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."

Bonfire of the inanities

We've heard the legend of the professor so disgusted with his lot that he burned his bridges when he left academe--by burning a pile of books in the middle of campus. This happened before my time so I can't attest to the truth of the story, but I've heard from people who claim to have witnessed the feat and I believe the prof in question was capable of making such a dramatic gesture. 

I thought of that prof this morning while I was clearing out the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet and found years of student course evaluations and annual reviews, from back when we did it all on paper. Do I want to know what my students thought of my teaching in 2003, or what my department chair wrote on my annual review in 2007? Not really. Off to the shredder!

Except for that one set of student evaluations containing comments so toxic that I persuaded the provost to remove them from my tenure file. Yes: in the semester before I came up for tenure, a first-year composition class sat in the classroom together writing course evaluations and somehow several students wrote very similar complaints stating that I shouldn't be allowed to wear short sleeves in class because the big hairy mole on the back of my arm was so disgusting that it prevented students from learning. Coincidence or conspiracy? Either way, I'd like to do something more satisfying than sending those evaluations to the shredder. Bonfire?

I couldn't bring myself to burn books, but I feel like lighting a match every time I run across a book with mold growing on the pages. What else would I toss into the bonfire? My old tenure file? A pile of instruction manuals for various software programs I've been required to master over the years? The carpet where the mold festered? Probably I ought to burn all my angers, resentments, and grudges so that I can proceed into retirement free of the burdens of past pain.

And what shall I do with the things I don't want to take home but don't want to burn? I'm resolved to hold a Giveaway Day, when I pile up the books, toys, and random coffee mugs I don't need at home and invite all and sundry to saunter in and grab what they want. I'll keep my stained-glass kaleidoscope, of course, and my Jane Austen action figure, but do I really need a Barbie rubber stamp or miniature Etch-A-Sketch? Surely someone would gladly take these things off my hands.

But first I need to sort through all the things and pack up what has to go home. Every once in a while I stumble upon buried treasure, but when instead I find toxic waste, I'm grateful I don't keep matches in my office.  

 

Friday poetry challenge: Paean to a flawed world

One sweet perk of staying in the guest apartment on campus is access to a reserved parking space in a central location, but it's really hard to take advantage of the space without a car.

On Sunday my husband parked in the spot reserved for the Executive Suite when he dropped me off on campus, but then he drove away and left me carless all week. Early Monday I told the building coordinator that I didn't need the parking space, but the sign stayed up, one of the best parking spaces on campus remaining empty. I wanted to stand out there and apologize to everyone who circled the lot looking for a place to park.

Now I'm finally home and have a car but can't park near the house. The driveway reconstruction is done but can't be driven on until the middle of next week, so we parked the car down by the road and walked up the hill. We'll have to work pretty hard to coordinate our movements with only one car until Wednesday, but I have a house and a bed and my family around and as long as I don't have to go anywhere, the car problem doesn't exist.

So I'll just park my butt in my space by the big window, watch some birds, and see what sorts of words come together in my fatigued mind.

A parking space without a car,

a prof within a Suite; 

a week away for work (not play!)

these job perks can't be beat.

A bridge that can't be driven on,

a creek without a flood--

but home is where the heart is, so

it's good, however flawed.

Good enough? The entire world seems flawed right now, but that doesn't mean it can't serve as fodder for rhyme. I'd love to see some more!

Preying for peace

It's hard to stay angry while protecting a preying mantis. I discovered this yesterday while sitting on a bench in the middle of campus.

Why was I on the bench? 

Because I'd been working in the cold library all day and I needed to warm up. 

Because my phone was dead and the bench was halfway between the library and the building where I'd left my phone charger.

Because I'd encountered another petty problem threatening to thwart my heroic quest toward living a normal life in my own house with my own family and my own bed.

Because I was angry. 

So I went outside and sat, alone, breathing deeply.

Nothing much going on. Cicadas humming, birds chipping, IT guy hustling equipment across campus.

But then one bird--a female cardinal--hopped down on the pavers right in front of me and starting poking at something that looked like a small brownish leaf, until the leaf moved in a way that suggested volition.

It was a preying mantis, a small brown one, extending its wings to bulk itself up. How could such a tiny, delicate creature fight off a bird so much bigger?

But it did. The cardinal scooted into a nearby bush and the mantis stood wobbling, almost invisible against the pavers.

Someone is bound to step on that mantis right after it has fought off death by cardinal, I thought. But not on my watch!

So I sat and watched for foot traffic, scarce at first. Then a colleague from the geology department led a group of students up to a garden plot nearby and started introducing students to gneiss and quartzite and a chunk of the Canadian shield and explained how these rocks had arrived in the nonglaciated part of Ohio, and when he was done, he led his class right past my bench.

Watch for the preying mantis, I said. Watch for the praying mantis, he told his students. We don't want to hurt a preying mantis. No one asked why, but the last student lingered to take a photo with his phone. (I would have done the same if my phone hadn't been dead.)

Later another colleague stopped by the bench. Watch for the preying mantis, I said. By then the mantis had turned around and seemed to be looking directly at me, though who's to say how a mantis perceives the world or what it makes of a big lump of human being sitting on a bench. I asked my colleague to take a photo and send it to me, but the minute she handed me her phone, the mantis dashed away toward the bushes far more quickly than I could have imagined. It hit the dirt and became all but invisible.

Still alive, though. Maybe it got chomped by a predator ten minutes after I stepped down as its protector, but I'd served my purpose. It was still breathing and so was I, and best of all, I wasn't angry. 

Would peace fill my life if I protected a mantis daily? 

Sadly, I'm unlikely to find the answer.

Who chooses shoes--and how?

Am I walking into the classroom today wearing my blue, pink, and white Brooks trainers? Yes I am--because they coordinate with my outfit, because they're comfy, and because they look cheery, as if my feet are smiling.

You will note two criteria missing from my footwear selection process: I don't wear shoes to please administrators, and I don't care what students think. I'm not convinced that students even notice my teaching clothes, though I do recall the time when I served on the tenure and promotion committee and read a comment on a course evaluation in which a student expressed indignation because the prof's shoes didn't match his belt. 

 

Listen: if we had to deny tenure to every prof who'd ever made a fashion faux pas, we'd have nothing but empty classrooms. 

I look around and don't see anyone here whose clothes would compel a student to stomp out of class and demand a refund, but nevertheless last week an administrator way above my pay grade castigated us all for dressing too casually. Why? Because casual dress will repel prospective students.

Wait--aren't profs supposed to look a little--um, eccentric?  

I know the demographic cliff is real and competition is stiff for the shrinking pool of high school seniors. I don't want to be responsible for alienating a potential student when increasing enrollment is so vital.

But do we really want students who make massive life-changing decisions based on how profs dress?

The answer, I'm afraid, is yes. We need to help students develop the critical thinking skills that will empower them to make decisions based on more reasonable criteria, but we'll never get those students if they object to my shoes.

I'm wearing them anyway. Because some things are more important than a hypothetical visiting student's fashion hangups. Like shoes that make my feet smile.

Friday poetry challenge (late): Back to the dorm, almost

What would it be like to live on campus again? Unlike the incoming class of 1980, today's students move into the dorm with plentiful bags and boxes--and wide-screen TVs, and gaming systems, and emotional support pets. In my freshman dorm, all it took to blow a circuit was for too many students to run their blow-dryers at the same time. We traveled light because we had to.

And I'll have to travel light when I move back on campus tomorrow. Our driveway could serve as a film location for a post-apocalyptic nightmare, but it certainly isn't suitable for driving. My husband's and son's cars are stuck on this side of the creek and the only way to get out to my car is to walk downhill through mud and clamber down a five-foot drop onto loose rocks and more mud--and then do everything in reverse on the return trip. This is dangerous enough when I'm dressed casually, but I certainly don't intend to practice my mountain-goat act while dressed for teaching Monday morning. 

So I'm moving to campus. (Temporarily!) I'll pack up my teaching clothes and make the perilous climb down the hill on Sunday afternoon, and then my husband will drop me off on campus, where I'll stay in the guest apartment in one of the classroom buildings. It's bigger and more private than my freshman dorm room and I won't have to walk up the hall to shower, but in two ways it closely resembles my freshman experience: I'll take with me only what I can pack in one overstuffed bag, and I won't have access to a car. I may even end up eating in the cafeteria!

I guess I'm grateful to have somewhere to lay my head down and cry while the contractors figure out what to do about the ramp leading up to our bridge, but I really hadn't planned to live on campus during my final semester before retirement. Instead of preparing to teach, I ought to be attending freshman orientation, playing ice-breaker games, and learning the words to the alma mater. 

As it happens, I already know the words to the alma mater, which begins, "Time-honored Marietta, thy walls to us are dear." Not dear enough to make me want to live within them, but beggars can't be choosers.  

What I really need is a cheer squad. Think how much more motivated I would be if energetic young people waved pom-poms to cheer on my every step!

Two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar,
If you know what "bits" are, stand up and holler!
If you're a professor, what're you doing here?
Go back home while we stand up and cheer!

Give me an O! 

         Give me a U! 

Give me a C!

Give me an H! 

What's that spell?
OUCH!
What's it mean?
Ancient knees can't play this game!
What do we care?
Not a whit!
What are we gonna do?
Play it anyway!
O-U-C-H OUCH OUCH OUCH

Well I guess I won't be pursuing a second career as a writer of school cheers. But anyone who wants to give it a shot should do so in the comments.

Just fine, I guess. And you?

Lots of questions came up at the all-campus convocation yesterday but the one I had most trouble answering was "How was your summer?" So simple! I thought about saying something like "I certainly don't recall poking out the eye of Poseidon's son, but I must have done something to make him angry." But then people would want to talk about the new Odyssey film, which I haven't seen.

My summer was....complicated. I submitted three essays to various publications and I eagerly await a response (story of my life). I waited, sometimes patiently, to find out whether I would be teaching a certain course this fall and then scrambled to write the syllabus, which ought to be done today. I presided over a whole mess of meetings and took care of logistics for more meetings. 

I found mold in my office, started packing up books to move them out and found more mold, left empty boxes in my office for a few days and found them damp and sagging, and now await the results of the deep cleaning that allegedly made the building where I'll do most of my teaching inhabitable.

I dealt with one disaster after another at home: a flash flood, falling trees that knocked out power, a less damaging flash flood, and a third flash flood that may leave my driveway unusable for the next week. The resident Mr. Fixit has promised to leave a ladder down at the edge of the bridge to enable us to clamber up and down as needed, but I don't relish doing all that clambering in teaching clothes, much less walking across the silt deposits in my best shoes. And I don't mind parking my car at the edge of the road while there's no rain in the forecast, but it's parked on a spot that was under several feet of water two days ago. If the storms start up again, I'm leaving.

I drove my son to Columbus for chemotherapy and treatments and tests, cooked toddler foods when he couldn't swallow solids, did everything in my power to make his life more pleasant, and tried not to fret about his prognosis (which is good! Really!). But cancer is a topic not easily introduced into light table banter at a festive event.

In fact my whole summer was a bummer, and who wants to spread a dark cloud through a crowd of (mostly) happy people? We have a lot to celebrate on campus: record-setting fund-raising, good news from the accreditors, a really great group of new faculty, and, best of all, my impending retirement. So I put on a smile and say "Fine," which is enough for most people. For those who really want to know more...ask Poseidon.   

It's deja vu all over again

I scared the bejeebers out of a cleaner this morning just by pressing the elevator button in the library on campus. She was cleaning inside the elevator, which kind of astounded me because I don't believe I've ever seen anyone cleaning the inside of an elevator before but of course it must happen or they'd be a mess. When the door opened, she just about jumped out of her skin. She wasn't expecting anyone to be in the library at 7 a.m., but there I was. (The library opens at 8:30--good thing I have a key pass!)

I explained, as coherently as I could considering everything, that I needed to get up to my office to brush my teeth. I couldn't get home last night, see, and while I was able to do some shopping and put together an outfit to wear today when I have to present information in front of the full faculty, I had neglected to buy a toothbrush, so this morning my mouth felt like I had slept in it. (Not that I got much sleeping done at all, but never mind that.) I keep a toothbrush and toothpaste in my office, which now is in the library while my former office recovers from the mold infestation. 

Am I making any sense at all?

In the 22 years we've lived out in the woods, our driveway has been under water maybe once a year, and the ramp up to the bridge has been thoroughly washed away three or four times. Until this year. I wrote already about our previous flash flood a few weeks ago (click here), but I didn't write about the much smaller flood two days ago that left our driveway difficult but still driveable. The July flood required us to bring in a truckload of gravel, some of which washed away Saturday night. 

And the rest washed away yesterday, along with...well, that whole chunk of driveway. There's no way to get up and over the creek until we can find a gravel guy who isn't already tied up with everyone else's flooding problems.

I knew our driveway was in trouble yesterday without even seeing it. I turned in at the end of our road and saw how high the creek was there, and I knew I wasn't getting across all that water. I drove far enough up our road to encounter a neighbor, who convinced me that proceeding further was futile. So instead of going home, I went shopping (so I don't have to wear yesterday's jeans and T-shirt in front of the full faculty this afternoon), and then I found a room in town and failed spectacularly at getting any sleep.

Today while I'm feeling my way around campus trying to appear competent, my extremely competent husband will be trying to track down some gravel and cut up the trees blocking the bridge. Will I get home tonight? No idea. If not, at least I know where I can find a toothbrush. 

 

See all those trees? Not ideal!

Nobody's driving over that.

This rainbow greeted me as I stepped out of Kohl's yesterday. A sign?

Friday poetry challenge: Small but mighty

I was sitting at a laundromat waiting and sweating and swatting bugs and wondering how a business dedicated to the pursuit of cleanliness could accumulate so much filth when suddenly, in the midst of all this mess, I received a text stating that electricity had been restored at my house. 

Hallelujah. Just a little over two days without power had transformed me into a gibbering idiot. I don't know how people live without easy access to electricity and running water, but I also don't know how profs function without access to Microsoft Word, which my college laptop suddenly refused to run this week. I had hoped to keep that cranky old laptop creaking along until I retire in December, but the laptop had other ideas. 

Now I have power and running water and a new (well, less old) laptop willing to do whatever I need, and in a few days I'll have access to my classroom building again, after the masters of mold remediation perform their whole-building magic. There isn't a laundromat on the planet big enough to complete that cleaning job, and if there were, it would be full of bugs, just like my errant computer.

Well I'm raving. Everything is swirling together in my head, including the all-day New Faculty Orientation I led today. Being "on" all day taxed the people skills that have been lying dormant all summer, but I ushered a string of competent colleagues through the room until the newbies had been oriented to within an inch of their lives. 

Later I arrived home exhausted to find the resident lumberjack cooking a wonderful supper, even though he'd been busy chopping up chunks of fallen trees, meeting with the insurance claims adjuster and the Spectrum cable dude, conferring with the helpful neighbor who offered to help him haul out the whole tree lodged under our bridge, and, yesterday, driving our son to Columbus, where he was adjudged too sick to undergo his scheduled treatment.

Nothing made me happier all week than to finally see my son eating solid food tonight, even if he was still in some pain. Small improvements matter, like clean clothes and a hot shower, helpful neighbors and competent IT guys. Shove all of this week's ups and downs into a washing machine and you never know what might come out when the agitator stops:

Bugs in the laundromat,
bugs in the tech,
mold in the office building--
who can say what's next?

Smiles in the meeting room,
water in the pipes, 
solid food that tastes so good--
little things, but nice.

And that's where I end this impossible week: nestled within the niceness. I'll take that over a filthy laundromat any day of the week.

Now your turn: show us little things that make a difference, for good or ill.

Note to disasters: take a number

And then a tree fell on my house is what I've been telling people, but that's not strictly accurate. It wasn't one tree but four, or five if you include the one that fell halfway across our road. A good neighbor would have whipped out a chain saw and removed the road hazard, but I just drove around it. I don't do chain saws.

And the trees didn't fall on the house but all around it, missing just about everything of value. A tree down the hill fell on a brush pile. The lovely tulip poplar out back missed the house, the deck, and the wood-burner but fell, appropriately, on the wood pile. The two pine trees just uphill missed the house, the shed, and most of my son's car (one small dent) but slammed down onto the power lines feeding the house, with predictable results.

I wasn't home when this happened but the men were listening to the carnage and marveling at their close escape. By the time I arrived home, the AEP crew had already removed the trees from the power line and then promptly failed to depart because one truck had sunk into a saturated bit of our front lawn. The other truck pulled the first one out and they promised that AEP would send someone to repair the muddy ruts they'd left behind, but I'm more concerned about whether they damaged the water line running under that bit of lawn--the water line that feeds the apartment above our garage, which, remarkably, never lost power. But we won't know whether that water line is leaking until we get power to the well pump. Maybe today?  

This all happened on Monday. Our son had an appointment at The James early Tuesday and it's not a great idea for a person with a compromised immune system to stay in a house that lacks running water, so I drove him to Columbus Monday afternoon and we stayed in a hotel. We left the resident woodsman behind to cope with the aftermath: calling the insurance guy, finding an electrician, hauling in bottled water, chopping trees. So my son and I were safely ensconced at the hospital Tuesday morning when the tornado hit Columbus.

Well, the weather people are calling it a possible tornado, but if you watch this bit of video of strong winds flipping a car over during a deluge that reduced highway visibility to near zero, you'll agree that only a fool would try to drive in those conditions. Nevertheless that's what I was doing about an hour after the car-flipping incident--driving my son home through conditions so deplorable that I didn't hit the speed limit for the first hour, and I tensed up so much that my entire body still hurts a day later. We didn't take our usual route because I was dropping my son off at a friend's house (with fully functioning electricity and running water!), so we missed a whole host of areas where the roads were submerged.

But I made it home, finally, to find our creek high and a tree lodged under the bridge but everything else intact, ish. I am very sad about the tulip poplar out back--such a lovely tree--but maybe one of the nearby saplings will grow up to take its place. And I was not thrilled about the lack of running water in the apartment where we slept last night, which is why I left for campus very early this morning, stumbling in the dark through spider webs and muddy ruts to get to my car and drive out to find a working bathroom. Today I'm on campus unwashed and in yesterday's jeans (because I can't do laundry), with spider webs in my hair and mud on my shoes but happy to be back at work in a building with electricity and running water. I feel horrible for the people who suffered more severe damage but I'm glad the storm spared my house.

But seriously: if I put this summer's disasters into a work of fiction, readers wouldn't believe it. Cancer, chemotherapy, mold, floods, falling trees, tornado (possibly!)--it's too much! It is too much, but if you hear me so much as whisper that surely we've fulfilled our quota of disasters for the year, just give me a good sharp kick, okay?  

One truck stuck, the other pulling.

Damage where the cables enter the house.

Power line on the ground.

The remains of the tulip poplar. Sad!

Where the tops of the pine trees snapped off. 

Once again, my whole yard smells like pine.

What I wish I could tell the newbies

As I've been organizing New Faculty Orientation for the half dozen incoming faculty members we'll welcome this Friday, I'm reminded of a post from a few years ago called "Old Faculty Re-Orientation," a list of things I wish someone had told me when I first started teaching here:

1. Where to park. (Seriously--I was an adjunct, so I was not included in New Faculty Orientation, and the sum total of my instruction in parking was "You can park along any of the streets around campus," which led to my first-ever parking ticket, which I could not well afford on an adjunct's paycheck--which, by the way, has not increased in the entire 15 years since I've been teaching here. I'm grateful I no longer earn an adjunct's paycheck, but why are we still paying today's adjuncts the same amount per course that I earned 15 years ago?)

2. Who was sleeping with whom. (Information that would have made some department-meeting discussions much more transparent.)

3. That colleagues may become friends but they're always colleagues first, and some so-called friends will eagerly sacrifice friendship on the altar of professional advancement. (Social Relations 101 in the School of Hard Knocks.)

4. The Law of Conservation of Curmudgeonliness on Campus: the minute one career curmudgeon retires, another rises up to take his or her place. (And someday I might become that person!)

5. That some day I would be mourning the loss of a long-lived curmudgeon whose notorious name is totally unknown to my younger colleagues. (Aging 101 in the School of Hard Knocks.)

6. That the wonderfulness that sometimes happens inside the classroom can make all the outside-the-classroom awfulness worthwhile. Or, to quote a former colleague of mine: "The students! The students!" (He was a little drunk at the time so maybe you had to be there.) 

 

That was my list in 2015. What would I add today?

First, I'd love to give new faculty members the secret cell-phone number they can use to text a particular administrator, which is the key to getting that person to read and respond to email messages, but if too many people get hold of that number then the person on the other end will be buried in new text messages and thus unlikely to pay attention to mine. Besides, I object to this roundabout method of getting a response and I don't want to feed the beast. Except when I really need a response.

Second, I'd like to provide new faculty with a list of the people who can be trusted to have their backs and those who can't, but the Master Backstabber File seems to have been corrupted. Better, maybe, for newbies to find out for themselves. How can they earn a degree from the School of Hard Knocks if they never get any hard knocks?

Finally, the reason we're here--The students! The students!--is as rewarding as ever, but when we're not feeling the rewards, it's always helpful to know where to find some cake. (In the Worthington Center for Teaching Excellence. We've misplaced all the magic wands that instantly solve pedagogy problems, but we can usually provide a nice piece of cake.)

What do you wish someone had told you when you were a newbie? 

Friday poetry challenge: Excavating buried treasure

I found buried treasure in my campus office yesterday, and it would be selfish not to share. 

I've been clearing out a filing cabinet and sending piles of documents to the shredder, mostly dating from the time before electronic everything. A two-foot-tall pile of student advising folders: gone. Hard copies of old syllabi, quizzes, and handouts--gone. A bulging folder labeled bad papers and a thinner one labeled good papers--gone. Hard copies of evidence from ancient plagiarism cases--gone. What's the statute of limitations for a plagiarism case from 2006? 

I quickly leaf through the files to remove paper clips and I see lots of names I don't recognize. I remember the students in the messier plagiarism cases and even more from the good papers file, but most of the names evoke not an iota of recognition. In the bad papers file I glance at a few opening lines, but they all sound like this one: "The surroundings that go on in the world today hurt many Americans; various people have their own way of living and their own thoughts of behavior." Gold star to anyone who can identify the topic of that paper. 

But hidden among the unmemorable and outdated files are a few items I can't discard. Years ago a student illustrated a handout introducing Baudrillard to literature classes, back when discussing Baudrillard was a thing, and while I haven't used the handout in years and I'll certainly never use it again, I'm keeping the student's drawing. 

And I'm keeping a paper that served as an excellent example of the Bumper-Sticker Essay--a feast of vague generalizations supported only by slogans from the NRA. I love the fact that it repeatedly refers to guns as "utensils," which makes me wonder whether I ought to stash a Luger in the kitchen amongst the spatulas.

I've set aside for further consideration a folder full of old transparencies for overhead projectors, including the ones I used in the teaching demonstration that won me this job. Mingling within the same crowded folder are a photograph of three space aliens from some cheesy B-movie, a detailed portrayal of the Great Chain of Being, a drawing of Abe Lincoln's top hat, and a photo of Charles Whittlesey, a noted geologist who surveyed the Indian Mounds in Marietta in 1837 (and also a distant relative of my mother). I don't know what to make of these oddities but I can't let them go without a thought.

The treasure I can finally share is an email from a student defending his decision to cheat in my class more than 20 years ago. I think this was in Postcolonial Literature Survey, back when I was still giving multiple-choice reading quizzes--five simple questions that anyone who had done the reading could easily answer. On the first quiz I thought a particular student had looked at a classmate's answers, so for the next quiz I made three versions. Sure enough, this student's responses were incorrect for his version of the quiz but correct for his classmate's version. I sent him a very brief email suggesting a meeting, and in response he sent me a screed two and a half pages long, a classic of defensive rhetoric. Here are a few excerpts, with distinctive syntax and spelling retained:

Here's the deal. I did not do my reading for this week. When we took the quiz, I was trying to answer to the questions until the girl sitting in front of me raised her quiz to check on her answers....This is when I decided to write down the answers she had on her paper thinking I might have a better chance to not get a zero....

Just like most students (I presume), I from time to time might have used the homework of somebody else before class to turn in one of mine. But I don't think this is dishonesty because most students do the same....

Now as for possibility that this behavior might be a usual habit for me, I would just like to let you know that I always sit in the front row when I'm in class (this semester, your class being the expection because I came late the first day).....

I'm an honest person and I don't believe in getting out of college with a degree without being able to show some degree in professiency in the subjects I studied as a major, minor or else. I'm ready to take any test you would like me to do in any subject I took so far to attest this.

If you see I did this regretable act for this quiz, it's for the following reasons: first of all in my opinion, this is just a quiz. Second, as I told you, I don't care too much about this subject I'm taking because hopefully, it will never help me to an important degree for any of my possible future careers....

I have high respect for the  subject you are teaching but I don't see a direct connection for me in it when it comes to giving me a job in the future....

[Deleted long paragraph about how hard the student had to work to get to college.] 

I regret this incident happening because now at least you will not see that and it's just as if all my efforts where waisted. And for what???? A quiz! 5 questions not even important in the sence that they don't even require any critical thinking, any analysis or anything related to the use of our brains to solve, create or investigate. The only think I needed to do was to read the book!!!!!!!!! I did not have time to do this and I sincerely regret not doing so. I thought about guessing the answers (actually you can see that on the first question) but I was like "Hell! this is not a big deal...it's just a quiz and this is not very important stuff!"....

I hope this will not have any direct consequences on my scholarships because I can not afford the tuition fees. (I'm almost laughing about it because that would be really odd and funny to loose all that work for something this insignificant for me)....

And on it goes.

The student was right about a few things. It's true that the quiz required no critical thinking, and that's one reason I moved away from multiple-choice reading quizzes and started instead giving questions requiring some analysis. It's also true that all he had to do was read the book, but that would have taken more time than writing a lengthy email defending his right to cheat.

What ever happened to this student? No idea. The name means nothing to me now, but he was perfectly suited to any career requiring the construction of irate screeds--a skill AI may have made obsolete. 

Just like me! 

So many obsolete files sent to the shredder! What will be left of me when my office is empty?

"I've piles
of files
to shred,"
I said,
a mound
I'm bound
to toss--
no loss!
I'll take
a break
to read
a screed--
a mess
express-
ing heat.
(The deets
long gone.
Doggone!)
I'll trash
this stash
of stuff,
enough
to force
a horse
to choke--
no joke!
And then
I'll pen
a note.
I quote:
"Retired."
Inspired?
Agree
with me:
attempt
to empt-
y drawers.
No more
to say.
Away
I'll wend.
(The end.)

That sudden abrupt stop seems appropriate for a career heading inexorably toward the exit, but I'd love to see some more poetry on my way out the door. Who will sling some rhymes?    

 

Just a tiny sampling of the treasures I've amassed.

 

Writing outside the barn--er, box

My favorite Writing Wednesday moment of the summer occurred when a serious history scholar explained that she'd been searching a database to find authentic Viking names to christen a fictional herd of cows. As one does.

On this final Writing Wednesday of the summer and probably of my career, I've been looking back at what these scribbling scholars have accomplished over the years. Colleagues have worked on scholarly books and articles, polished essays, massaged data, and contributed their expertise to various branches of the scholarly community. I've seen the names of my Writing Wednesday colleagues mentioned in the acknowledgments of published books and articles, and I've justified the existence of the group by convincing the Provost that meeting in a room to write for one morning each week builds our influence as scholars. And the Provost has shown appreciation by treating us to lunch at the end of the summer--which would be today.

But some of us have also worked on less scholarly projects during this time. Of the three articles I polished and submitted earlier this summer, only one was strictly scholarly; the other two were a bit of memoir and a humor piece. I've reached the point in my academic career when I have nothing more to prove to the scholarly community, so why not attempt to extend my influence outside the academy?

And I'm not the only one thinking that way. One of my colleagues this summer has spent his Writing Wednesday time polishing mini-essays for his Substack newsletter, which I highly recommend (click here).  David is an expert on religion, history, music, and social justice, all of which appear in his latest post, which movingly describes his recent visit to the southern border and the people who sacrifice to serve the needs of border-crossers.

Another colleague, the one seeking Viking names for cows, has been writing a series of romantasy novellas involving nuns and barbarians on a magical island (click here for info). She publishes under an assumed name because she's not eager for students to stumble upon her spicy texts, but exercising creativity this way fills her with the kind of joy so rarely inspired by scholarly writing. It's been fun to watch my colleagues follow their own paths toward different kinds of influence.

And what am I working on now? Well, my retirement shindig has been scheduled for the Friday of Homecoming weekend, and I've been asked to give a talk that appears on the Homecoming schedule as "Bev Hogue's Best Lecture." The pressure's on! What if I instead deliver my second-best lecture? How would anyone even know? So I've got some work to do, distilling a lifetime of scholarly wisdom into a lecture that can appeal to whoever happens to wander in during Homecoming. 

These days it seems everyone's greatest ambition is to be an influencer, but even we who sit in a campus classroom and write for hours at a time all summer long can wield influence in our own quiet way. We may not get millions of views on TikTok, but we still use our skill and creativity to make a mark on the world, one article or Substack or Viking cow at a time.

A birthday wish: more dullness, less drama

Would a grown man feel silly carrying a Happy Birthday balloon around a hospital all morning long? If he did, he didn't admit it. 

Yes, my son celebrated his birthday with chemotherapy--not exactly the top item on his wish list but he'll take it. Hospital staff gave him a birthday balloon at his first appointment, and everywhere he went for the rest of the day total strangers smiled and wished him a happy birthday. 

We had a little time to kill in Columbus afterward so I drove us up to Belle's Bread, a Japanese-owned French bakery known for its curry donuts. I bought some baked goods to take home and then my son wandered into the nearby Asian market and looked with longing at the sushi selection, knowing that raw fish is not a good choice for a guy with a compromised immune system. I remember the first time I ate sushi again after finishing six months of cancer treatment. There's nothing better than that long-delayed first bite--but it'll be a while before he tastes it. 

He stayed the night in Columbus so he can get more chemo today, so I was a long way down the highway before the big event: our daughter and son-in-law drove to Columbus to take our son out to dinner with his nieces and nephew. Chemo can make things taste horrible, dull the appetite, make swallowing painful, and even inspire vomiting, but this time he was able to enjoy a meal without too much drama.  

It wasn't a normal birthday but this hasn't been a normal year. My mother used to insist that normal is just a setting on your dryer, but after four full months of cancer treatments, we're really hoping that next year's birthday will involve more fun and less drama, more cake and fewer needles and nasty chemicals that make swallowing painful. Maybe it could even be a little, dare we say it, dull. Enough with the drama already! (But a few balloons wouldn't hurt.)