Friday poetry challenge: Toddlers at the top

Someone said that working in academe right now is like desperately holding on to an abusive relationship: just when you think things are getting better, a fist comes flying at you out of nowhere. 

It was nothing, really--just a little love-tap. Probably entirely accidental. Taking this latest blow personally would be just as petty and childish as taking bad weather personally. I mean, the storm hits everyone--it's not particularly intent upon ruining my weekend. But it would be nice to be able to do the work I love without wondering when I'll be floored by another arbitrary slap in the face.

While I play the toddler pouting in the corner, I wonder what it would be like if toddlers ruled the College. A previous administration taught us what Leadership by Tantrum looks like, and we've seen any number of bright shiny programs and plans get tossed aside the moment a new toy gets plopped down in the playroom. We've seen otherwise rational people hoarding goodies so no one else can touch them, and we've seen the hand of discipline being applied to exactly the wrong backside. Most of all, we've learned that it does no good to stomp our feet and cry that It's not fair! The kid who cries the loudest may occasionally get rewarded, but he's more often sent to the time-out box. So I'll sit over in my corner and sulk for a bit, but by next week this will all be forgotten and I'll be back in the playroom hoping for the best. (And--wham!) 

These toys are mine,
and that one, too! 
I don't want you,
or you, or you

to touch my things.
So here's the line:
on this side, every-
thing is mine.

On your side, play 
with broken toys.
Not fair? Who cares!
These bring me joy! 

Hey, give it back!
Don't make me mad!
Don't kick or I'll
be calling Dad!

I'll scream and cry
and raise a fuss!
He's here! Oh dear--
now all of us

are fleeing from
his angry spanks.
He missed! I'm safe!
He got you! Thanks

For soaking up
his angry blows.
Next time he'll get me.
(So it goes.)

Now your turn: what would happen if toddlers ruled your workplace? 

Where have all the students gone?

There was a time, not so long ago, when I started every semester hoping to scare a few students away. On the first day of class, after all the syllabus-related preliminaries, I would give students a poem they'd never seen before and require them to write about it, just to show me what they could do in 20 minutes, and I didn't complain if a few students went right over to the Records Office to drop the class. After all, my courses were generally full and a few drops meant good news for students on the waitlist.

Well, times have changed. I can't remember the last time I had a full class, much less a waitlist, and I've had multiple classes cancelled due to low (or nonexistent) enrollment. This semester I'm teaching American Lit Survey for the 25th and final time, but instead of 20 or 25 students including a swath of English majors, I started with 11 students. One student dropped yesterday, so I'm down to 10--with the drop deadline a full 10 days away.

And English majors? I may have one, unless someone has not yet declared. It looks like most of the students on the roster are majoring in finance or accounting, plus a couple of Education majors and a history buff. I can't afford to scare any of them away or I'll end up with no one to teach this semester, so I'm treading lightly. 

Further, one student made a comment on the first day of class that set off alarm bells. I won't reveal the content, but the comment and attitude put me on alert: if ever anyone was prepared to secretly record my class and post snippets out of context online, this is the one. I have never worried about the Powers That Be trying to constrain or control the content of my courses, but these days nothing scares me more than a student who knows how to record on a smartphone. We're all just one wacky ad-lib away from the wrong kind of notoriety.

But what can they do--fire me? I'm retiring in December. I can't afford to scare my small cadre of students, and I refuse to waste much time letting them scare me. If students can find a way to put up with me for a few more months, I can ride off into the sunset with my wacky ad-libs waving in the breeze. 

On a day like today, who needs a poet?

On a day celebrating the contributions of Martin Luther King, Jr., I'm thinking of Walt Whitman, which seems an odd choice. Whitman died decades before King's birth and his ideas belonged to a different century; nevertheless, I told my American Lit Survey students that since we're discussing Whitman in class on Wednesday, they should spend a little time on MLK day to sit and read Whitman's "The Wound-Dresser."  

What can a poem about Whitman's Civil War experience possibly say about the ongoing struggle for civil rights?

Whitman didn't fight in the Civil War--too old--but his brother fought and was wounded at Fredericksburg. Whitman traveled to a field hospital to tend to his brother's wounds, but then he accompanied a trainload of soldiers to a hospital in Washington, D.C., where he spent the next three years volunteering as a nurse.

Given the state of medical science at the time, it was a messy and unpleasant business, one that seems profoundly out of place in a war poem. Early in "The Wound-Dresser," Whitman describes the young people clamoring for war stories, asking him to "be witness again, paint the mightiest armies of earth," to describe the "hard-fought engagements or sieges tremendous" that led to Union victory. We've certainly had plenty of poetry extolling the glories of war, right on back to The Iliad, but Whitman had little experience of glory. 

Instead, he takes readers alongside as he moves through a hospital full of broken bodies, providing what small comfort he can. "Bearing the bandages, water and sponge, / Straight and swift to my wounded I go," he writes:

To the long rows of cots up and down each side I return,
To each and all one after another I draw near, not one do I miss,
An attendant follows holding a tray, he carries a refuse pail,
Soon to be fill'd with clotted rags and blood, emptied, and fill'd again.

No glory here--only blood and gore, wounds and refuse. In a poem full of pain, he won't allow readers to look away:

From the stump of the arm, the amputated,
I undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter and blood,
Back on his pillow the soldier bends with curv'd neck and side falling head,
His eyes are closed, his face is pale, he dares not look on the bloody stump,
And has not yet look'd on it.

But the poet has looked on it, and not just the bloody stump but "the fractur'd thigh, the knee, the wound in the abdomen"--how many wounds over three years of battles? And what kind of help could a poet possibly offer?

"The hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand, / I sit by the restless all the dark night," he writes, and sometimes, when nothing can be done, he wishes for the wounded the sweet succour of death.

He evokes the stench and mess of gangrenous flesh, the futility of so many promising lives lost, the human cost of fighting for a worthwhile principle. I tell my students that the image of the poet spreading comfort among the hospital beds provides an emblem for American authors after the Civil War. Who will mend the great bloody gash in the American psyche? Who will help suture the gaping divisions that continue to tear the nation apart? Whitman reminds us that equality does not arrive easily but often requires blood and sacrifice, and if we're not fit to fight, then the least we can do is tend wounds and bear witness.

Which is why, on a day like today, we still need nurses and wound-dressers, and we'll always need poets.

Twenty years of Excelsior, already?

It's a ridiculous situation from the start: a youth runs up a steep mountain in deep winter while carrying a banner inscribed with one word in Latin--Excelsior!--a very nice thought for those who read Latin, but others might find it incomprehensible. Why is he running up the mountain? With whom is he trying to communicate? Why won't he accept his neighbors' advice and trade his futile quest for a nice mug of hot cocoa? Longfellow doesn't tell us, so nobody knows.

These days blogging feels like an equally futile quest, especially when humanity seems determined to outsource all its reading and writing needs to robots. Have I been pouring my heart and soul into words in this space for twenty long years only to provide fodder for training mindless conglomerations of code?

Twenty years! It seems like a long time, but if this blog were a person, it wouldn't be old enough to drink. Just over four thousand posts and 1.5 million visits, though I place no confidence in the numbers because who knows how many visitors possess a mind rather than a circuit board?

I started blogging on January 18, 2006, with a post setting forth a sort of purpose, though it's couched no more clearly than the message on Longfellow's "banner with the strange device." Though that explanatory post is linked on my home page, it is only the second-most-visited post I've produced. The most-visited post, for reasons I can't fathom, is called "Meeting the OMBD Candidate." It describes academic job candidates who make members of the search committee declare, "Over my dead body!" It's not the greatest thing I've ever written but it must have struck a chord, with over 9000 visits since 2007.

"Teaching" is the most common label affixed to these posts at 1117, with "The perils of being me" and "Life in the Slow Lane" coming in a distant second and third at 835 and 831. Apparently I've written quite a lot about family, birds, books, and writing, but I also scribbled 166 posts labeled Coronavirus Chronicles and 136 labeled The New Normal, which seems odd because I feel as if cancer dominated a larger stretch of my life than did Covid-19.

Amidst all the posts about Serious Academic Matters as well as rampant silliness, I was surprised to find five posts from 2015 labeled The End of the World as We Know It, There we find George Washington seeking the name of Margaret Thatcher's wigmaker, John Muir providing inspiration for tinkerers and wanderers everywhere, academics becoming zombies at a conference, students learning novel ways to plagiarize, and teachers coping with the challenges of the Listicle Generation. I don't quite see the connection, nor do I recall why I abandoned the label not long after introducing it.

But I'm never quite sure what I'm doing here besides playing with words in a way that may provide some pleasure and insight to others. Longfellow's ridiculous youth engaged in a futile quest could be the mascot for any English professor's career, but I also quite enjoy another meaning of Excelsior: wood wool, the shavings used as packing material before the advent of styrofoam peanuts. Twenty years ago I concluded my first-ever blog post with a promise to share the "curly little shavings from the wood block of my mind," which expresses, as clearly as anything, what I'm trying to do here.

And I'm still trying to do it despite everything. Not long ago I resolved to restore three habits that I'd thoughtlessly abandoned last year: taking long walks, snapping frequent photos, and writing silly poetry. In the new year I've done some walking in the woods (ouch ouch ouch) and I've finally bought a new zoom lens, but thus far I've somehow avoided writing any doggerel. Time to fulfill my vow! What better way to celebrate a blogiversary?

Onward and Upward with Excelsior

I blogged about life in the slow lane and cancer;
I blogged my confusions and questions (and answers!).
I blogged about books, about teaching and writing,
I wrote on how tech breaks my neck--not indicting
its use but admitting my weakness. I posted
some pix of my grandkids, and sometimes I boasted
of tenure, promotion, awards--how I coasted!

I wrote about Covid and struggles with Zooming.
I wrote about birds, bees, and flowers a-blooming.
I wrote of The End of the World (hypothetical),
of Zombies and tinkerers, texts theoretical,
of life in the woods, on the road, on some beaches,
of sweet corn and pawpaws and pies full of peaches.

I blogged and I blogged and I wondered, "Who's reading?"
In what way is my goal (so bizarre!) still succeeding?
Though the bots boost my numbers, I can't see the point
of my yammering on in a vast, empty joint.

I think about quitting or splitting for Substackl
I wonder how long I'll have something to say.
What would happen, I ask, if one blog were to subtract
itself from the burgeoning media fray?

I think of the Longfellow poem, that poor youth
who sacrificed all for a hard, painful truth:
you can carry your message up Alps, ever higher,
you can trot, sprint, or sashay, but if you aspire
to communicate urgent commandments on satin, 
it's best, perhaps, not to proclaim them in Latin.

But this blog is a box full of thoughts and impressions,
all packed in with wood wool (excelsior!). I press on
and up with my strange banner waving, and even
if no one is reading, I can't help believing
that writing still matters, so I'll sing to the choir:
"Excelsior!" Sing with me! (It simply means "higher.")

I wouldn't call it a bribe, exactly

And so it has come to this: in my final year of teaching, I am offering extra credit just to convince literature students that I'm not scary.

Apparently they think we're scary. Students, that is. An expert at one of our teaching workshops earlier this week said studies show that today's students are terrified of visiting faculty offices, something I really didn't need an expert to tell me. I can go weeks at a time without having a student in my office, except when I require them to schedule one-on-one conferences for writing feedback or for advising.

I have done everything I can to make my office hospitable: Comfy chairs! Toys! Interesting books! A Jane Austen action figure! (Though the only actions she can take are to hold the writing desk and pen, which makes her seem pretty poorly armed in the world of action figures until you realize that the pen is mightier than the sword. You go, Jane!)

So while my colleague across the hall enjoys a constant parade of students coming by to talk about their classes and projects and life goals, and while another colleague upstairs attracts an army of students by providing, outside his office door, a basket of free snacks (Rice Krispies Treats! Granola bars! Twinkies!), I sit here twiddling my thumbs. Not that I'm complaining--thumb-twiddling fuels a plethora of idle thoughts, some of which may actually lead to worthwhile results. But if experts insist and studies show that getting students to visit my office will make them more comfortable contributing to class discussions, then by golly I'll get them there.

So for the first time, I am offering five extra-credit points to any student who visits my office before February 6 and spends a mere ten minutes casually chatting about books and reading. How do they feel about books? What do they like to read? What don't they like to read? Why? I have promised a judgment-free zone and invited them to give Mr. Potato Head a makeover. Ideally, this will make them more comfortable opening their mouths in class while helping me to understand their complicated (maybe?) feelings about books and reading.

If it works, five points is a small price to pay. If it doesn't? Let them eat Twinkies. 

 

Welcome to my office!

  

 

I've met my quota of meaningless meetings

I neglected to take a Buzzword Bingo card to the four million hours of required campus meetings this morning, so of course I sat quietly in my seat and paid careful attention to boatloads of highly engaging material about, for instance, new College policies for purchasing and budgeting. 

Not. 

I may be exaggerating just a little, but what do you expect from someone who's spent half a day squeezed into an auditorium while being bombarded with more information than any one person could possibly absorb in a lifetime--with no coffee? Yes: someone thought it was a great idea to pen up the entire faculty in four hours of meetings with not a single drop of caffeine in sight. That would be someone who has no understanding of human nature, or who hasn't yet mastered the new purchasing policies and therefore can't order coffee for a room full of busy people who would rather be writing their syllabi. 

At one point I looked around and noted the number of colleagues doing stuff on their phones--at least half of the attendees in one row. But these are mature professional people so I'm sure they were completing Important College Business and not, for instance, today's Wordle. (Which I solved in two tries! And frankly I ought to get a round of applause for not jumping up and down and screaming YES in the middle of the meeting!)

A person gets sleepy, you know? Especially an aging academic on the verge of retirement who has already fulfilled her lifetime quota of meetings that should have been emails. So I kept myself alert by finding interesting anagrams of colleagues' names. Somehow it's easier to keep smiling when I think of my longsuffering colleagues as Tickle Sieve, Sick Mirth, Macabre Magic, Chantal Roadkill, or, especially, Clamoring Ahem. 

I could have attended another two hours of meetings this afternoon but no. Why? Because I have a few last-minute preparations for yet another series of meetings tomorrow--teaching workshops I've organized--but these meetings are entirely voluntary AND plenty of caffeine will be available, not to mention lunch and door prizes. Also, I don't need to spend an hour learning about how I can be involved in an exciting new program that will barely get off the ground by the time I retire in December. And aside from that, this morning's many-meeting marathon left me so slap-happy that I'm afraid I won't be able to keep a straight face while listening to the earnest pleas of Sacra Hokum.

So instead, I think I'll just skedaddle. (Shh, don't tell!)

Don't look now, but Eve Bough has left the building. 

On (not) teaching in Texas

I'm probably not the only professor right now who's frantically finishing up spring semester syllabi while breathing a silent prayer of gratitude: I'm glad I'm not teaching in Texas. 

Let Texas stand for any state or system where legislators or governing boards are trying to force professors to comply with ideological constraints on curricula. Today everyone's talking about an article in Inside Higher Ed about Texas A&M University, where a philosophy professor has been told to remove Plato from his syllabus (?) and a History of Film class was deemed inappropriate for the core curriculum because it includes material on feminism and queer cinema. When students were informed that the course no longer counts toward their core requirements, enrollment started dropping--which may have been the point.

I'm most interested, of course, in how these strictures affect English professors. Here's the relevant portion of the article: 

English faculty members received an email Tuesday from senior executive associate dean of the college Cynthia Werner telling them that literature with major plot lines that concern gay, lesbian or transgender identities should not be taught in core-curriculum classes.

In a follow-up email Wednesday, Werner said, "If a course includes eight books and only one has a main character who has an LGBTQ identity and the plot lines are not overly focused on sexual orientation (i.e. that is THE main plot line), I personally think it would be OK to keep the book in the course." She also clarified that faculty may assign textbooks with chapters that cover transgender identity, so long as they do not talk about the material or include it on assignments or exam questions.

I'm trying to imagine the mental gymnastics an English professor would have to perform in order to comply with this, um, guidance. Okay, what if my course has seven books but two of them have minor characters or plot lines dealing with sexual orientation? What if none of the readings directly address sexuality but there's a whole lot of ambiguous subtext? How much ambiguous subtext is equal to one main plot? It's a word problem with too many variables and undefined terms, and even if my answer might satisfy the personal feelings of this one associate dean, who's to say that someone higher up might have a different interpretation of the rules?

And then what about literature that's not plot-driven? How many Walt Whitman poems vaguely referencing sexuality (wink-wink, nudge-nudge) would correspond to one book with a major plot dealing with sexual identity? Let's all play "Tiptoe Past the Subtext"! Would it even be possible to teach Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," or is some clever textbook publisher even now creating a bowdlerized version to remove anything that could be remotely perceived as offensive? (It would be a much shorter poem, which would certainly make some students very happy.)

I don't know how to teach Charlotte Perkins Gilman or Kate Chopin without directly addressing gender roles--or Susan Glaspell's Trifles, for that matter. Or Zora Neale Hurston's "Sweat." Or Ernest Hemingway's "Soldier's Home." Or Elizabeth Bishop or Jhumpa Lahiri or Toni Morrison or Alice Walker or Maxine Hong Kingston. Even when the "main plot" of a work of literature is not "overly focused" on gender or sexuality, those topics may still be relevant to class discussion and analysis. 

And as to the further guidance that it's acceptable to assign texts including the forbidden topics as long as we pretend those parts of the text don't exist--well good luck with that. Such a stricture is bound to backfire. The best way to get a group of students to read a text is to tell them that it's forbidden. So while I'm glad I'm not teaching in Texas, if I were, I'd be tempted to issue an anti-syllabus--a list of texts we're not permitted to read or talk about. That would be a fun couple weeks of teaching before I got fired.

Good thing I'm retiring at the end of the year, though, because someday we may all be teaching in the equivalent of Texas, and then what would I do? 

Signs and wonders

I looked at the dead bird at my feet and wondered whether it might be an omen.

I'd noticed the bird yesterday morning, a lively little house finch flitting around the feeders, its brilliant red head providing a flash of color on a bleak gray day. We get more purple finches here than house finches hereabouts and I was so excited to see this one that I took a (very bad) photo with my phone to send to my daughter. And then this morning I walked out to my car--reluctantly, because I did not at all relish heading back to work after winter break--and there on the driveway right next to my car door was a dead house finch. Frozen solid, with no sign of injury.

An omen!?

Ridiculous, of course, but there I was making my first visit back to campus in weeks (though it feels more like months) at the start of a new semester in a new year that also happens to be my final year of teaching before retirement, and I was looking for some reason to feel positive about all the annoying tasks I had to tackle today. Instead, nature delivered a dead bird. If I had one of the seers from Homer's Odyssey on hand maybe he could have told me what the bird portends, but those guys were mostly interested in interpreting auspicious actions of eagles. Would they even notice a tiny house finch dropping dead in my driveway?

As it happens, I saw eagles yesterday, a pair of them flying overhead near the Muskingum River. I had to crane my neck to see them and the only reason I could do that was that my son was driving my car, taking three of us to Columbus to meet up with five other members of the family for a Columbus Blue Jackets hockey game. This is the second year my son has treated us all to a hockey game as a Christmas gift, and this time he even took us all out to eat afterward--and did all the driving, two hours each way. I don't know if seeing eagles flying just overhead constitutes a sign of anything specific, but I'd say that having a son willing to provide such an excellent experience is a sign that he knows what makes a great family gift. (I was going to say it's a sign that he was raised right, but that feels just a tad self-serving.)

What a difference a day makes: hockey and eagles yesterday, work and a dead finch today. Work was hard but I did what I needed to do and I even got excited about meeting with a colleague to put together what promises to be a really fun presentation. I hope I'll have more eagle days coming up but I guess I can deal with the other kind as well. Maybe a dead bird in my driveway is just a dead bird in my driveway. 

Eagles overhead, though--that's another kind of wonder entirely.

Year in review, or why the world needs more doggerel

If I had a time machine today, I wouldn't go back decades to kill baby Hitler or tackle Lee Harvey Oswald before he pulled the trigger or demand that Dickens reveal the ending of Edwin Drood. No, I'd do something entirely selfish: go back to January 2025 and give myself a good sharp kick in the shin while delivering some pointed advice: Don't stop walking in the woods! Buy a new telephoto lens! And for heaven's sake write some poetry once in a while!

I've just spent a couple of hours reviewing the past year's blog posts and while I admit that it's been an odd year, a frustrating year, a year that taxed my annual quota of futile tasks, nevertheless I can see points where I could have made the year more bearable just by doing more of the things that bring me joy. I know why I cut down on long walks in the woods--knee injury plus broken telephoto lens plus enervating malaise--but I also know that walking in the woods with the camera provides an ideal palliative for futility and oddness and malaise, and it might have helped my knee recover more quickly too. 

And that's another thing I'd kick myself about: I injured my knee in early August but didn't seek medical help for two months, months of pain and misery and lack of sleep. What was I thinking? Granted, the cortisone shot took a while to work, but if I'd gotten it earlier I could have avoided two months of agony and perhaps even motivated myself to spend more time in the woods.

And what made me (mostly) stop writing poetry? I've never suffered the delusion that the weekly doggerel I used to compose was any good, but at least it provided an excuse to have fun with words while distracting from the surrounding chaos and, yes, futility. Maybe part of me thinks that doggerel is far too frivolous for times like these, but if I give up doggerel, the terrorists win. Or something like that.

I'm venting, but I'm mostly mad at myself. So many opportunities to connect with thinking people everywhere but mostly I've been griping about my aches and pains, my foundering career, and my impending retirement. Who wants to read all that? (Here's another kick! And another!)

Now that I've got that out of my system, let's take a look at some of the more memorable  moments of 2025 as recorded on this blog. 

My favorite blog post of the year happened in November after I drove home from my daughter's choir concert while pondering what happens When Wordsworth visits Wendy's. Another pair of holiday concerts inspired a post highlighting Angelic voices, eclectic spaces. 

Literature, like music, feeds my soul in more ways than I can measure, so it's a good thing that (Some) visiting writers rock! In November my soul gorged on visits with two visiting writers: Mary Roach, who taught us A little more than diddly, and Jonathan Johnson, whose homely poems made penultimate Friday fabulous.

It's no surprise that my classes inspired many blog posts in 2025, but I was surprised at how few of them deal directly with Artificial Intelligence. I may be obsessed with AI-induced paranoia and the awe of the Oracle, but I wrote more frequently about other teaching topics. I saw evidence of the continuing decline of intellectual curiosity in my first-year seminar class, where students got Pig-headed about Pygmalion while eluding illumination about "Illuminati." I applauded students willing to ask awkward questions, though some of them hit a bit too close to home.

In my upper-level writing classes, I pondered The tragedy of TL;DR and gave students Some practice in probing for the story as well as A step-by-step guide to writing a step-by-step guide. And my students taught me a thing or two, from the existence of a hybrid sport or elaborate prank to a novel suggestion for constructing a nap rubric.

But a whole host of posts dealt with frustrations endemic to higher education that go far beyond teaching. Some of these frustrations arise from this peculiar cultural moment, when higher education is being undermined and attacked from a variety of angles, requiring career academics to spend far too much time dealing with the Department of Aggravation, Obfuscation, and Angst (the AOA department). Federal Budget cuts hit home while cancelled grants undermine valuable projects.

Other stresses arise from my own peculiar situation: my skills are being underutilized so I'm Twiddling the time away, dealing with malfunctioning campus systems, tiptoeing around topics too sensitive to write about, and banging my head against the wall. My administrative role(s) often leave me Clambering through the claptrap and wondering why academics are often compelled to Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. On the one hand I'm agonizing over how far I should go to keep students comfortable, and on the other I'm devoting hours to trying to find sexier names for my courses so students might actually enroll--and all this leads me to echo a lament from a Douglas Adams character: Brain the size of a planet and they've got me pushing piddling paperwork.

And yet I found some things to celebrate in academe. I enjoyed Celebrating second chances while Turning up the sound on the symphony of learning. Students inspire me, which is Why I'd like to retire--but not today. As I enter my final year of teaching before retirement, I assure myself that I'm not just Mailing it in and I wonder what happens When the door swings back. There's no doubt that I'll need a new challenge, but where will I find it when my students are gone?

Maybe I'll be the type of old person who rambles on about my aches and pains, like the knee injury that cramped my style during fall break or the vertigo attack that helped me make the world a better place or the dreaded polyps that inspired a TMI alert.

Or maybe I'll charge full-bore into Grandma Mode, rambling on about my intelligent and talented grandkids ad nauseam or describing in great detail all the joys of Grandma and Grampa Camp: the wild times, the Things I had forgotten about having a house full of kids, the answers to questions no one asked, and the rare moments of Peace, quiet, and nothing to do.

Or maybe retirement will give me more time to focus on the joys of nature and travel: the Road trip back to winter, the bootless endeavor in the snow and the coming thaw, the encounters with Bird people, with Spring ephemerals, with Summer sunshine and sweet corn season and Pumpkins, peppers, pawpaws, pizzazz. At some point I need to get more closely acquainted with the chickens, who landed in the spring and eventually suffered a close encounter with life (and death) in the slow lane, and whose diminished numbers were enriched by the addition of Guineas in the mist.

Or maybe we'll find the funds for more home renovation projects, like the bathroom renovation that first required Excavating the family landfill. I wished for a self-demolishing bathroom, praised a project that's going well, and eventually found myself Flush with success, with a room that sparks a frisson of satisfaction every time I walk by.

The new bathroom provides tangible evidence of a job well done, but this was also the year that brought kudos for a writing job well done, when an academic journal editor's praise inspired me to beg readers to Stop me before I get "brilliant" tattooed on my forehead. It may not be as visible as a renovated bathroom, but that close and careful reading of my work reminds me that futility need not be the overarching theme of this past year, or of the next either. 

In fact, what this brief and perhaps agonizing plunge into my personal time machine tells me is that I don't have to settle for futility. I can carry on, fight the fight, grapple with boondoggles and conquer the claptrap--but to make it bearable I'll need to I buy a telephoto lens, go for walks in the woods, and make a regular date with doggerel.

Carrying the castle through stormy seas

"World's largest medieval cog found off Copenhagen" proclaimed the headline, but at first I couldn't make any sense of it because I was thinking of a cog as a tiny wheel essential to keeping machinery going, which doesn't sound like something happening in medieval times, but then I clicked and found out quickly that a cog is (or was, I guess) a type of ship, in this case a 90-foot-long cargo ship of a type known as the "draft horses of maritime trade in medieval northern Europe," carrying hundreds of tons of cargo from Point A to Point B and beyond.

So not a tiny but essential bit in a larger machine but a massive, strong, and sturdy bit of an even larger machine. Built around 1410, the shipwreck also features a brick galley well equipped to provide hot meals for the crew and "the first archeological evidence of a cog castle ever found," and before you get all excited about floating castles, in maritime terms a castle is a covered platform where the hard-working crew could shelter from the weather. (And where else am I going to flaunt my new vocabulary if not here?)

Just yesterday I was complaining (to a retired colleague and a couple of cashiers at the grocery store who got drawn into the conversation) about being nothing more than a cog in a machine, a tiny (but essential!) part that struggles to keep spinning silently even when gunk gums up the works, but now I wonder whether I ought to think of myself as a different kind of cog--a massive workhorse that carries a lot of weight to connect distant points, well equipped to weather storms while providing food, shelter, and comfort for my crew. 

Sure, maybe one day I'll flounder in one of those storms, but in the meantime I get to carry a castle. (No tiara, though. It's not that kind of castle.) 

Winter snooze-fest

As my prosthetic memory insists on reminding me, one year ago today I was on Tybee Island, Georgia, in the presence of egrets and skimmers and sunshine and seafood, and two years ago today I was doing about the same on Cedar Key, Florida. But winter break is not all sunshine and shorelines: 17 years ago today I'd just arrived in San Francisco for the MLA convention three time zones away from home, where my paper was scheduled so late in the day that I felt like I was sleep-walking through the whole presentation. Was it a brilliant paper? You'd have to ask the half-dozen listeners who bothered to show up. 

This year I'm at home for the holidays, being entertained by the photos sent daily by friends who are enjoying a cruise to Antarctica. Kayaking amongst whales and penguins and beautiful sunshine looks fabulous, but I am not the least bit envious of their good fortune because I know I could never take such a trip, thanks to a tendency toward severe seasickness. It's hard to watch whales through a constant scrim of vomit. (Trust me--I've tried!)

Yesterday I took my car out of the driveway for the first time since Sunday for a trip to the grocery store. That's about the extent of the excitement going on in my life right now. Not that I'm complaining: I received a pile of great books for Christmas plus a couple of beautiful jigsaw puzzles and I have some low-stakes administrative tasks I need to tackle, so I'm not going to say the days are just packed but I'll admit that they're not without incident. The incidents just don't make for interesting reading.

So I'm grateful for a gift my daughter gave me, a gift that shows how well she knows me. It never would have occurred to me to seek out a rack of Scrabble tiles spelling out THANKFUL, but when I unwrapped it on Christmas, it was exactly what I needed, a reminder of h0w much I have to be thankful for right here at home: word games, family, puzzles, chickens, so much more.

But still: would a little sunshine be too much to ask? 

Father and son working on a puzzle

Now who's going to help me eat all these cookies?

Two weeks ago I spent a Saturday morning baking two kinds of Christmas cookies and shooing the resident cookie-eaters away from the results: Don't touch! They're for a campus event! Finally I promised that I'd bake some more as we got closer to Christmas.

Both kinds of cookies earned praise at our campus cookie event, but I brought home a lot of the Russian Teacakes. They're well loved by many different names but no one ever asks for the recipe.

However, several people wanted the recipe for the other cookies I baked: Chocolate-Covered Cherry Cookies. I know exactly how long I've owned the recipe because it came inside a holiday recipe box we received as a wedding gift 43 years ago. Since then it's been a regular part of my holiday repertoire, along with Santa's Whiskers, Nick-0f-Time Cranberry White Chocolate Drops, cut-out cookies, and Jam Thumbprints. But I've never shared this recipe here--until now.

These cookies are rich and chocolatey, with a burst of yummy cherry in the middle. I always make a horrible mess assembling them, but you won't lack for volunteers to lick the spoon. 

Chocolate-Covered Cherry Cookies

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 cup butter, softened
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
10 oz. maraschino cherries, drained (but save the liquid)
6 oz. semisweet chocolate pieces
1/2 cup sweetened condensed milk

Stir together flour, cocoa powder, salt, baking powder, and baking soda; set aside. In mixer bowl cream butter and sugar. Add egg and vanilla; beat until well blended. Gradually add dry ingredients; beat until well blended. 

Shape dough into one-inch balls; place on ungreased cookie sheet. Press down center of each ball with thumb. Place a cherry in the center of each cookie.

In a small saucepan, combine chocolate pieces and sweetened condensed milk; heat, stirring, until chocolate is melted. Add 4 tsp. of reserved cherry juice. (If it's too thick to spread, add a little more.) Spoon frosting over each cookie, spreading to cover cherry. 

Bake at 350 degrees about 10 minutes or until done. Let cool before removing from pan.

 

Because that's how we roll

For our 43rd anniversary, my husband gave me a massive book on the history of Maori art, a gorgeous compendium I've been wish-listing for ages. I gave him a tomahawk steak the size of his head at the Bears Den restaurant in Cambridge, Ohio, part of our annual holiday trek to visit with the taxidermy, view the courthouse light show, and eat the best beef on the planet--or at least our part of the planet.

The book weighs 8.9 pounds. The steak weighed significantly less. A good time was had by all, except maybe the elk that appeared to be looking for the rest rooms.

Not photoshopped. That bone is at least a foot long.

Fingers to show scale. The pages are thick and glossy and covered with beautiful things.

Doing my small part to make the world a better place

I staggered like a drunkard while walking into Wal-Mart would be a great line in a country song, but for me it's just another Wednesday. Plagued with vertigo connected to an inner-ear problem, I nevertheless headed out to do some holiday errands but found myself reeling through the parking lot and reaching out to strangers' cars to maintain balance. Kind of embarrassing, especially since the entire population of Washington County had apparently decided to shop at Wal-Mart yesterday. I saw a woman trying to push a shopping cart crammed full of all manner of stuff topped with a huge wide-screen TV box while eleventy-seven small children trailed behind not very calmly. She's the one who should have been staggering, but there I was holding on to the battery display so I wouldn't fall over. I needed to buy five small items--why did I have to wait behind a half-dozen people in the self-checkout lane while suffering from a vertigo attack? Sure, I could have stayed home, but where's the fun in that? 

Every day this week I've had to do some dumb errand on campus, and every day I've vowed that that's the last time I'm visiting campus until January. But stuff comes up. I needed to do some prep work for the workshop I'm leading on January 13, which seems a long time off but if we don't order lunch now, there won't be anyone on campus to take the order for weeks. And someone has to buy door prizes, so someone has to check out a college credit card, which can't be done after the business office closes for the holidays. And then someone else wanted to meet me on campus to give me a gift (very nice!) and I was on the way to deliver some freshly laid eggs after my annual glaucoma test (no change--all good!) and I knew the person I was meeting has been ill and can eat a very limited diet that happens to include eggs, so I let her take half of the very beautiful blue and green eggs and took the other half up the hill to my retired colleague, who had admired the eggs when I'd posted a pic online and wondered where she could get some green eggs (unaccompanied by ham). No wonder I'm dizzy! 

It's probably the weather change, which can set off a vertigo attack, or it might herald an impending migraine. In a masterpiece of poor timing, I've been reading Mary Roach's excellent book Packing for Mars and I happened yesterday to read the chapter on the problem of motion sickness among astronauts. Just reading about the Vomit Comet made me want to puke. It was interesting to learn, though, that I'm not the only person in the world who can suffer debilitating vertigo as a result of (takes a deep breath) sitting on a rocking chair, sitting on a swing, getting a glimpse of a rotating fan, spinning in anything resembling the Mad Teacup Ride, reading in the car, looking in the wrong direction while riding on a boat, turning my head to the side quickly when my head is stuffed up, or any number of other ordinary experiences.

Which is yet another reason why we're once again not going on a cruise for our anniversary. My husband used to lobby pretty heavily for going on a cruise, but he has seen me seasick enough times to have given it a rest. The closest I've ever come to suicide was on a three-hour whale-watching boat out of Monterey Bay. Even our little canoe can sometimes set me off if we're sitting still and bobbing. Yesterday, though, I didn't need a boat or a swing or a fan or any mad teacups: something shifted in my inner ear and boom, I was making a spectacle of myself in front of the entire county in the Wal-Mart parking lot.

Well if my antics made a few people laugh, if I lightened the load for just one overburdened shopper, if I provided an object lesson to a parent encouraging a teen not to drink and drive, then maybe my vertigo attack made the world just a teeny bit better for someone. It's literally the least I can do, short of actually puking.

43 years ago today

Our chickens are little artists

Angelic voices, eclectic spaces

Two holiday concerts one week apart:

Last week I enjoyed Handel's Messiah sung by a heavenly host of singers, including my husband, accompanied by orchestra and harpsichord in the historic Basilica of St. Mary of the Assumption, an ornately decorated worship space where hundreds of listeners sat on rows of pews surrounded by statuary, stained glass, imported marble, and angels, lots of angels, including cherubs hovering around the ascending Mary up front and, above our heads, a phalanx of carved angels holding torches on their heads.

Yesterday we watched five women (including our daughter) singing Christmas music in close harmony, without accompaniment, in Cuyahoga Falls at the historic Jenks Building, in a converted garage where a spattering of observers who had braved the horrible weather sat on mismatched chairs surrounded by decor I can only describe as eclectic: an industrial-size coffee roaster on one side of the performance space and a canoe hanging from the ceiling on the other, plus piles of used books and vinyl records, unusual light fixtures and barking dogs sculpted from scrap metal and fish trophies and framed covers of Time magazine featuring Kennedys and a drill bit the size of my oldest grandkid and an anvil and a small statue of a man playing saxophone and, above our heads, a bust of a man wearing on his head not torches but what looked like a small satellite dish.

During the final leg of our two-hour drive to yesterday's concert, the weather was awful enough to prompt me to ask out loud, "Is it worth killing ourselves in a snowstorm just to get to this concert?"

Reader: it was. Spending a couple of hours surrounded by music so lovely it makes me smile clear down to the soles of my feet is worth any effort, whether it's Handel in the basilica or "The Holly and the Ivy" in the garage.

I rarely carry much cash but, thanks to an unusual series of events, last week I ended up with a fifty-dollar bill and a twenty in my wallet, and after the Messiah performance I decided I would put my hand in my purse and pull out a bill blindly to put it into the plate, and then yesterday the other bill went into the tip jar. I'd do it again in a heartbeat. You can't buy holiday cheer, but those experiences were worth every penny.

Voices of angels.

Coffee roaster the size of a locomotive

The singers in the family

Not a clue. Seriously, I've got nothing.

Snoopy in his Sopwith Camel?

Sn

Junkyard dogs

Deck the halls with bogus sources

So I'm sitting in the waiting room while my car undergoes routine maintenance and I'm feeling rather virtuous. Why? Because instead of watching the television tuned to the Sky Is Falling Channel, and instead of doomscrolling on my phone, and instead of playing the vintage PacMan game in the corner, I'm writing Christmas cards. So much to do in the holiday season and here I am providing a shining example of efficiency! But really it's just another way to put off grading research papers.

How do I procrastinate? Let me count the ways: I grade all the little things that don't take much thought, respond to a million not-so-urgent emails, bake cookies, write cards, shop for gifts, attend concerts, visit the holiday tree display at the park, mail packages--but I still haven't started grading research papers.

On Tuesday in our Center for Teaching Excellence I spent five hours hanging out with colleagues while eating cookies and laughing my head off (at this link, among other things), which was very therapeutic--but I really needed to be grading research papers.

I could have postponed mailing packages until the weather cleared up but instead I drove to the horrible downtown post office, made a futile circuit of the overstuffed parking lot, drove around the block in the pouring rain, and finally parked at the only available spot down the street--but that was just the first half of my Adventures in Package-Mailing. Then I had to toddle up the hill in the rain while juggling an umbrella and two bulky packages that blocked my view, and I didn't have enough hands free to manage the umbrella and the packages AND open the door so I got thoroughly wet in the struggle while an older guy in a gentleman's cap stood nearby laughing at me. Not the highlight of my holiday season--but it was better than grading research papers.

To be clear, these are not traditional research papers at all. My Nature Writing students wrote a persuasive essay that required a minimum of five sources, but some of those sources could be interviews with experts. Only nine papers--maybe I can finish them today (if I ever stop blogging and start grading).

The first-year seminar papers are more challenging. I'm down to sixteen students (from a high of 19 at the start) and I believe one of them never turned in a paper, so there's one down and 15 to go. They had to write something I call a researched persuasive memo, trying to persuade a specific person or group to take a specific action in order to improve education (however the students want to interpret that). They were required to use at least three sources, which ideally would all be academic sources drawn from our research databases but I'm not holding my breath. I had a dickens of a time trying to get students to understand that quoting from the online abstract is not the same as citing the article itself, but even those abstract-dependent essays are easier to grade than the ones that provide only vague references without actual citations. 

Because I'm going to have to check sources. Maybe not all of them, but at least one per paper and more if things don't add up. Some students won't provide sufficient bibliographic info so I'll have to try to find the sources myself. Some students will misunderstand or misrepresent sources, through either sloppiness or intent (though it's hard to tell at this stage). And some sources will be entirely imaginary, invented by an anonymous AI. 

Here I am enjoying the heck out of the holiday season; I'm wearing a holiday sweater and festive socks and I'm fully equipped to spread holiday cheer at a moment's notice, but instead I have to force myself to read a whole bunch of research papers.

So I'm giving myself a stern talking-to: no more holiday cheer until the papers are graded. No more cookies or cards or packages or errands. It's time to turn aside from fa-la-la-la-la and pick up the research papers. 

If you don't hear from me by this time next week, send in the Saint Bernards. (Extra credit if they're carrying eggnog and cookies.)

 

 

 

TMI alert! (Seriously, go read something less icky)

I'd been sitting half-naked on an examination table for about 20 minutes with nothing but a flimsy paper blanket to cover my nether parts when a bright young thing in surgical scrubs poked her head through the door and asked, "Are you ready to get your IUD inserted?" Which would be a neat trick considering I haven't had a uterus since 2009. I don't know where you'd insert an IUD in someone lacking a uterus--or, for that matter, why.

My experience at the gynecologist's office this morning may look like a comedy of errors in retrospect, but it didn't feel particularly funny at the time. I've been suffering from a serious case of IPNBLRSTTBS Syndrome (It's Probably Nothing But Let's Run Some Tests To Be Sure), and this is where you'll want to close your eyes and cover your ears if you're allergic to ick. 

There's a bit of scar tissue, see, where my most private regions had endured massive amounts of radiation 16 years ago, and my new gynecologist wanted to do a biopsy on a polyp located there, which looked like a cervical polyp, but no insurance company is going to approve a biopsy on a cervical polyp for a person who lacks a cervix. So when I arrived today I signed a release form allowing removal of an endometrial polyp, but then someone in the chain of command noted that a person lacking a uterus probably doesn't have endometrial tissue either. In the end they had to tear up the signed release form and get me to sign a new one allowing removal of a vaginal polyp, which, on closer inspection, turned out to be two vaginal polyps, which were eventually removed. 

But first I had to spend a full 30 minutes waiting (and sweating and breathing deeply to try to keep my blood pressure under control), wondering what kind of wild party was taking place out at the nurses' station and why all the new medical staffers look like they just got out of the seventh grade and why I always carefully fold my clothes at the gynecologist's office so that the person poking around in my most intimate regions won't be exposed to my ratty old granny panties. What else was there to do but think, and fret, and sweat? 

I'm not proud of it, but eventually I got tired of waiting (and sweating, and fretting) so I used my cell phone to call the front desk and ask whether I'd been forgotten. What did they want me to do, walk out there in front of everyone and demand satisfaction while wrapped in a flimsy paper blanket? I had sweated so much that the paper was starting to disintegrate anyway, so I made the call.

"Don't worry, she's on the way," they said, and indeed she was, and within moments I was on my back enduring a procedure that was less painful than I'd expected but also more bloody. My longtime gynecologist--the one who did my hysterectomy and found the cancer and got me through all the horrors of treatment--was a dapper gentleman with the kindly gravitas of a modern Marcus Welby, and the new one who replaced him is on maternity leave, so I was dealing with someone I'd only just met who seemed caring and competent despite looking about twelve years old. She spoke like an intimacy coordinator, asking repeatedly, "All right if I touch you here?" Not sure what would have happened if I'd said no. I suspect it would be difficult to remove a vaginal polyp without touching some sensitive parts--er, tissues. Why does the word tissues make everything ickier?

But now it's all over but the waiting. Three to five days for biopsy results, 72 hours with no sex. (During my birthday week! Ah, the humanity!) I wondered about the propriety of writing about all this ick, but the advantage of having entered my Crone Era is that I'm allowed to write about whatever I want, and what I want right now is to wonder what happened to the woman who was expecting to get an IUD. Did some bright young thing poke her head in the door and ask, "Are you ready to get your polyps biopsied?" 

 

Errant u's, invisible emus, and other news

I have reached the point in the semester when little annoyances evoke outsize responses; for instance, yesterday I may have publicly threatened to employ a flamethrower against students who spell my name incorrectly. (Fourteen weeks into the semester and they can't figure out how many u's are in my last name?) 

PowerPoint slides with very small white text on a black background! Students who insist that they've "fixed" everything I marked on their drafts when they've corrected small errors but ignored the big stuff! A classroom thermostat that hisses, loudly, throughout a two-hour event! A new light fixture in the library that makes me want to distribute green visors to everyone forced to work under those harsh conditions! All these things have earned my ire in the past couple of days.

But probably my time would be better spent on a wild-emu chase. Actually I don't know whether the emus in question are wild or domesticated, and in fact I'm not entirely sure that emus respond to domestication, but I do know that people I know and trust, people who inherited a big chunk of my DNA, claim to have spotted emus in a fenced enclosure along a particular stretch of my daily commute. Every day since Thanksgiving I have looked for emus along that stretch of highway but I have not seen so much as a feather.

Well, I have seen some feathers, but they weren't on any emus. Yesterday a Carolina wren got into my house--who knows how?--and kept fluttering from room to room trying to find its way out. At one point it flew into our bedroom and hid behind a framed photograph of a ruby-crowned kinglet. Nice choice, but hiding in my bedroom is not a viable lifestyle for a wren.

So despite the cold weather we opened the back door wide, but the bird wouldn't come close while we were nearby. My husband left for an early meeting so I sat quietly, as far from the cold as I could get while still maintaining a clear view of the door, because otherwise I'd never know whether the bird got out of the house. (Once, years ago, we found a dead bird in a large plant pot downstairs. Who knows how long it had been in the house without our knowledge?) In the dead quiet I could hear the bird flittering here and there until finally it flew right out the back door, which made me happy because I'd had enough of letting the winter freeze invade my space. 

Meanwhile, deer hunting season has started, prompting one of my students to comment on what a great sacrifice he was making just to be in class on Monday. Others didn't bother trying. I hope they'll bag their deer, but local bag limits were severely reduced after a disease ravaged the local deer population this fall. I told a colleague that some of my students seem to have deer flu and she asked, "What are the symptoms?" Look for massive outbreaks of camouflage and hunter orange.

Finally, my adorable daughter, who shares my interest in holiday music and punctuation, sent me a link to a charming YouTube video attempting to answer a burning question: Where does the comma go in "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen"? Who can maintain an air of annoyance with such silliness about? Forget about the spelling errors, errant students, and emus; let's play with punctuation!