Inhabiting an unimaginable future; or, why I can't stop watching rug-cleaning videos

In all those childhood hours I spent glued to the television to absorb Gene Roddenberry's vision of the future on the original Star Trek, I never once saw Kirk or Spock or Dr. McCoy use their sleek hand-held devices to watch videos of total strangers cleaning nasty dirty rugs, and neither would I have imagined rug-cleaning videos playing any part in my own future. And yet here I am all these years later scrolling through social media and getting transfixed by videos of faceless men scrubbing filthy rugs.

In general I have a well-developed resistance to clickbait. I can scroll past all manner of enticing posts without a qualm, and those online ads for arthritis medications, incontinence products, and "fashions for the mature woman" only make me want to run to wherever the immature women are doing their shopping. But show me a video of some random dude shampooing a rug so dirty you can't tell what color it's supposed to be and I'm enthralled.

I don't like cleaning my own rugs and I don't own the kind of equipment these guys use to clean their filthy rugs--and when the rug's true colors finally come to light, I often find them garish or unappealing. Many of these rugs are pulled out of landfills or other unsavory places and then cleaned up to be donated to charity, but if someone tried to give one to me, my immediate impulse would be to burn it. 

But I watch anyway! Can't seem to stop myself, in fact. What is wrong with me?

Recently I realized that I have a very specific anxiety surrounding the prospect of death. I don't fear suffering or death itself, but I am terrified of leaving behind a mess that others will have to clean up. This explains why I've recently updated my will and worked so hard to pay off my debts and why I make regular trips to donate old stuff to the Goodwill. I don't want to involve other people in my messes and I don't want to get involved in other people's messes, so why am I unable to resist watching these filthy rugs getting cleaned?

First I'm lured by the soothing visuals--the rhythmic sweeping and spraying and shampooing, the washing away of layers of grime--and then the suspense as the rug's true colors are slowly revealed. But I think what most satisfies me is the knowledge that even an irredeemably dirty rug can become new again, all its pollution washed down the drain. In the midst of an increasingly messy world, I find hope in rug-cleaning videos.

That's one theory. It's also possible that I have completely lost my mind. But if that's the case, how would I know?

Supply chain problems and a change of plans

Mere minutes after I posted about my busy fall plans, I learned that the carpet that's supposed to be installed in our house today has been held up by supply chain problems. Suddenly I found myself in possession of a commodity in very short supply lately: a whole day with absolutely nothing on the schedule. So I drove north a day early and have been enjoying some time with the grandkids. Fortunately, fall leaves and fun are not subject to supply-chain slowdowns.

 

 

 

A very full Fall Break

And so Fall Break begins: After a nearly three-hour meeting, I arrive home long after dark burdened with a tote bag full of midterm exams and papers that must be graded before noon Monday and facing a full schedule of events that will deeply eat into my grading time. I may not have to teach for the next couple of days, but that doesn't mean I won't be working.

What made me think it was a good idea to pursue a demanding home-improvement project in the middle of a busy semester? Over the summer we painted most of the living areas in our house, and two weeks ago we painted our bedroom. Last week on my I finally painted our bathroom, making no attempt to keep paint off the carpet that will soon be replaced by waterproof vinyl flooring. For nearly 20 years I've wondered who thinks it's a great idea to install off-white carpet in the bathroom, but finally all that mess is going away.

But first I need to get a mammogram--first thing tomorrow. And then I need to finish cleaning out closets in two bedrooms and shifting small movables to make it easier for the flooring dudes to move the big stuff. Yesterday we cleared out both big closets in the guest room, but I still need to move a lot of junk out of the laundry room--and now I'm looking at our big walk-in closet and wondering whether it would be a better use of my time to just burn the place down and start over. At some point I'll need to haul some boxes of stuff to the Goodwill, but that can wait until the dust settles, or the smoke, as the case may be.

Then on Friday comes the good part: the flooring guys will tear the old, stained carpet our of two bedrooms and a bathroom, tear up the nasty old linoleum in the laundry room, and install new carpet in the bedrooms and vinyl tile in bathroom and laundry room.

I know I'll have to distract myself so I don't keep sticking my nose in during the installation process, so I'm thinking that Friday will be the time for grading. Saturday is the time for driving north to see the grandkids, and Sunday is the time for driving home, so I'm not sure when I'm going to get around to putting all the stuff back into the closets and reassembling the rooms after the flooring is done.

So yeah, I'll enjoy my Fall Break, but I doubt that it'll feel much like a break. At some point I intend to sink my bare feet into that brand-new carpet and savor the softness and the absence of stains. But then I'm getting back to work.    

Encounters with brilliance--and its opposite

I remember the first time I read J. Drew Lanham's very brief essay "9 Rules for the Black Birdwatcher" in Orion--I immediately decided my creative nonfiction students had to read it, and then I made them write their own essays in the form of lists, which is not nearly as easy as Lanham makes it look. His nine brief rules beautifully braid together ideas about race, extinctions, expertise, and, of course, birds. I've read other things by Lanham over the years but nothing that made me happier than the news announed this week that he's one of this year's recipients of a MacArthur "Genius" Grant. Sometimes good things happen to good people, and when they do, this makes me very happy.

I didn't feel much like a genius this morning when I showed up to my composition class prepared to discuss the wrong reading assignment. Someone mis-read the syllabus and that someone was me. Oops. Somehow I pulled together a meaningful discussion but if my teaching skills were evaluated solely based on this morning's class, I'd be seeking another line of work.

But I did do one brilliant thing this week: I invited a former student to share his considerable expertise with my Honors Lit students, who are working their way through Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain. My former student spoke about Civil War weaponry, using pictures, props, and hands-on activities to help my students understand the experiences of soldiers on the battlefield. It makes me happy to see a former student shine in front of the classroom, so I was grinning my head off this morning. Someone should give that dude a prize! 

Three cheers for an un-cretin future!

I don't know what kinds of stretching I'm supposed to do to prepare for the rigors of painting a room but I didn't do them over the weekend, and neither did I do any kind of prep for the long local-history walk I took with my Honors students on Sunday, with the result that every muscle in my body hurts during a week when I have to attend all kinds of extra meetings and events on campus thanks to Homecoming and faculty governance duties. And none of this is helping my bone spurs!

But do you know what will help my bone spurs? According to my doctor, I should do more walking. Yes: to reduce my foot pain, I need to do more of the exact activity that leads to foot pain. I suppose it can't hurt, except when it does.

But look on the bright side: my bedroom walls look sharp with a nice fresh coat of paint--and since that carpet is getting replaced next week, I painted merrily away without worrying about drips. The barn-red accent wall was fun while it lasted but now that it's white, I can redecorate in cheery shades of blue, which means I get to do some real shopping. And I have just enough paint left to do our bathroom later this week, and if I get sufficiently inspired I'll buy more paint and do the laundry room, although the prospect of moving the washer and dryer is not appealing. After that we will have finished our entire interior house-painting project. That's something to celebrate.

This evening I'll help a retired colleague celebrate his 85th birthday. To entertain him, I'm assembling a narrative from a collection of inane sentences written by past students, including "It is not cretin what our future is," a sentiment that I sincerely hope is true.

Friday poetry challenge: bananas for pawpaws

This week my husband went out into our woods and shook some trees--literally--and a harvest of pawpaws came tumbling down, so today was pawpaw day in my Honors Lit class. We're in the middle of Cold Mountain and I want students to know what kinds of things Inman might have been eating during his long trek through the autumn woods, so pawpaws appropriately enhance the learning experience.

Students were appreciative, but a few of them made some interesting faces in response to their first taste of that sticky yellow flesh, and of course now the aroma has suffused the entire building. A few students discreetly discarded their pawpaws while others came back for seconds. I was just happy to put part of our harvest to good use, because we can't possibly eat our entire harvest. And besides, eating pawpaws is a cultural experience! It may look like the bastard lovechild of a pear and a potato, but a pawpaw tastes like a walk in the autumn woods.

I'm bananas for pawpaws,
that green, lumpy fruit
that grows in the woods in the autumn.
If you like 'em too,
here's some advice for you:
Just stop by my office--I've got'em.

Surely someone out there can do better than that. Show me some pawpaw poetry!

I need a cure for Three-Hour Meeting Madness

How do you survive a three-hour meeting without going insane?

Especially a meeting that starts at 4 p.m. and is supposed to last 90 minutes but keeps going on and on and on because issues of some importance to the future of the institution are on the table and they deserve full attention but you're having trouble producing coherent thought because you're stuck in a conference room for three hours at your stupidest time of day and you're getting hungry thirsty hangry tired annoyed and whatever you want to call the other symptoms of Long-Meeting Madness?

I sat through such a meeting last week and another is looming this afternoon, but this time I intend to come prepared. A previous provost used to bring M&M's to Faculty Council meetings on the theory that there's no situation that can't be improved by the addition of chocolate, but apparently our M&M budget got slashed so we sit there for three hours succumbing to tedium without food, drink, or rest-room breaks until we're nearly comatose. 

But not today! My personal chocolate budget remains robust, so I intend to stock up before the meeting, and if my fellow Council members are nice to me and don't take my preferred chair, I may even share.

I don't have a problem remaining engaged in discussion on certain topics, but the list of topics on which I am willing to spend an hour debating the finer points is getting smaller by the minute. And then, of course, certain perennial topics keep coming up when they're most likely to distract us from more significant concerns; for instance, every minute we spend debating whether we should have to teach on Labor Day is time we can't devote to advising the Powers That Be on whether retiring colleagues should be replaced by tenure-track faculty members or adjuncts.

But nevertheless we keep spending time drowning in endless debates on matters that fail to register on my Make Me Care meter. It takes every ounce of self-control to sit still and look interested when what I really want to do is poke out my eyeballs with a dull pencil or run to the other side of the building and pull the fire alarm.  

This week, though, I have a plan. When my attention wanders, I'll pop in a chocolate and surreptitiously pen lyrics for a new rap musical based on thick documents we've been asked to peruse. I'll start on the Tone at the Top rap as soon as I come up with a rhyme for no nefarious acts. Throw hilarious facts? Slow injurious yaks? Show me various jacks?

No rush. In three hours I'm bound to come up with a workable solution, which is more than I can say about many meetings.

Surprised by students

Lately I've been surprising my students in ways that surprise me, creating a feedback loop of surprises on top of surprises.  Not a bad situation as the semester moves toward its muddled middle.

Students are surprised that I don't care about staples, and I'm surprised at the depth of their surprise. Apparently they've all encountered the stapler Nazis out there. Sure, staples are nice, but an unstapled paper is not the hill I want to die on. I noticed that more than half of today's homework assignments are stapled, thanks to one generous student who always carries a stapler and will happily share. 

Students in another class were shocked when I told them I don't care where they sit. We were required to use seating charts for the past two years and to limit student movement in the classroom because of the fear of Covid transmission, but this morning they expressed surprise when I allowed some folks to switch seats. I mean, we're not in third grade anymore! Let's move around!

And a student in another class was so surprised that she called me the best teacher ever, an exaggeration for sure but I'll accept applause whether I've earned it or not. All I did was provide full MLA-style citations for required readings in the coursepack. I mean, if I want students to refer to these readings in their writing, they need to know how to cite them, right? Not that big a deal.

Today I plan to surprise a set of students by cancelling Wednesday's class. Giving them a day off probably makes me the worst professor ever pedagogically speaking, but they're turning in a major assignment on that date and I'm not sure they'll be alert enough to attend to any new material I try to introduce. I'm not even going to call it a "research day" and tell them to work where they like. They've worked hard--they've earned a day off.

So, of course, have I. After spending the entire weekend grading papers, I ought to get right down to work tackling the next set, but instead I just might reward myself with an hour of absolute idleness. And that will be the biggest surprise of all.

 

Jennette McCurdy on mothers and middle school

Jennette McCurdy was a child star on a Nickelodeon show I've never watched, but nevertheless I found her memoir, I'm Glad My Mom Died, insightful and terrifying and funny all at the same time for its compelling portrayal of her controlling stage mom, her battle with eating disorders, and her life as a child star. She puts the cost of stardom into perspective here:

It doesn't help that I'm famous for a thing I started when I was a kid. I think of what it would be like if everyone was famous for a thing they did when they were thirteen: their middle school band, their seventh-grade science project, their eighth-grade play. The middle school years are the years to stumble, fall, and tuck under the rug as you're done with them because you've already outgrown them by the time you're fifteen.

But not for me. I'm cemented in people's minds as the person I was when I was a kid.

As I said: horrifying. I quit playing the flute following the fiasco of my seventh-grade marching band season and I shudder to imagine being stuck in that wretched scratchy wool uniform forever, desperately struggling to march intricate formations while playing the right notes on my flute but knowing that I could accomplish only one of those two goals at any given moment. Don't even get me started about the fire ants on the practice field. I've successfully swept those memories under the rug and I would not care to carry them around with me everywhere.

So I have some sympathy for the child star "cemented in people's minds" as a 13-year-old, and her book is a brisk and often comical variation on the tear-off-the-bandaid memoir, full of grotesque details but never maudlin. I've never seen her act, but I believe her when she says she's rather write than act; her long-thwarted passion throbs through the book and made me want to keep reading long after she'd finally left behind her eighth-grade self.

I guess I'll never be a ditch-digger

As I struggled to remain standing in wet, slippery mud while trying to dislodge a stubborn wad  of heavy wet clay off the end of a shovel, I thought, Well there's another career path closed to me in case the whole teaching thing doesn't work out.

Two days later my entire upper body is still aching from the short time I spent with a group of volunteers digging shallow trenches to improve drainage on a newish trail near the Luke Chute pollinator habitat. Volunteers were urged to bring their own tools, so my husband brought along a shovel and mattock while I brought along my husband, who could dig a trench through the Hoover dam without breaking a sweat. 

He swung that mattock to dislodge rocks and break up clumps of roots while I struggled to lift the heavy shovelfuls of clay soil and struggled even more to stay standing in the slippery mud on the edge of the trench. I'd never make it as a ditch-digger, but at least I was there, trying to make an impact on a place that matters to me. 

I hadn't ventured up that particular trail before and wouldn't have found the way without a guide, but now I'm looking forward to walking up there in the spring when the trilliums starts blooming. There's a spot upstream where wild ginger grows, a treat I've not yet seen in the wild, and the whole trail holds the promise of unexplored territory.

In fact we encountered a set of hikers walking the trail from the opposite direction as we made our way up the steep hill to the part of the path that needed trenching. That spot was muddy on Saturday but is reportedly nearly impassable in the spring. The two trenches we dug should make a difference, and even though my ditch-digging skills are subpar, I can still give myself a pat on the back for being part of the process--and for bringing my husband, the hardest-working tool in the box.  

How do you count what can't be squeezed into a spreadsheet?

The problem with clarifying our value proposition, as the current euphemism puts it, is that a lot depends on whose values are included in the proposition.

Let me try that again.

Suppose you are a bean-counter at a campus suffering from budget problems, and one way to fix the problem is to cut some faculty lines, transform others into part-time contingent positions (because "any adjunct can teach that class for a lot less money"), and discontinue some programs entirely. How do you decide which programs to chop and which to enhance? (In this context, "enhance" might mean simply "allow to continue functioning as usual," but that's a quibble for another day.)

You've got to develop some metrics, concrete numbers to show which programs are contributing to the success of the institution and which ones aren't. The problem with this system, though, is that numbers can measure only those qualities that are measurable by numbers, which seems so self-evident that it's hardly worth mentioning but at the same time needs to be reiterated: numbers can measure only those qualities that are measurable by numbers. Which raises the question: what about the ones that aren't? How do you measure the immeasurable, untangle the intangible, eff the ineffable?

First let's think about the metrics that might be used to evaluate the effectiveness of a program, starting with FTEs, AKA "butts in seats." How many students does a program attract? How many of them graduate, and how quickly? How effective is the education they receive in those classes? This can be hard to measure--course evaluations are notoriously unreliable, but that doesn't mean their numbers won't be consulted. Assessment data will help. What about post-graduate outcomes--how many students go to grad school or find a job in their field within six months or a year? And of course you have to consider costs: How much does the department cost the institution in salaries, benefits, equipment, and facilities? How much grant money does it bring in? All these numbers are easily obtained and will therefore play a big part in evaluating a department's value to the institution.

So you run all these numbers through the algorithms and you come up with a list of programs or majors that attract a lot of students who demonstrate positive outcomes at a reasonable cost, and you conclude that those departments are contributing quite a lot to the success of the institution and should therefore be enhanced. Kudos to you, Top-Notch Department! According to the metrics, you're doing a great job educating your majors!

But of course Top-Notch Department isn't functioning in a vacuum. Its majors must take courses outside the department--writing and speech and general education courses, maybe even a second major or minor or certificate. How much do these other departments contribute to Top-Notch Department's students' success? That's a little harder to quantify. How much does a good Business Writing class contribute to a Finance major's ability to communicate clearly? How much more employable is a Petroleum Engineering major who can speak a foreign language proficiently? How can you equitably distribute the credit to all the departments that might contribute more or less to a student's success? And what about outside-of-class activities? How much does participation in student government or baseball or a fraternity or Model U.N. contribute to student success? 

Maybe that task is too difficult. It's a lot easier to ignore extracurriculars and courses outside the major; in fact, maybe it would be a lot easier--and cheaper!--if more of those general education and service courses were taught by part-time and contingent faculty members, which would improve the value proposition of the institution as a whole.

But, again, a lot depends on what you value.

Do you see general education courses as check-marks on a transcript or as opportunities for students to have enriching and sometimes life-changing encounters with a wide range of ideas? Is there room in your algorithm to measure the degree of enrichment experienced in those classes? Where does "that course changed my life!" fit into your metrics?

Do you see faculty members as interchangeable cogs in a machine or as experts and leaders who contribute to the quality of the institution even when they're not in the classroom? Is there room in your algorithm to value the time faculty members spend advising students, leading campus committees, or organizing cultural events that serve the entire community?

How, in other words, can your numbers quantify the things that make a Liberal Arts education a Liberal Arts education? How are you going to quantify the value of students' self-understanding and breadth of knowledge and in-depth study with faculty members who enjoy the academic freedom protected by tenure?

Maybe that's too much to expect. In fact, this whole program evaluation process has a fairly tight deadline, so you'd better just gather the numbers that are easily gathered and crunch the numbers that are easily crunched and ignore those qualities that resist quantification, even if those are the qualities most closely associated with the institution's mission, history, and identity. After all, you devalue the intangible or immeasurable or ineffable characteristics long enough, eventually they are bound to disappear. And since the costs of ignoring unquantifiable qualities are themselves difficult to quantify, you don't even have to worry about what may be lost along the way. Problem solved!

Meanwhile, those of us who value the intangible qualities that can't be squeezed into a spreadsheet find ourselves, at best, sidelined, dismissed as obstructionists or devotees of an outmoded ideal--or, at worst, deleted entirely from the system, just as our values are deleted from the institution's value proposition.

So go ahead, bean-counters, count what can be counted--but be watchful lest you count out the very qualities that make the institution matter most.

Mount Chicago: comedy, memory, anomaly

When people ask me what Adam Levin's new novel, Mount Chicago, is about, I'm tempted to respond, "It's about 600 pages long."

The length is an important detail I neglected to notice when I ordered the book. I'd read a review that made me think this novel could be a good reading assignment for my Concepts of Comedy class, but a 600-page novel in that class would wipe out half of the syllabus. I might assign a 600-page novel in an upper-level class full of English majors, but certainly not in a lower-level class full of General Education students. Unless I want to spend a month talking to myself about a novel no one else in the room has read, I'm not going to assign Mount Chicago in my Comedy class.

Which is not to say that it has nothing to say about comedy. In fact, the novel tackles a couple of my favorite questions: How do cultures memorialize tragic events, and what role can comedy play? The sections that deal with these topics are insightful and often quite funny, but they're funny in a way unlikely to resonate with my students. I mean, when the malaprop-prone Mayor says he wants a memorial more popular than Auschwitz but "less depressing," the laughter is not unmixed with pain.

But, on the other hand, there are plenty of poop jokes, plus a personable parrot named Gogol, a duck named Momo whose attempt to free his people--er, ducks--from their oppressors is thwarted by an untimely erection and who therefore becomes a comedian, and a comedian named Shlomo--er, Solomon Gladman--doomed by hemorrhoids to a miserable life that may or may not be redeemed by comedy.

It's complicated, in other words. The style evokes Vonnegut, Pynchon, and David Foster Wallace, with massive digressions that tumble forward and backward and circle in upon themselves before reaching punchlines that are frequently worth the effort.

The longest digressions concern Apter Schutz, who seems at first like a minor character but, like the parrot named Gogol, steps up, demonstrating a powerful ability to make money through honest but not always honorable means and eventually becoming advisor to the malaprop-spouting Mayor of Chicago, who struggles to create the appropriate response to a disaster that swallows up a huge chunk of the city. 

 

This disaster is, more or less, the driver of the plot, such as it is. First, what to call the disaster? "Sinkhole" is accurate, but "Sinkholes were for Florida. They made you think of swamps and they made you think of armpits. Swampy armpits." The Mayor similarly dismisses "the seismic event" (too earthquaky), but finally Apter offers "the anomaly," which earns him a job as the Mayor's chief advisor, in which position he is placed in charge of developing the park that will serve as a memorial to the anomaly and become a more popular but less depressing Auschwitz, and off we go on a million digressions, some of which are rewarding and others not so much.

 

But I kept reading through almost 600 pages because that's what I do, and in that I resemble no one so much as the hardy Chicagoans described by their Mayor in response to the aforementioned anomaly:

We are, every one of us, all-star NFL linemen in our souls, and yes it is true that I wish, like I'm sure all of you wish, that there had never been any chapter that required our talent for this overcoming of it to be demonstrated, but we have demonstrated that talent, in spades, we have put our big shoulders to the task of tackling this chapter that needs to be tackled, we have tackled it in fact, and we will keep on demonstrating even more of our talent in even further spades, we will keep on tackling it till the game is over or it can't get up, whichever comes first, and if you want to know why, I will tell you why, even though I think you already know why: because this is Chicago and we are Chicagoans, and that's what we do.

So yes: I have tackled all the chapters, and I found something funny in all of them and sometimes something admirable and often something surreal or bizarre, but now I am done tackling chapters and I am closing the book.

Recharging my batteries

This used to be easier, I tell myself as I slog my way up the Big Horrible Hill, but I'm not sure that's true. Walking up that hill has always been challenging, which makes it a great workout. What's changed is pain.

My hips hurt walking up the hill and my knees hurt coming down. On the stretch of road along our creek--a lovely place to walk in any season--the road's steep bank makes my right foot and ankle bend in a way that causes constant pain and makes me limp through the home stretch. Then I sit down for a few minutes and rise to find I've stiffened up everywhere. If the walk is difficult, the aftermath is even worse.

Good thing the walk offers plenty of distractions from the pain. This morning I followed a red-tailed hawk up the hill; it would perch on a tree and shriek, and then as soon as I got a little closer, it would fly to a tree just a little bit further up the hill until it finally got tired of the chase and flew off into the woods. Elsewhere I heard kingfishers and a pileated woodpecker, but not much else was stirring in the cool morning woods.

Wildflowers are also getting more scarce--just a few tall thistles plus jewelweed, ironweed, wingleaf, some scraggly chicory and something that looked like lobelia. I should have taken along my trash-picker-upper for the fresh crop of beer cans alongside the road, but I can't handle that and the camera at the same time, and apparently I can't handle the camera either because I neglected to check whether the battery had any charge left. It did, but not enough.

But the walk recharged my batteries, calming my anxious thoughts and preparing me for the pile of reading and grading approaching just down the road. I can live with a little joint pain if it means a chance to absorb energy from a walk in the woods. 

 

Friday poetry challenge: seasonal haiku

It's not just the calendar pointing toward autumn: on these cool mornings I drive through dense fog along the river, wearing a jacket or sweater that I'm bound to leave behind somewhere when the sun comes out. The pollinator garden has reached Peak Sunflower while the grass around my house seems to have finally slowed down its frantic summer growth. And the cool nights are already inspiring mice to seek a warm indoor space to spend the winter--time to bait the mouse-traps!

At school the changing season means my students suddenly find themselves facing demands in every class, from history exams to chem lab reports to oral presentations. And in my classes they'll all be submitting drafts--all my students--over the next week and a half. "Do you read them all?" asked a student this morning, but of course I do: read and re-read and respond and reach out. So the honeymoon's over for me as well as my students; a week from now I'll be struggling to keep up with the flood of drafts alongside class preps and committee meetings. ("I feel like you go to a lot of meetings," said our new administrative assistant, but we all have a lot of meetings! Maybe I just complain about them more.)

Between the morning fog and the flood of drafts, I keep wishing someone would toss me a lifeline. I wish I could follow the advice in Wendell Berry's poem "Stay Home," except then I'd have to deal with the mouse problem. Let's write some haiku!

Fog blankets the road,
blanks out my thoughts, bringing
the promise of autumn:

Sunflowers hover
above us who hunger for
transient colors;

their heads droop with seeds,
ours under workloads that mag-
nify gravity.

Light in the fog, or
lines on the page: a lifeline!
Let autumn roll on.

Little worries, big worries

I arrived home after a late-afternoon meeting yesterday to find that my husband had left two boxes of Domino's pizza on the dining table accompanied by a flurry of sticky notes, one of which told me not to worry about the kitchen, which, of course, propelled me into the kitchen to see what I wasn't supposed to worry about, where I saw that the cabinets under the sink were standing open and it looked like the cabinet had vomited its contents all across the floor.

Plumbing problem. Nothing a handy husband armed with PVC pipe can't handle. Last night, I just walked away from the mess and told myself not to worry about it, which is about as effective as trying not to think about pink elephants.

Still, I welcome these minor kerfuffles because they give me something to talk about when I can't talk about larger and more consequential problems that don't quite portend The End of the World As We Know It but certainly feel that way. I mean, we are in the middle of a budget crisis that will eventually lead to the brutal amputation of faculty positions and programs. There isn't enough PVC pipe in the world to fix that problem.

I keep going to meetings where I am asked to envision the future of various programs and departments, but it's hard to get motivated to plan for a program that may get axed at any moment. It's like spending a lot of time picking out new cabinets for the kitchen only to come home one day and find that the whole house has been swallowed by a sinkhole.

Too many metaphors? Since I can't talk about details of the current crisis, metaphors are all I've got. Somehow, they're not helping.

So it's comforting to know that my helpful husband is at home fixing the plumbing problem while I focus on trying not to worry about the kitchen. That's a level of not-worrying I can live with.

Mayo-news

Today a student researching a medical topic said he thought a great source would be the Mayonnaise Clinic (what if the door is ajar?), and in another class a student wondered what kind of Yelp review Odysseus would write about, say, the Cyclops' cave or Circe's house. They make me laugh, these students of mine, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not.

In my Nature class, students debated whether a certain poem is about eating apples or having sex (or both!), making good arguments on each side. In the Place class, on the other hand, only two people in the room really wanted to talk about poetry while the rest inspired me to say, "You know, I didn't assign these poems to torture to." I doubt that they believed me.

And then there was cake where no cake was supposed to be. How can I explain the bizarre series of events that resulted in the appearance of a birthday cake proclaiming Happy Birthday Bev in a large committee meeting on a day that is three months away from my birthday? Why do I have the remains of that cake in a large box in my office right now? Well, it's complicated. A few weeks ago, we were looking over the schedule for future meetings and I noticed that the final meeting on the schedule was slated for the final day of the fall semester, which is also, coincidentally, my birthday, and I said, jokingly, something like If we have to meet on my birthday, someone had better bring cake! And someone did...just not on my birthday.

So yeah, it's been an up-and-down kind of day, ranging from silliness to sweetness to torture, but I guess the bright side is that the work week is over and all I have to do before I go home is attend our departmental picnic (with cake!) and then go see the theatre department's production of Into the Woods, presented in a woodsy park next to the river in the dark, with mosquitos (but not cake).

Which goes to show, I guess, that academics is sometimes like a box of chocolates but more often like a jar of mayonnaise where no mayonnaise is expected to be.

  

S'mores and stomping, with aplomb

While we were walking the track at the rec center, my retired colleague asked about my Labor Day weekend and I told her about the grandkids' camping trip in our back yard--sleeping in the tent, stomping in the creek, cooking out, making S'mores.

"Next time you have S'mores," she said, "You'd better invite me."

I struggled to picture my perfectly-pulled-together colleague messing around with marshmallows on a stick. "You know you can make them in the microwave," I pointed out.

"Right," she said, "But that's not how I like them."

This was an unexpected aspect of my former colleague's character. She is the ultimate in elegance, always perfectly manicured and with every hair in place. She never even broke a sweat despite walking briskly around the track for an hour only two months after her knee replacement. But she had very specific expectations for the perfect S'mores experience:

"I'll need two marshmallows, not one, and I'll hold them over the coals until they're just about to catch fire--not charred, but nice and crisp on the outside and gooey on the inside. Then I want to set them and the chocolate carefully between graham crackers and smash them together, and when I bite into it, I want the goo to drip down my face."

I agree that this is the ideal recipe for S'mores, but the thought of melted marshmallows and chocolate dripping down my elegant colleague's face was causing a little cognitive dissonance. Somehow she's always managed to sail through distressing circumstances without a hint of muss or fuss, so I wouldn't be surprised if she could handle the whole S'mores-making experience without a hint of melty goo on her chin or a drop of chocolate on a perfectly manicured fingernail. But it would be worth the experiment just to see how she does it.

And then when we're done, I'll see how she feels about creek-stomping. I'm sure she could stomp with perfect aplomb, a lesson in elegance for all of us. 

Friday poetry challenge: relishing the niceness, for now

The other day I asked my first-year composition students what has surprised them the most about being in college, and several said they were surprised by how stinking nice all the professors are. Give it time is what I wanted to say, but I bit my tongue. 

I've been doing that a lot lately. My tongue-biting skills are legendary, developed over long years of being a pastor's wife, but right now I'm privy to way too much information that I'm not allowed to share with the general public, so I find myself keeping silent when every muscle in my mouth is screaming to speak out. The stress of keeping silent makes niceness much more challenging.  

Students, though, deserve the extra effort required for niceness. I try to be as pleasant as possible to all my students, but there are times when harsh truths have to be conveyed, like You're in danger of failing or This looks like plagiarism or even You need to work harder on getting the details right. Often that kind of message doesn't feel particularly nice to the listener, while an Honors student may consider a B+ positively brutal.

This early in the semester, though, I've had little opportunity to be anything but nice. I've written some pointed marginal comments on homework assignments, but at this point I'm overlooking small issues while balancing out positive and negative feedback. There's no particularly nice way to say Add quotation marks, but at least I'm not prefacing my comments with Hey, stupid.

As the semester goes on, everyone's workload ramps up and sleep becomes more fleeting, niceness starts to fray around the edges. If I wait until after midterm grades come out to ask my students whether they still think all their professors are so nice, I suspect that I'll hear some different answers--if I can hear anything over all the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Today, though, I'll relish the niceness and hope that it hangs around as long as possible. 

Nice work! Nice font! Nice title too!
Good vivid verb in sentence 2!
Your punctuation's rather strange;
your spelling is downright deranged.
Your paper lacks a thesis, and
its logic stands on sinking sand.
There's no citation--not a one!
The final paragraph's not done.
This thing's a mess! But one thing's nice:
you've spelled my name correctly--twice!

 

Busy bench

Sit on this bench in the middle of campus and everyone I know will pass by: 

The Instructional Technologist who answers a question about Canvas and tells me about her cats.

The Associate Provost for Tackling Annoying Tasks (or whatever his title is), who asks me which of several options for classroom chairs I prefer.

A retired colleague who has unexpectedly come out of retirement to teach a few classes in place of another colleague who suddenly left us for reasons that cannot be discussed in public so I keep my mouth shut even though I really want to know what happened.

Dozens of butterflies, bees, and birds attracted to the nearby pollinator gardens.

Our resident narcissist, who appears as if by magic the minute I tell a colleague that it's impossible to reason with a narcissist.

A former student who assures me that he's graduating next May even though it seems like I just had him in first-year writing five minutes ago.

A groundskeeper responsible for keeping the pollinator garden growing, who zips past too quickly to do more than accept my thanks.

Another student and another, and then a whole stream of students heading for lunch.

But now my lunch break is over and it's time to head back inside and get to work, knowing that my bench will still be there the next time I want to watch the passing parade--and learn a thing or two in the process.

 

From falling trees to failing teas

If a tree falls in the forest and I'm not there to hear it, does it still make an impact?

Yes, and you could have heard the long-term effect of this impact early this morning if you'd seen me bonking my head against my car's door frame. It may not be immediately clear how these two events are related, but one led to the other as inevitably as washing the car leads to rain.

So the resident woodsman cut down a tree, a lovely tulip poplar that unfortunately grew too close to the driveway and interfered with delivery trucks' ability to get around the last steep curve. I'm amazed that he brought this massive tree down without doing any damage to nearby rhododendron bushes or the bottlebrush buckeye, but there was nowhere to drop it but across the driveway so there it still sat when I got home last night. I parked my car further down the driveway and clambered up a wet, muddy slope to get to the house, too tired to think about how I might eventually get the car out of its tight spot.

This morning the rain was pouring down when I went out the door laden with umbrella, tote bag, flashlight, and a loaf of zucchini bread (for a retired colleague who's coming by for a casual colloquy this afternoon). My husband helped me get down the muddy slope and then executed a perfect 14-point turn to get my car facing the right direction--and off I went, never even noticing that I'd left the house without my usual travel mug full of tea. Yes, I blame the tree for that, because if the tree hadn't been in the way, I wouldn't have been too distracted to notice the travel-mug-shaped void at the center of my being.

But I didn't notice the absence until I was halfway to town and I can't get through the morning without my usual quota of caffeine so I decided to stop at a convenience store and pick up a jolt of Diet Wild Cherry Pepsi, which is not my usual morning quaff but there really isn't anywhere in town to get real chai brewed from loose tea leaves or even bottled unsweetened iced tea, and beggars can't be choosers.

So I walk out in the rain and open the car door and the slippery plastic Pepsi bottle slips out of my hand and starts rolling away, at which point I lunge after it but miscalculate the angles and bash my head against the door frame. Ouch! (Again, I blame the tree. Obviously!) And there goes my morning quota of caffeine rolling across the parking lot into the path of a car, whose driver stops and looks at me where I'm holding my aching head and nods to indicate he'll wait while I retrieve my drink, which is just about to roll into the road. This is a person who understand the power of caffeine addition. 

Did I go running across a rainy parking lot this morning to chase a bottle of Diet Wild Cherry Pepsi? Yes I did. I may have sacrificed my dignity, but I salvaged my caffeine.

Now I'm in my office preparing for tomorrow's classes while the resident woodsman disassembles the tulip poplar's trunk to move it out of the driveway. If all goes according to plan, I'll be able to drive all the way up my driveway when I finally get home. If not, I think I'll just leave my car in a ditch and drop out of the rat race, wandering off to become a woodland hermit. 

(But who will bring me my morning tea? If my tea fails in the woods--trust me, you'll hear it.)

Let them eat cake!

So I'm sitting in my Honors Literature room a few minutes before class starts and a student raises her hand and asks, "Can we have cake?" 

Well sure, why not? Cake in class would be a great idea, now that we're no longer operating under those strict Covid protocols that outlawed food and drink in the classrooms. However, on the first day of class I'm not generally equipped to serve cake to students, so I guess the answer to the question is: Yes, but not today.

I'm trying to say Yes to students more often because they're coming to my class after all those Covid disruptions and I want to create a comfortable and challenging learning environment, but also because I'm aware that some people find English teachers scary. I don't think I'm particularly intimidating but then I'm not an 18-year-old freshperson, so what do I know? So I say yes to cake (but not today).

I also gave a qualified yes to a student who emailed me last week with a question related to my new no-laptops-in-the-classroom policy. I told him about the problem I had last year with students being so busy doing on unrelated things on their laptops (emailing, assignments for other classes, shopping, games) that they simply weren't available to engage in class discussions, and I told the student that if he can meet with other students in the class and come up with a proposal that will meet their needs for technology while meeting my need to have students engage in class discussion, then I'll be happy to negotiate. I hope to give students a sense of agency, but not so much agency that they'll disengage from class entirely. We'll see how it works.

And we'll see how I work too. I've taught two first-year classes back-to-back this morning and I'll teach two sophomore-level classes back-to-back this afternoon, which is a workable schedule. This is the first time in 20 years that I haven't had an 8 a.m. class, but I was ready to go at 8 anyway. Old habits die hard! This morning's classes went well, with students appearing alert, curious, and eager to ask questions. Let's hope they're as interested in learning as they are in eating cake. 

My first-day-of-school picture.

 

Rule 1: No pajamas at meetings

Yesterday I received an email requesting that I attend a meeting today from 3:30 a.m. to 3:40 p.m., and said, "Dude, I don't meet with anyone at 3:30 a.m. except my pillow." So he sent a corrected time for the meeting: 3:30 p.m. to 3:40 a.m. the next day. Someone needs to figure out his scheduling software!

When people ask me whether classes have started yet I say, "No, but I have a lot of meetings," but outsiders don't seem to understand just how disruptive and time-consuming academic meetings can be, even when they're not scheduled at 3:30 a.m. Three meetings yesterday, two today, three tomorrow, each one requiring a different level of preparation. Today's meeting required me to dress professionally, but I don't even know what that means anymore. I showered, and I'm not wearing pajamas. Isn't that enough?

Given the current campus climate/budget crisis/dystopian nightmare, some of these meetings get pretty intense. Spend an hour immersed in a thick gray sludge of anger, fear, and gloom, and then emerge into a lovely sunny day with butterflies flitting among the flowers--it's like moving between parallel universes. But even the butterflies can't stop people from congregating outside for the meeting postmortem, where we prod the corpse a few more times to see whether it's really dead or just sleeping.

Sleeping gets more difficult after a stressful meeting, which is why it would make some sense to start scheduling meetings at 3:30 a.m. I mean, if we're not sleeping anyway, why not do something useful?

Not really about sharks, or anvils either

Somewhere deep in the darkest recesses of my memory lies the scene from Batman where Adam West, dangling from a helicopter, gets attacked by an extremely phony shark and saves himself by asking Robin to hand him an aerosol can of Shark Repellent--and I know I didn't just dream that up because here it is on YouTube.

The scene raises a number of questions, starting with Why and moving on to Who's flying the helicopter while Robin fetches the Shark Repellent, but you've got to hand it to a guy who has so deeply internalized the Boy Scout Motto that he can Be Prepared to fight off a shark attack even while dangling from a helicopter. 

I wasn't a particularly good Girl Scout, but even I knew that you can't Be Prepared for everything all the time: you wouldn't take Shark Repellent on a trek through the desert any more than you'd take sunscreen while spelunking. There just isn't a tool belt big enough to deal with all possible problems, much less the impossible ones. I mean, you don't whip out a handy can of Anvil Repellent unless you live in a world where anvils routinely fall out of the sky.

But what if you do?

This week an anvil fell on my campus, and those of us who were close enough to see a beloved colleague's career go splat are suddenly asking ourselves a bunch of questions we've never had to ask before. For instance:

• Is this a one-time event or should we expect showers of anvils?
• How does one protect oneself from showers of anvils? Umbrellas would be useless, and no one's selling Falling Anvil Insurance.
• If an anvil could fall on that end of campus, what's to stop one from falling on my building or my department or my office?
• If I saw an anvil falling toward my office and had only 30 seconds to save what I could from the wreckage, what would I grab? What would I gladly leave behind?
• How does one prepare for the possibility of falling anvils? I'd start with a home computer so I don't have to be entirely dependent on my college laptop, plus an email account separate from my college account, plus copies of all my valuable files, but what else do I need in my toolbelt?

Even Batman couldn't fight off that shark on his own--he needed his trusty sidekick. If the local forecast calls for showers of anvils, I hope those of us who see it coming will band together to share whatever we've got in our toolbelts. Now is the time Be Prepared--to make sure those toolbelts are fully stocked up with useful things, because once the anvils start falling, it'll be too late.

Wandering in the realm of possibility

I'd like to say that this morning I found myself boldly going where no man had gone before, but clearly others had bushwhacked through the wilderness before me and left random stuff behind. At one point I asked my companion to identify some unfamiliar foliage on the ground, and she said, "Christmas tree." Which indeed it was: branches from an artificial tree, scattered amongst teasels and ironweed and milkweed in the middle of nowhere.

We were exploring a 44-acre tract of land that had recently been donated to the Friends of the Lower Muskingum River. The hilly land would be ideal for hiking trails and a picnic shelter and a pollinator habitat, but first the group needs to figure out what's there and what needs to be done to make it usable. I offered to go out with the FLMR director and take some photos to put in the newsletter, and that's why I found myself early this morning stumbling through thick stands of giant ironweed and sliding down a deer trail toward a secluded creek. 

Butterflies and other pollinators were out in abundance, along with pesky horseflies adept at landing on that unreachable spot in the middle of my back. Up on the ridge (which I'm calling Butterfly Ridge until it gets a real name) we walked in bright sun over the overgrown remains of a gravel drive, but along the creekbanks the foliage closed in and we found ourselves ducking under branches of autumn olive and avoiding thickets of multiflora rose. It's a narrow, twisty creek and we don't know whether it's prone to flooding, but we were pleased to see some small fishes and some easy places to wade across.

At first it looked like untouched wilderness, but by the time were were done, the whole place was overlaid by signs of prior habitation and dreams of what could be there in the future. It doesn't even have a name but it's a place of possibilities visible only to those who are willing to look. But you'll never find the place without a guide, and I was really happy to have a good one this morning.

 

Making a nuisance of myself, maybe

I'm sitting in the lobby outside some administrative offices wondering to what extent I ought to make a nuisance of myself.

Some would say I've spent 22 years making a nuisance of myself and I ought to hang back and let some others pick up the slack, and they have a point. I am aware that I do an awful lot of complaining and demanding and grumbling about every stinking little thing that goes wrong on campus.

But on the other hand, I'm being only a minor nuisance here today. As it happens, this lobby has fast, strong, reliable wireless internet service, while my office, at the moment, has ... nothing. Or nothing usable. It took me nearly an hour this morning just to upload a single document to our new course management system, with a hard-wired internet connection in my office that kept disconnecting at random or running at speeds so slow that I couldn't even check my email. I'm accustomed to that kind of service at home, but not on campus.

We're required to use the new course management system but it's going to be pretty hard to do that if I don't have enough connectivity to upload a single document. One option, of course, would be to simply print out all those documents instead of making them available online. In one class I have around 200 pages of readings I need to make available to 18 students, which would be an obscene amount of printing even if we weren't in the middle of a serious budget crisis. And that's just one class!

I have a limited amount of time to get my courses ready before classes start next week, but fortunately, our crack IT staff is on the job. Yes! They have a solution: "Have you tried turning it off and turning back on again?"

Yes, in fact, I have seen every episode of The IT Crowd and I know that's the first step to solving any IT problem, so that's actually the very first thing I did when the problem started. It didn't help. 

And so instead of doing my important prep work in my comfy campus office, I'm sitting in the busy lobby outside some offices where our top administrators enjoy excellent internet access along with the power to require us to use a new course management system that I am not actually capable of using because there's no usable internet connection in my office.

I'm working steadily and quietly and without a lot of fuss and so far I haven't made a nuisance of myself, but give me some time and you never know what might happen.  

Skyrocketing stress levels on campus

It's a good thing the pollinator gardens on campus are attracting visitors right now, because I needed that flutter of fritillary wings after my morning meetings. 

Classes start two weeks from now and everyone is scrambling to adjust to a new course management system while trying to develop fall syllabi, which causes one kind of annoyance and stress, but an entirely different level of stress and grumbling and despair arise from the rumors swirling about impending cuts of faculty and staff and programs and--well, anything that can be cut to save a nickel, and meanwhile, many departments are struggling to do essential work with insufficient staffing. It's easy to talk about doing more with less but it's not so easy to make the painful decisions about valuable things we won't be able to do at all.

The grumbling gets louder the closer I get, so after my meetings, I'm spending time with the fritillaries. As long as no one decides to add the pollinator garden to the list of items to be cut, I think I may survive this semester.

Thrills and spills in a smelly office

I'm pleased to report that my office on campus smells really good this morning, and so do I. Vanilla latte! On the floor, my shirt, my pants, and even the new shoes I'm wearing for the first time today. (Good thing they're not white.) The coffee cup itself and a good measure of its contents ended up in an open desk drawer containing manila envelopes, labels, and about half a ream of copy paper. That's all in the trash right now--but, again, it smells really good.

Great time for a colleague to drop by with a prospective student who needs an answer to a question! I had to assure her that I did indeed have a clean shirt on when I arrived on campus this morning, even if it now looks as if some vengeful plagiarist poured an entire pot of coffee down my front.  

I had intended to do a little cleaning in my office this morning--sorting papers, putting away books, dusting--but instead I did a whole lot of wet and messy cleaning. My trash can is full of ruined envelopes and coffee-soaked paper towels, and the rug beneath my desk still has a big wet spot.

But it smells really, really good. Delicious, actually. I can taste that vanilla latte just by sitting my office and breathing. Not the way I prefer to ingest my vanilla latte, but under the circumstances, it's the best I can do.

A day that starts like this can't possibly get any worse, right?  

Here comes Trouble

When a stray dog tries to "herd" our lawnmower by nipping at the tires, it's kind of cute; but when that same dog tries to herd my grandkids by nipping at their hands, not so cute. Big, energetic, jumping dog, small children, lots of distress. My daughter, the dog-whisperer, tried to do her magic to distract the dog while I got the kids inside, but for her pains she got bitten--just a small bite, no stitches necessary, but even a small bite can be dangerous when you don't know the dog's vaccination history.

It's hard for the visiting grandkids to enjoy the great outdoors while a big bossy jumpy dog keeps trying to control their movements, so we called the county sheriff, who eventually responded with two options: we could restrain the dog so they could come and collect it, or they could set up a live trap. I pointed out that a live trap would be more likely to capture the family of raccoons that's been ravaging our birdfeeders, so we made a plan to restrain the dog.

Easier said than done. Tuesday morning we took the kids out on a creek hike, with lots of splashing and shrieking and fun, and we kept our eyes peeled for this stray dog.

Now I have gone on record stating that I'd like to get a new dog to replace Hopeful, but this is not that dog. From the first time she followed me home, Hopeful started sleeping across the threshold of the front door as if to protect us, and even at her most energetic, she never bit or nipped or threatened anyone. A dog that nips at my grandkids and bites my daughter is not going to be my best friend without some intensive training of the sort I'm not equipped to provide, so we needed an intervention.

We were splashing through a shallow section of the creek when the dog came charging up. My husband was equipped with thick gloves and a leash, and he soon had the dog restrained--temporarily. The dog acted much more obedient while leashed, but he kept slipping out of the collar and running off, and off the leash, he's a maniac. Finally the resident dog-wrangler tightened the collar and tied the leash to a stake out back and came in to get ready for work while we waited for the deputy sheriff. I sent her out back to collect the dog, but all she found was a limp leash.

At that time the dog-wrangler was in the shower and I was in the house awaiting developments while my daughter and grandkids were building a dam down at the creek, and all I could think of was that dog rushing off to try to herd them up again, nipping every hand she could find. But the dog got caught and the grandkids were fine and the deputy took the beast away. Problem solved!

Until this morning, when the dog came back.

The grandkids have gone back home so the dog isn't going to menace anyone but us and our lawnmower, which he apparently hates. I can only assume that the dog belongs to one of our neighbors, though he has no tags and I haven't seen him showing signs of attachment to any particular house. If the dog was released, I assume that means he's owned and cared for and up-to-date with vaccinations, although the sheriff's office isn't providing any further information.

So we carry on, trying to coexist with a visiting dog that thinks it's the boss of us. Call him Trouble--and when he comes charging, guard your hands and children and lawnmowers, because he's not giving up until he's got everyone just where he wants 'em.

 

Where can I find some Black-Hole-B-Gone?

Here we are a few days from the dreaded arrival of August and what do I have to show for it? New artificial lenses in both eyes, new paint on a bunch of walls, nice memories from Dad's memorial service, but the rest of the summer feels like a big black hole--not just empty but an insatiable force sucking my entire universe toward oblivion.

People keep asking how my second cataract surgery went and I tell them fine, it went fine, I feel fine. The surgery itself went even more smoothly than the first one, and this time I'll know better than to take a long sunny road trip ten days after eye surgery. They even told me not to mow the lawn lest foreign matter gets thrown toward my eyes, and I'm more than happy to oblige. No troubles. All good.

But the truth is that I feel reamed out. Maybe this is cumulative effect of this whole long complicated summer piling up on me, but truly I want to pull the covers over my head and block out the world for the foreseeable future. Here's how bad it is: my home internet has been on the blink all week and I didn't even want to drive to town to find a working connection. 

And yet here I sit in my office trying to weed through the messages that have been piling up in my inbox: Gordian knots requiring swift Faculty Council action, problems with a nonresponsive contributor to the volume I'm editing, problems with paperwork for Dad's estate--and you don't know how complicated these things can get unless you've tried to track down a notary recently. This place used to be crawling with notaries but someone came along with some Notary-B-Gone and wiped 'em out.

For an academic, summer should be a time of research and writing and calm consideration of future classes, but that's not how this summer has worked for me. August marks the end of scholarly productivity and the beginning of the scramble to prep fall classes, so whatever scholarship I could have tackled this summer simply didn't happen, and now it won't. I end the summer with nicely painted walls and a thicker bank statement and new lenses in my eyeballs, but everything else has fallen into that hungry black hole. I'd like to put it all behind me and start fresh, but the minute I turn my back, it'll come creeping up behind me, ready to start chomping up my fall.

Dealing with deferred maintenance

When the first dribble of funds from my father's estate trickled in, we ordered a new mattress set. The mattress delivery guys took one look at our bridge and said we're not driving our truck over that, so these two strong young men cheerfully walked two-tenths of a mile uphill carrying the mattress and base on their backs, like tiny leaf-cutter ants carrying impossibly large loads. I tipped them well, and we've been sleeping peacefully ever since.

In case you're wondering how we've already received distributions from my father's estate, it's because he was a very smart man: after my mother died, he made all of his accounts payable on death to me and my brothers. There are still some bits and bobs hovering out there in limbo--a couple of small life insurance policies, a refund from the assisted living center, possibly a tax refund--but otherwise, Dad's modest assets have flowed smoothly into our grateful hands.

Aside from the new bed (badly needed), we've been mostly devoting my inheritance to what people in the facilities management field call deferred maintenance. For instance, last week we got both septic tanks cleaned. (Dealing with family history!)  We had a flooring company come out and measure rooms for new flooring but haven't ordered it yet. I've wanted to tear that stained wall-to-wall carpet out of our bathroom for 18 years, but I'll have to live with the new flooring for the next 18 years so I don't want to make any rash decisions.

And we've been painting. Truthfully, we were planning on painting the living areas this summer anyway, but Dad's generosity meant that I didn't blink at the price of high-quality paint. We painted the upstairs living areas before our trip to Florida and we've painted the downstairs this week, with the exception of the two most annoying spots in our house--possibly on the planet. One is the stairwell connecting upstairs to downstairs, where there are all kinds of fiddly bits to work around and you can't use a ladder or a step-stool to reach the high parts. I'm capable of finding something to trip on on an empty basketball court, so a stairwell covered with plastic drop-cloths and surrounded by wet paint is strictly a no-go zone for me. This is one of those times when my husband fully realizes the disadvantage of being the graceful one in the relationship.

The other difficult area is a big stretch of wall behind the old entertainment center in the basement. The basement is full of heavy things that don't get moved often--two old sofas, the piano, many overflowing bookshelves--but the entertainment center is actually bolted to the wall, and there's nowhere to put it until all those other things get moved back in place. In addition, it's full of stuff: books, old stereo equipment, piles of vinyl LP's, boxes of board games, an old radio-controlled airplane, several wooden hippopotamuses (don't ask), and an old-style television too unwieldy for any one person to handle.

This would be a good time to chuck the old TV and get a new flat-screen TV and a tidy stand, but then what to do with that ancient entertainment center? It's not exactly fine furniture--it came into our lives close to 40 years ago as a stack of particle-board pieces in a flat box accompanied by incomprehensible directions, and it's a miracle our marriage survived the process of putting that behemoth together. Last night I learned that the local Habitat for Humanity ReStore won't even accept entertainment centers, which is fine because I have no idea how we would get it there. It would be deeply satisfying to take an axe to it and burn the resulting pieces, but that's not a particularly respectful way to treat family history. I suspect that it will end up in the garage, gathering dust and mouse nests with all the other stuff we don't know what to do with.

Someday we can pass it on to our children--part of their inheritance. Along with an axe and a box of matches.    

Who wants to paint around that carpet?

Just a part of the basement chaos.