Bigger on the inside

As much as I hate the thought of packing up all my books and saying goodbye to my beautiful big windows and sage-green walls, I'm getting ready to move to a new office. My three-year term in the Worthington Center is coming to a close so at some point this summer I'll invite all my friends to a moving party so we can shift all my stuff across campus.


My new office is in an older building--built the year I was born, so I wouldn't call it decrepit. Seasoned, yes; a bit eccentric in spots, certainly; but not exactly an antique. The best office available is oddly shaped: taller than it is wide, with a window set so high in the wall that you'd have to climb up the bookshelves to get a good look out, and then you'd just see the feet of passersby. It's a basement office, but it's in a great neighborhood, surrounded by friendly and interesting people.

To make the room less cramped and dungeon-like, I'll paint the walls a sunshiny shade, bring in a colorful rug, and get rid of any excess furniture. (Four filing cabinets? Who needs four filing cabinets?) I'd like to ask the physical plant to blast out a big part of the outer wall, shove the dirt to the side, and install a walk-out porch--or wait, the ceiling is surely high enough to allow the installation of a loft!

I'm dreaming, of course--but wouldn't it be great to find a way to make my office bigger on the inside than it is on the outside? Sort of like a Tardis--which would also simplify the task of moving all those books. Where's Doctor Who when I need him?

News of the world

This morning I saw the first trilliums of the season. Also Dutchman's Breeches. Also kingfishers, which come out of hiding only when I'm not carrying a camera. (My question: how do they know?)

I walked out early and found the road near the creek dotted with dead frogs plus, for variety, a dead spider big enough to qualify as roadkill. Also a spotted slug the size of Schenectady. Experts predict a banner year for all the creepy-crawlies, thanks to a warm, wet winter and early spring.

And speaking of creepy-crawlies: what's spotted like a brown spotted slug but much skinnier and moves like a tiny snake? Don't know? Neither do I, but whatever it was, it was crawling across my road toward the creek. Some sort of legless lizard or a tiny baby snake of a species I don't recognize? Just when I think I've figured out what sorts of creatures share my environment, along comes something I've never seen before.

Next time I'm taking the camera. But don't bother warning the kingfishers because I'm sure they already know.

The picture of health

It's been weeks now but I'm still startled every time I open the college's web site and see my own face smiling back at me. Who is that woman and what is she grinning about? The photo is attached to a story about my recent teaching prize, but the photo was actually taken in spring of 2009 to illustrate a different story about cross-disciplinary learning. I generally dislike photos of myself but I like this one because it makes me look like I'm in on a very happy secret.

I did have a secret in spring of 2009--a secret so deep even I didn't know it. When this photo was taken, I was just weeks away from being diagnosed with stage 3 endometrial cancer. I may look like the picture of health, but deep down inside I'm being eaten alive by a pestilent scourge of out-of-control cells. Chances are good that I was in pain when this photo was taken, but I had grown accustomed to dismissing my pain. "Just a natural part of the aging process," they told me. "At your age, you may as well tough it out until menopause."

I'm glad I finally found a doctor who would take my pain seriously and unearth that hidden secret, but I still wonder: how could I have looked so healthy when I was so very very sick? This is the face of cancer--I just didn't know it at the time. 

In the glomming

I found out today that I've been using the word glom incorrectly--maybe. I would have to go back to campus to find out for sure, but I'm trying to avoid campus not because I'm unfriendly but because of what I'm calling the sabbatical effect. If I were on campus every day, all the gossip and negative vibes and bad karma and generally icky gunk that grows in the darker corners of academe would waft my way gradually, a bit at a time, but now that I'm visiting campus rarely, all that gunk gloms onto me all at once in a big goopy lump.

See that? I used glom onto as if I were a magnet and all that campus gunk were iron, or as if I were a spoon sliding through a pot of honey. I just can't stop all that stuff from sticking to me.

But that's wrong, or it may be wrong, depending on what dictionary you look at. Dictionary.com suggests that the word springs from the Scots glaum or glahm "to snatch at" or "to steal."  (No relation to gloaming, which comes to us from Old English glom meaning twilight.)

All the definitions I found allow glom to be used alone transitively meaning to steal, to grab or catch, even (colloquially) to arrest. The Dictionary of American Slang offers the following sentence: "He gloms just about everything he needs."

I don't know about you, but if I wanted to snatch a word to use in that sort of sentence, I would never glom glom. (Except I just did it. Doesn't it sound odd?) But perhaps glom agglomerates different meanings when it becomes glom onto.

Um, no. Here is the full entry:

glom onto: to take hold or possession of: He wanted to glom onto some of that money.

Sure, but if our nameless hero succeeds in snatching some cash, does the money glom onto him? If I accumulate campus gunk, does it glom onto me or do I glom onto it?

I suppose the OED would provide enlightenment, but I would have to venture out and drive to campus and use the online OED database, which I can't access from home. The very thought of driving out in the gloaming to explore the roots of glom makes me gloomy--but does gloom glom onto me? I wish I knew.

Book-order blues

Book order deadlines are no respecter of sabbaticals, so here I sit searching for a reader for my fall freshman composition class. Easy, right? The options are endless, and creating a custom reader gets easier all the time (although no less expensive). So what's my problem?

My fall section of freshman composition is a learning community linked with an introductory biology class, so I'll need to introduce students to two different citation styles AND I need very focused readings. No problem finding essays offering a variety of perspectives on, say, biofuels, but where do I find really cutting-edge readings on photosynthesis?

I've found a number of anthologies on contemporary issues in biology, some published as recently as 1981 (!) and some priced under $120 (for a paperback), except for the one that lists the hardback price at $139.99 and the paperback at $912.18. (Surely that's a typo, right? Who pays close to a thousand dollars for a paperback book?)

Maybe it's time to explore a custom reader. The last custom reader I ordered was a disaster--late, incomplete, and outrageously expensive (with no secondary market, so no buybacks)--but that was before the online era. Today's it's a breeze to assemble a custom reader: just click to select essays, study questions, rhetorical apparatus. It's like online shopping: before you know it, your virtual shopping cart bulges with great deals that add up to $912.18. (Maybe that's not a typo....)

For years I've wondered what it would be like to teach a composition class with no reader at all, relying entirely on readings available online or (drum roll, please) in the library. Maybe this would be a good time to find out--from others who have tried it. A little help?

Argh! Now it turns out custom readers have to be ordered in quantities higher than the course cap (18). What next?

Time to crash the peeper party

The raucous party ran on past midnight last night so I couldn't quite believe it when I heard the first shrill suggestion that it might begin again before dawn. After all that racket last night, I thought, they can't possibly have any energy left to start partying again at 5:57 a.m. But they do and they did.

I'm not sure how long this party has been going on, but I know this is the first time since we moved to the woods that the weather has been warm enough this early in the season to allow open windows all night long. Probably the party has been cranked up full blast every year at this time but we slept right through it. This spring, though, we can't ignore the mating call of the frog.

What kind of frog? I wish I could tell you. I know three things about them: they are abundant, persistent, and very, very loud.

I also know that the insistent spring call comes from male frogs hoping to attract mates, who are hopelessly attracted to the piercing peeps. If you stood in a singles bar and honked an air horn over and over all night long you wouldn't expect to find women lining up to have your babies, but apparently frogs think differently. If they think at all.

I think I'd like to see the creatures that have been disturbing the peace for the past week, so I spent an hour or so tromping around the woods along our creek. I saw plenty of signs of spring--daffodils and forsythia blooming, towhees in the trees and a great blue heron flying overhead, green buds on the trees and green shoots popping up in the woods, and up near the house more towhees and bluejays and Carolina wrens and a lone cowbird poking its head out from behind a feeder, but I didn't see a single frog.

Judging by the sound, we could have a veritable Mormon Tabernacle Choir of frogs singing their fool heads off out there, but during the day they may as well be invisible. Maybe I need to do my frog-hunting while the party is in full swing. I've never received an invitation, but I intend to crash this peeping party--as soon as I find a reliable flashlight.

Springtime, green slime

You wake up on a lazy Saturday to find the weather warm, sunny, and springlike, and while a nagging voice in the back of the mind whines, "Don't enjoy it! You can't have weather this nice so early in the year without paying for it down the road!", your pale, pasty, northern winter skin begs to be taken outside into the sunshine.

So you head for the deck to sit with your feet up and read your newspaper to the sound of birds in the trees heralding spring, except all the deck furniture looks as if it's been living in the bottom of an aquarium that hasn't been cleaned in a decade. What is that green slime? Algae? It coats the table and chairs, discolors the shady parts of the deck and even the siding. Who wants to sit on green slime?

So you fetch a bucket and a pile of rags and some Pine-Sol and you start scrubbing, shoving furniture around and turning it over to get to the really yucky spots, and before you know it sweat pours down your face and neck and back and combines with Pine-Sol to produce a vile odor that sticks with you, repelling all living beings that come close enough to sniff it, but the hard work pays off and in less time than it takes to wallpaper the Parthenon the deck and its furniture are sparkling clean.

You have vanquished the green slime! You deserve a rousing round of applause, but what you really want is a chance to sit in the sun, put your feet up, and welcome spring.

As soon as everything dries off.

Swamp fever

At first glance, the swamp looks useless. You can't plow it, fence it, or build on it, and it's likely to breed mosquitoes and other pests--in fact, early settlers unaware of the mosquito's role in the spread of malaria believed the swamp air alone caused disease. This fear of the "miasma" caused settlers to either avoid swamps altogether or drain them dry.

Some years ago we lived in the middle of what was once northwest Ohio's Great Black Swamp, long drained to make room for corn, wheat, and soybeans--and roads, houses, schools, and factories. You could live there a long time without ever thinking about the swamp, but every once in a while the land remembers its origins. In wet seasons, crawdads colonized the low spots on our lawn and waterfowl dabbled in the ditch. Once I found one of our foster children throwing stones at a heron. "It's just a bird," he said.

We saw many "just a birds" today on a visit to Killbuck Marsh, Ohio's largest inland marsh and a popular stopping-over point for migrating waterfowl. We were chasing rumors of sandhill cranes but saw instead great blue herons, Canada geese, some ducks too distant to be reliably identified, and red-winged blackbirds by the thousands. At one point we were looking through a dense tangle of waterlogged undergrowth when a mass of brilliant white floated into view: a pair of swans.

 We saw signs warning hunters not to shoot the swans, but the most interesting sign we saw was being eaten by a tree. We mark our territory, post our signs, and build our fences, but sometimes nature has the last word.

 

The eagles have landed

I'm sitting in my car in the parking lot of a church waiting for my husband to get done with choir practice so we can drive a few hours north to visit family, but I've got my laptop in the car AND I just got some slightly better photos of the resident eagles this morning AND I've found a very fast wi-fi hotspot nearby AND it's unsecured, so why not upload some photos?

Some days I just love technology.

This is the only photo that shows both birds. They were sitting back-to-back above the river, one looking upstream and one looking downstream.

Even sabbaticophiles need a break

What does Spring Break mean to the prof who's on sabbatical?

It means there's no point in going to campus because everyone I'd like to see is either off gallivanting somewhere interesting or, more likely, hunkering down at home with a pile of midterms to grade. I'm tempted to call them all up and sing the "I'm on sabbatical and you're not!" song, but that would be wrong.

Really wrong.

So don't even think about it.

Maybe I'll just stand outside their windows and hum it softly.

For the sabbaticaler (sabbaticalizer? sabbaticalitioner? sabbaticationist?), Spring Break resembles the rest of the semester, only lonelier because of the aforementioned absent colleagues. I could just stay home and continue working on my research project, which, frankly, has gotten a little unwieldy. It's time to close the books on reading and note-taking and start doing some serious writing.

First, though, I think I'll take a break. Tomorrow I'll drive up to my daughter and son-in-law's house to spend a few days helping my daughter celebrate her grad-school Spring Break, although I wish I'd reminded her earlier that the word "Break" is strictly metaphorical and does not mandate the breaking of limbs or the spraining of ankles. Can a musical grad student go canoeing on crutches? We're about to find out!

If nothing else, we can spend some time writing new verses to the "I'm on sabbatical and you're not!" song. One of these days I may even get the courage to sing it.

Stumbling sentences, dancing prose

Quick! Who wrote this:

"Mamma," John began slowly, "it hurts me to see you so troubled over my going away; but I feel that I must go. I'm stagnating here. This indolent atmosphere will stifle every bit of ambition that's in me....I want to do something worthy of a strong man. I have done nothing so far but look to you and papa for everything. Let me learn to strive and think--in short, be a man."

And how about this:

"High John de Conquer came to be a man, and a mighty man at that. But he was not a natural man in the beginning. First off, he was a whisper, a will to hope, a wish to find something worthy of laughter and song. Then the whisper put on flesh. His footsteps sounded across the world in a low but musical rhythm as if the world he walked on was a singing-drum."

The second passage might be more recognizable: the lyrical language, careful control of rhythm, and love for African American folklore point clearly to Zora Neale Hurston, who wrote this description in "High John De Conquer" (1943).

But what about the first passage? Stilted dialogue, melodramatic pauses, lack of attention to rhythm and sound--just try saying out loud "This indolent atmosphere will stifle every bit of ambition that's in me." It sounds like a very bad soap opera, but no: it comes from "John Redding Goes to Sea," a short story written in 1921 by Zora Neale Hurston.

"John Redding" is a very odd short story that follows the nineteenth-century convention requiring the hero to speak in standard English even if everyone around him speaks in dialect. John's mother says, "Ah nevah wuz happy an' nevah specks tuh be," and his father says things like "we mus' let John hoe his own row. If it's travlin' twon't be foh long. He'll come back to us bettah than when he went off. What do you say, son?"

What John says is the first passage above, and it's just as ridiculous in context as out.


The remarkable thing here is not so much that Hurston was capable of writing bad sentences, but that she could so completely leave behind the stilted sentiments of John Redding's speech as she gained control over rhythm and sound. "High John De Conquer" is a minor work, loosely structured and lacking the impact of frequently anthologized short stories like "Sweat" and "The Gilded Six-Bits," but look at this sentence: "First off, he was a whisper, a will to hope, a wish to find something worthy of laughter and song." The sibilants shuffle through the sentence while the Ws carry us forward in a rhythm that feels loose but controlled. You can't pronounce that sentence quickly.

You can't say John Redding's sentences quickly either, but that's because they're constructed for the eye rather than the tongue. No one outside of melodrama ever said "Let me learn to strive and think--in short, be a man," but it's easy to imagine a front-porch storyteller leaning forward in a rocking chair to say, "High John de Conquer came to be a man, and a mighty man at that. But he was not a natural man in the beginning."

Zora Neale Hurston came to be a writer, and a mighty writer at that, but these passages suggest that she had to work really hard to develop the style that sounds so natural. But here's the question: how did she make it look so easy?

When did Ohio become a verb?

Sometimes the best part of voting is getting the little sticker. This year, though, the sticker is nearly as incomprehensible as the ballot.

If you squint, you can just about make that the red Ohio looks sort of vaguely like a lopsided angular warped heart, which makes this "I Heart Voting." But if your eyes are worn out from trying to make sense of the ballot, the sticker looks like "I Ohio Voting," which makes sense as long as Ohio is a verb, or "I Lopsided Angular Warped Heart Voting," which makes no sense at all.

Who came up with this idea? Exhaustive research (of the first Google entry that popped up) reveals that this sticker design was the result of a statewide contest, earning 38 percent of the vote--and the first runner-up received 37 percent (see all the contenders here). The Ohio Secretary of State thinks all Ohioans should wear the sticker as a "badge of honor," but you'll notice he didn't call it a badge of grammar or logic or comprehensibility.

But okay: I'll wear my sticker as a badge of honor even if today I didn't particularly heart voting. This election season has been making my heart feel squeezed and stomped on and warped into lopsided shapes, and if that's what the sticker is trying to say, I'm all for it.

The search of my nightmares

In my dream I'm serving on a search committee trying to sort through 30,000 applicant files. Thirty thousand! I've served on some difficult searches but never one that reached nightmare proportions.

Everyone complains about sorting through hundreds of applicant files, but trust me: it's better to have too many applicants than too few. I've served on both kinds of searches and there's nothing more disheartening than an applicant pool too shallow to drown a doubt.

Over the past decade, I've served on search committees almost every year, some inside my department and some outside. When I look around campus and consider the people I've had a hand in hiring, I feel pretty good: I've hired some fun and intelligent and amazing people and only one outright disaster, and Dr. Disaster has long since left the building.  

What stands out from all those searches?

Worst question from an applicant: "How often do you get to Cleveland to go clubbing?" (Um, it's three hours away....are you sure you want to live in Appalachia?)

Second-worst question from an applicant: "How much did you pay for your house?" (Go ahead and ask me about housing prices in the area, but my house? Are you kidding me?)

Worst question I received while being interviewed by a member of the search committee that hired me: "Do you believe in Satan? Because [name redacted] is the spawn of Satan!"

Worst response from an applicant I was interviewing: "I don't know if you know anything about American Literature, but...."

Worst weather-related search committee disaster: the finalist arrives in town just before the blizzard strikes, but only one member of the search committee can get to campus (on foot!) for the interview because the roads are closed and the rest of us are hopelessly snowed in. By the time the roads clear, the applicant has left town.

Worst dining behavior by an applicant: while eating a meal at a very nice restaurant, the applicant picks up the linen napkin, blows her nose on it, and then smooths the napkin down in her lap, only to repeat the process multiple times throughout the meal.  

Second-worst dining behavior: talking interminably about Foucault while the restaurant is emptying out because everyone wants to get home to watch the Superbowl.

Longest time served on a search committee: two and a half years--and the result was Dr. Disaster.

Which is worse, hiring the wrong person or hiring no one? I served on a search committee that resulted in no hire, which is generally referred to as a "failed" search. But honestly: would you prefer that we hired another Dr. Disaster? Sometimes the best thing to do is call it a day and go to Plan B.

And if Plan B attracts 30,000 applicants--please don't appoint me to the search committee!

Like a rolling stone

Moss is easy.
Eagles are hard.

Moss sits there like a bump on a log, a bright patch of green in a the drab winter woods.

Eagles soar--you never know where--and they blend with the trees where they perch.

You can walk right up to patch of moss and it'll sit there and pose as long as you like.

Just try sneaking up on an eagle. They don't call 'em "eagle eyes" for nothing.

I've seen this pair of eagles perched on trees along the Muskingum not five miles from my house twice now in the past week, but I didn't have the camera with me. Today I was determined to get a good shot.

First I had to find the eagles. We found one just about where we'd seen it this morning, but we were driving on a busy state highway and the eagle was at the top of a tree on the other side of the river. Quick--make a U-turn and park sort of illegally on a side road, then dash across traffic to squeeze into the thin space between the road's edge and the guardrail to get a distant blurry photo.

How to get closer? Stumble down the slope into a field, pass a passel of "No Trespassing" signs, get right down on the muddy bank that was underwater just last week and lift the camera just as the eagle spreads its wings to soar downstream. It's a wonder to watch--but the photos show a mere speck of white above the brown river.

Back in the car. Drive downstream and find the eagle perched on another tree. Pull off on the shoulder, lean on the guardrail, and lift the camera only to see the eagle take off upstream again.

The sight of that eagle swooping above the river will feed my spirit for days to come, but the photos? Meh. Too distant for clarity, too mobile for good composition. If I could only get the eagles to sit still like a bump on a log long enough to let me walk right up and focus, I might get a good shot.


But what would you call an eagle that acted like moss? It certainly wouldn't be an eagle.

Singing the deluge blues

A few years ago a newly hired colleague asked, "Does it rain in Marietta all the time?"

"No," I said. "Only when you're here."

Sad but true. That poor guy--he came from out of state and taught for us during a highly unusual year year in which we endured two hundred-year floods three months apart. He lived in a lovely house that was usually located near the river and only occasionally in the river. He was here just one year, but I'm sure he tells all his friends that it always rains in southeastern Ohio.

This winter feels like a replay of that wet season. Today we're under a tornado watch and a flash flood advisory, but I took advantage of the one brief hour of sunshine between downpours to visit the Ohio River Islands National Wildlife Refuge and see what I could see.

The answer is: not much. It was the wrong time of day and the wrong season of the year to see many birds, although the chickadees were out in force and I saw a few eastern bluebirds. The walk along the river was soothing, though, and the silence helped me clear my brain. No one was out fishing or birding or hiking or boating, which was probably wise given the weather.

I drove home through a deluge that decreased visibility pretty close to zero, and now the sky is shifting among ominous shades of gray. Rain again? All the time.

Fumbling in memory's closet

It doesn't matter how strenuously I'm working out during my exercise class: when the CD gets to "Eye of the Tiger," I smile, and I may even laugh if my lungs aren't otherwise occupied. I used to associate the song with high school football games, but then one of the students on the California Lit trip dreamed up (literally) entirely new lyrics, and then when she reported the dream (and the lyrics) to the rest of us, we laughed.

Here's the thing: I don't even remember the lyrics or which student dreamed them up. All I remember is the flash of joy the lyrics brought to the group, and it's that joy the song recovers for me.

A similar thing happened this morning when I heard the familiar doot-doot-doot-do-DO-do-do-doot-doot rhythm coming through the speakers and suddenly I was transported back to a junior-high math class in which a friend was trying to teach me the steps to the Hustle. I couldn't do it then and wouldn't want to try now, but "The Hustle" inevitably takes me back to that moment when a cheerleader stepped outside her usual social stratum and tried to teach me to dance. (In math class. Don't even ask.)

Now that cheerleader sat in front of me in that class for most of the year, which is how we got to be good enough friends so that she would buy me a Pet Rock for my birthday, and then when she was killed in a car wreck a few months later, I skipped classes so I could go to the funeral. I still have the Pet Rock (in its original box so maybe it's worth something, but the box is a bit battered so maybe not). The rock's name is Marvin.

The cheerleader's name? No idea. "The Hustle" brings her face back to me as clearly as if we were still standing in Miss Fike's algebra class, but her name has fallen into that black hole hidden in the darkest corner of memory's closet.

Music provides a powerful key to that closet, bringing to light scenes that have been lurking in the shadows unnoticed for years, but it also reveals the existence of the black hole. Who knows what's down there? For all I know, my old cheerleader friend is in that undiscovered country singing comical new lyrics to "Eye of the Tiger."

A strictly gnome-free vessel

A few years ago when one of my colleagues learned he would be receiving our top teaching prize, he announced the news to his friends thus: "We're gettin' a boat!"

When people ask me what I'll do with the prize, I'm generally a little more subdued, mumbling about deferred maintenance and new ceiling tiles and the crack across my front porch slab. But today I have to shout a little bit because I just made the final payment on a hospital bill I've been nibbling away at since 2009. That's right: we may not be gettin' a boat, but we're gettin' a bill paid off! A bill that has been sitting on my shoulders like a malicious gnome constantly reminding me of the pain and distress associated with surgery and chemotherapy and radiation and all the other horrors of that wretched time. But thanks to my teaching prize, I have paid the bill and banished the gnome. Woo-hoo!

How shall I celebrate? By gettin' a boat!

Not a great big speedboat for cruising the river or a clunky catamaran or a fishing boat or even a rowboat. I realized last week that what I needed to get closer to those eagles was a nice slow quiet canoe. We live a mile from a scenic river and we have a roof rack suitable for hauling a canoe--it wouldn't even have to be brand-new. I'm keeping my eyes open for a used canoe for two--woo-hoo! We're gettin' a boat!

There's only one rule: no gnomes allowed.

Non-complaint noncompliance

Cold wind whipped and whistled around the church this evening and the temperature inside was not much warmer--45 degrees. Apparently no one informed the programmable thermostat that we might want some warmth at the Ash Wednesday service.

Not that I am complaining. Much. I keep promising myself that I'll try to give up complaining for Lent but before you know it I'm complaining about how difficult it is to stop complaining. I'm tired of hearing myself gripe (she griped). Please, someone, make it stop!

I'll start by not complaining about how cold it was in church. Maybe shivering in a freezing sanctuary is the right way to start the season of self-denial. At least I had a warm coat! With a hood! And gloves! And a blanket! And besides, all that shivering led some interesting vibrato to the singing and extra texture to the ashes marking my forehead.

But I'm not complaining! Merely reporting the facts as I see them, objectively and without rancor. At least that's what I'm telling myself. When I cross the line from reporting to complaining, I'm sure someone will tell me.

First, though, tell me this: is it technically considered a complaint if I complain that not complaining is my cross to bear?

A no-brainer--for now

Okay ladies, here's a quiz:

You've put it off long enough, but it's time to schedule that mammogram! Fortunately, two excellent local medical facilities are competing for your business, both accepting your health insurance. How do you decide where to go?

Which would you prefer to hear:
A. "Who's next?"
B. "So good to see you again. Come right back here and make yourself comfortable."

You're going to have to put on one of those horrible hospital gowns, but where would you prefer to sit while wearing it:
A. In a drafty corridor where busy people dressed in professional attire keep passing by and trying not to notice that you're sitting there in a flimsy pastel garment that reveals more flesh than you normally show in public.
B. In a private room in the presence of the technician--and no one else.

It's time to step up to the big bad machine--and maybe both medical facilities use the same big bad machine, but the people who run them have different skill sets. Which technician would you rather have manhandling your tender girly parts:
A. The highly efficient technician who causes so much pain you wonder whether she trained by repeatedly slamming a garage door down on a grapefruit.
B. The slow and gentle technician who has learned the secret of squeezing grapefruits without making them burst, who somehow manages to squash your breasts without causing more than a modicum of discomfort.

I don't know about you, but I'm choosing B every time; in fact, the only people I can imagine choosing A are those who are unaware that other options exist. Yes, it is possible to get a pain-free mammogram!

For now.

The slow and gentle technician told me this morning that the B practice has been purchased by medical facility A, but it's too early to know what that will mean for the future. Will the B people teach the A people how to make mammograms less unpleasant? Or will the force of the larger A facility lead inevitably to a pervasive mediocrity of service?

Only time will tell--but as long as it makes a real difference, I'm choosing B for better breast care.

Feathered tales

Where I saw random scattered feathers, my colleague saw a story: "This looks like an owl's feather caught on this thorn, but down here I see dark bars, and look at these rusty-brown spots. Could be a Cooper's Hawk, but it looks like the predator became prey."

She followed the trail of feathers to a tree and then looked up and pointed. "See the feathers caught on that branch? The owl sat up there and tore the hawk to pieces."

This is the advantage of going out bird-watching with an expert: she sees what the birds are doing even when they're not actually present.

In just a few hours at two local wetlands today we saw a host of cormorants, great blue herons, mallard ducks, hooded mergansers, kingfishers, assorted gulls and little brown birds, and one fat muskrat.

And did I mention the pair of bald eagles?

At first I had to take the eagles on faith. To the naked eye they looked like black lumps on a distant tree, and my telephoto lens just made them look like slightly larger black lumps. My colleague's high-powered binoculars rendered the lumps more birdlike, but she was certain their size and color marked them as eagles.

I was less certain until I got home and enhanced the photo. They're eagles all right--a little blurry but eagles nevertheless.

If I'd been bumbling about on my own, those black lumps in the trees would have remained black lumps--I wouldn't have looked twice or known what I was seeing. And later I wouldn't have understood the evidence of the battle of the owl and the Cooper's Hawk, nor would I have diagnosed the cause of the wedge missing from the trunk of a big dead tree. (Beavers!)

Through careful attention I'm learning to see what's happening in the woods and wetlands around me, but spending the afternoon with a real expert opened my eyes to how much I still have to learn. Binoculars are helpful only if you know where to point them and how to interpret what they reveal, how to translate scattered feathers and lumpy black blotches into a story, an image, and a truth.

Three cheers for shoes! (And other stuff)

YES that was me standing on the stage at Founders' Day last night, but I'm not sure what all the fuss was about. Probably my shoes. In my expert opinion as an arbiter of fashion, I maintain that it doesn't matter what you wear under all your academic regalia or what color your robe is or whether you've got blue velvet chevrons on the sleeves or brown and orange satin lining the hood or a wee gold tassel on your silly velvet hat--no, none of that matters as long as you're wearing super-cute shoes. And if your shoes are as cute as mine were last night,  your colleagues just won't be able to hold back the applause.

Of course, they may have had something else to clap about, like that prize thing. You know, that little teaching award. No big deal. Well okay, maybe it's sort of a big deal. And if the college press release wants to call it the "highest honor of the evening," who am I to quibble? All I can do is express my gratitude to everyone who made this honor possible (well, not everyone or we'd be here all night): Thank you for the applause. Thank you for your confidence in me. Thank you for the $support$. 

And thank you for giving me a great excuse to step out in my super-cute shoes.

Mostly true (unless it isn't)

In "Facts are Stupid," Dan Kois examines the ongoing debate about truth vs. fact in creative nonfiction, making a compelling case for the need for trust between author and reader. I can't tell you exactly how he twists the knife in your gut at the end; you'll just have to read it for yourself (here). But I will raise the question: are readers more likely to trust a writer who reveals his inaccuracies or one who denies them?

Of course there's an important distinction between outright untruth and exaggeration for comic effect--or at least I hope there is. (But what if that's a specious claim? What if the toaster manual I recently ridiculed was only 20 pages long instead of 40? Will revealing that inaccuracy destroy my readers' trust?) "Some inaccuracies are good for business," claims the Foundling Father in The America Play by Suzan-Lori Parks: "Take the stovepipe hat! Never really worn indoors but people dont like their Lincoln hatless."

Truth hurts--but so does falsehood. My commitment to telling the truth may have initially arisen from an innate inability to lie convincingly. I won't claim that I cannot tell a lie, but I know that any lie I tell will make my head hurt and my heart race, and I'm convinced that a lie will telegraph its falsehood as if in blinking neon lights on my forehead. (But what if I'm lying right now about my inadequacy as a liar? How would you know?)

So while I'm pretty good at telling the truth, I'm even better at not telling the whole truth. More than 20 years as a pastor's wife have trained me to bite my tongue and keep big chunks of truth to myself. I haven't mentioned publicly, for instance, the campus brouhaha that's currently making me grind my few remaining molars into dust. (Would a fact-checker challenge that statement? If I tell you that I'm missing two molars and the ones that remain are so badly cracked that my dentist keeps asking me whether I've ever fallen face-first out of a third-story window, will you believe me or assume that I'm exaggerating to win sympathy?)

Dan Kois convinces me that writing effective nonfiction requires a commitment to both truth and fact, but that commitment needn't crowd out creativity, comedy, and art. If facts alone could speak for themselves, we wouldn't need writers; we would just point out the window toward the big wide world and say, "See for yourself!" But when a nonfiction writer tosses facts out the window, that's when he ought to lose my trust.

(Unless he doesn't--and then what do I do?)   

The hard work of healing

My surgeon's eyes lit up when he examined the incision left behind by my port removal. "Wow!" he said. "That really healed up nicely!"

"Thanks," I said. "Healing nicely is one of my hidden talents. I worked really hard to get it right."

Right.

If anyone ought to be thanked, it's the surgeon--he did, after all, make that incision and stitch (and glue) it back together. All I did was lie there obliviously while I was anesthetized and afterward refrain from scratching when it itched. I'm not sure my inaction contributed much to the final outcome.

But hey, compliments are hard to come by these days, so if my surgeon insists on commending me for healing up so nicely, who am I to object? And while you're at it, go ahead and congratulate me for how splendidly I manage to keep my blood flowing, my peristalsis proceeding, my joints bending, and my toenails growing. I'm just full of hidden talents!

Welcome to Epiphany City

Yesterday morning I woke up with an epiphany, a sudden understanding about how I will frame the argument in my current writing project. This is always an exciting step in any writing project--the moment when a nebulous mass of ideas starts to crystallize around a core insight that will shape my work from this point on.

Epiphanies like that come along only after proper preparation; all the reading, thinking, talking, writing, and traveling I've been doing created the right conditions for the production of epiphanies. I'll have to work pretty hard to transform a momentary epiphany into a polished journal article, but that's what my sabbatical is for. For once, a great idea won't get shoved aside by committee work, grading, and all the petty annoyances of the academic life.

That's the magic of the sabbatical. I'm living in Epiphany City, where ideas can come out and play without fear that shopkeepers will shoo them off the sidewalk.

Final rusting place

If I found a rusted hulk of a classic muscle car plonked down in the middle of my sodden potato field, I believe I'd call it an art installation, charge admission, and open a gift shop offering colorful postcards, bronze reproductions, and silk-screened scarves plus occasional appearances by the reclusive artist, Mephisto Limpet, who would earnestly intone pretentious twaddle about "interrogating the scintillating liminal continuum linking the conception, as it were, of the virgin-soil-qua-final-resting/rusting-place with the exhaustion of the catalytic vision of mobility stopped, as it were, in its tracks by the feeble hedonistic vacuity demonstrated in the post-industrial pre-apocalyptic anti-pre-postmodernist whatness of the artifact returning, as it were, to its natural elements."

But it is not my art installation or my potato field or my rusting hulk of a classic muscle car, so all I can do when I walk past is to utter a silent homage to the Ford Fairlane meeting its final reward: may it rust, as it were, in peace.

 

In a jam

Yesterday I received hearty congratulations on a major milestone: the adoption of a new toaster. The thick multilingual manual greets me with "Congratulations on your purchase of an OSTER Toaster," as if buying a toaster merited a ticker-tape parade and a medal the size of a hubcap.

I'm not sure who needs a 40-page manual to learn how to operate a toaster (Conociendo Su Tostadora!), but I don't intend to read the whole thing. I have seen Groundhog Day, so I don't need to be reminded that it's a bad idea to use my new toaster in the bathtub--although maybe that would be a great place to use the old toaster. Nobody warned me not to!

Anyone who needs to be told repeatedly in writing to "Press the toast button if you are going to toast bread" probably shouldn't be permitted to own a toaster, especially considering the manual's stern warning that "Toasted food can be very hot." (Isn't this the whole POINT of a toaster? I mean, the reason we had to retire the old toaster was that it got out of the habit of producing heat, which transformed it into a clunky decorative item with little practical use. If the need arose I suppose I could toss it at an intruder, but what would stop the intruder from simply tossing it back? I can't keep a nonfunctional toaster clogging up the kitchen just on the off chance that I might someday want to play Toss the Toaster with a masked stranger!)

But I digress.

My new toaster has entered the Internet age: it comes equipped with directions for accessing the Oster Inspire Club, an online forum promising "Exclusive access to recipes, entertaining ideas, and exciting new products." Entertaining with a toaster? Sign me up!

A quick search for toaster-related recipes results in the luscious-sounding Toaster Petite Italian Hazelnut Chocolate Spread Puffs, but further exploration reveals that this recipe requires a toaster OVEN, which is a different animal entirely. If I had purchased an Oster Toaster Oven, Oster Inspire could inspire me to entertain a glittering assemblage of friends with Spa Pizza (prebaked pizza shells, one sliced tomato, and a dollop of goat cheese) or Meatloaf Enrobed in Mashed Potatoes. (Is this a bathrobe-themed party or what?)

For plain old toasters, though, Oster Inspire offers nothing except helpful hints about what the "bagel" button is for. (Toasting bagels. Who knew?) If I want to use my new toaster to entertain my friends, I'll have to come up with my own recipes. Whole-wheat toast with raspberry jelly, anyone? How about a nice bagel with cream cheese?

Be careful! Toasted foods can be very hot!

Sirens vs. silence

Every once in a while I wonder how much easier my life would be if I lived in town instead of out here in the sticks. Just think of it: I could have city water and sewer service instead of a cranky well and septic tank, and if I accidentally left something important at my office, I could just zip over there and grab it instead of carefully weighing the time and energy costs of driving 20 miles each way. If I lived in town I would be surrounded by people and cars instead of possums and coons, and if I needed help, I could find some pretty quickly.

I wouldn't have to walk a quarter mile to pick up my mail.

I wouldn't get stuck at home in winter weather. Instead, I would have to go to work. (Score one for living in the sticks!)

If I lived in town I wouldn't find the neighbor's cows wandering through the yard, and I wouldn't have to worry about whether my driveway might be under water after heavy rains because I wouldn't have a creek.

Right: no long walks along the water's edge to fill my ears with the sound of the creek splashing over rocks. No kingfishers swooping above the water's surface, and no great blue herons wading in the shallows where the little fishes live. No golden sunshine reflecting off the surface of the water or shining on the mottled bark of tall sycamore trees.

In town I might have many other things--convenience stores, for instance, and trick-or-treaters at Halloween--but I wouldn't have a creek. I need a creek, and I need a meadow and a piney woods and a butterfly garden and silence. In town I could listen to the sounds of sirens and passing cars, but in the sticks I hear the creek, the birds, the wind, the silence.

All things considered, I think I'll stick with the sticks.

Doing our homework

College professors of all stripes moan and groan about students' unwillingness to read, but try to organize a faculty event requiring a little reading and what happens?

Nobody shows up.

Well, usually. In the past when I've planned book discussions or teaching workshops requiring just a smidgen of advance reading, attendance has been abysmal. Apparently, faculty members don't like to do homework any more than students do.

But today was different. Since September, we've given away free copies of Arum and Roksa's Academically Adrift to close to half of the faculty on our campus, and we've talked it up at every workshop and event sponsored by the Worthington Center for Teaching Excellence. We lined up two excellent colleagues to lead the discussion and served lunch to participants--all 24 of them. That's nearly a quarter of our full-time faculty, and certainly more than we've ever attracted for a book discussion. And even more have registered to attend the discussion of the second half of the book two weeks from now.

Was it the book's controversial content that reeled in so many of my colleagues or was it the free lunch? Were they so awed by the cool bookmarks publicizing the event that they simply couldn't stay away? Who knows? But as the discussion veered today toward questions about how to motivate students to study outside of class, I wanted to ask my colleagues: what motivated you to do your homework for today's discussion? Bottle up that motivation and sell it on the open market and we'll all make a bundle.

On reading bad books

Life is too short to waste time reading bad books, and yet I sometimes find myself slogging through a book I'd really rather throw through a plate-glass window. Why?

Sometimes a bad book provides valuable context for a better book. Want to understand the convoluted logic of the Old Plantation Myth that enticed readers of popular American fiction from around 1890 to 1920? Then you're going to have to hold your nose and read Thomas Dixon's wretched novel The Leopard's Spots, full of abhorrent racist rhetoric that inspired a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. When I introduce students to the Old Plantation Myth to help them understand Charles Chesnutt's subversive short stories, I tell them, "I read Thomas Dixon so you don' t have to."

Sometimes a badly written book is a gift from a friend or colleague who is likely to ask me for a response, and I'd better read the whole thing so I can locate the bright shining moments to mention in conversation. (And if you think I'm planning to mention any titles or authors, think again.)

Sometimes a bad book is just silly enough to provide lightweight comic relief in an other wise gloomy week. Many of the self-published books sent to me by earnest strangers seeking my affirmation fall in this category, offering up mixed metaphors and sentences of such clunkiness that they make me laugh--but that doesn't mean I'll read the whole thing. If you haven't hooked me by the end of the first chapter, it goes into the recycling pile. (Sorry, self-published authors: I know there's some talent out there, but editors exist for a reason!)

Sometimes a bad book holds out the hope that it just might get a whole lot better, but by the time I realize it's a hopeless case, I'm too far in to turn back. Recently, for instance, I've received in the mail piles of unsolicited books from writers who read about my California Literature class in the Los Angeles Times and think my students would enjoy reading their work. Some of them are good and some are not half bad, but today I read a flimsy novel that is, essentially, a pale imitation of Nathanael West, and not even the mature Nathanael West who wrote The Day of the Locust but the juvenile West of The Secret Life of Balso Snell. We don't need another Nathanael West, number one, and number two, even if we needed another Nathanael West, we certainly don't need any pale imitations of Balso Snell.

But I think I'm done reading bad books for a little while at least. I would bet that the number of bad books I've read in my lifetime exceeds the total number of books most of my English majors have read. I've reached my quota; it's time for someone else to take over. Bad books, anyone? Just say the word and I'll send one on its way.

All I really want right now

...is something to drink. Water, orange juice, tea, coffee, whatever--I just really want a drink. And some breakfast. I know for a fact that there's a little leftover veggie pizza in the fridge, and that would suit me right down to my toes.

But I am under strict orders: nothing to eat or drink after midnight. How will I make it through the morning with no caffeine? I'll be a basket case by the time I get to the hospital.

Yes: it's finally port-removal day! That handy little chunk of plastic installed beneath my skin to assist in the delivery of chemotherapy drugs has got to, and good riddance!

My surgeon tells me that the port is much easier to remove than to install, but it still requires anesthesia, boo hiss. I have requested something other than propofol, which provided Michael Jackson with a dose of euphoria (and death) but only gave me vertigo so severe I couldn't turn my head without getting seasick. I have to get to the hospital two hours early (!) for a ten-minute procedure that will eat up my afternoon, and I can't eat or drink a thing until it's over.

I intend to spend my morning not thinking about all the things I'd like to eat and drink. I won't think, for instance, about orange juice, chai latte, pineapple chunks, veggie pizza, peanut butter sandwiches, or water. This is me not thinking about water. Water water water water water. Someone get me some water! It's all I really want right now!