Buckeye buzz

And this is why I planted a bottlebrush buckeye: when it's fully blooming, it's like a magnet for pollinators. Last evening it was abuzz with butterflies, hummingbird moths, and all kinds of bees. Very soothing. Very beautiful.

 

 

 

 

Grief/relief

Days after my father's memorial service, I keep waiting for that intense feeling of loss I experienced when my mother died--the sense that the world had suddenly gone dim, the nightmares about misplacing something important, the sudden urge to call her on the phone and the grief when I realized it would never happen again. 

None of this has happened since Dad's death. Even the memorial service, which was moving and very well done, left me dry-eyed. I enjoyed chatting with family and old friends, visiting places that were meaningful to me once and that I won't have any good reason to visit again, but instead of loss, I'm ashamed to find myself experiencing an immense sense of relief.

I'm relieved, of course, that his suffering is over, that the lifelong workaholic will finally have a chance to rest. But I'm also relieved that I'll no longer need to make those awkward phone calls, yelling down the phone line in hopes that he'd understand a fraction of what I was trying to say. 

I'm relieved that we won't ever again have to re-litigate every stupid thing I've ever done in my whole entire life. Once when I was a kid I lost a shoe, and for the rest of his life my father characterized me as the kind of person who's always losing things, a person no one else in my life would recognize. But the shoe-losing version of me died with Dad, and I am relieved to let her go.

Since my father died, I've been telling people that I intend to honor his death by forgetting every horrible thing he ever said or did, but it's not easy because so many of the happy times have horrible bits attached to them like leeches. Last week my brothers and I were comparing notes and realized that we had all recently vastly over-tipped a server in memory of all the times we'd had to go back into a restaurant and add to the tip after one of our father's epic public tantrums. If nothing else, his temper made us all generous tippers.

Well your father couldn't have been all bad--look how great all of you turned out! I heard this from several people last week and they're right: my father was not all bad, and toward the end of his life he was trying to be very, very good. He endowed us with an appreciation for hard work, independence, and humor, and our complicated upbringing made us resilient and self-sufficient, able to compartmentalize our feelings so we could act rationally.

So that's what I'm doing now. I've been sick for the entire month of July, still struggling with a lingering sinus infection, still getting negative results on Covid tests but feeling guilty every time I cough in public, still trying to power my way through all kinds of estate-related details even though all I really want to do is sleep. I don't have room in my life right now for loss, so I think I'll set it aside for later. Which is a huge relief.

 

Walk on the wild(ish) side

Who thought visiting Florida in July was a great idea? It's hot! And bright! And the birds I love to see here in winter are keeping cooler elsewhere. And yet we're finding a way to see some sights, in between family visits and services.

At Fort Caroline, a reconstructed fort near the site of an early settlement of French Huguenots who attempted to colonize Florida before being massacred by Spanish conquistadors, we saw crabs waging and epic battle for territory on the shores of the St. Johns River. While hiking through the dense woods to see what sort of terrain drove the Spanish to near despair so long ago, my son got whacked in the face by an errant elderberry bush. When you see elderberries so close to a French fort, it's time to look out for taunters, and sure enough there was a tiny crab in fort's moat waving its big claw as if to claim the entire territory for itself. The crab probably has more right to the place than the rest of us.

Fort Caroline, a reconstruction

Crab in the moat

Mirror world

Sea breezes

There's nothing like a sunrise walk on the beach to clear your head, especially after spending 12 hours on the road to get here. Tomorrow: Dad's memorial service. Today: fresh air and sunshine. What more could we ask for?

 

My summer phlegm-fest

I'm watching a bunch of little birds scavenging in the tall grass below the birdfeeders, their little bird bodies popping up above the grass like popcorn kernels. Some kind of sparrow but I can't tell which kind unless I get the binoculars, which are way over on the other side of the room, and I don't have the energy to reach for them because I'm sick. Not interestingly sick: no fever, no covid, no exotic diagnoses; just the usual summer sinus crud--a little coughing, a little malaise, a lot of congestion. The only thing that makes me feel better is to go out on the back deck and sit in the dry heat with the sun blazing on my back, but I can't stay out there all day, not to mention at night.

One recent night--Friday, maybe?--I got up in the wee hours for a coughing fit and came out to the living room so I wouldn't wake up the hubby (who could sleep through a freight train crashing into our bedroom, but never mind). I was sitting on the sofa and looking out the window when suddenly I saw something looking back. Raccoons! Two of them, juveniles, very interested in the plants on the front porch. They kept climbing up to look in the window but didn't seem to know what to make of what they saw, and then one of them climbed up the brick wall all the way to the porch's ceiling. How did it hold on? Clever little beasties.

They've been quite a pain this summer, knocking down birdfeeders and rooting up plants, and they're not the least bit intimidated by my husband's frequent attempts to scare them off with a slingshot or air rifle. I can coexist with the raccoons until they start eating our corn, but since we're a little behind on the gardening this summer, we've got a while to wait before we go into total war mode.

Another day I saw a different visitor on the porch--a giant leopard moth, which a friend suggested ought to be called a coloring-book moth. I love those subtle blue spots livening up the black-and-white palette. In the distance I can see that the bottlebrush buckeye is finally blooming, and my goal for tomorrow is to summon the energy to walk out there and look for hummingbird moths.

Right now, though, I'm happy to sit here and let the world come to me, but that won't work later in the week. We're leaving Thursday for a road trip to Florida for my father's memorial service, and we have an awful lot to do before we leave. Like painting the house. Well, not the whole house, but the main living areas--entry, hallways, living room, dining room, kitchen. We've been taping up woodwork for days and finally this morning we started slapping on the paint. My contributions to the project were punctuated by trips outside to sit in the sun and clear up my congestion. Tape up some woodwork, sit in the sun. Roll paint on a wall, sit in the sun. It's not the most efficient method of painting but I made it work.

Eventually we reached the point where all the remaining sections required either more manual dexterity or longer arms than I've ever possessed, so I wrapped myself in a blanket, sipped hot herbal tea, and supervised my husband from a distance. He doesn't need my help to paint the most intricate details, but it made me feel useful.

Tomorrow we'll pull off all the tape and move the furniture back where it goes, because right now my house is labyrinth that might well have a minotaur in the middle, growling for supper. Wait, maybe that's me. I could be stuck in here a long time if no one shows me the way out. Where are those clever raccoons when I need 'em?

 

Giant Leopard Moth. Note the tiny blue dots on the top of its head.

Finding myself at a college reunion

My first thought on seeing my husband's college classmates assembled for their 40th reunion was Who are all these old people? Not only because they are, in fact, old--a whole two years older than I am--but because I really didn't know a whole lot of his classmates 40 years ago and I don't know them any better now. But I enjoyed visiting with the woman who preceded me as editor of our college newspaper and marveling over the incredible improvements in the college's journalism facilities.

We used to put together the college paper in a spare room in the basement of a women's dorm; now, the college has a whole fancy-schmantsy high-tech building dedicated to print and broadcast journalism. When we pasted up the newspaper (using a wonky wax machine to position hard copy on layout sheets), our work often extended past curfew, in which case we had to call Campus Security to get an officer to walk us across campus and let us in our dorms. 

Which are gone. In fact, nearly every place I inhabited in that little college community has been torn down. In my freshman year, eleven of us were housed in an overflow dorm near campus, although calling it a dorm is misleading. It was an old white frame house with bunk-beds crammed into every available nook and cranny. The spot where it sat is now a parking lot, as is just about every other place I lived. My husband's first dorm is now the admissions office. And the library where I spent so much of my time was transformed into a student center after the new (and very impressive) library was built in 2020.

So the campus has changed and the people have changed and the dress code has really changed. Women had to wear dresses or skirts pretty much all the time; if we wanted to run on the college track, we would put a denim wrap skirt over our shorts lest anyone should be offended by the sight of knees while we walked up the hill to the athletic fields. I remember once that the wife of a Trustee complained to the college administration because the yearbook showed too many women wearing pants, and if a woman had shown up in the college chapel wearing a pants suit, the dean of women would have had heart failure on the spot.

So it was a little disconcerting to see all these old people wandering around the sacred environs in (gasp!) shorts and T-shirts, many of the men violating the former dress code by sporting facial hair. Some of them even had hair that fell below the level of their shirt collar, though many more had no hair at all. (Because they are old. As am I.)

I found myself in the basement of the chapel, where pictures of each graduating class line the walls. In my senior photo, I look like a ghost with a perm. I'm wearing a gray wool skirt suit that I remember well, because I sewed it myself after smuggling my sewing machine into my dorm room. (Ancient electrical wiring--excess appliances not allowed!) I bought the gray wool fabric to coordinate with some antique mother-of-pearl buttons I found at a flea market, because back then I was capable of buying yards and yards of wool to match a set of pretty buttons and turning the whole thing into my best skirt suit in my spare time. Who is that person and where did she go?

Ultimately, she went home. It was interesting to commune with my former self over the weekend but it's good to be home, where my sewing machine barely runs and I don't have to worry about dress codes and my house hasn't been converted into a parking lot. My alma mater played a big part in getting me where I am today, a lot older and maybe a little bit wiser--and with a lot less hair. I mean, who was that person?

 

More anthology anguish

My previous post has come back to haunt me. When I wrote "Such are the dreams of the everyday academic," I didn't expect to suffer lingering after-effects.

First, it left behind an annoying earworm--I can't get that stupid Glen Campbell song "Dreams of the Everyday Housewife" out of my head, even though it makes me want to kick whoever wrote the lyrics, which Google suggests was Chris Gantry. I've often warned my students against equating the narrator of a poem with its author so I don't want to attribute the sentiments in the song to either Glen Campbell or Chris Gantry, but any dude who refers to his beloved spouse as an "everyday housewife" while claiming to have access to her deepest inner feelings deserves a hearty kick in the shins. Unfortunately, those guys aren't available for kicking so I remain frustrated.

Second, my curiosity about the contents of the new edition of my usual American Lit Survey anthology got the better of me and I had to take a look. The good news is that yes, there are some interesting additions, although I still don't see any sign of Amit Majmudar. The bad news, though, is more mixed.

No more "Daisy Miller"! Instead, the only Henry James work included in this edition is "The Turn of the Screw." Now there's nothing wrong with "The Turn of the Screw" except that it doesn't do what I need it to do in that particular class. We start off the American Lit Survey by talking about how writers tried to reimagine what it meant to be an American in the aftermath of the Civil War, and "Daisy Miller" serves nicely as James shows all these expatriate Americans in Europe trying and failing to understand Daisy. As an added bonus, we examine how Daisy's jingoistic little brother illustrates some less admirable aspects of American character. Ideal! 

"The Turn of the Screw," on the other hand, is a thoroughly British story, and in fact it's often taught in British Lit classes. James is one of those authors who ends up on both American and Brit Lit syllabi, but that doesn't mean that students should read the same story in both classes. "The Turn of the Screw" simply can't do for my students what "Daisy Miller" does. And besides, I'll miss Daisy! She's a problematic character but useful in her own way.

The drama problem is of a different sort. My students tend to fear poetry and dislike the length of prose fiction readings, but they just don't seem to have much experience in reading dramatic works. They'll take a stab at Susan Glaspell's Trifles, which provides a good introduction to elements of modernism in one action-packed act. Anything longer or more demanding sends students straight to online summaries, while those who attempt to do the reading offer the same tired complaints year after year. Long Day's Journey into Night: too many long boring speeches. Glengarry Glen Ross: too much cursing. Topdog/Underdog: couldn't keep the characters straight. And so on.

The new anthology still offers Trifles and Long Day's Journey into Night, but instead of A Streetcar Named Desire, it includes Death of a Salesman. The last time I taught Death of a Salesman, I swore that I'd never do it again. In class discussions, the play serves primarily as a cliche-generating machine, and I've never seen a student paper on Death of a Salesman that didn't reek of online summaries. I also find it annoying that this anthology acts as if American drama ended around 1950. Surely some playwright has written something interesting since Death of a Salesman?

So now what do I do--find a different anthology or supplement this one? Fortunately, I don't have to decide for a couple of months, by which time I may have managed to remove that annoying earworm. 

Such are the dreams of the everyday academic

Months before classes start I'm already having first-day-of class nightmares. Last week's horror-fest featured the usual elements--no roster, no syllabus, nonfunctional technology--plus a new twist: poison ivy growing in the corners of the classroom, which one student gathered into lovely bouquets to share with others. 

Last night's nightmare was inspired by the newly revised edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature that arrived on my desk last week: I was desperately trying to assemble a last-minute syllabus but couldn't find anything I needed  because instead of the usual densely printed pages of poetry and prose, the new anthology was full of colorful ads for luxury handbags and watches. It looked like 900 pages of advertisements torn from the Style issue of the New Yorker. How am I supposed to teach from that?

Well the good news is that I don't have to. The new anthology is fatter than the old one, which is not surprising since the time period covered keeps expanding. Post-Civil War American Literature now covers 22 more years than it did when I started teaching the subject, and a lot can happen in 22 years: Amit Majmudar! Colson Whitehead! George Saunders! I haven't opened the new anthology but I see from the publicity material that it includes a cluster of science fiction selections including works by Octavia Butler and N.K. Jemisin, which my students might find interesting. Will it include works inspired by the Covid pandemic, or is it still too soon for those works to have entered the canon? Will it include more drama or just the usual offerings? I get tired of Long Day's Journey into Night and A Streetcar Named Desire, but in the absence of meaningful alternatives, that's what I teach. And what will be left out?

The anthology sits on the desk in my office still unopened. I'm scheduled to teach the class in spring of 2023, but given the declining enrollments in literature surveys, I may not have enough students to even offer it, so what would be the point of opening the book at this early stage? And yet that's what I'm doing, if only in my dreams.   

 

Early lessons from the World of Work

My son was excited last week to receive notification that he'll be getting a check as part of a settlement from a former employer, but I warned him not to get too excited. I was party to a similar settlement as a teen after a restaurant where I'd waitressed went bankrupt, and for several years I received an annual check. I think the biggest one was for 59 cents.

I never cashed the checks. I was more interested in messing up their accounting than in spending the 59 cents. Like my son, I was not party to the lawsuit and to this day don't even know what the settlement was for, but I guess it was nice to be remembered.

That restaurant was one of a sad series: for a stretch of three years during my late teens and early 20s, every company I worked for went through bankruptcy either while I was working for them or soon thereafter. It was quite an education for a naive kid just starting out in the world of work, and it took me a long time to get over the fear that I had somehow jinxed all those fine employers. Well, maybe fine isn't quite accurate. Pick your own adjective:

The restaurant was my first real job, and I confess that I was not a great waitress--but in my defense, it wasn't a great restaurant either. I started waitressing at 17, and by the time I quit eight months later, only one other waitress on the afternoon shift had worked there longer. Training was hit-or-miss, and I made a lot of mistakes. I was really good at keeping things organized and working efficiently, but I was very bad at what they call "soft skills," meaning I wasn't willing to flirt with every idiot who walked in with the price of a cup of coffee in his pants. I also wasn't willing to spend time in the breakroom with the skeevy hosts, who would guide the best tippers to the tables of waitresses who didn't mind getting groped.

I got into trouble once after I got caught in a sudden storm on the way to work and ran my mom's car through water just a bit too deep. It stalled out and I decided, in my adolescent wisdom, to leave the car where it was and walk the remaining mile to the restaurant, because abandoning my mom's car somehow seemed less horrible than being late to work. However, I couldn't bear the thought of walking through knee-high water in the ugly leather waitress shoes that had cost so much of my first paycheck, so I took off my shoes, hiked up the skirt of my ugly uniform, and walked in my panty hose through the deep water. By the time I got to the restaurant, I was drenched and exhausted and my panty hose were shredded, which the manager duly noted as he reamed me out. He was not impressed by the dedication that propelled me to walk a mile through knee-high water, and my parents were even less impressed by my stupidity in driving through that water. But I don't think you can blame the restaurant's decline on that incident.

And you definitely can't blame me for my next employer's problems. Sears was already in bankruptcy protection when I started working in the regional HR office. I did a lot of typing and filing and answering of phones in an office staffed entirely by women--except for the male HR director, who wasn't around much and never learned my name. I remember once a girl I knew from church came in for an interview wearing a tight dress slit up to there, and afterward the HR director came out and announced to all the women in the office, "I think we'll hire the dress and you can all take turns wearing it."

But that was a part-time job and I needed full-time when summer hit, so I started working in the office of a citrus processing plant that suffused my life with the bitter smell of burnt oranges. At first I worked primarily in the Traffic office, where I typed and filed paperwork related to deliveries, but then they started moving me around to whatever department needed a hand, which is how I briefly served some time processing complaints--and trust me, you don't want to know what kinds of things people reported finding in their orange juice. After another employee was fired for lying about having a high school diploma, I was placed in charge of processing and reconciling daily bank deposits, which should tell you something about the company's problem finding qualified accounting help. I spent the rest of my time there, two summers and a long winter break, working on various projects in Accounts Payable or Accounts Receivable.

Early in my tenure, the Powers That Be decided to put me to work on a big pile of paperwork at a spare desk in a small office in which the only other person was the twentysomething son of the company's owner. This son had to be treated with exaggerated respect whenever he turned up despite the fact that no one could ever figure out what he did for the company, but that day I found out how he spent a large proportion of his company time: talking loudly on the phone, recounting sexual escapades in great detail to whoever was on the other end. And all I could do was sit there with my back to the owner's son and try not to hear.

That company went bankrupt a year or so after I quit, to no one's surprise. For a little while I worked for a small community newspaper, which was my dream job until my first paycheck bounced. I don't recall how long I worked there but one day they just closed up with no further word, and a year or two later I heard that the owner was in legal trouble over some kind of fraud. 

The next small community newspaper I worked for--in a different state but essentially the same job--closed up in the middle of summer without any warning. I showed up one day to collect my final paycheck and the owner told me there was no money to pay me the $60 he owed me. I told him I didn't have enough money to fill my car with gas to get home, so I would just sit in his office until he found my money. It took a while, but he paid me--in cash. That $60 had to get me through the rest of the summer, so I wasn't about to leave without it.

 

That was the summer after my sophomore year of college, so I was all of 20 years old and flat broke, but fortunately, that was my last brush with bankrupt employers. I later worked for a truly horrible newspaper that maintained a healthy bottom line by allowing the advertisers to call the shots, and then later I moved into the heady world of academe, where everyone complains about budget cuts but at least the paychecks don't bounce. And I don't have to flirt with idiots, get groped, or listen to some moron's sexual escapades just to remain gainfully employed. I still do stupid things once in a while, but no one's going to require me to wear ugly shoes while being reamed out. 

 

The best part is that every once in a while I get an unexpected reward for my hard work--and it's usually a little more than 59 cents.

Positive I'm negative, unless I'm not

Which is more stressful: a home Covid test or a home pregnancy test? The pregnancy test is much quicker and less complicated and a positive result can lead to new life, while the Covid test is slow and clunky and may portend disaster. 

I'm pleased to report that my home Covid test was negative this morning, which is really good news for the approximately 80 people with whom I spent time over the weekend. It felt fabulous to do so much face-to-face socializing after a long dry spell, but then it was sobering to learn that I'd been exposed to Covid just before all the socializing began.

It started on Thursday morning, when I had coffee and a long face-to-face chat with a friend, blissfully unaware that she would soon develop mild symptoms and test positive for Covid. 

On Friday I drove north to attend my grandson's birthday party, a raucous outdoor affair involving squirt-guns and water balloons, where the youngest attendee was the three-week-old sibling of one of the guests. I never even got close to the baby, but my grandkids were in my face and on my lap often enough.

On Saturday I drove south to attend a friend's 50th anniversary celebration, where I spent two hours indoors with about 50 people, mostly over 50 and a few in poor health. A joyful event with hugs all around. We ate cupcakes and sang songs and played a ridiculous version of The Newlywed Game in which long-married couples tried to answer questions about their spouses, to amusing effect. It didn't surprise me to learn that my husband does not know my ring size--but then, neither do I.

Then yesterday I went to a church service, but it was a small number of people who mostly kept their distance. Aside from that, during my road trip I had fleeting encounters with random strangers in various gas stations and rest areas, and let me just say that based on my experience, Circle K has the dirtiest rest rooms along major highways in Ohio. 

Now I'm at home enjoying memories of a joyful weekend alongside the dread associated with Covid exposure. The good news is if I was exposed on Thursday, I'm unlikely to have been contagious on Friday or Saturday. Today's negative Covid test is encouraging, but I ought to test again tomorrow just to be sure. Meanwhile, I'm staying home, just to stay on the safe side, and trying to cherish the joy despite the persistent dread.

 

 

  

Seeking the password into the secret clubhouse

Bored with being in limbo, I promised myself I'd come up with an idea for my next big writing project by today, and bingo--it happened. Last night I ran across a two-word phrase that sparked an idea that could inspire interesting academic writing for the rest of the summer, if not longer. 

But by this morning, the second-guessing had set in. The problem is simple: I keep finding myself restating things I've said over and over again, each time with more urgency. What makes me think that this time someone will listen?

And this, in a nutshell, is the problem with academic writing: The process is so slow and uncertain that it's nearly impossible to know whether the words are having any impact. I can look back and see that the articles I've written have aided my tenure and promotion cases, but with no more promotions available, nobody on campus really cares whether I keep writing and publishing.

But I care! Last summer I worked very hard to research and write an essay that serves as an analysis of a particular poem but also engages with current discussions about intersections of race, history, and literature, but the pace of academic publishing is so slow that seven months after submission there’s still no word on whether the essay will be accepted for publication. If it ever gets published, the discussion will have moved on.

I look at my Google Scholar account and see that several of that my articles are steadily being cited, two in particular, but the citations tend to be perfunctory, as if the authors are just checking my work off a list to satisfy someone's demand for comprehensiveness. I tell my students that it's important to contribute to the "scholarly conversation" about their research topics, but I don't see much evidence of such a conversation. I wonder whether that thrilling exchange of ideas is happening in some secret clubhouse where all the cool kids gather while I stumble around trying to find the entrance and remember the password.

I know I have more to say about many topics, but the reading public isn’t exactly lining up outside my door begging me to share my thoughts. Lacking external motivations, I will need to rely on the internal kind. Why keep writing when it's impossible to gauge impact and there’s no clear reward?

Because I still have a few more years of teaching to do and I want to model for my students the importance of maintaining a regular writing habit. (As if they cared.)

Because playing with words engages a part of my brain that I fear will atrophy for lack of use. (Already this week I’ve hovered long over the keyboard to try to dig up the word “unwieldy” in a context where it was the only right word but for some reason my brain refused to supply it.)

Because I’ve always imagined my retirement as a time when I can write for pleasure, but it won’t happen if I’ve forsaken the habit of writing.

Because I’ve thought of myself as a writer since I was about eight years old, and a writer writes.

And there it is: If I am a writer, I will write, regardless of whether anyone ever reads my words.

And if I can't think of anything to write about, I'll write about not writing, a topic on which every scholar I've ever known is an occasional expert.

Sure, go ahead and shoot laser beams into my eyeball! I can take it!

With a blink of an eye I can change the world--or at least its appearance. Close my left eye and open my right and I see whiter whites and brighter brights; close the right and open the left and it looks as if someone has pulled down a yellow scrim, making the world look like an antique sepia-toned photograph.

And that dulled view is apparently how I've been seeing the world for quite some time. I had the cataract removed from my right eye Wednesday and a new artificial lens inserted, and at first I couldn't see much because it felt like someone had dumped a truckload of sand into my eye. I walked around for a day and a half with my eye either clamped shut and weeping or open and blurred. Today, though, I can see, and what I'm seeing with my new lens only reveals how faulty the old lens must have been. 

Getting it out was both easy and awful, in different ways. There was some discomfort, but the only real pain occurred after the surgery, when they tore some tape off my forehead. Two days later, I can still feel that sting. 

Every aspect of the experience is designed to keep patients calm and comfortable, including the small dose of Valium that didn't seem to do much for me. When the nurse asked me whether I was feeling relaxed, I told her that relaxation isn't my spiritual gift--and besides, the word relax simply doesn't fit into any situation involving lasers pointed at my eyeball. When James Bond was strapped down on that table with the laser overhead, did Goldfinger tell him to relax? Maybe he should have given him some Valium.

My doctor's surgery runs like a well-oiled machine, with squads of specialized staff people moving efficiently from patient to patient to perform their essential roles--vitals, history, Valium, eyedrops, and on and on. By the time I was wheeled into the laser-surgery suite, I had spent a total of maybe 30 seconds with my actual doctor, and by the time he was done, I'd spent, at most, 10 minutes in his presence. The result of all that machine-like efficiency is a patient who feels like no more than a cog in the machine--a sore and sorry cog that can neither relax nor see straight.

But it's all good, or it will be soon enough. My eyes have always had trouble playing well together, but now they have to learn to cooperate all over again, which leads sometimes to double vision, or not quite double but one-and-a-half vision that resolves only with squinting. The doctor reassures me that everything will be fine with time, especially after I get the other cataract removed sometime next month. Meanwhile, I'm feeling my way around and enjoying changing the world with every blink of my eye.

Foot feats

Red feet, wet feet, tired feet, sore feet--I'm clearly having way too much fun on my holiday weekend. The red stripes on my feet were a result of wearing sandals to a baseball game without applying sunscreen, and goodness do they hurt. Mowing on the steep slopes always causes foot pain, so by the end of the day, my feet demanded a rest. And then this morning I hiked at Luke Chute Conservation Area while the burgeoning greenery was still dew-bedecked, soaking my shoes and socks, but I had neglected to bring another pair so I had to drive another 40 miles up the highway dripping wet. Now I intend to spend the rest of the holiday weekend reading a book with my feet up, still striped red but finally dry.

 

 

 

 

There aren't enough support groups on the planet for this

Judging by comments from my colleagues assembled for our first Writing Wednesday session, we need to establish some support groups to help us all get through the summer. Writing Wednesday works like a writing support group, but what some of us really need is an I-don't-know-what-to-write support group so we can encourage each other to keep going when we're out of ideas and our brains are crowded with other concerns, like campus budget problems, continuing Covid cases, and random mass shootings that make us cry every time we turn on the radio. 

But that's not all! We need more:

A Growing Out Our Bangs support group so we can share strategies on staying sane when yard work sends long strands of sweaty hair into our eyes. Headbands or barrettes? Discuss!

A Dealing with the Loss of Colleagues support group to help us walk that fine line between publicly celebrating the successes of colleagues who have found better jobs elsewhere while privately grieving their loss and wishing we could go away with them. Maybe we can craft spiffy little carrying-cases to hold those unwieldy wads of envy.

A Making Small-Talk with Wretched People support group where we can practice the skills required for random public encounters with the higher-ups who are determined to make our lives miserable. What do we say when we bump up against an intransigent administrator at the Farmers Market when it takes every ounce of self-control to hold back a sharp kick in the shins? What martial art system will help us hold back our kicks?

A Coping with Anxious Offspring support group where we can hold each others' hands when children respond to the horrors of modern life by falling into silence, depression, or eating disorders. Where do we find hope when children lose their joy? Too painful to discuss, so keep the Kleenex handy.

A Support for the Supporters support group where those of us who are trying to support so many others can lay down all responsibility for others' issues and just sit in a pool of our own feelings until someone notices and reaches out a hand. Let's have a pity party! (Be sure to bring along your tiny violin.)

Not-so-swift slog through etc.

I saw a bald eagle flying overhead early on my road trip back to Ohio, and as soon as I got home I saw an oriole. The rest of the time I saw a lot of Swifts--not birds but trucks with the word Swift on the back. So many trucks! So many construction zones! So much traffic! I wasn't exactly flying down the interstate--more like crawling.

But it is good to be back home. I spent a few days helping my brother and sister-in-law clean out Dad's things and make arrangements for the funeral (in July, in Florida), which exhausted both mind and body. He had only enough stuff to fill a generous room in his assisted living facility, but it was still a lot to go through: Dozens of DVD's, mostly British mysteries or war movies. Hundreds of greeting cards. Socks, shoes, shirts, pajamas, so many belts. Piles of photographs, many of unidentified people. Crumpled documents covered with enigmatic notes. 

One of those documents contains seven pages of single-spaced notes for a memoir. He wrote a few pages and left the rest in outline form, leaving behind lists of topics that raise more questions than they answer. Next to "Basic Training" he wrote "sick, cry, gas," which makes me wonder what kind of gas he's talking about. Were they eating a lot of beans or what? Next to one relative's name he wrote "temperance society, Calif., usher, leave for AF, suicide try, sickness, State Theater, spanking," while next to another he wrote "money lending, cod liver oil, strict but fair, favored me even though many spats, Charlie McC, school, caddying, last letter, etc." I detect a story there but with all the main characters among the dead, we'll never know.

"Etc." comes up over and over again in these notes:

money, jealous, car crash, etc.
religion, etc.
New Orleans (girls, etc.)
stockroom, not Jewish, etc.

And in fact, under the heading "Grandchildren and Retirement," the first item listed is a large ETC. Whatever that means.

Among this mass of incomplete notes, I find two statements most evocative. First, "How my life was changed by the G/D episode," a reference to an incident that occurred when he was working for General Dynamics in Rochester, New York. I was three or four years old but I can distinctly recall a huge change in our family dynamics, and after that we started moving around every couple of years as Dad struggled to hold down a job. What caused the disruption? Mom and Dad never told us and quickly changed the subject when we tried to gently probe. Now we'll never know.

Earlier in the outline, amidst a list of fragmentary references to his education, he wrote one complete sentence: "I never swam in the deep end." This is literally true since Dad was not a swimmer, but it's also metaphorically true: Dad was a specialist in safety and reliability and was always interested in playing it safe. Maybe he would have been less risk-averse if he'd learned to swim.

Now I don't know what to do with all this stuff. We divvied up the things that were worth saving and I came home with a two-foot-long cobalt-blue shoe-horn (because why not) and a lovely pair of occasional chairs that remind me of Mom, but I also have possession of this fragmentary outline for a memoir that will never be written. What am I supposed to do with all that etc.?

I thought about that during my not-flying-but-crawling drive home, hemmed in by slow-moving Swift trucks, an event that will barely merit an etc. in the story of my life. My father may have failed to leave behind a memoir, but he left a mark on many people, including the assisted-living staff members and residents who appreciated his intelligence and encouragement. He left a mark on all of us, helping to produce children who can work hard together to deal with his effects and arrange a funeral without discord. He made us all aware of risks, but he also made sure we all knew how to swim so we're not afraid to go into the deep end. And he encouraged us to develop analytical skills so that we'd know where to start when life tossed us a lot of etc. 

Whatever that means.

End of the road, beginning of a new journey

My father died while I was driving 70 mph on I-40 in traffic conditions that left no room for feelings, so I comforted myself with the thought that at least I was trying to reach him in time. In a grueling and occasionally joyful journey full of misunderstandings and missed connections, we never stopped trying to reach each other.

That attempt has been complicated by distance, Dad's health problems, and technical difficulties. Our recent phone calls have mostly consisted of me yelling inane pleasantries down the phone line and him responding, "What was that? I can't hear you." Nevertheless communication did occasionally occur; for instance a few weeks ago I realized that things had gotten serious when Dad admitted that he'd been watching college softball coverage because he could no longer find the golf channel. You might as well take away his oxygen!

Low oxygen levels caused other problems in bridging the gap, making it difficult for Dad to come up with common words, including, sometimes, oxygen. We were talking on the phone a few weeks ago when Dad tried to tell me something about "that thing I take," and I offered several possible words for thing: Medication? Physical therapy? Vitamins? "No," he said in some distress, "The thing I breathe." Oxygen. So necessary, in so many ways.

But congestive heart failure creates supply-chain issues re: oxygen, especially when lung cancer is busy tearing up all the roads and bridges. We all saw the decline coming, and I'd planned to drive down to North Carolina today for what would surely be our final visit. Then last week pneumonia sent Dad to the hospital, erecting further barriers to communication. 

On Sunday afternoon, my brother put his cell phone on speaker so Dad and I could talk. I know he heard me when I told him about our granddaughter's upcoming birthday party, because he responded, very clearly, "I'll be sure to be there." Those were the last coherent words I heard from him, and what a nice thought! Even as lack of oxygen was taking him farther and farther from us, he kept promising further connection.

I spoke to him again yesterday but heard no clear reply, but by then I'd already packed up and hit the road a day early. The doctors said multiple organ failure and palliative care and just a matter of time, but I heard an urgent call to get there before it was too late. Perfect weather, minimal traffic, very little road construction--ideal conditions for a road trip, which I made in record time. Nevertheless I was over an hour from Raleigh when my brother called to say it was too late. 

What could I do? I kept on driving. I'll be sure to be there, he'd told me, always hopeful that we could find a way to meet and hug and communicate, even when the words wouldn't come. And now there's nothing left to say.

Francis Zelesky, 1933-2022

You are now entering the Timeless Zone

Only Wednesday? How can this be?!

The end of classes means the end of time, or the end of my constant awareness of time. I spent an hour in the cool of the morning wrasslin' with the weed-whacker and came inside feeling like I'd done a day's work, but here I have the whole rest of a Wednesday to fill up however I like. Think of the possibilities! I could buy paint for the living room, clean the hall closets, read a good book--or, more likely, catch up on email and read a bunch of files to prepare for tomorrow's assessment meeting.

The weed-whacking was a pain, literally--I had to work around flood debris and lingering muddy spots and ended up with a massive blister that burst as I was carrying the weed-whacker back up the hill. Another sign of the end of time: a yard-work-related injury. It'll heal. So will the lawn, eventually. A little flood damage is not the end of the world.

Yesterday I applauded another kind of ending: celebrating some retirements. One long-time colleague spoke of her delight in seeking new adventures, and she's just the type to keep adventuring until there are no more adventures left. This, I think, is the reason I have trouble seeing beyond retirement: I can't envision what new adventures might be out there beyond the classroom. I realize that this is a failure of imagination, so I'd better get the imagination cranked up before it gets too decrepit to do the work.

But first, I'll start by imagining my summer break. Surely I'll do something more significant than weed-whacking and wildflower walks and forgetting that it's Wednesday, but at the moment, that's about all I can manage.

Here are some pictures from yesterday's walk.

 

Eight or ten turkey vultures were hovering overhead along the creek.

Brand-new oak leaves emerging.

Buckeye blossoms!

Our creek looks so harmless when it's not in flood stage.

Blue-eyed Mary.

Green valerian, maybe?

Stonecrop.

Perfoliate bellwort.

My first rhododendron blossom!

   

Doused with a dose of perspective

There's nothing like a little minor disaster to distract attention from major disasters, and it's helpful to occasionally be doused with a dose of perspective. Which is why I'm not complaining (much) about the flash flood that washed away part of my driveway Friday night. Sure, I've been mightily inconvenienced, but nobody died, right? I had to use some creativity to get around obstacles that washed across my path, but I thrive on creativity, so it's all good. Or it's all mud. Or something like that.

Friday felt like a disaster long before the flood hit. I spent the morning hours first having all kinds of uncomfortable eye tests at the cataract surgeon's office, then balked at the cost estimate and wondered whether my eyesight was really valuable enough to merit wiping out my entire health savings account, then spent some time squinting blurrily at final exam and papers, and then attended a campus meeting that left me feeling reamed out and hopeless, and then I finally got to go home--but I didn't take my laptop with me because I was sure I'd be back on campus Saturday morning to finish the final set of student papers before attending Commencement.

And sure, rain was in the forecast, but we've had plenty of rain this spring without problems, so when the sky started falling in earnest, I was totally unprepared. Frankly, I'm not sure how anyone could have prepared for that kind of deluge--when the normally placid creek suddenly starts thundering like Niagara Falls, it doesn't do any good to stand on the bridge declaring "Thus far and no further!" A chunk of wet sky fell into our area and transformed our tiny creek into a solid wall of water that overtopped its banks, inundated our lower meadow, tossed entire trees against our bridge, and wiped out part of the ramp that connects the bridge to the lowest part of the driveway.

What to do? No way to drive across all that water and no possibility of a gravel delivery over the weekend, so we mostly stayed put. No Commencement for me! (Good thing I wasn't slated to serve as Marshal this year.) But I needed to finish grading that last pile of papers, so I used my husband's laptop to sign into our course management system so I could access the papers and issue a grade. I didn't have access to my usual grading rubrics and I couldn't insert comments into the papers, but who reads comments on a final paper anyway? I decided to just wing it, and if the students want to quibble over the grade, I can deal with that later. 

But now the grading is done and the driveway is fixed and I'm getting caught up on all the things I couldn't do over the weekend without access to my laptop, which turns out to be quite a lot. But again, nobody died, and the inability to get to campus reminded me how very much I love my job and want to be able to see well enough to keep doing it, so I'll soon be scheduling that cataract surgery regardless of the cost. See? Perspective: sometimes it comes in little doses, and sometimes it falls like Niagara from the sky, but either way it can wash away the pervading gloom and make me feel a little less hopeless.

You really wouldn't want to drive on that mess.

Free delivery of firewood.

 

Debris shows that the bridge was under water overnight.

That's gravel from our driveway washed into the neighbor's field.

That tree usually stretches far above the water level.

 

Fueling final exams

My American Lit classroom was bubbling with energy at noon when students gathered to take their final exam. Where was all that energy last week when we were discussing poetry? No matter: a few of these students are graduating on Saturday and they're delighted to finally be done; the rest are just full of beans. Cocoa beans, to be exact. Yes, I brought chocolate to the final exam. Final exams are long and grueling--I don't want anyone to faint dead away. I want their brain cells to be alert and well lubricated, and chocolate can help. I suspect that some of these students will find other ways to lubricate their brains later on.

My Learning in Retirement class was also bubbling yesterday but for different reasons. No final exams in the Comedy in Theory and Practice class; just a final wrap-up of concepts and an opportunity for my retirees to put what they've learned into practice: each class member could take the microphone for up to five minutes to share a joke or funny story or whatever. If someone could find a way to transform Dad Jokes into fuel, that class could keep the world turning on its axis for a few millennia. 

I was strong-armed into teaching that class but I came to look forward to it every Tuesday afternoon. I mean, who doesn't appreciate a weekly excuse to laugh with a bunch of interesting people? We read some great stuff and watched some silly videos but mostly it was all about the laughter. Now I'm looking at the vast expanse of summer break stretching before me and wondering where I'll find my Tuesday afternoon laughs. Shall I go out back and tell jokes to the birds?

That's the drawback of summer break: no good reason to spend time regularly yammering with a room full of people. Of course I'll have Writing Wednesdays, and Faculty Council will continue to meet occasionally over the summer to hash out details of the College's survival plan--oops, Strategic Plan, sorry!--but laughter is rarely at the top of the agenda for those meetings. Still, it's better than spending the entire summer talking to the birds.

They've been pretty bubbly lately, the birds. For a week I've been hearing wood thrushes in the woods below the woodpile, and this morning there were orioles at the end of my road. Mornings are raucous with birdsong, suggesting that the local avian population is getting plenty of the bird equivalent of chocolates. 

Have my students had enough? I've run out of things to teach them this semester so it's time for them to show me what they've learned, and then it's time for me to read it all and assign a grade. So many things to grade! I need some fuel. Good thing they didn't eat up all the chocolates.

 

Wishing upon a shooting star

I thought I saw shooting stars, those delicate white or purple blossoms that appear to be ready for blast-off, and I was so surprised I even said the words shooting stars out loud although no one was around to hear. 

Soon, though, I was assailed by doubt. I'd never seen shooting stars in that stretch of woods before and couldn't be sure they would bloom so early there; I couldn't get close enough to examine them carefully and the photos I took showed an ambiguous mass of blurred blossoms. So I lost confidence in my shooting stars, didn't tell anyone that I'd seen such a thing and couldn't be certain that I had.

And then I saw a newspaper photo showing shooting stars blooming in the same area of the state where I'd been hiking, and I knew that I was both right and wrong--right in believing I was seeing shooting stars, wrong to doubt my perceptions. 

I try to approach the natural world with humility, knowing that what I don't know far exceeds what I do, and yet when I encountered another hiker in those same woods who was all excited about what he thought was "some weird kind of pitcher-plant back there," I looked at the photo on his phone and confidently identified it as Jack-in-the-pulpit. I even pointed out a few more places where he could be sure to find more. Most of the time I know what I know and I'm willing to learn about what I don't know, but I'm reluctant to take a risk on an identification if I'm not entirely certain--because what if I'm wrong?

Well, what if I am? Will the world end if I misidentify a wildflower? Will the botanists of the world line up to heap contempt on my head? I've known some botanists and I don't see them carrying around buckets of contempt to throw at rank amateurs.

The word amateur, let's recall, derives from the French for lover, and love is a risky pursuit. I love wildflowers enough to venture into unknown territory and try out paths that might prove to be dead ends, and sometimes I have to stop in my tracks and confront an unexpected wonder. Shooting stars, I say out loud, and next time I'll believe it.