Get Off of My Lawn

Before there were viral memes in social media, there were much slower-paced, smaller-focused “e-mail stories” – funny tales; “pass this on to someone you love” kind of content, often with a down-home, good-old-fashioned American values quality that made people press the Forward button.

Now, I’m a reader. There isn’t anything I don’t read. I don’t believe in “tl;dr.” I read them. I never forward them. If I have an opinion that I want to share, I’ll compose my own narrative, thank you. However, some of those stories actually stayed in my possession in one form or another – I adapted one about God and St. Francis having a discussion about the absurdity of suburban lawns as a wall hanging for myself, the year that my neighbors launched a “Let’s scare the over-educated depressive by threatening her dog because her failure to use herbicides leads to dandelions on MY LAWN” campaign. And “Lessons from Geese,” although overused, is still a favorite; I will re-read it and I will share its message (though rarely its actual text) with others. (Notice: no link. All existing internet versions of it seem to me to be missing something from the way it was originally told me.)

Today I got another one. They are rare in my mail now, because they are almost comically, stereotypically, the province of the AARP set (which of course I have now entered). However, as the baby of my family, daughter of the baby of her family, I am related to many members of this set. They don’t “Facebook.” They don’t blog. They’re far too frugal to use US postage for frivolities (heavily-underlined birthday cards are not frivolities). But they do e-mail. So today I got one. I love the person who sent it to me and the person who sent it to her. Let’s get that on the record first. However, I am undeniably aching and sad now that I have read it. It contains this passage – I have no author to cite; no attribution, and I am sorry, but I must quote verbatim:

I wasn’t sure how my customers would react to Stevie…He was short, a little dumpy with the smooth facial features and thick-tongued speech of Down’s Syndrome. I wasn’t worried about most of my trucker customers because truckers don’t generally care who buses tables as long as the meatloaf platter is good and the pies are homemade. …The ones who concerned me were the mouthy college kids traveling to school; the yuppie snobs who secretly polish their silverware with their napkins for fear of catching some dreaded ‘truck stop germ’; the pairs of white-shirted business men on expense accounts who think every truck stop waitress wants to be flirted with. I knew those people would be uncomfortable around Stevie so I closely watched him for the first few weeks.

Two days ago I was driving one of my mouthy college kids home from school. Her family life is challenging, but she is often laughing; a bright, unforced laugh of genuine delight. I knew her three weeks before I was brave enough to ask her if she was laughing at me or merely near me. Turns out she was taught, by her plain-spoken, hard-working mother, an employee in the social services field, that finding joy even in the hard times is a good road to peace. They don’t have a lot of money and (obviously) they don’t have a car. Circumstances beyond their control, that could have happened, and do happen, to everybody around here, have kept them from becoming what our narrator so glibly refers to as “yuppie snobs.” And the fact that it is a single parent household, run by a woman, prevents that woman from matching the definition of a “white-shirted business m[a]n.”

Yuppie Snobs? Business Men?

Mouthy College Kids?

So we were driving home from school. She’s crashing with me Mondays through Thursdays until the car situation gets resolved; because The Bus (yes, America, I said that in the singular) doesn’t run from her home to our school; she could change to The Other Bus, but The Bus and The Other Bus are not synchronized, and, as you can tell from the number of them (one each) there isn’t Another to Catch Later.

A driver in a very large, very loud, very un-muffled black pickup (I don’t know the make and model; and I don’t care) felt like tailgating me. I attribute motive even though I was not inside driver’s head. I base motive on the fact that I was going 40 down a road marked Speed Limit 40, a winding road (Welcome to Warren County; straight roads would be an indication of a bend in the time-space continuum) and a steep road (Welcome to Warren County; the hills have names) and the grill of this Truck, gleaming chrome like horizontal teeth, like a wide receiver’s mask, flashing in the early evening light, entirely occupied my rear view mirror. I instinctively slowed. The Truck’s engine growled as the driver downshifted. I signaled and slid to the shoulder; caught my breath as it roared past.

Rude? Yes, but so what. Dangerous? That’s more to the point, but still, I am a competent driver with thirty-five years of experience; I handled it just fine; safely. Mouthy college kid was more scared than I was but that’s normal; three years’ experience to my thirty-five. Stereotypical? Not in the least. Pickup trucks travel the windy, steep Warren County roads in legion and manage not to tailgate me or roar past me on a daily basis, even when I am stupid and go forty.

I deliberately did not make any assumptions about sex of driver, race of driver, age of driver, or even attitude of driver. It is just possible that driver really was in a terrible, possibly even life-altering, hurry. Driver’s method of letting me know that left something to be desired, I will grant you; and since we are not in a court of law I will admit that I assume there was some malice, or meanness, in scaring me even if driver’s reasons for hurry were sound, even valid.

Stupid truck driver.

Mouthy college kid.

Overeducated yuppie who, having just gotten through a weekend of four people giving each other germs and subsequently reversing the normal digestive processes in a house with three toilets, likes clean forks.

Business [wo]man who happened to be wearing a white blouse.

I live, breathe, eat, sleep, college kids. I feed, educate, chastise, advise, and love college kids. I married a business man in a white shirt (monogrammed cuffs, too; you wanna make something out of it? Nineteen-inch neck and thirty-eight-inch waist meant custom-made shirts, and monogramming was free, so there. Ha.) I have a Master’s Degree, the Yuppie Enrollment Certificate. I spell better than most truck-stop waitresses, but beyond that offer no superiority in form or function. This may be just a personal thing; an overly-sensitive woe-is-me thing, but I nearly cried at the thought that old people I loved were passing around an e-mail that contained barely-concealed prejudice against college kids and clean people with jobs – assuming their sympathy, empathy, Christian charity, whatever – was inferior to Truckers’. Inevitably, demonstrably, even dangerously inferior. Me. The white-shirted bleeding heart who never met a marginalized group she didn’t want to defend against hate, bullying, and oppression. Who once went over a dining room table at one member of the e-mail’s delivery list because of a casual comment about “Mexicans” while my white-shirted monogrammed business man held on to me and begged me, out of love and Christian charity, not to make a scene.

I ache at the thought that my education, the very thing that made me the compassionate person I am today by opening my heart and mind to the history, wisdom and literature of the human experience, makes me more likely, in some people’s eyes, of bullying or abusing a mentally challenged person. That my job, or my shirt, or my dislike of grease stains, makes me a more heartless, cold, and ungenerous person than a Trucker. I could fling those assumptions back if I liked, at a community of people not well-known for their tolerance of any nature of non-white men. Still and all, I’m going to breathe deeply and assume that the truck driver on Brass Castle Road really had to make a doctor’s appointment at 6 pm.

Prepared; or, Better to Have It and Not Need It Than Need It and Not Have It

Long before Bruce Willis had one, my Daddy had one.

This morning I sat at the kitchen table in a state of remarkable calm considering that it is a school morning. School mornings are artificial in a way, considering that we must, at the crack of dawn, try to think up everything that could possibly happen over the next eight or nine hours and be ready for that. Not just, what shall we eat now, but also what will we have with us to eat later; and for “eat” fill in any verb, and there’s a college day.

“Do I need my Bio book?” Probably better, in case you have an hour downtime you can get started on that chapter.

Seriously, who wants to think that far ahead?

Am I going to want coffee later? (Hmm. I’m going to say yes.) Bring my refillable Dunkin’ cup? (Needs to be washed.) Do I have two singles for the cafe? (Their debit-card reader is broken for the two-hundred and sixy-fifth time this year.) The heck, I’ll figure it out later.

This is why God invented vending machines: for the early-morning indecisives. If only He had been better about making sure we had quarters.

You know who never had any trouble with this stuff? My parents. My father, for example. Mornings were never scattered or frantic for my father. That might have had something to do with the fact that I think he wore the same Cold-War-Engineer outfit to work every day for thirty-six years: White shirt, polyester tie, gray, black or grayish-black suit, and the Pocket Protector, complete with two pens (red and blue), a mechanical pencil (Staedtler) and a wooden pencil (sharp); security badge clipped to the flap of the Pocket Protector. Wallet. Watch. Keys in a keyfold — that clever leather tri-fold contraption with the dozen nifty spring clips to hold each one key (this was before the automobile “chip key” whose girth ruined this noble male accessory). Coins. And all of this had come, swiftly and surely, from the handy surfaces, pouches and projections of The Kangaroo on the Dresser.

Years later my brother, our spouses and I sat in a movie theater and my brother and I, at least, completely lost the thread (?) of the plot of Pulp Fiction (that’s even funny to write, let alone contemplate) because we just sat there gaping at each other and going, “That’s Daddy’s Kangaroo!” I think maybe John Travolta was in that movie too. And Uma Thurman’s feet. But I only remember the Kangaroo.

My mother had her own calm morning ritual, and until I started housing college students I hadn’t understood it, or even fully remembered it, until one day I did it. The kitchen table, in the morning, always had a little row of objects. These were objects that my sister or brother or I had mentioned, in passing, probably out of the corner of a full mouth, some time in the last full moon, that we would need to take to school on such and such a day. Next to said objects were also food and quite probably a five or ten dollar bill.

“But I don’t need money today,” one of us would say. She would simply look at us as if to say, and until thirteen seconds ago you didn’t remember that you needed [object] and now you are convinced that I just saved your life.

“Besides,” she would say, placing a folding umbrella next to our books, “Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.”

Mary and Me on A Wednesday Morning

 

I had a pretty normal morning. With a couple of quirks. Usually I get up and have enough time to let Dog out, make coffee in my much-beloved Chemex pour-over, and stare at my e-mail as if that’s going to help something for maybe half-an-hour before I make the nine-mile drive to school. On Wednesdays I don’t have class until 2 pm, but I usually have “stuff” to do that often involves fixing tech problems I myself created, by being overly ambitious and overconfident in the ability of Microsoft to play nicely with the college’s infrastructure, and/or answering texts from students whose lives seem so much more complicated than mine did thirty years ago. I shoot for getting in by 9:30.

But this morning I had to pick somebody up a few miles out of my way, and the tank was on E, and so I found myself out on the NJ state highways among the regular people who have longish commutes and expectations of a 9 am arrival. I felt like an imposter. For one thing, I went to Dunkin Donuts. That’s not unprecedented, but you know how much I love my Chemex and how much my wallet hates being opened and reminded of its sad state; but in I went. The drive-through was packed with regular people, so I parked. There were three regular people running the place – doing a hell of a job, I might add, given the lines both inside and out. Given the varying quality of customers’ ordering. Are they explicit? Articulate? Of course this is New Jersey; we’re used to fast-talking mumblers who have not yet had coffee. Unlike the famous Krispy Kreme South Carolina experience, when I jogged in at 8 am with two refillable extra-large travel cups, thrust them at the young woman and requested black two Splendas and four glazed, please, to which she replied, “Honey, you’re gonna have to say that a whole lot slower.”

I know; it’s time to get a new story; that was 2003, and both of those traveling companions are dead now. That fellow-traveler and that Dog.

But these women were sharp. They translated mumbles into French Vanilla and pointing fingers into bagels, not toasted, extra cream cheese. (Oh, don’t get me wrong: I wasn’t the French Vanilla. I insist upon coffee that’s flavored like, well, coffee.) I was actually in and out before the car who joined the drive-in line just as I parked. A notable vehicle. A lime-green four-door Jeep. Shiny even in the winter (Fall? Spring? Hurricane?) weather.

When I got to the gas station, there was the lime-green jeep. I caught a glance of the woman driving. Probably a bit younger than me; forties; dark wavy hair, clearly attended to (one cannot say the same for my reddish frizz in its pony tail; it clearly exists without attention) nice black-and-white check blazer. No glasses. Everybody at school wears glasses, but apparently lots of regular people (under 50) don’t.

I decided that her name was Mary. As I turned onto Route 57 and she stayed straight for Schooley’s Mountain Road, I realized that our days, up to this point so in-tune with one another, were also going to diverge, probably radically. She was probably on-target to get to the office by 9. Slip her bag into the bottom desk drawer. She would be greeted, “Good morning, Mary.” How are the kids? What did you do last night? Oh, and when you get a chance can you take a look at the email I sent you? She will glide softly across the corporate carpet in her nice black shoes, over to the printer. The printer is in the same room as Mary’s desk.

Cut to me. My black boots are wet and the waxed floors squeak under them. That wouldn’t be such a bad thing but yesterday a couple of the students were complaining how annoying it was to sit in the hallway and listen to people’s boots squeak. So I’m annoying, already. Everybody’s happy to see Mary but I’m annoying people who have a 9:30 am Biology lab. I slide into the classroom I’m using. It’s not really my classroom but I’m the only one with activities in the room so it’s kind of my classroom, and I have the number code even though it doesn’t always work on the first try. I will need to access my student files today, so I will have to go to the room where I have a locking filing drawer. I have a locking filing cabinet in this room too, but nobody can find the key. Three separate people have written the key code number on the backs of their hands over the last two weeks, but I think they forget if that’s the room number or the key number and anyway I have a locked cabinet and all of my non-confidential files are in a pile on top of the locked file cabinet and my locking file drawer is in the other building. My feet are going to get wet again. Don’t forget to hit the button that locks the door. No, not the right one, the left one. Left as you’re facing the door. Left as you’re facing the door from the INSIDE of the door.

Hey, JoJo. My kids’ school is closed so I can’t come to class today.

OK.

Hey JoJo, were we supposed to write that report today?

Yesterday, actually. It’s OK get it to me as soon as you can.

Hey JoJo, my English prof didn’t show up and it says we should just read the chapter. Should I read the chapter?

Yes, why don’t you read the chapter.

JoJo: We are out of 3 x 5 index cards.

Wait, index cards? I thought this generation was supposed to consist of plugged in, wireless, digital natives. Who uses index cards? Isn’t there an IndexCardApp?

Probably, but if you try to download it the school’s WiFi will give a tremendous hiccup and quit for the day, and anyway the professor wants to see what we wrote on the card and we can’t take our phones out in class. Oh and I need to borrow white-out. And your stapler.

Mary’s thinking about lunch right about now. I’m thinking if I lock the door, close out the shared files on the server, lock my laptop, and hide the confidential folders underneath my laptop bag that’s lying on the squeaky waxed floor I can possibly sneak out long enough to pee.

Tonight I’ll have two, maybe three, wayward college students sleeping somewhere in the futons of my dwelling (that’s going to be the title of Part 2 of my memoir I’m never going to write, The Futons of My Dwelling-Place, or maybe that will be the title for “autobiographical poems”). I think I left my phone in the car. That’s OK, no bars today anyway. Write me a note on the whiteboard.

1100.500 Scholarly Projects

Someday, I’m Going to Write a Paper on That,
OR
Publish, or So What?

There is a strange, out-of-place folder on my portable hard drive. First, let me explain that I have a portable hard drive because I am a vagabond academic. Not so much as others I know, of course — people who teach as adjuncts in two or three colleges around the state. Compared to them, I am positively sedentary. I have an unofficial but graciously-respected desk in the corner of the adjunct office at the one school to which I devote all of my teaching. But that desk, like most of the public spaces on campus, has a shared PC terminal on which I cannot load software nor store local data. And despite the best efforts of the IT crew, each time I log in at that same terminal, even if it’s only been hours since the last time, the darn thing welcomes me to “my New MSOffice” and wants to know if I would like to set up my preferences. Well sure I’d like to, but you won’t remember them anyway, Bucky, so let’s skip it.

When I’m not at school, I use one or another of my two greater-than-five-years-old laptops which don’t really count as laptops any more except that technically I could perch one on my lap IF I am sitting within reasonable distance of an electrical outlet as neither storage battery any longer holds a charge. And then sometimes even when I am at school I need to use the computer that’s hooked up to the classroom SmartBoard, or, as in emergency situations like this one (I just HAVE to blog and the school is overrun with high school students who have been kicked out from the building next door because of some damn fire drill or bomb threat or something, and I have students who are taking finals and need proctoring so we’re in the library) I use whatever terminal is available, and for all of these reasons I carry my entire academic and professional life around with me on a 500 GB hard drive with 458 GB free space after three years of storing my entire academic life on it.

The 7.42 GB used space is neatly organized according to the kind of categorical principles which would make Aristotle fall in love with me.  My numbering system groups areas of academic inquiry into general types like Social Sciences (900.000) and even further delineated, such as The Teaching of Literature (650.000) and Studies in Colonial America (220.300). I finally figured out that there were Old Testament texts which I used when teaching Milton (yes, there he is again) AND Comparative Religion AND Myth and Culture AND American Puritanism so if I am looking for Old Testament I don’t hunt through all of those course materials; I go to 100.000 The Ancient World/111.000 The Middle East and there we are.  Not to be confused with 100.000 The Ancient World/150.000 Greece and Rome/150.500 Roman Empire, where New Testament texts can be found.

But there’s a strange folder. (We’re back to where we started.)  1100.500 Scholarly Projects. It’s a mess of materials.  It contains All The Things I’m Going To Write A Paper About, and it doesn’t matter if they are about Shakespeare (210.110) or Harriet Arnow (450.200 Post War America) or anti-slavery documents in Concord, 1860 – 1870 (320.100); they are all stuck in 1100.500 Scholarly Projects.  And I do mean stuck. Because in addition to being a vagabond academic, I am also an Academic in Limbo.  I am not on a tenure-track, nor do I expect (at age 50) to ever be on one.  This could be read as Good News to the optimistic or terminally lazy, because it means that I am not a victim of the age-old academic trap called Publish or Perish.  See, back in the old days when academia was a moribund, inflexible old-boys’ network of Get your Ph.D., Get Your Foot In at a University, Get Published, Panic, Get Tenure, Then Sit and Moulder and Sometimes Teach But Mostly Let Your Grad Students Correct The Papers, “Publish” was a key activity.  Publish meant conduct original research. (Humanities: Go to old libraries at older colleges and read original documents while wearing oversized white gloves. Social Sciences: Ask lots of people random questions and make neat-looking line graphs demonstrating  “a correlation of something to something else.”) Publish meant submit said research to a scholarly journal, wait for the peer review, then breathe for maybe six months while you think of the next thing to Publish.

Some of that still happens at larger institutions, but anywhere from 40 to 70 percent (depending on whose line graph you look at) of all current instructors of higher education are not on a tenure track.  Most of us are adjunct, part-time, “contingent,” or simply non-tenure-track (“lecturers” or “instructors.”) Depending on the institution, we might be well paid or poorly paid, with benefits or without, relatively secure in our positions or biting our nails each semester, appreciated or belittled. But generally, we are Not Called Upon To Publish To Prove Our Worth.

Sure. The one thing in the academic’s job requirements I might have been good at.  Politics and schmoozing, not so much.  Faculty mixers, no thanks.  But Reading and Writing About Scholarly Subjects?  Never mind “where do I sign up?” this was WHY I signed up in the first place! (Plus teaching.  Must never forget the classroom.  Still have that, thank heaven.)

Nobody cares if I publish.

And that means that nobody bugs me to finish.

And that means there are stupid unfinished 1150.000 Scholarly Projects.

Oh, I wish the act of writing this blog, amongst the final exams and the Displaced High Schoolers, would get me any nearer to writing That Paper I’m Going To Write, but I doubt it.

Who Rearranged My Chairs?

It’s always a bit of a shock when I hear something that contradicts a pet belief of mine. Most of these “pets” are unwanted; unwelcome.  For example, I’ve been in …