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Taking Stock: Third Week of April 2013

4/16/2013

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             Taking Stock: Third Week of April 2013
                                       *

                          A Year in a Nutshell
                                       or
                              Welcome Home!

            This is my second blog post in Spring ’13 semester. I originally began this blog site in February 2011, and kept posting essays fairly regularly until last Spring. Then things got pretty crazed; I have only now settled down into a routine. And I do know that this is the second blog in a row I’ve begun with a whining excuse. So, enough sniveling excuses, here it is.
            This past summer, I moved about 25 feet, from BA 221 to BA 224. But that short distance was, metaphorically speaking, enormous. I moved from the office of Chair of the English Department back to my longstanding faculty office, almost immediately next door. It’s the same office I’ve occupied since I arrived on the Southwest campus in August 1989.
            Five and a half years ago when I began my first term as Chair, I took over from an excellent Chair and colleague, Dr. Lori Baker. I left the office in steady, capable hands, with Dr. Neil Smith at the helm. I came in to the Chair’s office under President David Danahar, and left while an interim president, Dr. Ron Wood, ran the show. Late this past February, a new President was named, Dr. Connie Gores, SMSU’s first woman president. I expect great things out of Dr. Gores when she takes over July 1, 2013; I’m sure the campus, community, and I won’t be disappointed.
            Changes and more changes.
            This past summer, a neighbor, Bob, moved to the Cities. Bob was here next door when we first moved to this house in 1991. He and all of us in the neighborhood struggled through the ’93 floods together. Several summers later, we celebrated when the city finally redid the back easement and our main sewer lines, and tore up our lawns and removed our privacy hedges. Over all these years, we’ve exchanged Christmas gifts and dinners. He and I fell into a routine of going to breakfast at Mike’s or Hy-Vee every so often; I miss those eggs and hash browns mornings.
            Surviving events like a flood can bond us. Bob is retired and has all his family and many of his friends in the Cities; he wanted to be closer to all those family events. Didn’t take long for him to pack up and move leaving a void in the neighborhood.
            On campus, the Whitman Room is quiet different as well; its voices and laughter and youthful energy. That’s our English student hangout and lounge. Last May, in one of my final acts as Chair, I formally greeted our newly-minted graduates as they received their degrees at Commencement. Several great students with whom I had worked closely for the past four or five years graduated that day. Many are currently at law school or graduate school in the Cities, Iowa, or Alabama, points over the horizon.
            All these folks off on their new adventures.
            But moving 25 feet is an adventure, too, a grand adventure.
            For one, I teach differently. Specifically, I am back to fulltime in the classroom since I no longer have the added duties of Chair. No extra meetings, no interrupted days with gloom and joy, deaths in families near and far, engagements, expectations of new life, broken hearts, disappointments and acceptance letters, problems with a DARS (our electronic academic record-keeping system), and complaints about the weather. No more long conversations with profs concerning students, schedules, career choices, lack of opportunities, lost causes, fellow colleagues, my decisions (good ones and bad ones—plenty of those), the Admin, the Contract, our pay frozen for four long years, and the weather. Always the weather.
            We live in Minnesota. Somehow the damnable weather must be someone’s fault. And of course, we live in Marshall. Someone must be able to shut off its continuous wind.
            And my short move over last summer hasn’t been as easy as just closing one door and walking through another. I had a semester sabbatical in Fall ‘12, rich with possible blog posts but instead you had to follow me on Facebook. Great travels to London, Bath, and Canterbury to study, to immerse myself in British literary heritage, and to daily walk the ways of Dickens, Browning, Chaucer, Austen, and Pip, Little Dorrit, and so many others.
            But, it is this term’s classes that are occupying me now. Four classes, all different preps, two new to me and both almost still just-out-of-the-box brand new to the campus. My third class I regularly teach, but I significantly changed it. The last is a milk run for me, but one I haven’t taught in five or six years. Frankly, I’m struggling to juggle all this, to know all my 85 students’ names, to plan ahead when at times I have only my experience and intuition to guide me. But, I’m managing. And, I don’t have any of those endless, albeit, necessary meetings.
            (One of my good friends once had a sign on his door: “Call a meeting, the creative alternative to work!” So right he is.)
            Five years as Chair! It still boggles my mind. I had planned on one year; it grew into five.
            But I did like it. I’ll leave it to others to judge how good a job I did, but I know I enjoyed myself. “Enjoyed” in the sense that each day I did have a strong sense that what I did mattered and that I had actually helped people, students mostly. I have the same sense as a professor (i.e., one who’s teaching fulltime), the awareness that what I do matters. The classroom, however, is planting an orchard knowing I will not taste the fruit.
             Being a Chair is often like being an air traffic controller: okay, that one’s landed; this one’s taxiing; that one has taken off. You can see what’s what, often the day it happens. With deadlines and specific tasks, you know when to check off something from the “To Do” list. Not so with lecturing on Browning to high school teachers-in-training or future grad students. Will this end up at Marshall High? In a MA thesis at Kansas State? And what of those who are struggling even to pass the class? Is their possibility of graduation fading?
            In addition to returning to the classroom after a restful sabbatical, I returned to the classroom after an amazing weekend in the Cities called the Landmark Educational Forum. A few of you may at this point believe I drank “the Kool-Aid” or suffered a mind-meld or was abducted by aliens in London, but far from it. Marianne and I went together to our Forum; it was intense and enlightening.
            First off, be clear: Landmark is not a cult. And be forewarned, it is brutally honest. However, the sharp honesty it demands starts with each participant, (that would be me) being honest about the games and stories we (that would be I) believe are true. And believe them even when we know they are our own fictions.
            I won’t give away too much on the whole weekend’s experience, but I will say that even here in Marshall, there are introduction sessions open to all. Or, wherever you live, you can look up Landmark Educational Forum online and find out about introduction opportunities in your location. It is worth the time, effort, and (yes) money to attend a Landmark Forum Weekend.
            And so, this semester: I believe the rest and change in routine created by sabbatical, the passing along of Chair duties, and the personal enlightenment of Landmark have all helped me begin this term on much better footing. I’m behind in grading. Break Week became a grading frenzy marathon, and still I stayed way behind. But, it’s all good.
            And it’s good to be back where I belong, at the chalkboard, at the lectern, holding office hours, grading those long-neglected stacks of frosh comp.
             T. S. Eliot said: “And the end of all our journeys will be to return to the starting point / And know the place for the first time.”
            It’s great to be home.

  

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WINTER

4/27/2011

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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.

  

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