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.

 

 

Buckeye buzz

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

 

 

 

 

Grief/relief

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Walk on the wild(ish) side

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

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

Fort Caroline, a reconstruction

Crab in the moat

Mirror world

Sea breezes

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

 

My summer phlegm-fest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Finding myself at a college reunion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

More anthology anguish

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Such are the dreams of the everyday academic

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

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

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

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

 

Early lessons from the World of Work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

Positive I'm negative, unless I'm not

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

  

Seeking the password into the secret clubhouse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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