The same river twice

My final time teaching A River Runs through It and I realize I don't know how to teach this text. The film, sure--focus on how color, composition, and movement emphasize the connection between people and nature, etc. But the book? Students find it boring, all those words, all those long descriptions of geology and fly-fishing and fish. I put students in groups and ask them to identify what would constitute paradise for each main character; I talk about fallenness, how people are a mess who need grace and strength and art; I read passages aloud, about the rhythms of life and Paul's being encircled by a halo in the water and the moving closing lines:

Eventually all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters.

Norman is haunted by waters because the waters tell stories of loss--of innocence, perfection, and loved ones. The loss of his brother looms large throughout the book, which is why it's so shocking that Paul's death takes up no more than a page and a half of text. The question of how to help Paul, though, suffuses the entire novella, alongside the larger question of how anyone can help anyone else, particularly those closest to us. How do we help those who don't want our help? How do we accept help when doing so requires admitting vulnerability? How do serve as our brother's keeper when our brother resists the very idea of being kept by anyone?

Maybe my students are too young to find such questions compelling, but for me, the questions grow richer and more meaningful with each passing year. I have seen loved ones struggle to help those closest to them, and I've seen the pain that results when someone close can't be helped. I've kept my deepest struggles to myself so as not to burden others, but now I want to--need to--help my son as he faces his most demanding trial, and all I can do is offer money and comfort food and encouragement. He is grateful, but it never feels like enough. 

Now others are stepping up to help me and my family: covering my classes after my surgery, offering meals when I'm in recovery, sending gifts to help with my son's medical expenses. It's all more than I could have dreamed of and more than enough but, at the same time, I wish we had no need for anyone's help and could turn it all away.

And so I read A River Runs through It through different eyes this time, knowing the weight of loss like never before and wondering whether I can get through those final pages without collapsing in tears in front of my students. I may just lead them out into the deep waters and encourage them to feel the mist rising, ensconcing all of us in a halo of waters, and then I'll let them find their way back to shore on their own.    

Overwhelmed? Just a bit

Today I had to explain to my upper-level literature students the meaning of bits in the Zora Neale Hurston story "The Gilded Six-Bits." 

I am definitely getting too old for this.

And too tired. I went home exhausted last Friday, worked all day Saturday and part of Sunday, and have been scrambling today just to avoid falling hopelessly behind on this week's work. To actually get ahead, I'd need a whole extra day in the week--and then I'd probably just sleep the day away. 

Part of this frenzy of activity involves preparation for the three days of class I'll miss after my surgery. I've copied texts, written group work prompts and reading quizzes, provided contexts, goals, and discussion questions for the wonderful colleagues who will be covering for me, and tried to anticipate any problem that might arise. All this advanced preparation will pay off when I spend a few days not thinking about classes, but at the moment it's a lot.

Another task bogging me down right now is the need to pack up my office in the moldy building. Every time I'm in there I fill another box or two, but I keep finding new deposits of ick. Today, a full two months after I discovered mold growing on my carpet and a month after the College conducted in-depth cleaning and installed heavy-duty dehumidifiers throughout the building, I found a row of books on the bottom shelf that were wet to the touch, some of them moldy and some warped from moisture. Working in there more than a few minutes makes me cough and sneeze and stuffs up my sinuses, but I'm only about half done with the packing job. I keep thinking of Thoreau's image of his townsfolk who inherited property and spent their lives "well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing a large barn." That office weighs on me but I can't just set down the load and walk away. Someone has to deal with all those books.

So I truly have no time for blogging or walking or photography or fun, but nevertheless I have shamelessly indulged in all these activities in the past week. It's required. Literally: last week's leader at a campus workshop challenged each participant to write down one leisure activity unrelated to our work that we would promise to do before the next meeting, and then he collected the notecards. Will there be a quiz at the end? At any rate I felt obliged to do some leisure activities, which makes it no so much leisure as work, but whatever. The photography walk I'd promised myself was difficult to squeeze in between thunderstorms, but somehow I managed to get it done, though there wasn't a whole lot to photograph aside from pawpaws and standing waves in my creek where no standing waves ought to exist at this time of year.

But I got out of the house and away from my work and looked at pretty things, and now my whole house smells like pawpaws. They're not particularly abundant this year but the ones we've harvested are fat and juicy, a benefit of our unbearably wet, muddy summer. Maybe the only benefit. 

I mentioned the pawpaws to my students and few of them knew what I was talking about, but if I brought in pawpaws and sold them for two bits each, they'd all go hungry. 

Friday poetry challenge: So bad it's good, but not quite good (or bad) enough

Once again I've found buried treasure while cleaning out old files in my office: 

• my very first tenure-track contract, which offers definitive proof of my nonexistent negotiating skills
• a cache of envelopes, both letter size (bedecked with the college logo) and manila mailers, all rendered unusable because the moisture in my office glued the flaps shut
• expense reports and receipts from every conference I ever attended with College funds, back when I regularly attended conferences (and the College had funds) 

But the most unexpected item I located in the current sweep was the 2002 JAM Anthology, a printed collection of prize-winning poetry from the Julia A. Moore Bad Poetry Contest sponsored by the Flint, Michigan, Public Library. Although I doubt that this fact ever appeared on my Vita or in my tenure file, it is nevertheless indisputable that my poem "Shopping for Words on a Snowy Evening" was a finalist in the 2002 Julia A. Moore Bad Poetry Contest.

And the crowd goes wild!

I had entirely forgotten entering a bad poem in the Julia A. Moore Bad Poetry Contest, but I certainly remember a research project that required me to read a lot of bad poetry by the likes of Julia A. Moore ("The Sweet Singer of Michigan") and James Whitcomb Riley (the perpetrator of "The Happy Little Cripple"). Julia A. Moore is perhaps best remembered (?) as the author of "The Great Chicago Fire," a poem of monumental awfulness that ends with a resounding thud. I mean, go and read it. It's really bad.

My poem included in the anthology is, I hope, not quite that awful, which is why it was merely a finalist rather than a prize-winner. I know I could do better today, which would make me even less likely to win a prize, which is good, I guess? Anyway here it is, fresh from the JAM Anthology that has been nestling within the moist and moldy confines of my desk drawer since 2002:

Shopping for Words on a Snowy Evening

Whose words these are I think I know:
He's listed in the footnotes, though
He will not see me stopping here
To copy sentences--and mo'!

My editor might think it queer
To cut and paste words without fear
Out of that text, from which I take
Whole paragraphs, and move them here.

If caught, I'll say, "There's some mistake!
I never really meant to take
Those words! At least, not take for keeps.
Oh please do not my books forsake!"

The words are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have contract terms to keep,
And books to crib before I sleep,
And books to crib before I sleep.

I don't know which is worse: the badness of this poem or the fact that it wasn't bad enough to earn a prize. But what sort of person wants to win a prize in a Bad Poetry Contest anyway? (That would be me.)

So go ahead--try to do better! 

Doing my breast--er, best--to be transparent, but not too transparent

The next question, of course, is what to tell my students--and when.

Seventeen years ago when I was fighting an entirely different type of cancer with a treatment plan requiring radiation every weekday for a month and chemotherapy every three weeks until Thanksgiving, I knew from the start that I would have to tell my students something. My hair started falling out during the first week of the semester so I couldn't pretend everything was fine. Besides, I had to arrange online activities for chemo days, so from the start I enlisted my students' help in making all the logistics work right.

This time is different. No chemo, no hair loss, and not much chance that I'll look visibly ill before the surgery. Afterward I'll have to take a little time off, but how much do my students need to know about why?

The good news is that the lumpectomy itself will be on October 5--in the middle of our four-day fall break. I plan to stay off campus that whole week and I've already found colleagues to cover my Wednesday and Friday classes. The Thursday capstone students were already scheduled to have a research day in preparation for their annotated bibliography assignment, and I trust them to use the time wisely even if no one is in class taking attendance. 

But I have to tell my classes something about why I won't be on campus and why I won't necessarily be responsive to emails, and I need an explanation more compelling than because I'll be taking really great drugs.

I don't remember how much I told my students last time--did they know what kind of cancer or where? Would they even know the meaning of endometrial? I think I kept it vague, but I don't remember. 

This time I'm telling them that I need to have a medical procedure that will keep me off campus and mostly inaccessible for a week but it's nothing to worry about. Is that too vague? I mean, I don't want students thinking about my breasts, and I certainly don't want them thinking about the fact that one of the pre-op procedures involves inserting a tiny radioactive seed into my breast ACK OOF YIPES. I'd rather not think about that myself so I'm certainly not telling anyone else about it. (Except you. You I can trust.)

Most of all I don't want my students thinking about me at all. I want them to think about poetry and fiction and nature and culture and history, but it's impossible to do that when someone is poking a radioactive breast in your face. So I'll shut up about the breast.  

So we've agreed on a plan: be as vague as possible; focus on the course material; reassure them about the positive prognosis. Don't even breathe the word breast. (Breast breast breast breast breast.) 

Attack of the killer anomalies

I'm sitting in my classroom watching my students take their first exam when I realize that I have once again become a nonperson. My previous laptop used to periodically decide that I was not authorized to access campus resources, especially wifi and printers, but that laptop is dead and gone. This morning I'm using the computer in my regular classroom, which won't let me log in to campus email or Canvas or any other resource requiring a College password. "You are locked out," says the error message. No indication of why or what to do about it.

Can't record attendance. Can't read or respond to email. Can't access course materials. Can't check my employee records to see if that stipend has come through yet. Can't do anything I need to do during class except text a message to the IT helpline.

I emphasize that it's not an emergency but nevertheless the IT guy shows up at the door while my students are taking their exam. After a whispered conversation, he promises to come back after class, but when he does, all he can do is inform me that only one person in the IT department is authorized to unblock me and he's out sick today.

So naturally I panic. 

I've been doing that a lot lately. Because of the anomalously disastrous year we've been enduring, panic hovers so close to the surface that it takes very little to urge it out of hiding. After all our floods and storms and falling trees, I hyperventilate every time a dark cloud rolls overhead, and a night-time storm keeps me awake long after my rational mind assures me that there's no danger in falling asleep. 

So naturally when I get locked out of all campus resources, my mind assumes the unthinkable: I'm getting fired. Maybe the Powers That Be found out that I taught in jeans last Friday while a prospective students was visiting my classroom. (Nice black jeans! On Friday, when half of my colleagues teach in college T-shirts and jeans!) Maybe they finally got fed up with my grousing and decided to show me the door but then forgot to inform HR. Maybe campus police were instructed to escort me off campus but got confused by my dual roles and showed up at the wrong office. It could happen!

But of course it doesn't. It's all just a computer anomaly, the aftermath of a power outage that hit campus for a few hours last night. Why it decided to banish no one but me from the island remains a mystery, but by 1 p.m. I'm no longer locked out of campus systems and I am fully authorized to attend to my usual duties.

All that panic over nothing! Next time, someone should take me to a dark room and make me breathe deeply and listen to whale songs until the urge to panic passes, except I would probably panic over the possibility of whales invading my office and thrashing my books to smithereens. 

But no time to think about that now. I've got exams to grade and attendance to record and stipends to hunt down and I'd better get it all done before the next anomaly wrecks my day.

Friday poetry challenge: Ordinary heroes

Sept. 11 is a good day for appreciating heroes: the first responders who run up the stairs of a burning building when everyone else is running down, the airplane passengers who disable a hijacker intent on terror, or the workers who sort through piles of mangled metal to retrieve barely recognizable bits of bodies. We salute them and rightly laud their extraordinary actions.

But sometimes a perfectly ordinary action can feel heroic, as I reminded myself yesterday while running through my mental list of friends who would be willing to answer a phone call at 5:30 a.m. and drive clear out to the middle of nowhere to lend me a car. It's a short list.

"I'll call Tom," said my husband, and within minutes neighbor Tom, barely awake, was parked at the end of our driveway in his Subaru, which he kindly allowed us to drive to Columbus for a many-test medical marathon.

Why couldn't I drive my own car? Because a violent thunderstorm in the wee hours of the morning had dropped a tree across the top of our bridge. 

The bridge was fine, and the newly repaired part of the driveway was fine, but some gravel had washed away at the end, leaving a one-foot sheer dropoff that my car couldn't have managed even if there hadn't been a tree on the bridge.

So off we went in Tom's car, leaving when it was still so dark that I had no idea what color it was. I had visions of wandering around a parking garage clicking the key fob toward random vehicles until the right one responded.

My son did the dark morning driving, dealing ably with road debris, standing water, and slick silty lanes, not to mention rush-hour traffic in Columbus. We had something like eight separate appointments in three different buildings but somehow we made it through everything. My son stayed in Columbus for the night so he can have more tests today and meet up with his sister, who will drive down to take the next step toward donating the bone marrow he'll need--another kind of ordinary heroism.

And I drove home in Tom's car, relieved to have learned that a lumpectomy and radiation ought to take care of my little health problem and it can all happen within the next four weeks. The logistical challenges of scheduling the surgery and covering my classes will be nontrivial, but having a plan in place is half the battle. 

It was a long, exhausting day that brought relief and results--but none of it would have happened if neighbor Tom hadn't answered his phone. 

O sing with me of neighbor Tom
Who took a call with pajamas on,
Brought a Subaru when all hope was gone--
my neighbor Tom! 

Who are your ordinary heroes?

The end is near(ish)

Well that is absolutely the LAST time I'm teaching on Labor Day, harrumph, and you'd better believe I reminded my colleagues of that fact repeatedly yesterday. Laboring on Labor Day is such a tradition here that it's not worth noting its oddness, but I'm definitely eager to abandon the tradition when I retire.

Also: that moment when I'm standing in front of a room full of students attempting to draw a connection between today's reading and something we discussed last week, but it suddenly occurs to me that the previous reading I'm referring to was discussed in an entirely different class. Oops. Never mind. It's nice to make connections across classes, such as when one of my capstone students brings up an example of witty repartee from the Jane Austen class, but when I'm the only one in the room who has been present in both discussions, the connection is broken.

I will not miss that feeling of never getting caught up, the knowledge that the to-do list never ends because the minute I cross off one task, two more will crop up to take its place. And I won't miss the regret that arises from the sudden realization that I've required students in two different classes to turn in a major assignment on the same day. What moron wrote this syllabus?! Oops, that would be me.

I won't miss the necessity of mastering new classroom technology. We now have access to Respondus, a lockdown browser helpful to faculty who want to allow students to use laptops in class but don't want to hand over their writing process to AI. We will all need training on Respondus--except for those of us who will be sashaying out the door at the end of the semester. I long ago exceeded my quota of new technologies to master. Time for someone else to pick up the baton.

But first I have to get through this semester, and we've barely begun the third week. How many days left they ask me, but who's counting? I'm a word person, not a number person, so the answer has to be something like not enough days to complete everything I need to do. 

Ask me again after I've crossed a few more tasks off my list. The end isn't quite near, but I can feel it getting closer by the minute.  

Which is why I handed in my journalist badge

I've been accused once again of burying the lede--a valid complaint if I were writing breaking news for the New York Times but I'm not so give me a break.

The lede, for the non-journalists among us, is that all-important first paragraph in a straight news story organized in the inverted pyramid form. The lede succinctly serves up the Who, What, Where, Why, When, and How of some newsworthy event in words readers can easily digest. I worked as a journalist long enough to master the form and I have the trophies to prove it, but I've always preferred feature writing.

Feature writing tends to be less urgent, less formulaic, and more colorful than straight news, often meandering down a leisurely path and trusting readers to make their way without a road map. Or, to switch metaphors, the feature story doesn't force-feed readers the meat of the story all at once but instead allows them to taste a bit here and a bit there until they've well and truly feasted.

Feature writing is appropriate for stories that are interesting but not especially pressing; straight news serves up facts while features use facts to move toward insight or understanding or, sometimes, amusement. 

I'd be the first to admit that the difficulties I've been facing this year are far from newsworthy to anyone outside my immediate circle. The catastrophic flooding in Nepal makes our little inundation look like the aftermath of a toddler's bathtime, and the other ills that have plagued us (cancer, mold) are common to thousands of people all over the world. So when I write about my experiences, I'm well aware that there's nothing particularly special about what we're going through. This is not front-page news but merely the human condition. Nothing to see here. Move on.

But writing helps me make sense of things and may provide insight or understanding or amusement to others, which is why I keep doing it but also why I don't feel any obligation to follow traditional journalistic conventions. I write for myself and for those few people interested in following me down a meandering path, and sometimes I like to provide some rewards along the way, little nuggets of insight or information buried long past the opening line.

For those readers who can't stick with me past the first paragraph--what are you even doing here? Surely you can find something more newsworthy to peruse.

For the rest, thanks for coming along on the ride. Better buckle up because it's bound to be bumpy.

An earnest approach to assigning blame

Earlier this week I enjoyed a chat with Lady Bracknell--or with the colleague who will be playing the role of Lady Bracknell next week in a community production of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. The usual administrative claptrap is so much easier to stomach when I imagine the words spoken in the distinctive cadence of Lady Bracknell, who is remembered for lines like these:

Thirty-five is an attractive age. London is full of women of the highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.

Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit: touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately, in England at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. 

[After asking Jack Worthing whether he smokes and receiving an affirmative reply]: I am glad to hear it. A man should always have an occupation of some kind.  

My favorite line occurs as Lady Bracknell questions Jack Worthing about his suitability as a match for her daughter:

Lady Bracknell: Are your parents living?

Jack Worthing: I have lost both my parents.

Lady Bracknell: To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness. 

Cracks me up every time. Blaming an orphan for the loss of parents is ridiculous, of course, but it becomes more ludicrous when it comes to light that, in this situation, the child was not the careless one. 

We're not comfortable blaming Jack for being left behind with the baggage, but Odysseus is certainly comfortable blaming Poseidon for raining disasters down on his head--even though Odysseus himself bears a big chunk of the blame. A hero enmeshed in horrors may need to assign blame outside himself, but pointing the finger doesn't do much to get him out of trouble.

Yesterday someone tried to assign blame for the recent string of disasters besetting my household: "We all know who did this to you--the Man Upstairs." As if some all-powerful being gets his jollies by targeting my office with mold, my house with floods and windstorms, and my son with lymphoma. I don't intend to engage in theological debate regarding the origin of pain and suffering, but I have always felt that there's so much awfulness oozing around loose in the world that I shouldn't be surprised when some of it sticks to me. The rain falls on the just and the unjust, etc. It just seems like we've met our quota of rain for a while so we ought to be due for a long dry spell.

Silly me! 

The good news is that my son and I both have appointments at The James next Thursday, so we can share the ride.

The bad news is that his appointments deal with the extremely scary prospect of getting a bone marrow transplant while my appointment is a consultation with a surgical oncologist who would like to remove the cancerous lump from my breast. 

Lady Bracknell might say that having two members of the same household undergoing cancer treatment at the same time looks like carelessness, but whose carelessness? Finding someone to blame won't help any of us cope, but what will? 

I won't have a treatment plan until I get more imaging, so I have no idea how this new diagnosis will affect my ability to teach and perform my administrative tasks. Plenty of people have offered to help and I will take them up on those offers as soon as I have more information. Meanwhile, I teach my classes and perform my administrative tasks and take care of my household and try very hard not to think too much about what lies ahead. 

But if a little comedy from Lady Bracknell can lighten the load, I'll grab hold of it in earnest.   

Peace, rest, poetry

Wendell Berry died this week, a fine poet whom I used to occasionally encounter in elevators while I was in grad school at the University of Kentucky, and even though he's not on the Concepts of Nature syllabus until October, I thought it would be appropriate to start today's class with my favorite Berry poem:

The Peace of Wild Things
by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.  

I couldn't read the poem out loud because I knew it would make me cry, but I asked the students to contemplate these questions, relevant to today's reading assignment: What do animals do for us? What do we do for animals? 

We had a great discussion about this and several other poems, but this poem kept following me even after class. It's popping up on social media all over the place--in fact, I posted it myself. Kind of ironic that a poet known for his contempt for technology should inspire an epidemic of online posting.

But I love this poem: it moves with the gentle cadence of a person walking in the woods, invites us along on the journey, and leaves us in peace. I have told my family that if they don't read this poem at my funeral, I will come back and haunt them. It is a gift, given to those who struggle with despair for the world and fear for the future, who suffer from disturbed sleep and restless thoughts. I need this poem right now, and if I had a few hours I could explain why. Meanwhile, "I rest in the grace of the world, and am free."