously, slow, smelly, noisy, unreliable, or absent, but my orthopedist says my knee will be happier if I avoid steps for a while, so I hear and obey.

For about four days after the cortisone shot my knee felt great. I was able to walk without a discernible limp and sleep without being awakened by shooting pains. 

Then I twisted it again--not as badly as the first time, but enough to make me despair of ever living without pain. Back to taking piles of painkillers every day, back to limping slowly around campus, back to being awakened by pain every stinking night.

But then it started feeling better. I can sleep! I've cut back on the painkillers! I can walk for a time without a limp! I can put on my socks without being overcome by a strong desire to cut off my right leg above the knee! Stairs still hurt, especially going down, and by the end of the day my leg feels fatigued, but the knee is making steady progress, filling me with hope that I may someday get around campus without having to plan every step of my route in advance. 

For a while I was going to Faculty Council meetings to offer feedback on topics related to one of my positions, but the last time I attended a Council meeting, my knee hurt so badly that I resolved to stay away until such time as Hell freezes over. Council meets on the top floor of the administration building, a lovely historic pile where the steps seem as steep and endless as the Eiffel Tower.  

How would a person dependent on a wheelchair access any of the services available in that building? Well, there's no room inside the building for an elevator, so some years ago the College installed an outdoor chair lift just next to the steps. To operate the chair lift, you have to press a buzzer and hope someone inside the building hears the summons and knows how to operate the lift. Once years ago the chair lift got stuck halfway up with a wheelchair-bound person in it. 

And even if it works, the chair lift only gets you so far: access to the main floor of the building, where all the services most essential to students are located. There is no elevator to the upper floor, where Faculty Council meets and where the Human Resources office is located. How am I supposed to file paperwork requesting accommodations for my bum knee when I can't get up the steps to HR? 

But let's look on the bright side: I can walk! I can sleep! And I'm not trying to play football with a broken neck! I've reached the age when joint pain is a fairly constant part of everyday life, but there's hope that someday I'll be able to walk down the stairs without giving it a second thought. Anything to avoid the elevator! 

When the door swings back

On cop shows it's become a cliche: the officers encounter a woman with bruises on her face and ask who's been hitting her and the woman says I walked into a door. Lame! Such a lame excuse that it has become code for Let's all pretend that no one is hitting me. 

So I probably ought to come up with something else to say when people ask about the bruise on my forehead, like The plunger the aliens used to suck me into their flying saucer left a nasty red mark. That's about as believable as I walked into a door, but nevertheless I assure you that I' telling the truth: I walked into a door, and I have a door-shaped bruise to prove it.

Trust me: my husband is the last person on earth who would intentionally hurt anyone, and also he doesn't know his own strength, so if he decided one day to punch me in the face, I'd still be lying on the floor in the room where it happened. The laundry room. Which has swinging saloon doors, one of which failed to swing back out and so was located where I didn't expect it when I turn to walk vigorously out of the room.

My husband heard me holler and yelled up from the basement, Are you okay?  

No, I said, but there's not a thing you can do about it. 

I could blame it on my lifelong klutziness or an aging body or the malignant door, but the fact is that I've been doing a lot of stupid things lately because I'm distracted by fears that my teaching career is going pfft right in front of my face. Whatever I do to try not to think about it, I'm frequently assaulted by intrusive thoughts of despair over my moribund teaching career. 

No literature classes this semester because students wouldn't sign up for them. No upper-level literature class since fall of 2024, and it's possible that one or both of my literature classes scheduled for next semester will be canceled due to low enrollment, which would leave me with...nothing to teach. 

Of course the Powers That Be will make sure I devote my non-teaching time to administrative projects to make up for not teaching, but while I'm pretty good at administrative claptrap, it doesn't feed my soul the way teaching does. And it's a little embarrassing for the senior member of the English department to be haunting the halls with nothing to do because my courses have been so roundly rejected by students that I've become utterly irrelevant. (And they're left with no options for American Literature classes, which leads to a pretty unbalanced English major, but that's not my fault.)

I'm trying not to whine too much about this lest I become the curmudgeonly old crone who's always bringing down the mood, which will make me even less welcome on campus. But when a colleague from another department asked how I was doing this morning and I said not great and spilled my guts, I found out that it's not just me--other departments are seeing declining enrollments, and other colleagues are wondering what they'll do to fulfill contractual requirements when there's nothing left to teach. There's not enough administrative claptrap to fill all the gaps in teaching loads, so what are the options?

It's a painful time to be a prof, but at least the painful bruise on my forehead gives me a chance to change the subject. Twenty-five years ago I walked through a door into a wonderful career, and now that door has swung back to hit me in the face, and it hurts.

No, I'm not okay--but there's not a thing you can do about it.