Friday poetry challenge: Glassy-eyed wonder

When I chose the window seat, I did not expect it to become the Falling Window Seat, offering a front-row view of a smashing performance that caused diners to leap from their seats in astonishment or maybe terror. I'm pleased to report that no one was injured in the making of this spectacle, but the glass shattered spectacularly and the show, alas, could not go on.

I'd driven my son to Columbus for chemotherapy at The James, and we'd arrived early enough to grab lunch at the hospital cafe. The Juneteenth holiday had thinned out the usual crowd, so we scored a table next to a window. But what was happening just outside our window? Thick coils of rope swaying like pendulums in the breeze, scattered tools and unrecognizable equipment, and one worker, a man in hard hat and yellow vest, leaned back and looked up over our heads as he held a rope taut, trying to steady something outside our angle of vision. Moderately interesting, we thought, but not much of a show.

And then BOOM!--Something big smashed down on the terrace. 

Inside the cafe, diners jumped from their seats and ran, some leaping away from the windows and some rushing toward them to get a better view. Suddenly the cafe was crowded with onlookers chattering in many languages, wondering whether they ought to call a doctor or flee for their lives.  

Meanwhile, the terrace outside was thronged with workers looking up at the building, looking down at the shards of shattered glass, looking inquisitively at the equipment they'd been using to try to raise a massive pane of glass into place. One man talked into a radio while others began to remove the suction cups from the glass lifter. A worker stood with hands on his hips, looking up and shaking his head. Anyone who had been standing nearby when the glass fell would have been studded with shrapnel.

Indoors, onlookers scanned the shards for blood, expressed relief at its absence. Outdoors, workers in sturdy boots walked around oblivious of the dangers underfoot.

It could have been a disaster--it certainly sounded like one. But instead it was a bit of terror and shock intruding into our lunch hour before we walked back into our ordinary lives, relieved that today we would not be a part of a story on the evening news. Another day, another near-death experience. Ho-hum.

But the beat goes on:

Bless this mess, this glass that passed

so close--but missed! I must insist:

let's raise a glass and wrest a gloss

from this distress. (The shards got tossed.)

Now who wants to try turning an unexpected interruption into a smash hit?

Bumper sticker befuddlement

I'm getting too old for this, I tell myself, though it's hard to define what this refers to. I'm definitely getting too old to decipher bumper stickers on passing cars, but if I'm so close that I can easily read the words but still can't fathom what they're trying to say, that's a different kind of problem. 

I understand what it means when a pickup truck the size of Nebraska has its backside plastered with the American flag with assault rifles replacing the stripes, and I know what it means when a vanity license plate spelling BEHEMOTH is attached to an SUV so bit it makes me wonder why no auto-makers have manufactured a car by that name. These signs communicate very clearly: I'm a big tough dude who may well be armed--stay out of my way. I am happy to oblige, and kudos for spelling behemoth correctly, but do you know how to pronounce it? 

But then I stand staring at a tiny colorful car sporting a pink bumper sticker that says I got a lobotomy at Claire's, which I kind of understand because the relentless pink glitteriness of Claire's boutiques could make anyone over the age of 12 feel lobotomized, but apparently there's a whole pop-culture thing about getting a lobotomy at Claire's, an online rabbit hole I don't intend to descend.

I'm definitely getting too old for some of the pop-culture references I encounter while out in public, but often I can't even tell if a bit of text is gesturing toward pop culture or simply being silly. We need more zombie baseball: pop culture reference or random words on a bumper sticker? If someone will explain to me what zombie baseball is, I can make an informed decision about whether we need more of it.

I need less confusion in my life and fewer opportunities for annoyance over inept advertising, an epidemic I can't seem to avoid. My ears hurt every time I hear a local radio ad telling me that electronic bikes has raised the bar, but at least the problem is easy to identify: somebody  (copywriter, editor, ad manager, business owner, whatever) can't grasp the concept of subject/verb agreement. I get that, though I worry about how all those people could hear they has without grimacing. 

What I don't get is how a whole host of people could have approved a radio ad for a local flooring company that keeps telling me We want you to be where your feet are. Grammatically correct, yes, but what does it mean? I generally am where my feet are because it was my feet that got me there, and if there's a way for me to be where my feet aren't--short of amputation--I'd like to hear about it. 

Or maybe they want me to lie on the ground hugging my feet? Assuming the fetal position is unlikely to put me in the proper frame of mind to buy flooring--or anything else. I'd like to let my feet take me to whoever wrote that ad and ask a simple question: What were you thinking?

But then maybe I'm overthinking it. Maybe it's just noise intended to get attention or gesture toward some outside reference without making meaning at all. And that, I think, is what I'm getting too old for: maneuvering through a world where the gap between word and meaning sometimes seems unbridgeable.

Antidotes for summer panic

Of course it's ridiculous to suffer a midsummer panic attack when summer hasn't, technically, even started yet, but the academic calendar skews everything so that June is my only real month off all year, though it's not entirely off because I have to attend webinars (yuck) and preside at meetings to plan events funded by the grant I'm administering, a task that will double in size in July, when I will also have to plan orientation for incoming faculty (and yes, I'm glad we have a few new hires this fall, since last year I planned the entire all-day event for exactly one new faculty member) while also preparing syllabi for two or, possibly, three classes, one of which I'm completely rejiggering, and the word possibly back there is another reason I'm a little stressed out since, for reasons I can't disclose, I won't know for another couple of weeks whether I'll teach that third (very important) class and I refuse to start working on fall syllabi until I know exactly what I'm teaching, so July will be crammed full and then we'll plunge into the deep end--August, when everything starts up again.

No wonder I'm panicking! Here we are in the middle of June and what have I accomplished? I've written an essay that felt like excellent therapy but will probably never be published, and I've chaired a couple of meetings, and I've worked on publicity about the grant, and I've driven my son to Columbus for chemotherapy and to Belpre for blood tests and a transfusion, and yes, I'm troubled that he needed two blood transfusions in one week and feels really awful after the most recent round of chemo, so I walk around with a solid little lump of concern sitting on top of my brain every single minute of the day, which makes it hard to think about more important things--but is there really anything more important right now than my son's health?

I've been seeking distractions so I won't think so much about what I can't control, but then I played this online game so much that it hurt my wrist and shoulder so I had to delete it from my phone, and then I started reading too much, taking up Middlemarch again, not only because I felt I needed to do it justice after ragging on it last week but also to try to resolve a question that was puzzling me: did I miss an important element of Casaubon's character? The question arose when a friend referred to Casaubon as a conchologist and I thought wait a minute, I don't remember that, so I had to go and read the whole stinking novel (which is really delightful and funnier than I'd remembered but not, I insist, the greatest of all time) and there it is, in chapter 30, when Casaubon is recovering from his illness and Mr. Brooke advises him to eschew scholarship and take up a more relaxing pursuit, a passage well worth reading simply for the contrasting voices:

"Yes, yes," said Mr. Brooke. "Get Dorothea to play backgammon with you in the evenings. And shuttlecock, now--I don't know a finer game than shuttlecock for the daytime. I remember it all the fashion. To be sure, your eyes might not stand that, Casaubon. But you must unbend, you know. Why, you might take to some light study; conchology, now: I always think that must be a light study. Or get Dorothea to read you light things, Smollett--'Roderick Random,' 'Humphry Clinker'; they are a little broad, but she may read anything now she's married, you know. I remember they made me laugh uncommonly--there's a droll bit about a postilion's breeches. We have so little humor now. I have gone through all these things, but they might be rather new to you."

"As new as eating thistles," would have been an answer to represent Mr. Casaubon's feelings. But he only bowed resignedly, with due respect to his wife's uncle, and observed that doubtless the works he mentioned had "served as a resource to a certain order of minds."

You must unbend, I tell myself, echoing Mr. Brooke, but I certainly don't intend to take up the "light study" of conchology. Maybe I just need to read less.

And so I did. At the suggestion of another friend, I read Less, a novel by Andrew Sean Greer that neatly rebuts Mr. Brooke's claim that "We have so little humor now." You want humor? Read Less!  Middlemarch is funny (sometimes) but it takes a week to read, provided that you're not devoting any time to, for instance, having a job, but a quick reader can breeze through Less in a lazy June afternoon. I don't know how to describe the plot without evoking Homer and James Joyce and Jack Kerouac and, especially, Dante, which would make the book sound stuffy and scholarly, two things it most decidedly isn't, even though the main character, Arthur Less, finds himself in a dark wood on the eve of midlife and proceeds through various circles of travel hell. It's just a very funny account of a man running away from one problem and straight into a series of new ones while being stripped of everything that makes his life meaningful. Okay, that doesn't sound funny either, but trust me: it is a total hoot, with some marvelous moments of insight as well as a neat twist at the end. Just what I needed right now.

And so was this: "The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech," an online rant by Brian Phillips, who provides his list as a sort of addendum to the Pope's encyclical regarding technology. I suspect that every reader will find something familiar among Phillips's 40 problems, like the one concerning online tracking of packages:

Welcome to Schrodinger's UPS Vortex, the quantum rift within which your box is on a truck passing through Memphis, in a warehouse in Topeka, or on the outer rim of the galaxy, where it's being worshipped as a god by a species of semi-intelligent space protozoa. 

Or this one concerning the difficulty of finding helpful information in an emergency: 

I am in a hurricane. My house is in a swimming pool, and the swimming pool is in a tree. Emergency services are, for reasons I am not presently at leisure to explore, posting vital safety updates on X. When I try to read the relevant thread, the app tells me I can't do it unless I create an account, something I would gladly do if a Kia Sorrento were not flying at my face. I shall die peacefully here in my swimming-pool tree, knowing that at least i never had to talk to Grok.

Phillips ends his amusing rant with a mini-sermon aimed at tech billionaires, reminding them that "There are things in the world that are more important than money"--which, come to think of it, is an important principle underlying the plot of both Middlemarch and Less. All funny, and all effective at distracting from a midsummer panic attack in the middle of June.

But eek--where is the summer going?

Friday poetry challenge: It takes a village (idiot)

So I'm driving home from Aldi where I've witnessed three random acts of kindness in a single shopping trip and I'm filled with a warm sense of appreciation for the community of Aldi shoppers, and I'm on a stretch of twisty country road that runs past a property formerly owned by a con man who tried to bilk our community out of piles of money through a complex scheme thwarted by a few random locals with the courage to open their mouths--so yes, I'm feeling good about the power of ordinary people to keep their community safe and happy, when suddenly there's this kid riding a scooter in the road right in front of my car.

I'm not talking about a Vespa; I'm talking about a glorified skateboard with handlebars, a flimsy thing that this kid, who looks to be about 12 years old, is zipping and weaving and swerving around on right in the middle of my lane with no helmet or knee pads or any other kind of protection. I come around a curve and there he is, but he must have heard me coming because he quickly swerves into the other lane to get out of my way. Right: he's riding a foot-powered vehicle that clearly isn't roadworthy straight into oncoming traffic--if there's anything coming around the next curve, he's toast. Why not steer his scooter to a safer place, like, for instance, off the road?

I barely have time to think all this before I'm past him and rounding the next curve and relieved to see that no cars are coming, and I look in the rear-view mirror to see that Scooter Boy has swerved back into my lane, which is the right lane for motorized vehicles but not for helmetless boys on scooters. Someone needs to teach that kid a lesson, I tell myself, and suddenly I hear my dad yelling at a bike-rider who crossed (in a crosswalk! in a school zone!) in front of his car: It'd serve you right if someone ran you over! 

And I don't want to be the cranky old person who yells at random strangers, but I also don't want to be the benevolent old person who drives blithely around a blind curve and flattens a kid on a scooter. I can see why that stretch of road would be appealing to a scooter-rider, with all the curves and hills offering opportunities for daredevil jumps and spins, but that one-mile stretch of road serves as a shortcut between the interstate and a busy highway. It gets traffic! Someone could get killed! Someone needs to teach that kid a lesson! But there's nowhere to pull over and even if I did, what would I say to the kid--and why would he listen to me?

So I drive on home, hoping that the kid has a mom or aunt or nosy neighbor nearby who will witness his shenanigans and give him a good talking-to. It takes a village to raise a child, but unless he's auditioning for the role of Village Idiot, he needs to get his scooter off the road. 

I'm tempted to leave him a note in the style of William Carlos Williams:

This is Just To Say

I have driven
my car
past your
scooter

which you
were probably
proud to be
riding so well

Forgive me
for not stopping
(you stopped
my heart cold)

Try yelling that message! Or better yet, trying putting some unsolicited advice into verse form for the benefit of various Village Idiots.

And then we'll rank the lists of the greatest lists of lists

I'll bet I'm not the only English professor on the planet who has been asked recently--usually by people who have never read George Eliot--whether Middlemarch is the greatest novel ever written.  

I'm not remotely qualified to determine whether Middlemarch is the greatest novel ever written because I haven't read every novel ever written, but since it's summer break and there is literally nothing at stake, I'm going to go ahead and offer my unqualified answer: No. 

Now don't go hating on me already. I like Middlemarch; I've read it several times and I'll no doubt read it again; but not only do I not believe it's the greatest novel ever written, but I'm not convinced that it's the greatest novel about an intelligent woman who makes unfortunate choices. I would far rather read, for instance, Portrait of a Lady (Henry James) or Howards End (E.M. Forster) or The House of Mirth (Edith Wharton). 

Then again, it all depends on what you mean by greatest. There's a difference between an engaging novel and an important novel, a diverting novel and an influential novel. The categories may overlap, but still, there's a reason that many of the people asking me the question haven't ever bothered to read Middlemarch. It starts slowly, for one thing; the opening chapter doesn't provide a sufficient taste of the pleasures that await.

The question arises, of course, in response to the list of 100 greatest novels in English published last month in The Guardian (click here for full list), which surveyed 170 authors, critics, and academics to come up with the definitive list, which aroused so much discussion that they then assembled a second list of 100 best novels drawn from the votes of more than 3000 readers (click here for the readers' choices). 

There is some overlap; Middlemarch appears on both lists, but the readers placed it at number 2, after Lord of the Rings. I'm pleased to see that the readers' choice list elevates Joseph Heller's Catch-22 from number 99 to number 8, just one indication that the readers placed a higher premium on comedy than did the academics. 

I had a feeling that I'd read most of the books on both lists, but then I counted. On the academics' list, I started at number 1 and didn't hit a novel I hadn't read until number 42: Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, which I tried to read--twice!--but gave up halfway through because I couldn't stand to spend another moment amongst all those whiny people. Reading a book halfway through twice is not at all equivalent to reading it all the way through once. It's the only book that appeared on my PhD comprehensive exam reading list that I never actually finished, not that it's ever made any noticeable difference in my career or life.

After I stumbled on number 42, I found another 16 books on the list that I either haven't read or else have retained no memory of reading. The Leopard? The Golden Notebook? No idea. I am ashamed to admit that I've never read The Master and the Margarita, but there's still time. I'm not sure there's time to slog through more than 1000 pages of The Man Without Qualities, but then again I've read In Search of Lost Time repeatedly without complaining about the length, so no excuses!

On the readers' choice list, I start running into trouble around number 30. I've never read Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible, or if I did, I don't remember. I've never, believe it or not, read Watership Down, or Lonesome Dove, or The Outsider. All told, I've overlooked something like 23 titles on the readers' choice list, but I had trouble keeping count because I kept getting distracted by the titles on the list that I regret having read.

Hemingway? He wrote some nearly perfect short stories--"The Snows of Kilimanjaro," "Indian Camp," and others--but his novels leave me cold. 

Jack Kerouac? The prose in On the Road might carry me away, but the casual acceptance of domestic abuse in Big Sur left a bad taste in my mouth that tainted my every encounter with Kerouac.

Dune? Please, no. Impressive world-building, depressing sentence-building.

Despite my disdain, these novels got enough votes from readers to put them on the list of the 100 greatest. But again: what do we mean by greatest? The voters, whoever they are, may believe they're relying on objective criteria, but we're all human. By any rational measure, Middlemarch is an important, influential, even ground-breaking novel--but I'd rather read Edith Wharton.

The House of Mirth doesn't even appear on the critics' list, but Wharton's Age of Innocence is number 38. Wharton appears nowhere on the readers' choice list. No accounting for taste!

I wouldn't put Wharton at number 1, but I don't know which novel belongs there. Every title I choose makes me feel guilty about all the ones I'm neglecting. 

On the original list, you can click on a link to see the list of authors, critics, and academics and how they voted, which is pretty interesting. Both Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan rank Ulysses as the greatest novel ever written, but I could happily put Midnight's Children or Atonement in that spot if it didn't require shoving Pride and Prejudice and Moby Dick out of the way. Michael Chabon put Moby Dick first and so did Stephen King, who warmed my heart by including McTeague at number 10. Jennifer Egan put Middlemarch first but included The House of Mirth at number 10.

The more lists I read, the more novels I want to put in first place, or else make up different lists for different types of greatness. One of these days we can make a list of the top 100 lists of top 100 greatest novels. It might be the size of a library's card catalog, but what a wonderful invitation into the joys of reading.

Readers: what's on your list--and what isn't?

Mystery of the dying maple

It's a little disconcerting to park my car next to a maple tree in rapid decline. Last year about half of the limbs looked dead, but this year very few limbs have any leaves at all. 

Why? Your guess is as good as mine. Dig down in that part of the yard and you'll find a thick layer of gravel a few inches beneath the surface, and many things we've planted out there have failed to thrive. The maple was here before we moved in and looked okay for many years. A dogwood we planted seems to be thriving, but the Japanese maple nearby has a few leafless limbs. We've taken some dead limbs off the big maple but at some point the whole tree needs to come down.

Which is a shame because it's an ideal staging space for birds visiting our feeders. This morning I watched an adult red-bellied woodpecker grab a seed from the feeder and then fly back to feed a juvenile waiting in the tree. The dearth of foliage makes it easy to observe birds' social behavior: cardinals fighting for territory, male cowbirds putting on a courtship display for a female, and, this morning, two house finches having an encounter I couldn't quite interpret.

Taking out the sickly maple will provide more sunshine for the dogwood, but I'll miss that tree when it's gone. Is it a mistake to get so attached to particular trees? That maple seems like a permanent fixture of the landscape, but a tree that stands tall today may well start dropping limbs in the next windstorm.  

Just not on my car, okay? 

Cowbirds vying for the attention of a female.

Wish I knew what they were thinking.

Same tree, different branches.

Dead limb between two still living.

A model of sharing.

Friday poetry challenge: Mulling over mullein

Is it pathetic to admit that some days the thing I look forward to more than anything is a particular patch of weeds growing beside the highway on my drive home from work?

After a day involving too much administrative claptrap, a long but productive meeting, and an infuriating encounter with a person whose idea of an apology is "I'm sorry you feel that way," I was driving home wanting to punch someone when I passed a mullein patch and saw that the weeds had started blooming.

Elsewhere mullein may be a medicinal plant cultivated for its power to attract pollinators, but around here it's considered a weed that flourishes accidentally in sunny spots that the highway mowers can't reach. A volunteer promoting health, attracting pollinators, and providing beauty--what's not to love?

I know the spots along my commute where mullein grows best and I look forward to the blooms every summer, my eyes searching the shoulder for yellow when they ought to be fixed on the road. Yesterday my husband and I were on our way home when I pointed out a cluster of blooming mullein, maybe six or eight plants in all, and he said, "We've got more than that growing just uphill from the house."

Well I didn't know that because my bum knee has been resisting hilly walks, but it's feeling significantly better after a cortisone shot so when we got home I walked right up the hill to the spot in question. A few years ago we'd had a massive dying tree cut down there, a process that had obliterated the few mullein stalks growing nearby--temporarily. Bringing more sunshine into the area has resulted in a mullein boom--close to 20 stalks rising up and starting to bloom.

One definition of weed is a plant to which we say We'd prefer your absence, but I'm not complaining about a bumper crop of mullein bringing beauty into my back yard. They make me want to squeeze out some doggerel, but what rhymes with mullein?

I can't be sullen
around a mullein.

Its fuzzy leaves
are never dull. In

woods where there's
rarely a lull in

songs of birds,
where trees are fallen,

just uphill from
a creek that's swollen,

I can't be sullen
around a mullein.
  

So okay, it's weedy but at least I tried. Who else will give it a shot? 

Making the strings visible: Things My Grandmother Said by Amit Majmudar

"Every kite forgets its string," writes Amit Majmudar, but the poet has not forgotten the strings that tie him to the women in his life--grandmother, mother, wife, friends, and others who feature in his new collection, Things My Grandmother Said. The kite line comes from the title poem, full of pithy aphorisms expressed in a voice so familiar it could belong to anyone's grandmother:

I wasn't crying, I was dicing onions
in a memory in Ahmedabad.

Sure, the Ganges is holy
but who told you to drink from it?

                                Love
should be diving board, marriage
should be lap swim.

I like that old lady! I've written before about how skillfully Majmudar plays with voice, language, poetic forms, and images, but in this collection I was frequently struck by line breaks. In the title poem, for instance, the grandmother says this:

This girl is perfect for you, I know
her aunt.

Look at how the line break shifts the function of "I know": in the first line, it indicates a confidence in the girl's perfection; but "I know / her aunt" suggests that the girl's perfection is contingent upon her connections. 

Or take a look at the ambiguity encouraged by the second line break below: 

What does it mean when the white
man trying to enter me
in a database asks
Sweetie, aren't you hot
under all that
cloth?

These lines appear in "The Migration Diary of Hala Almasi," a long poem dealing with various violations of women's privacy, rights, and bodies. In this context, a man's trying to "enter me" suggests physical violence--but "enter me / in a database" leads to a different type of violence as the veiled migrant from Kabul gets squeezed into a little box on a computer screen. The final stanza plays with permutations of a common phrase to convey the many ways a woman may be denied agency:

The woman undergoes
the marriage. The woman goes under
the man's last name. The woman goes under
the man. The woman undergoes
the parting of the seas so the man
with the staff can enter
her promised land. The woman undergoes
the miscarriage. The woman undergoes
the man's war. The men say they promised
the women nothing. The country
goes under. The men put
the women on a raft and say:
Go. So we go. Some across, some
Under.

Another poem dealing with a woman's pain, "Regeneration," describes a traumatic brain injury:

You shaped and smashed
Your brainstuff flat
On all the scattered
Bits of matter
Gray and white
To piece your anguish
Into language
And write.

"To piece your anguish / Into language" is an apt description of the poet's purpose, especially in a world where, as "Meteorology" insists, humanity seems 

Trapped in chaos
country during
chaos season. 

"Meteorology" wonders whether the butterfly's flapping wing can affect distant weather or chance encounters can change a life:

One summer day
you see a face
in a coffee shop
and chaos pulls
a fire alarm
deep inside you.  

That fire alarm rings in other poems presenting novel images for human connections. "Recourse," for instance, is a lovely sonnet corona dealing with love, time, change, and constancy, in which the ties that bind may be benign or menacing:

I want to weave a crown for you, design
a daisy chain whose threaded stems become
a bracelet that handcuffs your wrist to mine...

And in "Remote Work," a poem decrying the isolation of the perpetually online,

We are kites without strings, strings
desperate to be strummed ...

But how can strings be strummed over the distance imposed by technology? 

Another poem, "School of Witchcraft and Wizadry," recalls the loneliness of a schoolboy who feels isolated until someone sees through his invisibility cloak:

One friend is all it takes,
one person to rhyme with the mysterious
magical word you always were.
Together, you're a spell now,
conjuring happiness
with a wand
no bigger than a No. 2 pencil....

A pencil may be a magic wand in a world where anguish becomes language. Among the poems celebrating connections among friends, relatives, lovers, and others, poems exploring grandmother's words, mother love, and Mother Earth, Majmudar concludes the collection by asserting that "We Are All God's Poems":

We are all first drafts, shy in public
and rhythmically iffy. We are all
orphan lines yearning to become
couplets, willing to rhyme slant
if that means we don't have to be alone.

In a volume full of love that survives beyond loss, Majmudar invites us, in "Cat's Cradle," to recall

how beautiful and necessary beings
who give you love can take their love
but keep on cradling you, unseen  ...

Yes, the kite may forget its string, but that doesn't erase the unseen strings that are strummed so potently in Things My Grandmother Said.

Summertime and the living's sneezy

Sometimes I have to get away from my office, books, and screens and find a place outdoors to sit and breathe some fresh air, which is difficult right now when the air feels saturated with pollen. Yesterday on the drive home I had a sneezing fit so severe that I had to pull off the road until I could see again, but sometimes getting outdoors is worth a little discomfort, especially when campus is abloom with lovely things.

Except wait a minute, what happened to the pollinator gardens? For years now two plots just outside my building have barely contained a riot of sunflowers, dahlias, coneflowers, and more, attracting all kinds of birds, butterflies, and bees. 

They're gone, torn out in favor of neat little rows of marigolds. Someone in a position of authority decided that the pollinator plots looked too messy, that gardens are best when they're neat, tidy, and arranged in straight lines. This is clearly someone who hasn't spent much time in actual woods or meadows or other wild places. I've been cheered to see some sunflowers lined up in rows at the end of the plots, but otherwise, no pollinator gardens this year. How am I supposed to endure six more months of office work without the opportunity to commune with butterflies? 

So today I fled campus and found a quiet space along the Ohio River. Floodwaters have receded so it's a nice time to watch the boats go by. Years ago--can it be 40 years?--when we spent our grad-school summers working in campgrounds near Port Huron, Michigan, we could go to a park on the St. Clair River any day around noon and see a crowd gathered to eat lunch while watching the ships go by, big lakers that the locals knew by name, length, and cargo. Here we see coal barges and sometimes pleasure boats, but it's soothing to sit by the water even when there's nothing going past except our beloved local sternwheeler, the Valley Gem.

I've been working way too hard so far this summer, especially considering that it's only June. But goodness gracious--it's June already! I have to plan grant-related meetings, prep workshops, write syllabi for two or possibly three fall classes, and deal with  aging-related annoyances. Which would you prefer to do: get a cortisone shot in your right knee, get physical therapy for bursitis in your left hip, or navigate the paperwork required to sign up for Medicare? 

Time is flying way too quickly and I'm getting older by the minute, as my aching joints keep reminding me. But a bench next to the river is a catalyst for healing, a place where I can listen to the birds, watch the boats, and breathe deeply. 

But not too deeply--all that pollen makes me sneeze. 

 

 

Friday poetry challenge: Driven to excel at tedious tasks

Halfway through our long drive home from Columbus after my son's weekly chemotherapy treatment, the hospital called asking him to come back--not today but tomorrow AND Sunday. Yes: they want him to make the four-hour round trip three days in a row, and since chemo makes him too dopey to drive, I guess I'll be in the driver's seat.   

I had just been boasting that I'm getting better at managing this challenging task. If I set my alarm for 4 a.m., take an eye-opening shower, and eat or drink nothing before we leave, I can drive straight to The James without GPS and, usually, without a rest-room break. While my son gets his tests and treatment, I eat breakfast in the hospital cafe and suck in some caffeine so that I'm fully alert by the time we're ready to head back home in heavier traffic. 

So here's my reward for boasting about how well I'm doing: I have to do it again, and again, and again. 

It was a snafu not of our own making. His current treatment plan requires him to get a certain drug by injection four days in a row; he received the first shot during today's regular hospital visit and the remaining pre-filled syringes should have been delivered to our house by courier. Then the phone call came: the pharmacy was out of the drug and wouldn't be able to deliver more to our house until Monday. The hospital has enough on hand to give him the shots tomorrow and Sunday, but only if he can show up in person.

It's important that the treatment not be interrupted, and so, after a bit of back-and-forth on the phone, he agreed to get back to The James on Saturday and Sunday, but the hospital sweetened the deal by offering him some gift cards to pay for gas plus a deeply discounted hotel room for the night. Unless he can find someone else eager to take an unexpected junket to Columbus, I'll once again be doing the driving while he does the sleeping, which plays an important part in his recovery. While I'm getting better at driving, he's getting better at surviving. At this point, the tests are all pointing toward eventual success.

I thought he was asleep early this morning as I drove through dark and fog and traffic, but then he chuckled at the Fresh Air podcast I was listening to: an interview with David Sedaris. Near the end the author was asked why he still writes and goes on book tours and revises his work obsessively at the age of 69, and Sedaris said, "Because I want to get better." 

I immediately wished my students could hear--really hear--that message, but at the time I was thinking only in terms of writing. I have no desire to get any better at driving my son to the hospital, but if that's what it takes to help him get better, I guess I'll do it.

Let's wrap some rhymes around road hazards:

Long lines of orange cones
stretch toward the horizon.
Cars swerve--he's got nerve!
I've got to keep my eyes on
"variable speed limit" signs
and follow to the letter.
I'm not so hot on driving, but
at least I'm getting better.

Your turn: pour some pizzazz on a tedious task.

From bird-watching to word-watching.

So how was your holiday, I asked, and my colleague shrugged. I missed the library, she said. I need to be here to write.

Writing during summer break? What a concept. Writing Wednesdays begin tomorrow but meanwhile I've been too distracted to do any serious writing. Time to construct a list of summer priorities! But that feels too much like work. Maybe tomorrow.

Today I'm holding on to the last vestiges of joy from my weekend with the grandkids. I'm recalling how they infuse every moment with energy, how they play the piano with verve and invent silly games and put together Lego blocks in unconventional ways. The youngest showed me how her colorful Lego shark could swallow a swimmer and poop him out the other end. When she and her brother couldn't recall the theme to Jaws, they hummed the Pink Panther theme instead. 

I loved taking the oldest grandkid to riding lessons and seeing that petite person take a great big horse through its paces with confidence and skill. Where did she get that? From her mother, no doubt. Big animals make me nervous.

But that didn't stop me from trying to visit some bison on the drive home. I'd read about the bison herd at the new visitor center at Jesse Owens State Park, which isn't really on the way to anywhere but I didn't mind taking the scenic route down twisty country roads. 

Finally I turned in at the sign pointing to the parking area. I had to haul my wonky knee up multiple flights of steps, through a steep green area that will one day be a pollinator habitat, up to the top of a hill where the Visitor Center sat, and the first thing I saw was another lot where I could have parked to avoid the many steps. 

Today my knee is absolutely screaming, but at least I got to see the place where the herd of bison would have been if they'd been out. We've had rain. The lower part of the bison habitat was flooded. The bison were locked safely away from the mess, so I just enjoyed the view. Saw some killdeer. Heard some orioles. Dashed down the steps as fast as I could to avoid the sudden rain.

On Sunday I'd had lunch with an old friend and stopped by the heron rookery in Cuyahoga Valley National Park, where an idling tourist bus made the place sound and smell like a busy factory floor. When the bus finally left, it was as if someone had opened a door to birdsong. Herons were feeding chicks in many of the nests, but thick foliage obscured the view. So imagine how delighted I was today to stop on the bridge at the end of my driveway and see a great blue heron standing in my own little creek.

Good to get away, nice to be home, but soon I'll need to switch from birdwatching to word-watching. Summer break is here--so it's time for summer writing. Tomorrow.

  

At the heron rookery

 

Yellow warbler looking sweet

Oriole

Tree swallow looking sassy

Friday poetry challenge: Plenty of nothing

You don't have to write good poetry, I tell myself. There's already more good poetry published than you'll ever get a chance to read. 

I'm giving myself a little pep talk: You're not doing this for a grade. There is literally nothing at stake except a promise that you made to yourself. You're not going to stand over the keyboard threatening to slap your own hand with a ruler if you can't produce a little Friday poetry.

But I've got no motivation, no inspiration, not the least thread of an idea worth wrapping words around. I survived four days of meetings this week, dealt gracefully with some unreasonable people, cooked some decent meals, paid some bills, read a book, and failed to find a glossy ibis.

The ibis, a rare visitor to this area, was reported by the local birding group. I read the ibis alert while sitting not eight feet from a photograph I took of a glossy ibis at a wetland in Florida, proof positive that I have seen glossy ibises in person, but if a glossy ibis makes a pit stop at a wetland within an hour's drive of my house, I can't help it: I want to go and see. 

But I couldn't go just then (rain) and then I had more meetings the next day, but yesterday--more than 36 hours after the ibis report--my longsuffering husband agreed to take us on an ibis hunt. Directions were incomplete and GPS was not helpful, but we found the pond, as advertised, right next to the Hallelujah Barn. 

Alas, no ibis. So maybe the high point of my week was going on a long drive in the countryside to see an absence of ibis.

Pond without ibis,

poem without thought,

day with no meetings--

hurrah for what's not.

(And that's all I've got.)

Okay, your turn: wrap some words around a big ol' wad of nothing.

(Hat tip to my adorable daughter, who told me that if I have nothing to write about, I should write about nothing.)

Moving past panic mode

For academics, compliance is a dirty word, evoking visions of Vogons stomping through our lovely courses yelling Resistance is useless! We're happy to insist that students comply with disciplinary conventions regarding format, syntax, citation styles, and so on, and we absolutely insist that students comply with requirements for completing their programs, but we balk at complying with procedures mandated by our own institutions, much less federal mandates.

Which is why I had to try to talk some colleagues down off the ledge this morning. Panic may be an appropriate response to some situations, but it's not my favorite way to start a faculty workshop.

The topic was accessibility--big scary word that means a million different things, but at the moment it means that federal law requires us to make course materials accessible to all kinds of students, including those who are visually impaired. The deadline, thankfully, has been extended until next April, but that doesn't mean we should sit on our hands until the Vogons come stomping through and hold a gun to our heads--or, more likely, a lawsuit. So the Instructional Technologist and I invited faculty to join us for two workdays in a computer-equipped classroom, and we even fed them muffins and lunch. 

The plan was to provide guidelines and techniques for making course materials accessible and then set faculty loose to work on their own materials (documents, presentations, Canvas pages) while we offered one-on-one assistance. But first we had to defuse the panic.

I can understand the source of the panic: if someone told me to insert alternative text descriptions for every image I've ever used in a PowerPoint presentation, I'd panic too. But no one is asking anyone to do that. This workshop was called "Small Change, Big Impact," and the goal was to persuade a few faculty members to, at the bare minimum, make their syllabi fully accessible and to think about accessibility when creating new course materials. We're not interested in the past; we want to make small changes moving forward so that eventually we'll all be in full compliance with the law, though maybe the best we can hope for is that most of us will be closer to partial compliance.

Well this morning you'd have thought we were asking people to sacrifice their firstborns on the altar of Moloch. No one was holding a gun to anyone's head! We were just trying to help! Baby steps, people! Move the needle a few degrees! A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step! And now I'm running out of cliches to describe the minimal changes we're requesting.

At one point I looked at the sea (well, puddle) of angry faces and realized that I don't even need to be there. I'm retiring in December! I could just ignore these new guidelines and fade off into the sunset before the deadline, but instead I was sitting there trying to figure out how to format class readings so they're be comprehensible to a student relying on a text reader. It has to do with formatting headings, and establishing reading order in PowerPoints, and inserting alternative text for images. Not rocket science, in other words, except for the STEM people in the room who have to figure out how to translate complex scientific images into readable text. But we have a year to figure this out! Let's take advantage of the time available and get it done.

(What about a student too visually impaired to be able to see through a microscope? He could become James Thurber is what I want to say, but probably someone else is better equipped to come up with a helpful response.)

By the end of the day we'd all learned a thing or two and made at least a few improvements, and many of us will go back and continue the process tomorrow, keeping the panic at bay as much as possible. Here's what really scares me, though: Less than one-fifth of our faculty showed up for today's workshop. What about the rest? Who will motivate them to make the changes needed to comply with this federal mandate?

Maybe it's time to send in the Vogons.

Finding beauty in a world of hurt

Yesterday in the midst of hanging around the hospital with my son, I kept remembering that it was both my oldest grandkid's 13th birthday and the tenth anniversary of my mother's death. This morning my prosthetic memory showed me adorable baby pictures but also reminded me that on the day after my mother died, I went to a park near her house and saw juvenile anhingas stretching their wings. Birds are good therapy, then and now, but I can't get away to Florida at the moment so I've been outside watching the ordinary birds that visit our yard.

I've been hearing brown thrashers calling but finally caught a glimpse of a handsome one today. And for the first time I saw male cowbirds performing their mating display, puffing up their chests and making that peculiar gurgling sound to attract the attention of a female that seemed profoundly unimpressed. Cardinals, woodpeckers, mourning doves, towhees, finches, sparrows, chickadees, titmice...is there anything more relaxing than sitting in the quiet morning sun while birds flit here and there? Just what I needed after the week I've endured.

A few Sundays ago while I was driving to church a red-tailed hawk slammed into my windshield with a sound as loud as a gunshot. I was so startled I nearly drove off the road. I checked my windshield for cracks and saw only a gooey smear but no other sign of the hawk. I can't imagine that it could have survived such a collision, which really upset me. I love hawks even though I know they often eat smaller birds. 

Anyone who pays attention knows that nature is not always a warm and cuddly place; the juvenile bird stretching its wings today may be a smear on a windshield tomorrow, and the cowbird mating display that amuses me today may result in eggs laid in other birds' nests so that the fledgling cowbirds can destroy the other chicks. Life and death are partners in the grand dance, but as they swirl there's time to celebrate a whole world of beauty.  

Juvenile anhinga

 

Towhee

Male cowbirds vying for the attention of a female.

Brown thrasher

Downy woodpecker

Chickadee

Tulip poplar,  blossoming

Mourning dove

Infused, transfused, and woobering away

I'm sitting in a waiting room at The James, stressed out after a bizarre and busy week and exhausted after driving two hours in the foggy morning to get my son to Columbus in time for chemotherapy, a blood transfusion, and a lumbar puncture, so I close my eyes and listen to the lively music someone is playing on the grand piano in the lobby. Lovely. But wait--is that the theme from MASH? A high-tech hospital resembles a MASH unit the way a calculator resembles an abacus, but beyond that, what sane person sitting at a piano in a cancer hospital full of patients undergoing excruciating and sometimes futile treatment thinks it's a great idea to play a song called "Suicide Is Painless"? 

The player is highly skilled but the selections are eclectic: the charming holiday tune "Some Children See Him" followed by "The Entertainer" and "Lord of the Dance." And "Suicide Is Painless." I take comfort in the assurance that a majority of the people listening aren't aware of the lyrics. 

My son is weathering his treatments well, starting with an infusion of Madagascar periwinkle (vincristine) in the early hours while I suck in an infusion of caffeine. How early do I have to get up to fulfill my early-morning trasnport duties? Fourish. Autocorrect thinks that should be nourish, which reminds me of the transfusion nurse who keeps trying to feed us and finally takes me to a locked room containing a refrigerator with a big sign on the door: Patient Nourishment Only. Uncrustables and ginger ale--sweet! I'm not a patient but I leave there well nourished.

In my purse is a book that ought to nourish my soul while I wait, but after the early start and the long drive, my eyes and brain are too fatigued to focus on the words. Instead I listen to the nurse's enthusiastic explanation of the need for a transfusion: red blood cells are like little delivery vehicles transporting oxygen and other essential elements all over the body, but chemo cripples the blood-cell-making equipment. What do you do when your car breaks down? You call an Uber! It's amusing to think of a fleet of tiny Ubers zooming into my son's blood vessels, but it's even funnier when the nurse keeps pronouncing it Woober. 

If retirement gets dull I suppose I can pursue a second career as a Woober driver, given my recent mastery of the art of driving long distances while barely awake. But the pay can't possibly be worth the hassles. I'll get up before the sun and drive to Columbus to help my flesh and blood battle lymphoma, but I'd be less motivated to transport people who aren't my son. I am not, after all, a red blood cell. I need to take time to nourish my own soul with poetry and nature and music.

Though maybe not "Suicide is Painless."

Working through the glitches

In the quiet darkness of the planetarium I may have heard some snoring, but I swear it wasn't me. I was breathing deeply and at times my eyes were shut, but I was just resting. Honest.

Well you can't blame a bunch of faculty members for falling asleep in the dark right after lunch on our big workshop day. Final grades were due at 9 a.m. and I know some profs were scrambling right up until the last minute, but enough of them showed up to make our morning workshop sessions worthwhile. We learned things, shared stories, and laughed together, which was good enough for me.

Which is why I was a little annoyed this morning when a colleague expressed sympathy over how badly the workshop turned out. How could we have been at the same event? Granted, we endured a few technical glitches--an intransigent computer, a clock stuck in a time warp, and a presenter delayed at a rail crossing. But while we waited for these problems to resolve, we filled the time by talking about great things our students had accomplished this semester.

If there was one unexpected throughline in the day's presentations, it was the need to accept and learn from imperfection. A presenter talked about what he'd learned from a new assignment that was "somewhat okay some of the time," and a small group discussion led to a great piece of advice for profs facing disruptions to teaching plans: "Accept imperfection." Another presenter reminded us that we need to acknowledge our students' right to fail: if they resist all our attempts to help them succeed, then "we may feel like we have failed them when they've failed us."

Our campus caterers didn't fail us: the lunch was perfect and the conversations even better. And then a bunch of us went over to the planetarium to see what the whizzy new equipment can do, except those comfy chairs in a darkened room were an invitation to relax perhaps a bit too deeply. 

We've all worked hard this semester and we needed some relaxation, and some laughter, and some commiseration, conversation, and compassion. I offer no apologies for presiding over a glitchy workshop. We're imperfect people working in imperfect circumstances and sometimes being somewhat okay can feel like triumph.

Time to hang up the regalia

Clues that it's time to hang up my regalia for good: 

Early in my career here I taught a terrific student...who returned for this year's Commencement as our distinguished speaker. How did she accomplish so much so quickly?

My second year here I served on the search committee that hired a wonderful young colleague...who will retire as soon as he gets his grades turned in this week. How could someone I hired beat me to retirement?

I survived all the standing and processing and sitting in uncomfortable chairs at Commencement ...but afterward my legs were so sore I could hardly walk. When did I get so old?

We suddenly need to fill in some blanks in the teaching schedule because of a colleague's unexpected departure...but I don't want to step up and teach any of the unmanned classes, even for overload pay. What happened to my sense of duty?

After Commencement I should have carefully hung up my regalia so it'll be ready the next time I need it...but it felt like too much work, so I left it draped over a chair. When will I need academic regalia again?

 

Pencils down, forks up

What a semester! I'd like to put a fork in it and call it done but the thick bits are still stewing. 

I've graded all the final exams except for one that a student had to take online, and of course it's a pain for me to write an online version of a face-to-face exam and post it to Canvas and arrange for online proctoring but it's more of a pain for the student who broke his leg very messily and is still at home recovering from surgery. So I did all the things and checked yesterday to make sure his exam was complete in Canvas but I didn't grade it, but now that I've graded all the hand-written exams (and my goodness my students wrote some great essays!), I can't get into Canvas at all because it is "currently undergoing scheduled maintenance." Did I receive an email about this scheduled maintenance? Maybe I did. I don't remember. At any rate I can't finish that last bit of grading or post the grades until the scheduled maintenance is complete so here I sit, stewing.

I've been stewing a lot lately over any number of silly little things, which is probably one reason my hair is falling out. It's probably not noticeable to anyone else, but my hair has been thinning on top since around March, due, no doubt, to stress caused by trying to live a semi-normal life while helping my son endure the throes of cancer treatment. But at least I still have hair. The chemo was making my son's hair fall out in clumps, so he finally got a buzz cut to even it out, and my husband got the same cut in sympathy, so now they have matching hair. So okay, one is more gray than the other, but you can certainly see the family forehead.

So while I'm stewing over any number of annoying little things, I have to remind myself: I still have hair, and my students wrote some wonderful essays, and the grading is nearly done. At some point scheduled maintenance will be complete. Meanwhile, I'll sit here with my fork at the ready.

A triumph of boredom

The thing no one tells you about cancer, I told my son yesterday, is that it's really boring. 

They tell us it's a journey, an unexpected adventure that might lead to new wisdom and purpose, or that it's a battle in which we might find triumph, but more often cancer is just a slog through muck that tries to enforce stasis, or an attempt to stay awake despite overwhelming fatigue, or an inability to relish things that once brought joy. Like food, for instance. When chemo destroys the taste buds, everything turns bland, and orange Gatorade can only go so far to assuage the ennui.

Mostly it's about waiting, but any cancer patient's patience can be tested when appointments require a two-hour car ride that makes you queasy, followed by various snafus and delays at the hospital so that your two-hour appointment turns into a 13-hour day, most of it deadly dull. Get a lumbar puncture and then lie flat on your back for an hour or so staring at the same old boring ceiling tiles. Sit still while chemo drugs drip, drip, drip into your blood vessels. Wait for test results, wait for answers, wait for food, and then regret it when it arrives because it tastes like sand.

So when my son's Gatorade supply ran out last night and he asked me to take a quick drive down the highway to pick up more, I suggested that he come along for the ride, just to get out of the house. Not much new to see--some new tar and chip on part of our road, a spot where milkweed is coming up on the shoulder, a view of the creek, the river, the sky. But it was better than staring at the same old boring walls in the same old boring house where nothing much ever happens. 

One day, I told him, you'll back at this time and it will be a boring blip in an otherwise exciting life. And I hope that's true. Meanwhile, there's always Gatorade.