In Praise of Great Teachers

   “And if I were a good teacher, who would know?”  
                Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons

    It’s often easier to complain than praise. Even so, this essay is about the great profs I’ve known, the rare ones who have challenged me to become a better student and a better professor, those who have inspired me personally and professionally. It is offered as thanks to those in academe who keep it alive and thriving.

    Perhaps the best professor I have ever known is Dr. Charles Nelson from my days at Sacramento State University where I completed my MA in English.  SSU was my launching pad.  I did well in my MA work, well enough to voice aloud my desire to earn a PhD and teach at the college level. The MA gave me the ability to teach in the California two-year system with its good pay and multitude of opportunities since the state boasts of so many campuses from the Sierras to the Pacific.  
            
     But Charles stirred me on to the next level. I am forever indebted to him. (As an aside, one of my worst profs at the time urged me to stay at Lucky’s, a supermarket chain where I used to work.  “You’ll make more as a store manager than a high school teacher or a professor,” he explained.  Not exactly a Christa McAuliffe comment.)  
             
     Originally from Oklahoma, in his office Charles spoke with a relaxed twang of the Sooner State. He’d
drop a few Twain-like words, including that colloquial A-word ain’t when we spoke about my next project with him. For instance:  “I ain’t too sure Hamlet’s crazy.” Besides that ain’t, his crazy seemed stretched out by the addition of several letters: crraazzzy. But, get Professor Nelson in the classroom lecturing and he held his own intellectually, bar none, with never an ain’t or other grammatical slip.
              
     Any yet, he did something that few adults do when seriously talking about any subject.  He broke into laughter about the whole situation—genuine, often self-effacing, always playful, never cynical, pure fun-loving laughter at the absurdity of the situation.  (“What?  Killing your brother and marrying his widow for the crown of Denmark? You crraasssy?”)  More than once he pulled my academic career out of the recycle bin.  
             
     I was a bit of a lost puppy at the time.  I did a start-and-stop MA.  I started at Hayward State near Oakland, ran out of money, didn’t finish, and transferred to Sac State in my hometown.  I needed to regroup, then my father got very sick, and here I was stacking groceries all night at Lucky’s, trying to
finish my MA, searching for something professionally. Dr. Nelson helped me when I applied to the Catholic Diocesan system where I taught (sometimes full-, sometimes part-time) for the next four years.  Over the course of one grueling year,
he guided me through my final MA project while I was teaching and while my Father was growing sicker.
              
     To finally graduate, I wrote a series of essays in lieu of a single thesis.  It was probably more
challenging than a thesis since it had to be passed in pieces, and Charles was no slouch about scholarship.  I remember he wrote things like, “Why are you quoting all this outside material if you don’t use it in your essay?” I learned to temper my enthusiasm for long quotes that seemed more like
padding than serious research. It’s a story I still tell my students every time I teach composition. I want my writing students to have the same skills Dr. Nelson taught me.
             
     Two men pointed me toward Notre Dame, my Father (who was a “Subway Alum” always wanting one of his sons to attend ND) and Charles.  When I was accepted, I was also accepted at several other schools, but only ND offered me four years of teaching so I could teach part-time to pay my way through the program.  Dr. Nelson assured me that ND wasn’t just a football school. The rest is history.
             
     Years later at Notre Dame, in order to finish my dissertation, I worked closely with another gem of a professor, Dr. Donald Sniegowski. He made sure that my work was edited well, and he scrupulously went over every detail with me even under adverse circumstances. (This was actually the job of my thesis director, but Don did it instead; that tells you something right there.) One Saturday, we were to meet, but he called to cancel since he was going to
the hospital with phlebitis.  He had limped into the English office that morning to put his completed evaluation in my mailbox so that even though we weren’t meeting, I would have his notes about my next chapter.  
       
     Twenty-some years later, when our daughter asked her own professor to work on a paper dealing with African literature, her prof told her that she
needed to work with Professor Sniegowski, a noted specialist on that topic.  She called, made an appointment, and met with him.  When she entered his office, Don had a copy of my dissertation open and asked her if she was related to its author.  He hadn’t forgotten although the phlebitis had long since cleared up. 
           
     The first department chair I worked with was Dr. Ed Uehling at Valpo U near Chicago but located in Valparaiso, Indiana.  Good school. I faced a rocky year, but Ed helped me so much. He was a genuine man and a stabilizing influence on me. I had high school classroom know-how, a PhD in hand, administrative and university-level teaching experience, yet I was not getting any traction on the
job search.  Ed kept up the encouragement.  When I contemplated other academic careers or different professional tracks altogether (like being a tech-writer for an engineering firm in Michigan), Ed counseled me to stay with our profession.  I did, he worked with me, and I moved along to another campus in a tenure-track situation.

     As a department chair myself now, I often think about how Dr. Uehling would do things.  His calm and thoughtful demeanor managed many a situation (a mess I created or other issues). Well-respected, Ed helped on many levels at Valpo campus-wide.  I wouldn’t be here if not for him.  Even now, I wish at times that my hot Italian temper could be as cool and controlled under fire as Ed’s.
              
     The saddest story to relate in this blog is about Dr. Bob Alexander.  He was nearing the end of his exemplary career at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania where I taught for two years after Valpo. This campus and I were not a fit.  We should have been: small, Catholic liberal arts college so like my alma mater from California, my own PhD from ND where the priests of King’s were trained, and the list goes on. But, it never worked out between us. It went from bad to worse.
               
     Bob was an inspiration, however.  He was the professor who used to enter the classroom each day a few minutes late on purpose.  His explanation:  if on time, you looked cowed by the administration; if too late, you seemed to disrespect the students.  His trick was to come in consistently a few minutes late to show his students he was his own boss.  Having taught high school, I never broke with that routine of being “ahead of the bell,” but I loved Bob for his
wise, idiosyncratic attitude.
           
     His heart gave out while he was fighting severe influenza our last winter in Pennsylvania.  He was within a year or so of retirement.  It was the saddest blow since he had been such an advocate of mine at a time when my life at King’s had grown so deplorable. His wife, Gracie, told me later that Bob’s one regret was that he had never written while teaching.  I remember that every time I write now; Bob didn’t write and it haunted his widow and cast a shadow over his fine career.  

    Every career is filled with mentors and colleagues who rise up at precisely the needed moment. We all
could fill pages with anecdotes of colleagues or teachers who inspired us, helped us, kicked us out of our complacency, encouraged us at just the right
moment.
           
     It’s not about their published books or their impressive resumes, although many of these scholars are widely published.  It’s about their humanity in the face of so many obstacles in academe today, their humanity and their love of teaching which they shared with me and so many others. They cared about their students, embraced our profession as a vocation not an occupation, and did their best.
          
     At this time of Thanksgiving past and Christmas ahead, holidays steeped in gratefulness, it’s important to remember all those inspiring men and women from our past.  Colleagues and mentors like these point our way to the future.  


                 
 


  

          On Coffee and Coffee Shops

             Like everyone else who makes
               the mistake of getting older, 
                      I begin each day
                 with coffee and obituaries. 
                                     Bill Cosby

    Let’s be clear.  The most up-to-date science of this passing hour is:  coffee and caffeine are the two most heinous villains of our society, bar none.  There’s probably no drug worse for anyone than caffeine, unless you start the list with nicotine, heroin, cocaine, and alcohol. I know my science, and I know that every few years a new double-blind,
thoroughly scientific study comes out blaming coffee for all the evils of the world:  over population, global
climate change, IBS, low birth weight, the Euro-Zone meltdown, Velveeta Cheese, the luckless (not-so) Fightin’ Irish, not to mention the obvious Yugo Automotive Company.  I’m just quoting science, folks.  It’s all right there in the research somewhere.  
              
     Then again, (or so science tells us on alternating weeks in contrast to the above findings) coffee and caffeine are those rare nectars of the gods,
ambrosia from Mount Olympus (if it is located in Ethiopia), sent by the gods to satisfy men and women, to quicken their minds, sharpen their senses.  This rich, dark, steaming liquid with its mild stimulus awakens us, drives us on, supports us, loves us as no other.  Daily Arabica saves us from heart disease, dementia, failing Intro to Post-Modern Poetry taught by a retro Beatnik, early-onset Alzheimer’s, kicking the dog first thing each day, yelling at the paperboy for a late delivery, and general crabbiness around our spouses each morning.  
 
     Scientific results are sketchy, but I firmly believe World War One and the Great Influenza might have been avoided had more Europeans regularly consumed coffee.  I am also sure had Americans consumed more java in the 1920s, the Depression would not have begun.  Coffee and caffeine regularly stop IBS, occasionally PMS, the IRS, and (I firmly believe) the return of the Antichrist (or coffee would not be served as a post-Communion beverage in the basements and social halls of every church in
America each Sunday.)

    Coffee is our salvation—embrace it.  Drop that Diet Mountain Dew in the morning, Sallie, grow up, face your responsibilities like an adult, and drink your coffee.  It saves the planet, Lonny, and possibly your soul.
            
     But don’t spoil it.  There is nothing worse than “flavored”coffee.  Look, coffee is excellent, perfect, in its own pristine essence.  A little cream or milk, okay.  (That’s how I drink it.)  But these whippy-dippy frappes with a dusting of chocolate and pinch of cinnamon and everything else but a cherry, are a sacrilege against the inviolate laws of heaven.  It’s not a dessert; it’s coffee.  Hot and fresh in the morning.  Delicious in the afternoon. Don’t make it into a calorie orgy. 
 
    I mean, have you ever seen a morning news show named after any other drink? It’s “Morning, Joe” with
product placement, a Starbuck’s select brand thrown in, genial conversation and hard news, plenty of coffee and more coffee.  It’s not “Good Morning, Diet Dew,” is it?  Or “Hot Water with Lemon Slice to Mellow Your Day with Regis and Kelly,” right?  How perky would they be after consuming that?  When CNBC tried a new show, “Green Tea Your Day to Successful Investing” (aimed at the unconventional
investor watching at 5 AM after yoga), the DOW tanked.  Green tea’s a killer.
             
     On Break Weekend this semester, we drove to Indianapolis. That first morning, I had to fend for myself and find coffee in the Butler-Tarkington neighborhood near Butler University.  I had a $5 coupon for Starbucks; it was a sunbathed autumnal day.  I’ve visited enough to know my way, and
so off I scurried.  My sister-in-law lives in the same neighborhood that produced Kurt Vonnegut, with
comfortable, well-kept houses, some with 5th bedroom additions and long driveways.  A few blocks brings you to a shopping and restaurant cluster. 
Up Broadway, onto 48th Street, turn at Illinois, Starbucks at the next corner. An easy walk.

    With the Green Coffee Giant in sight, I was pulled aside, distracted by the Illinois Street Food Emporium Bakery and Deli.  It was warm enough to sit outside; a few patrons did.  But, I decided to duck inside.  It was an Alice-through-the-Looking-Glass moment. I might have been transported back to the 1950s.  I stood transfixed by this bakery-deli-café.  I
couldn’t resist the charms of a real, still-functioning neighborhood diner, Formica tabletops and all.  I
ordered the breakfast special:  two scrambled eggs, sausage, whole wheat toast, and a BOLD endless cup of coffee. I was impressed when the clerk at the cash register wrote down my order on a slip of paper. 
Computers haven’t found their way behind the counters of the Emporium.
            
     I can’t say the service was fast, because I waited a long time sipping my free refill.  But the staff was
delightful.  The helpful woman who took my order walked me through getting my silverware (a bit hidden to the side) and made sure I got all the steaming coffee I urgently needed. Not a Styrofoam cup but a gigantic ceramic mug.  
 
     To a writer with an eye for future characters, The Illinois Street Food Emporium was a palate of unmatched hues and texture.  One well-heeled patron in a fitted wool suit was ready for a power business deal. She was perhaps my age; I imagined her in the Butler U Foundation Office raising millions.  Others who strolled in were sweatshirt moms out for a morning walk, chat, and coffee with
friends.  Regulars came in to be greeted by “the usual”as soon as they stepped to the counter. 
Still others saved seats for friends; the Emporium grew crowded but stayed welcoming.  
        
     Indianapolis is a diverse city, and like many metro areas, has its share of racial tensions.  I saw none of that friction at the Emporium as neighbors—young and old, black and white—greeted one another over coffee and a bagel or a fresh cinnamon bun.  

     The place was filled with ease and comfort.  These were Hoosiers, not Minnesota-nice folks, so the level of laughter and conversation and geniality
grew quite loud.  Day after day, meal after meal, this place hosts scores of people from many walks of life who truly enjoy each other.  And I do mean the tables were integrated, not clusters of similar races sitting separated, tolerating each other.  They knew each other, were friends with each other.  It was an amazing sight to savor in our sometimes strained society.  I began to feel like the welcomed odd duck invited alone to someone else’s huge family gathering, a family that liked and appreciated one another.  
 
     My strongest impression of the friendliness of the Emporium was how many patrons knew multiple tables. They entered, got their coffee and donut, and sat with one table, but often they waved at patrons at several others. And, the staff knew everyone, greeted everyone, laughed with everyone. I did feel a bit like the orphan left out of the feast, except my eggs and sausage were that good, in their greasy, home-style way.

     When I finished, I made it a point to thank the staff.  “Well, come back,” they laughed.  I explained I was in Indianapolis only once or twice a year and probably wouldn’t be back until next summer.  “That fine,” they said, “we’ll still be here.”

     Later that day, when I explained to our uncle, Father Tom Murphy, a longtime Indianapolis resident, where I had breakfast, he knew the place well.  “It’s an institution,” he explained.  That and so much more.

     But, my $5 coupon for Starbucks was still in my wallet.  From the Emporium it was a few steps across Illinois to the gleaming and bright coffeehouse.  I love single location beans.  Blends can sneak in lower qualities beans, but I find Starbucks does some excellent combos. I love Sumatran coffee the most, but I tried their Komodo blend from the Southwest Pacific. And I couldn’t resist a pound of the “Morning Joe” variety, a robust Central and South American
product-placement selection.

     The clerk was friendly. He checked to make sure my coupon was valid, got me my take-out cup, Pike’s Peak, and then ground my two choices just right.

     In the corner at two small tables, three patrons sat buried in their computer screens.  One Apple and two HP, no wonder they weren’t talking. The tone was hushed. The largest cluster of friends I saw was three people whispering in a group. More people were speaking into their mobile phones rather than to each other.  Or they were glued to their hand-held units, texting, reading messages, playing Bejeweled. 
I had walked into a crowd of strangers linked by excellent coffee, separated by their own self-imposed isolation.  Most were urban-polished but with a
stylized hard-edged Metro look. A sprinkling of business-suits-in-a-hurry, but most wore clothing with a message and hair styles to impress rather than Colts caps huddled over the breakfast special laughing with friends. Excellent coffee, speedy service, but lacking in soul.

     I don’t think I saw an African-American sitting there or working there.   

     As I walked back to my sister-in-law’s past the Food Emporium, I almost stopped in for one of their fresh cinnamon buns I had earlier resisted, but I walked on.  
 
    Next June, I told myself, or next July.  They’ll still be there.

 


 


 

                            Dogs . . . and Cats (if I must)

    Let me be frank. I love dogs but am highly allergic to cats.  This puts me in an untenable position when trying to discuss either mammal fairly. Around a cat, my nose runs, my eyes itch and tear up, my voice gets hoarse.  I found this out the summer before I started high school.
         
     Those years were in the Dark Ages.  They may have been in the 60s, but “The Sixties” hadn’t officially hit yet.  I left a Catholic grammar school where there were at least girls in the room but where none of the “boy-girl thing” was condoned. During that summer, I didn’t know that a classmate, Alice, liked me.  But in my innocent and not-yet-grown-up boyhood, I liked another classmate, Margaret, who never liked me in that way.  This was awkward because Margaret and Alice were close friends.  
 
     These were two of the smartest and most sophisticated young women in our class.  Margaret had short, blond, school-girl hair, now longer and stylish in preparation for high school.  She was beginning to show her curves.  Slender Alice had long straight brown hair and stood taller than her friend. 
The pair had lost all girlish gawkiness and moved like women, not kids.  I was the self-conscious, scrawny boy who wore braces and who had very low, presentient standardized test scores that absolutely ruled out me ever going to college.
      
     One sultry afternoon, Margaret invited me over to sit on her shady patio
and imagine what high school would be like.  I had no illusions of my angelic blond sweeping me off my feet in an outburst of unrestrained emotion, but jumped at the chance.  I knew that at best ours was to remain a totally Catholic-guilt scripted, early-teenage scene of friendship as depicted in those stilted movies set in the English countryside with a dog nearby and no suggestion of even holding hands. 
 
    Alice was there, the only other guest. Here was my chance to behold the deity I adored, Margaret, and befriend her acolyte, Alice.  
 
     While Margaret fussed about making iced tea and opening potato chips, lithe Alice sat thigh-to-thigh right next to gangly me on a swinging bench meant for three.  We were both in Bermuda shorts; our legs even touched. 
Hers were shaved.  This position left no room for a phonebook between us. 
Girls in her class had been sanctimoniously instructed by stone-faced
Sister Mary Joseph, our former principal, to always keep a Yellow-Pages distance between themselves and boys sitting by them to avoid any near occasion of Mortal Sin.  
 
     Margaret owned a large tomcat, Merlin, whose black and white coat reminded me of our nuns.  Inexplicably, this feline took a liking to sweaty me.  He curled up on my lap and began purring.  Reaching over to pet him, Alice told me animal lovers made for caring friends, a fact she confidently knew.  

    Casting his dark and mysterious spell, Merlin immediately made me wheeze.  Soon defeated as if by Sister Principal herself, I rode my bike home hardly able to see, my first murky sortie into adulthood ended with swollen eyes brought on byallergic reactions not emotional rigidity or spiritual remorse.  
 
     They moved on to McClatchy, the public co-ed high school.  I went to Bishop Armstrong High School which at that time had no girls but, fortunately for me, no cats either.  Only in my senior year did I have a class that included young women.  Six of them, in uniforms, came over from Bishop Manogue, the all-girls’ high school.  My physics teacher, a Christian Brother
dressed like a Medieval monk, needed special permission from Rome to teach them because they were non-male.
  
     Although I was never supposed to do very well in my studies, I did okay
in high school and eventually I enrolled in an all-men’s college.
        
     My first year, I ended up with a puppy living in my dorm room, which
didn’t work since such creatures live to eat, sleep, eliminate, and whimper when ignored.  This was my older brother’s pup, but his RA was onto him and threatened to have him thrown off campus for keeping a dog.  Here I was, a lowly freshman, coerced into taking care of this dog as though it was suddenly okay for new students to house a yapping pet while upper-classmen
couldn’t.  Furious, I gave in to this forced-on-me, fraternal burden. But, in one week, I totally had it.  Fortunately, my brother was engaged and his future father-in-law agreed to take that canine off my hands.   
          
     It’s a tangled web, my relationship with cats and dogs.
  
     Here in Marshall, a friend, Cathy, often hosted us for dinner.  Several colleagues would sit around eating, telling stories, joking, when without warning Cathy would shout at the top of her lungs, “GET OFF THERE!” at her cat behind me tiptoeing on the spread of food.  She was a tall, robust woman and could be indescribably loud.  Her cat ignored her.  

    Cats are vertical, I’ve been told, with an attachment deficit.
      
     When Cathy went on sabbatical, friends agreed to take care of this cat for a year in their home. But, when she came back, the cat wouldn’t stay with her; it wandered back to that cat-sitters’ house, an independent feline to the
end.
        
     Dogs are loyal. They usually figure out who is the leader and follow that leader faithfully.  Man’s best friend after all.
          
     For five summers, I helped run a summer camp while I was teaching high
school.  The camp’s year-round caretaker, called by his initials, T. V., got a month off once 100 screaming campers descended on the place.  T. V. had an old black mongrel dog, Luke, which followed him everywhere.  Luke was no longer in his prime, but he was gentle with the kids, easy to care for, and always at my heels once the caretaker took off.
   
     Luke didn’t bark or fuss.  He was smart enough not to put his nose into porcupines which says something because we had other camp dogs, purebred St. Bernards, that never learned to avoid those smarting quills. (Saint Bernards are not a bright breed.  Those lunkhead dogs kept doing the same
thing over and over and expecting things to change. Vet bills for quill removal proved this.) 
          
     Luke followed me everywhere around camp.  If I needed to leave in the jeep, he moved off to the shade and waited until I returned, sleeping not far from where I parked.

    One hot morning, I walked across camp with Luke shadowing me.  After ten minutes in the nurse’s cabin, I came out to find Luke there on the nurse’s porch as always, but stone dead.  Dead!  Not even my dog.  Dead!  With a fly-covered trickle of blood near his breathless snout.  But steadfast!  He had followed me to the very end even though for eleven months each year he had plenty of time to shuffle off his mortal coil on the caretaker’s watch, not mine.

    The stupidest dog I ever owned was a yellow-Lab mix named Sugar.  She hated men, me in particular.  She was way too much dog for a housedog, and way too independent to live anywhere near a man used to having dogs obey him, accustomed to having his canines die at his feet.   

    Sugar ended up in Pig Heaven.  Unable to keep her, I gave her to a friend who owns a swine breeding farm.  Sugar was content to live out in the barn, eat all the hog carcasses she could dig up, and occasionally run with a pack of wild dogs.  But she lived long, died fat, and never bothered me again.
         
     The smartest dog I ever owned was really my mother’s kinetic and strong
Airedale.  I wanted to call him Brutus, but she wanted him to be Magoo. He became Brutus Magoo, but she couldn’t keep him after I went off to
graduate school.  Hyper Brutus ended up at my summer camp, living the good life until he was hit by a car.  He limped back to camp to die, but not
while I was there.

    The luckiest dog was Mollie, rescued from the local pound.  She was the oddest-shaped creature ever to walk this earth:  a sort of black Lab with stubby legs, a thick neck, a stubborn disposition, but as gentle as can be. 
Abandoned as a pup, she became a garbage gut; she’d gobble without
chewing any roadkill or dead bird she found.  Sit anywhere near her and she’d fling herself onto your lap.  She weighed 55 pounds, so if she caught you off guard, you were in for a surprise.
        
     But Maya takes the cake.  She is our Lab/Bassett mix with short non-Lab legs, long Bassett ears, and sad Bassett eyes. When excited, she barks like her Lab self then bays like her Bassett self then stops to ponder the whole confused process.  But she’s a keeper.  If a bit spoiled, that’s my fault for hiding dog treats in my office which she begs for whenever I sit down to write.  Maya was originally our daughter’s dog, but remained with us after she went off to college.  Now, several years later, there is no way Maya’s moving out to live with her “owner,”possession being 9/10th of the law. 

    And Maya’s not a cat.

This is a poem which I can't figure out how to post on my poetry page!  It is about our lost Space Shuttles, Columbia and Challenger, written right after the Columbia disintergrated on her return to Earth.  I post it today in honor of our last shuttle mission launched today, that of Atlantis.  Hope you like it.

                                Oh, Mortal Columbia

                “All farewells should be sudden, when forever,
                     Else they make an eternity of moments.”
                                            Byron

 Oh, mortal Columbia, 
We stood in sunshine awaiting your astral return,
But downward you came, as a blazing meteor, 
A fallen, streaking Mercury, broken, whose message
Was of sudden despair not inspiring triumph.

We thought of you as Apollo, divine and
Impervious to human flaw.
Humbled, helpless we stood, watching your contrail
Proclaim your frailty that you alone had not forgotten;
Heard, felt, your blasting trumpet blare discordant.

Today, faced now with challenges unknown,
We look heavenward, harking the explorer’s call,
Casting off onto our endeavors necessary, perilous, 
Else all your enterprising strides of discovery 
Shall become as Atlantis, known only as myth.

Oh, mortal Columbia, Gemini now as never before
With your ascending sister descended, Challenger,
With her, oh, mortal Columbia, immortal.  
 
James A. Zarzana

    I received an unexpected email the other day.  It was a brief notice from Saint Mary’s College of California where I earned my bachelor’s degree announcing that a classmate of mine had died.  Mike was 60 or 61. 
I dug out my old yearbook to make sure I was remembering correctly,
hoping that I had two classmates with the same name.  His is a common Irish name, but no such luck.  It was a small school, about 1,200 students, and I was right; it was him.  
            
     This shouldn’t surprise me.  As an educator, I’ve had students die tragically in accidents or illness.  Family members have passed on; both my parents are dead. This past winter, one of my colleagues at Southwest Minnesota State University died unexpectedly over Christmas Break.  He was only 54 and in perfect health, but a stroke took him after a long flight to visit his mother.  
 
    So, hearing of Mike’s untimely passing wasn’t out of the realm of my
experience.

    I opened my yearbook and glanced at the senior portraits.  This was 1972, the height of the counter-cultural movement in California; thus, these portraits were informal.  Turns out I took two of them, a fact I had forgotten.  Both were casual snaps of two friends after a play performance. Saint Mary’s had an amphitheatre then; the play, The Birds by Aristophanes, was performed wearing masks the way it would have been in 414 BC when first produced. (If the times were counter-cultural, I hung with the counter-counter-cultural crowd.  I believe the term today would be “nerds,” but that’s another blog post.) 
 
    I glanced at old friends with whom I have not spoken in years.  Partly, this is because I moved away from California in 1978 and have not been back for any length of time since then.  And once my Mother died in 2004, even my trips to family out there have been less frequent.  In fact, since her passing, my family has met here in Marshall or in South Bend more regularly than out West. 

    But, excuses aside, I should have kept in better touch with old friends.

    This past week, we drove to Chicago and Indianapolis to visit Marianne’s
family.  Her uncle, Uncle Tom, a retired priest, suffers from advanced Parkinson’s.  (He is affectionately, “Father Uncle Tom” or “UT”to his nieces and nephews.)  Even with his tremors, his mind is sharp as ever. What
struck me during out visit was his knowledge of classmates from high school,
Notre Dame, and Indiana Law School that he remembers and keeps in touch
with.  It’s a talent I lack.

    Uncle Tom is able to do this in part because he was born and raised in
Indianapolis and except for four years at Notre Dame, two years stationed in
Japan with the US Army in the 50s, and his time in Rome at seminary, he has
lived his whole life there. On the other hand, I have packed up and re-rooted myself several times since I was 28, twice in Indiana, then Pennsylvania, and twenty-plus years ago, Minnesota.  I move, time moves along, old friends are forgotten.

    Glancing through the yearbook of 1972 the other night, I remembered every one of my classmates, even ones I did not know well at the time. 
Several had a band, a retro group that in the early 1970s played 50s
music, their act complete with leather jackets and slicked-back hair.  Instead of individual snaps of these guys, they did a band photo in their stage attire. 
They were pretty good as a mock-rock band and actually ended up performing long after graduation.  They made quite a name for themselves in the San Francisco Bay Area until a few years back.  One or two years
ago they were up for a reprise gig when one of the members (another classmate) died unexpectedly.

    I knew all these guys, but was never close to them, so the passing of one
of them didn’t hit me like Mike’s.

But it was the announcement of Mike’s death that led me to my long-unopened yearbook with grainy black and white photos.  When I came upon the photos of close friends, I had to ask questions for which I don’t know the answers.  One photo showed a recently-married couple.  In this day and age, you have to ask at least mentally, are they still together? A few classmates had become lawyers. Still at it?  I know from recent class notes on the
Saint Mary’s alumni homepage, that classmates who went into high school teaching right after graduation have been able to take early retirement through buy-out programs designed to retire higher-paid teachers.  What are their second careers?  Another classmate once lived in Canada.  Still there? 
 
    It seems like I should know a few of these things, but I don’t.

    The twists and turns of keeping in touch. And the odd ways that old
friends and acquaintances return to your life.

    Soon after we were married, Marianne took a Notre Dame summer class. 
The first day, she came home talking about her new classmates and
mentioned one by name, a Christian Brother out from California for a summer degree.

    “Not Brother Edmund?”  Could he be my Saint Mary’s classmate?

    The next class meeting, Marianne put the Saint Mary’s Alumni Directory at Brother Edmund’s seat.  When he came in, he glanced around the room.  Zarzana is not a common name but when first introduced to Marianne he had not put the two together.  He should have asked about a connection; it’s not a name like Murphy or Smith or Kelly. 
 
    Small worlds do exist.

    On Saint Mary’s alumni webpage this past week, I found out Brother Edmund is now principal of a Christian Brothers high school in Berkeley, California.  I’m a department chair; he’s a principal; a classmate is gone. 
Time moves on.

    This all made me realize yet again how important it is to cherish each day and each friend.  I think this is one of life’s main messages, but daily routine can smother us so we forget it.  We need to relearn it.  And it takes a jolt to shove this message back into the forefront of our lives. 

    Take the sentence, “Life’s too short for. . .” and fill in the blank.  Life’s too short for bad coffee or cheap wine.  Life’s too short for putting up with this or that nonsense.  Life’s too short for wasting on an unfulfilling career. 
 
     For some, life is just all too short, period.

    When an obituary arrives out of the blue, making you realize how short life really can be, it’s time to remember and reconnect.

    I hope you make time this summer for just that: connecting and
reconnecting with family, with friends, and with your own past.

Books Do Furnish Rooms

                My summer break is finally here.  I look forward to two events during the summer:  writing more and reading more.  I’ve already moved into the pages of three books although my break from teaching is hardly two weeks old. 

For the past fifteen years or so, I’ve been making my way through Patrick O’Brien’s twenty-novel set of his Aubrey/Maturin seafaring works about the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic era.  I have only 100 pages left of the 19th novel, The Hundred Days, plus volume 20 (Blue at the Mizzen) to finish.  A must read for summer 2011.

                I also have been reading a recent biography, Beatrix Potter, A Life in Nature, by Linda Lear.  Potter was more than a writer of colorful and fascinating children’s books.  She was a naturalist who was not accepted during her time (in part because she was a woman) and a conservationist well before such a thing existed.  (I’ll have more to say about Potter as the summer progresses; she’s still a teen at the moment.)

                As we drove to and from Arizona right after graduation (my excuse for no blog last week), Marianne read First Family:  Abigail and John Adams by Joseph J. Ellis aloud as we tooled along.  Abigail and John were feisty, independent thinkers; we would do well to label them both as “Founding Fathers” of our democracy.  Marianne and I were enthralled by the coalescing of so many currents in their lives:  politics (obviously), but also home and often tragic family life, plus a passionate love for each other.  They are a good model for contemporary committed couples given the carnage of marriage we see all too often in the American political landscape these days.

                Lastly, I also opened a book I bought at Ypres last May while there with SMSU students, Dunkirk:  Retreat to Victory by Julian Thompson.  The author, a major general in the Royal Marines and a professor at King’s College, London, starts with the British Expeditionary Forces actions against the German Blitzkrieg while in Flanders in May 1940.  He does so to stress the heroism and tenacity of the BEF before it was overwhelmed by the Panzer onslaught and left huddled on the Dunkirk beaches awaiting evacuation by the Royal Navy—the final part of the story we all know.  Thompson shares an absorbing tale of French military blindness and Belgium wishful thinking, that their neutrality would save them this time, in 1940, although it hadn’t in 1914.

                I guess it’s no secret that I am a book lover.  Whenever I am in someone’s house which has a bookcase, I am not much of a conversationalist, I’m a library browser.  I love seeing works I have heard about but not read, and also seeing my favorite works proudly on display.  I especially love seeing works I teach on a shelf somewhere.  It makes me feel that teaching novels isn’t so esoteric and irrelevant.

                I recently spied dog-eared copies of Matilda and James and the Giant Peach which reveals that the adults of the house read to their children.  Roald Dahl teaches kids about more than just chocolate.  Houses with older kids (many now at college) usually have a tattered copy of To Kill a Mockingbird.  It’s not surprising that this work has remained timeless.  Its exposure of racism is as pertinent today as in the early Civil Rights Era. 

                I’m always excited to see Cry, The Beloved Country on a shelf, especially when its binding tells me it has been read.  This novel has one of my favorite characters, Msimangu, a young, dedicated priest fighting racial injustice with Gandhi-like fortitude and determination.  The work is an eye-opener for sheltered students who have no idea of what lurked under the oppressive stones of empire building.  Move the Imperial stones aside, and they see that in the ooze underneath, the history of colonialism (European or not) is an ugly history.

                It’s the same with All Quiet on the Western Front.  Here is a story of youth and honor and gullibility.  And then of disillusionment and horror.  I am convinced that some wars need to be fought; World War One was not.  Europe blundered into the slaughter and could never justify the carnage.

For a war that couldn’t be avoided, witness our Civil War, a war which should be viewed in its rawest contrasts and not glossed over with some fervor that celebrates “the honor-bound Confederacy” as actually having a real cause, now lost.  It was a war over the ownership of humans.  Black slaves as chattel, nothing more or less.  I don’t often see it on a bookshelf, but pick up a copy of The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara to witness the awful truth of that slaughter made worse by Southern “gentility.”

                On the lighter side, when I see that children and adults have devoured Harry Potter, I am especially pleased.  In Marshall when the intense frenzy of the final Potter books hit, I was among the first to get my hands on Book VI and Book VII.  Locally, I got the 10th copy of The Half-Blood Prince in the summer of ’05; in ’07 I had slipped to 23rd when buying The Deathly Hallows.  Either way, I was there at the stroke of midnight in our community bookstore, now unfortunately closed, to gather with witches, warlocks, nerds, geeks, book-freaks, and cyberpunks willing to try a different genre, plus all those enlightened parents who wanted to foster their youngsters’ passion for the right kind of magic, reading.  I feel at home among these devotees of Rowling.

                It’s a rare house that does not contain any of J. R. R. Tolkien’s works.  The Lord of the Rings is almost as ubiquitous as the Bible.  If Tolkien is there, I am almost certain of finding C. S. Lewis as well, Narnia and Screwtape and perhaps a personal work about his tragically lost wife, Joy.    

                While scouring my friends’ bookshelves, I am pleased to see a variety of cookbooks.  Before Abigail and John Adams caught our attention, Marianne and I read aloud My Life in France, the well-crafted autobiography of Julia and Paul Child during their European sojourn that eventually lead to her writing The Art of French Cooking.  (“And the rest is history,” as they say. . .)  I enjoy seeing other cook books as well from vegetarian to Indian to “eat fresh and local” newbie works.  It’s also encouraging to see a host of works about food production in America:  Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation.

                Books do furnish rooms.  Travel.  History.  Science for the non-scientific.  Art.  Photography.  Fiction, including sci-fi.  An occasional slim volume of poetry.  I love a crowded bookcase with cock-eyed books stuffed in them.  The montage shows that these volumes are for reading, not decorating.  It’s a positive sign.  As summer comes to warm us, don’t forget time for reading.  Devour a novel or two (or a dozen) this summer.  It’s good for your soul.  Read to a bored kid.  Buy them books.  Ask them what they are reading and share how much you enjoyed reading about Tom Sawyer or Elizabeth Bennet.  Live it up!

                Two novels you can’t see on a bookshelf yet are my first two Marsco Saga works, The Marsco Dissident and Marsco Triumphant.  They are speculative fiction which brings in many elements of today’s political chaos into a story set 90 years from now.  I plan to have them available for Kindle download in June or July this summer.  Meanwhile, I have loaded two chapters of the first novel on this website if you wish to take a look.  (Follow the Marsco link on this webpage.)

    

Winter

“Now is the Winter of our Discontent. . .”

Shakespeare

                One has to be hardy to live through a Minnesota winter.  And this past winter tested even the hardiest of us.  This is especially true for the non-native Minnesotans, like myself, who ventured north for opportunity and not for the weather.  Since moving here in 1989, I have learned to count the seasons differently.  Here, there are five:  winter, spring, summer, autumn, winter. 

                My struggles with winters are compounded by the fact that I spent the first 28 years of my life living in Sacramento, California.  While not a beach-front Malibu, its winters were certainly much less challenging than Alberta Clippers and blizzards and white-out road conditions.  Winter or summer (which has its own weather challenges), I soon learned that in Minnesota, if you’re hitting the highway, check the weather.  Sudden violent storms (blizzards and tornado-producing thunderheads) lurk just over the horizon.  In the Southwest corner of my adopted state, the prairie affords no natural barriers to block the incessant wind.  Snow can fall horizontally in the howling wind here.  Rain can be blown under the shingles of your roof to find a way into your kitchen. 

                Although Sacramento is not, say, an island in the Mediterranean, it certainly stacks up pretty well against a Minnesota winter.  Tule fog was our greatest threat.  And to have such thick ground fog, there must be no wind.  And the air temp stays above 32˚.  We thought it was cold, but it really wasn’t. 

One of my favorite TV shows when I was a California boy was West Point, a weekly series that dramatized the heroism of military officers who graduated from that service academy.  Each episode usually began with the hero as a green cadet who always seemed to get into trouble.  Every week some officer always yelled at a troublesome plebe warning the callow youth he would never make it. 

                A common punishment for wayward cadets was to have them march back and forth across a large quad.  In true TV fashion, to show the passage of time, several scenes would be blended through the changing of the seasons.  The camera would focus on the errant cadet’s feet, and, by the magic of TV, the ground around those pacing feet would get rained on then snowed on.  What took a few moments to pace off gave the impression of passing weeks then months.  Rain to snow to melt-off just before the commercial.

                My reaction to those feet pacing in snow was always the same.  How could anyone live in snow, I would ask?  At the time, I wanted to attend West Point; I was young and impressionable.  But live where it snowed?  Not for me, that icy life.

                Life kept me in California until I was 28.  After college, I worked on my MA in English literature and taught high school for four years all in and around Sacramento.  But, I was ambitious, anxious to move on to teaching at the university level and willing to put my feet in the waters of what lay beyond my hometown so long as it was along the West Coast.

                I applied to ten PhD schools:  five in California, two others on the West Coast, and a few token ones well beyond Utah just in case.  The tokens didn’t matter.  I was going to Cal or UCLA or at least UC Davis, a campus twenty minutes from home. 

Soon, the rejections piled up.  Berkeley, no!  UCLA, no!  Davis, no!  Those token places out East and in the Midwest increasingly grew more and more likely.  Harsh reality forced me to hatch a new plan:  cross the Sierras in an inverse move of those pioneers of the Gold Rush, snatch up my PhD in record time, and return to teach in California.  I just presumed I would come back to Sacramento State, where I earned my MA, and where I felt I belonged.  I couldn’t imagine living or teaching anywhere else.

                The last winter I taught high school in Sacramento, I lived with my parents because my father was seriously ill.  We didn’t know it, but he had less than two years to live.  That winter was also the worst winter in South Bend, Indiana, home of the University of Notre Dame.  WNDU, an NBC affiliate, was then located on the campus.  When the famous blizzard of 1978 socked Notre Dame, it made national news with live shots of snow piled up to second-story dorm windows and a campus blanketed to stillness.

                Notre Dame was one of the campuses that hadn’t yet rejected me.  And thanks to a WNDU feed, my father and I watched nightly for a week in January 1978 as a three-foot layer of snow and lamppost-high drifts closed the Notre Dame campus for the first time in a century.

                This was not sunny California.

                After the storm but while the campus was still closed, my dad and I sat safe and warm in front of our TV and watched students file into the ND basketball arena for a game.  ND insisted the game go on, so on it went even if the visiting team had to struggle to reach the campus.  True to form, the Irish student body came out of their snow-bound dorms and flowed towards the arena, their heads barely visible along the snow-cleared path.  A trench had been carved out for them just for this game.  It was like watching a white-shrouded World War I trench system without barbed wire.  The famous Golden Dome stood majestic but snow-covered, no longer gold.

                “How can anyone live in that?” I demanded, disdaining every thought of a snowy winter, especially with snow piled higher than your head.

                “You’re going to go to Notre Dame,” my dad replied, a man of few words.  He was a Notre Dame Subway Alum.  None of his four sons had attended ND.  His not-so-secret ambition in life:  have one of us earn an ND degree.

                A few weeks later, I got my acceptance letter from the Golden Dome, with a promise of four years of teaching to pay my way through.  It was a graduate teaching position, the best way to finance further education.  I may have been an idealistic English teacher, but I knew my four years of high school experience amounted to something.  Notre Dame agreed.  Besides graduate seminars and exams and a dissertation, I graded stacks and stacks of freshmen papers over the next several years, but the exchange was well worth it.

                Rather quickly, I even grew to appreciate harsh Midwest winters.  During my third year there, I went cross-country skiing with a young woman originally from Chicago who had winter down pat.  She was a graduate of Notre Dame; her senior year was that blizzard winter I had watched with my father.  I may have seen her on her way to that game.  Who knows?  Out skiing, I wore so many layers, I could hardly move.  After repeated falls, I split my pants down the backside seam.  She married me anyway.

                I don’t think of Minnesota winters in quite the same way as I did while living in California.  They are prolonged (and this past one especially so with snow even at the end of April), but they can be endured.  Once here, I bought a snow blower then up-scaled it to a larger model.  Now, I hire two strapping fellows to clear my long driveway.  I own parkas and overcoats, multiple scarves, several pairs of boots, sets of gloves.  Beyond all that, I’ve made tremendous friends who make trying situations bearable.  Their native (and non-native) good humor about winters of Ice Age proportions reminds me that those frozen months are as much a prolonged season as a state of mind.  Their warm hearts make life flourish here all year, every year.

And yet, when I teach the Percy Shelly poem “Ode to the West Wind” which ends:  “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?” I still remind my students that Shelley was living in sunny Italy when he wrote that, not Minnesota.