Teddy Robertson's blog

The Big R

2012-01-25T07:40:00.000-08:00

For a year now I've been withdrawing from an addiction. I have the shakes and almost every day, my new habit pattern wobbles. I'm in the throes of “The Big R.”

I’d been sidling up to retirement for a couple of years, eying my age cohort as they slipped away from my work orbit and into another life somewhere. I began to confide my anxieties to closest friends, swore them to secrecy. I felt like I was sneaking up on an adversary. Finally, I broached the subject to the Dean and Department Chair. And so I began to work half-time, down to three courses a year instead of six. I can’t complain: more time to enjoy my students and fewer meetings (although sometimes when I show up, I’m not needed---that’s when the shakes and wobbles come).

But I had to face the family math: my mother lived to 91. At age 66---with good luck, I had a quarter century left. Ok; let’s be realistic. Those last five years? Not so much. So subtract five and that knocks me down to---maybe---twenty years. At most, two decades remained in the game.

I’d been through all the other life-markers---births and baptisms, weddings, wakes and funerals (other people’s). Throw divorce in there too. You’ve got to face them when they hit. But their tedious social traditions bucked me up, provided tried and true ceremonies to lean on.

And now comes retirement. It’s different, more like a state of suspended existence that America seems to have just made up. And there are greeting cards for it.

Made up like adolescence---that one’s a double header. First you do it to your parents, then your kids do it to you. Then there’s middle age. Nice to know you’re in your prime, but it’s another 19^th century invention too, says Patricia Cohen, New York Times culture reporter.

There’s little anthropological evidence that our ancient forebears retired from anything. They just died in the traces, drifted away on ice floes, or were eaten. As my friend Chris says, “first you work, then you die.”

The online Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology says “retire” is from the French or Old French, “retirer”. It means to drawback or withdraw. It first appears in English (or as the linguists say, is attested) in the seventeenth century. How did the French get into this?

Well, the main French exhibit is Montaigne. Famous in his own lifetime, he had retired early from public life. You can do that if your family is rich and you have a first-class education. At age 37---middle age back in the day--- he chucked it all and “withdrew himself” (that’s what he said in Latin) to a tower in his father’s castle to write. He had wisdom sayings carved on the ceiling beams and he relieved his “fits of melancholy” by writing. He traveled a bit, even served as mayor of Bordeaux. But mainly he wrote and wrote---about Greek and Latin writers, age, and sleep, the education of children, wearing clothes, learning to die (read philosophy). And cannibals (rumored to roam the New World). He covers a lot of ground. A balanced latter life for nearly twenty years---what a game plan.

Contemporary retirement does not connote such elegant composure. It generates panic and a colossal amount of self- absorption. It’s right up there with adolescence. And like adolescence, retirement is big on marketing: books, blogs, therapy---it’s all there to help you navigate this looming, potential crisis. By the way, spend some money too, before impoverishment takes over. And it tells you: avoid disaster. Prepare, prepare---this is a Big Deal.

Move over, Montaigne, I’m having my fits of melancholy. Fatigue, depression, apprehension---and I’m sleeping ten hours a night like a teenager. Here I thought I was managing middle age, even enjoying it through the lens of writers like Nora Ephron---that wry chronicler of uneasy aging. Now it turns out that I’m no longer in the middle of middle age. I’m at its further edge. Smack: it’s the Big R. And did I mention that they’ve got greeting cards for it?

Disinclined to carve wisdom sayings on the beams over my desk, I tried post-it notes (I’ve got a lot of them; they’re from work). And on each one I scribble an anticipated change with retirement, a gimmick to collect my thoughts:

No emails that close with the snippily abridged “Best” or the faux British, “Cheers”
No emails with “sent from my iphone or droid”
No office parties

Time to---

· Write Christmas cards to nonagenarian friends

· Prune shrubs and put down bulbs

· Exercise in the middle of the day

· Buy fresh food and cook from scratch

· Read in the afternoon

· Write in the mornings

· Feed the birds

Not bad at all. What could I have overlooked? Oh, yes, the calamitous drop in income. No help from the affluent Montaigne here. The best I can say is that I don’t worry about work conflicts for my quarterly appointments with my CFP (certified financial planner for readers under twenty-five).

Money. That’s another entire packet of post-it notes. Of course it’s not retirement or even money that’s so disturbing; it’s what comes after. The Big R being the anteroom of the Big D.

Time to read philosophy.

Read more essays at http://eastvillagemagazine.org/

On Reading Parker Palmer late in life

2011-10-01T12:46:00.000-07:00

It’s ten minutes to the hour. Walking down the hall I can see into the classroom where students are settling in, the laptop users along the wall outlets, puffy down jackets chinked between chairs; it is winter. Rising above the color and buzz a lanky male perches cross-legged atop one of the tables in the back of the room. Ball cap bill turned to the back, he calls out good naturedly, “Hey, Professor, why the big smile---is it because you are going to put the screws to us with this quiz?” He means the first of four quizzes during the course; it’s the end of the second week of classes. Time to get down to business. He looks incredulous when I reply that I’m smiling because I am so happy to be there.

The cross-legged student is a charmer---smart and susceptible to being engrossed by the material of this course. And like many twenty-something males who turn up in classes today, pretty much fearless in the face of my academic, or at least grade-dispensing, authority. I have arrived early to position the electronic props essential for the next hour and fifteen minutes of concentration. The choreography of the contemporary classroom. Several students approach me with personal issues---future absences, work and family problems. Meantime I blank out the screen now humming down from the ceiling; at a later point I will want these students’ full attention on my words. Lecture materials cascade out of my bag onto the table, layered like strata on an archeological site. The hubbub subsides; the cross-legged student has slipped down silently from the table into his chair. We begin.

What makes this twenty-first century classroom life congenial, a source of satisfaction different from before---when I wore a suit and the room was hushed until I filled it with my voice? Where are the challenges of teaching in this changed atmosphere?

These questions were gathering in my mind in the early weeks of a recent winter semester when an interview Parker Palmer popped up in on NPR. I recognized his name but had never read his book with the title that grabs: The Courage to Teach. So, decades after I’d begun to practice the craft, I sought out a manual. Decades into collecting materials and ideas, tips and techniques, it seemed high time to read this influential classic.

The Courage to Teach dates from 1998 and since then many of its concepts have percolated through pedagogy: the community of teachers and learners, acceptance of different learning styles, the futility of external power over students, the need for authentic dialogue in the classroom. These notions are familiar now. College and university centers for learning and teaching have promoted them across American campuses. Books and teaching materials of all kinds have disseminated classroom techniques (although Palmer is chary of the term) that foster successful learning.

Reading The Courage to Teach unearthed memories from the past. The title echoes Paul Tillich’s 1952 volume The Courage to Be, a philosophical-theological reflection on the mid-twentieth-century anxiety of meaninglessness, fear of freedom and autonomy, and the consequent appeal of totalitarianism. Coinciding with American interest in existentialism in the latter 1950s, The Courage to Be was read in colleges and seminaries in the 1960s, cited in the pulpit and in Time magazine. Perhaps Tillich’s postwar analysis of the human condition (or its title) must have spoken to Palmer. At least, this was my supposition. To teach without a sense of self, to stand with an aura of authority before learners perhaps adrift in an era of anxiety courts dangers ethical and political. Whatever our subject matter, we are not simply purveyors of “objective” information. In any case, nearly six decades after Tillich the availability of information has so proliferated that it compels teachers to devote time to teaching judgment and criteria beyond facts and data. Our role with students---as with ourselves---is to be part of a quest for understanding and, in Tillich’s terms, a quest for meaning.

Reading The Courage to Teach also sent me back to a second book from the pre-Palmerian past: Carl Rogers’ On Becoming a Person, published in 1961. Rogers opened up the world of the human personality beyond my inherited cultural and parental understandings and introduced me to Kierkegaard’s injunction to become “that self which one truly is.” The dignity and respect that Rogers’ fully attentive and non-judgmental stance accords another human being fixed the phrase “client-centered therapy” in my vocabulary. Palmer’s several references to Martin Buber and “I and Thou” must have been a clue. On Becoming a Person offered hope and optimism; it imparted a different kind of confidence to meet the world than the baccalaureate diploma I attained.[1]

The opening chapters of The Courage to Teach deal with identity and integrity, fear and paradox---Palmer is big on paradox, not surprising for a Quaker and mystic. All these chapters survey what he terms the “inner landscape” of teaching and learning. Now, about midway through, however, the ground shifts: Parker Palmer moves from the teacher-learner relation to the centrality of the subject matter as the terrain where both meet.[2] The classroom is neither student-centered nor teacher-centered; it is subject-centered.[3] Something of a surprise here. Still expecting some ur-formulation of recent educational mottoes, I re-read the passage. Of course; we knew this all along. How could it be otherwise? It is the subject matter that lured us into our fields in the first place.

Reviewing my lecture notes the night before a teaching day, I am amazed at their density of information. Single-spaced with penciled notes crawling up the margins, their thoroughness is startling. Almost as startling to me is how my focus has shifted from masses of detail to problems and questions that continue to puzzle me after several decades of teaching. Some initially intrigued me in graduate courses; others have emerged over time. I have pursued them on my own, but I notice that more and more I raise them in the classroom. For their part, students pose questions to which I can only respond that I do not have an answer, but that the question is good and worth some research. To paraphrase Palmer, our subjects are large and complex, while our knowledge and our skills remain imperfect and partial. The shift away from masses of detailed material has opened space for exchanges in an area once chock a block with data. In the hour and fifteen minutes formerly too short to cram in the requisite coverage of material I feel a certain spaciousness.

Gathering in my mind this particular semester was a fresh awareness that each time I begin a Polish or Russian history course my own excitement as a learner returns. Once again, I am in thrall to my field, Slavic studies, just as I had been as a graduate student fascinated by history, literature, language. At that time Russian Formalism and the monumental figures of Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) and Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) dominated the field. We graduate students sailed along boldly, intrepid under the twin flags of binary oppositions and the dialogic imagination. I did not become a linguist or a literary theorist, but the insights of Jakobson and Bakhtin marked my understanding of Slavic languages and literatures, history and culture. The most basic notions of Jakobson and Bakhtin have nourished the lectures that I’ve composed, the readings I’ve chosen, and the discussions I’ve tried to stimulate. They nestle deep in every course.

Despite its prolixity, Palmer’s subtitle, “Exploring the Inner Landscape of the Teaching Self”, touched on something I recognized: congruity between the teacher’s inner and outer life, harmony between one’s knowledgeable self and the self who teaches. The teacher’s inner and outer lives meld without tension along the terrain of the course subject matter. In my own experience some congruity and harmony have grown increasingly palpable in recent years. I think I can even date it from roughly the time that texting replaced cell phone ringing, and students’ classroom comportment took another swerve downward.

When The Courage to Teach first appeared in print, the informality of teaching had already been advancing for three decades, since the late 1960s. Today colleagues decry the disappearance of classroom decorum. Syllabi catalog the proscriptions: alimentary (food and noisy wrappers), sartorial (hats), electronic (phones and laptops). The list grows yearly. Perhaps we should be surprised that the teacher-learner encounter still involves any layers of convention at all. Vestiges do remain. When the chips are down---a student challenges my expertise, all electronic equipment fails, a death occurs on campus---I feel the layers fall away. Sudden exposure reveals the self; I teach who I really am. Palmer calls it teaching from within.

Outside of class students seem perpetually en route: they email from their smart phones. They work several jobs or must be absent from class to do training for a job, having searched for months and finally landed one. They care for siblings. They seem less and less healthy. Students’ inner and outer lives are in struggle, not harmony. The fragmentation of work and learning challenges the vaunted multi-tasking capabilities of their generation, sabotages their efforts to focus, to concentrate. Learning requires concentration and not only now in the classroom. They will need the same ability to concentrate in the future, to persevere in jobs, and to pursue what we exhort as life-long learning. What facilitates concentration---beyond manners and decorum? I think it is fascination with a subject so absorbing that one forgets oneself. How can I entice these students to enter deeply into the subject matter of our course, deeply enough to promote the concentration essential now? If students can concentrate deeply here in the classroom, perhaps they can replicate the process elsewhere and repeatedly in life.

This same semester when reading Parker Palmer, I watched a PBS program in which a young African woman imprisoned during civil war in her country and threatened with torture or execution, recounted how she kept her sanity by learning a foreign language. Her desperate concentration helped her maintain some small degree of equanimity in inhuman conditions. She turned incarceration and maltreatment into a time for learning; learning became a refuge. Psychologically as well as physically, she survived. Her story reminded me of the many memoirs of concentration camp victims and Gulag prisoners who recited Torah or poetry from memory. The power of concentration, of total immersion in a world of knowledge beyond ourselves, can support the human spirit in the most acute, relentless, and terrifying situations we know.

And what of the elusive congruity between the teacher’s inner and outer life? That I experience congruence in my existence in the classroom today, an inner and outer life that have come together, is a convergence of disparate life experiences. The many pieces that have gradually moved toward connection have jagged edges and have been for decades far apart. Accidental experiences which first took me to Poland and encounters with amazing people there and along the way (few were scholars) shaped both my learning and my development as a person. Only the distance of years reveals how valuable were experiences, collisions with people and events over which I had so little control. Now what seems pivotal in the process was the attraction, the captivation with a subject that occurred and that impelled me to study, to concentrate. Understanding---knowledge---emerged slowly and partially. Time has intensified this dimension of what Palmer phrased as “the centrality of the subject.”

What seems to make this twenty-first century teaching life congenial and satisfying to me is somehow connected to the informality of the classroom which allows me to experience the congruence between my inner and outer life, my scholarly and teaching self, a shared humanity with my students. The challenge of teaching in this changed atmosphere involves finding new ways to let the subject matter captivate students, and so in turn promote the concentration that allows learning to develop. If I can exhibit that congruity at all, then perhaps such an experience can give students hope. Hope that their fragmentation, their anxiety, may gradually abate. Confidence that captivation may occur when a student finds his or her subject.

I’m glad that I found Parker Palmer late in my teaching life. Had someone handed me The Courage to Teach years ago, I probably would have been impatient with it. I would have skimmed it, frustrated at the tedium of therapeutic language. But just now it hits the spot. There are still things I can learn. I can read it for teaching, but better, I can read it for myself.

[1] In an October 2000 review of The Courage to Teach, Neil Lutsky noted Parker Palmer’s debt to Carl Rogers, writing that

“there's more than a faint echo of Carl Rogers in Parker Palmer (although Rogers is not mentioned in the book). What matters most in Palmer's scheme is the apparent authenticity of the teacher's commitment to his or her vocation and role. Inauthentic teaching reflects a turn from the deep personal valuing of the self toward, largely, the conditions of worth specified by the norms of contemporary ‘objectivist’ culture. “

Lutsky, N. (2002). “Should it matter who the teacher is? A review of Parker Palmer's The Courage to Teach.” In W. Buskist, V. Hevern, & G. W. Hill, IV, (Eds.). Essays from e-xcellence in teaching, 2000-2001 (chap. 7). Retrieved [June 30, 2009] from the Society for the Teaching of Psychology Web site: http://teachpsych.org/resources/e-books/eit2000/eit00-07.html

[2] Palmer shifts gears a second time with the last section of the book on the social microcosm.

[3] Ch. Four, pp. 116-117.

Million Dollars Red

2011-08-20T16:32:00.000-07:00

My daughter-in-law Kristin posted a picture of her toes on Facebook after a recent pedicure. Slender and delicate, her phalangial extremeties (toes) are pale and regular like those of the six cavorting ladies in Botticelli's "Allegory of Spring". Bright red nail polish and a tiny fanciful daisy---slightly different on each great toe---add joy to her agile step. And step she does. Kristin is a nurse in a trauma ICU. She works ten to twelve hour days, goes to school to earn her BSN, and loves my son Christopher. They have an energetic dog and a nervous cat and many, many friends. And two mortgages. Step, step, step.

I am fascinated with the bones in the foot, especially now when the metatarsus of my left foot seems to have developed a life of its own. For example, bones fracture. Since November of last year I've had metatarsals 3 and 4 both break. I've spent months in various kinds of casts. Knobs of bone seem to be developing on the sides of the foot. What is this?

Of course, I am older than Kristin---by nearly four decades---but I still want my feet to work. I don't stand, or walk, or run as much as a younger person would; I try to be kind to my skeletal system. I realize that bones age and get tired, but I take calcium and vitamins. I've not quit; why should they?

I coddle my feet. I wear Birkenstocks and just invested in a pair of New Balance 927s for walking. Not only are these shoe prices high. If you have any fashion radar, you see that you have to revise your entire wardrobe to accomodate this large boxy shape at the base of the silhouette. Or, not look down; or cover the lower portion of a full length mirror. The "line" just doesn't work.

Then, there's therapy; I get a foot massage from Tom at a manicure/pedicure place in LA. But the nail and polish business is less important to me than the "reflexology" therapy he does on my feet and legs. Whatever the scientific value of my "qi" or meridians, my step is light after an hour with Tom. This business is an Asian speciality, of course, and in Los Angeles, practically every block you drive has at least one nail salon. It's one of the growth industries of the last decade and the particular province of Asian immigrants.

Tom and his sister Nancy are from Vietnam; they run a little shop in one of the countless strip malls lining the major arteries in Torrance. They are open 7 days a week, from 9 am to 9 pm. Decor is minimal and the tv has no cable. A little shrine sits on the floor---an indecipherable Asian baroque design; sometimes with some kind of sweet roll offering in celophane. I restrain the impulse to genuflect. How they got here is sketchy: she'd escaped in a boat and watched people drown; then waited in an internment camp.This must have been several decades ago, maybe during the 1970s. Now she sends letters back to family in Vietnam, but not too often. I overheard this history in the most chatty encounter I'd observed in the three or four years I've gone there. Tom and Nancy do not talk much; their English suffices for business. Once in surprisingly expansive moment Tom confided to me that his daughter was applying to medical school and needing to re-take entrance exam.

But the main thing is that Tom understands my feet and in particular what's going on as my left foot ages and stress fractures occur. It touches me that he examines my foot with such understanding and compassion. He slowly nods his head when he takes my left foot in his capable hands and carefully probes its strengths and weaknesses. Gently tests its flexibility. Presses points in the sole and behind the knee. I am comforted.

Toward the end of an hour, after all therapy, he applies the polish: "Million Dollars Red." It's a bright, true red; makes me think of Marilyn Monroe. Who wants subtlety in southern California? For several weeks now, my feet will feel young again. That is, to say, I won't feel them at all. Some yoga classes and regular walking in those 927s will improve my attitude toward my phalangial extremities. So much of my life has been done on foot---the long blocks of Vienna suburbs and the cobblestones of Cracow, traipsing from campus to the edge of town in grad school, childhood wandering northern California hillsides from bus stop to home. Whatever the need, if I could walk it, I was OK. If I got tired, I could sit and rest. Legs and feet recovered. Walking has been my measure of life. Maybe only street people gauge their lives that way now. I wish them and their feet well.

Read more essays at http://eastvillagemagazine.org/

Jerry Rig

2011-07-28T12:24:00.000-07:00

Urban dictionary defines jerry-rig as fixing something non working in an unconventional way. Their etymology states that the term was created during World War II, a reference to the Germans who were termed "Jerries" as slang. Allies supposedly came across hastily repaired objects left by the retreating Germans. Hence the admiring, resourceful Yanks invented the term Jerry-rig.

Wikipedia offers a competing derivation; it contends that the phrase's origin is nautical, deriving from jury-rig, a temporary mast erected to replace one carried away. The make shift mast would only survive one day--un jour. Presumably this jour migrated to jury and thence to jury-rig. So the term dates back to sailing ships and predates American adventures in twentieth century war.

I’m not sure about all this; it's pretty shaky web research. Just the kind of “evidence” that I circle in red on student papers. But whatever its historic origins, jerry-rig is a useful expression in life which is so often make-shift.

Despite the term’s condescending connotations of something flimsy and shoddy, these temporary repairs sometimes outlive the original piece of equipment. Such successful jerry-rigging depends upon equipment: wire, duct tape, C-clamps, and an assortment of screws, shims, and sealants. All this in addition to a set of good tools that include a power drill. Jerry-rig operations also benefit from a solid work bench (stationary vise highly recommended). And above all, jerry-rig requires invention.

Jerry-rig is the specialty of my partner, Dennis. Through him I have learned to look differently at the broken objects of daily life. To embrace potential, instead of succumbing to frustration, to visualize the material world working in alternative and unexpected ways. To honor the originality praised by the romantics. Throwing something into the trash or even the Goodwill pile means that you just don’t rise to the challenges of life. It’s not sporting---a rejection of improvisation, imagination, and the unconventional. Going to the mall to buy a replacement means craven capitulation to the commercial (although we always seem to have a sheaf of expired Bed, Bath, and Beyond coupons just in case).

Last summer the switch on our tea-kettle cracked and broke off. As you can see here, Dennis' solution was to hold down the internal lever with a chop stick. Presto! The little orange light goes on and soon the water is boiling. English Breakfast tea will steep to its sable brown, caffeine-laden intensity. And no one has been electrocuted. To turn the kettle off, you pull the stick out---and just toss it into a drawer until tomorrow. No trace left to disturb kitchen décor. Of course, to insert the stick properly requires surgical precision. In my early morning, pre-caffeine bleariness, I am neither patient, nor particularly adept with chop sticks. I need a flashlight to poke in the stick at just the right angle.

We are offspring of Depression generations and recall the stories of how homes and lives were held together and very little was thrown away. Our family lore includes tales of the first refrigerator that replaced the old icebox, of sewing machines converted to electricity (my mother had one with an electric pedal), of knives and lawnmowers sharpened annually at the hardware store. Any piece of good metal, wood, or rope was stored and saved. What to do with such bits and pieces? Out of habit we continue to coil wire and wind up rope. We sort screws, nails, and bits of metal in tea tins and jelly jars. We buy duct tape on sale in multiple rolls from teen-aged clerks who pronounce it “duck” tape. (What do they envision with that webbed and quacking metaphor?)

The sturdy workbench in the basement of my house dates from the 1950s. The builder constructed it. Successive owners paneled its back wall with peg board and someone had thoughtfully left a few hooks. Now the wall is now covered with tools. Its dangling shop light has been augmented by old bathroom fluorescent rods also from the 1950s---salvaged and mounted on the beams. Still working but in a new context. Good light is essential for jerry-rig work.

Dennis comes from the rich repair tradition of the mid-twentieth century. His father and grandfather delighted in scavenging for broken equipment. They fixed motors and re-built car engines. Once they wired up a communication system from kitchen to garage so they could work in peace until dinnertime. Dennis even built his first stereo set. I marvel at this energy and precision, this depth of knowledge of the mechanical world. How it can be mobilized in a small emergencies.

My appreciation of jerry-rig has grown in recent years, while energy for re-furnishing the domestic material world around me has declined. I’m increasingly immune to the whole lot of the redecorating enablers---Restoration Hardware, Pottery Barn, Crate and Barrel, Williams-Sonoma. Fatigued by their showrooms of coordinated objects. Making do with a jerry-rig is just fine, so long as things collapse at a leisurely pace.

For more essays see East Village Magazine at http://eastvillagemagazine.org/

Waste management

2011-01-23T15:09:00.000-08:00

When I come to Los Angeles in the summer I live in an apartment on an alley. Actually, an alley in Torrance, one of the over 88 cities of LA county. It’s an area of small homes, a few shingled cottages from the 1940s, many tract era houses, and on the hillside multi-storied stuccos on stilts. A few two and three-storey apartment buildings cluster closer to the highway. Our place is the upper level rental at back of a small house, the kind built before the era of subdivisions. That’s what the decades of real estate expansion did here. Bungalows sprouted a second story, rear lots added rentals, garages became storage, driveways became patios, and cars went to the street where between 5 pm and 6 am there is no parking at all. When I walk the alley, here and there a garage door will be partially raised. Boxes and plastic bags jumbled inside from concrete floor to ceiling. No car. It’s strange for me, a California transplant to the Midwest where housing space abounds and population declines.

Los Angeles is not a very conversational place. Neighbors don’t acknowledge one another much. But in summertime the alley is lively: the cat lady calls to her felines by name in the morning, the classic car enthusiast guns his burgundy vintage Mustang as he heads out to Saturday breakfast, the Mexican swap meet guy hunches over the tail gate of his truck tinkering with something, and Steve the iron worker forges metal trellises with his blowtorch in the backyard.

But the prince of the alley is Larry. He has a real set up. And he’s friendly. In shorts and polo shirt, comfortable shoes and thick white socks, Larry pushes a laundry cart he’s customized for action. With brooms erect and bags dangling off the sides of the cart, he is outfitted for battle. Trundling methodically along the alley, Larry halts at the round, black 300-gallon trash containers set out every two or three residences. With gloved hands and a variety of home-devised spears, he probes the barrels for recyclables. It’s delicate work. Four feet high and nearly four feet across, the black containers are---as the city website proclaims---the frontline of the waste management system for alley residents. Unofficially, the Mexicans with small pickup trucks scour the alley on weekends for large metal: water heaters, room air conditioners, and miscellaneous pipes residents leave to the side of the barrels. We are on Larry’s Monday morning route. His schedule is set by the Mexicans and the city. On Mondays, Larry can park his cart at the barrels and poke in peace. On Tuesday mornings, an enormous city truck wedges and beeps its way through where two cars cannot pass; automated claws extend to grasp the containers, lift and tilt and dump them, now lighter from Larry’s work. And unimpeded thanks to the Mexicans. A lone driver operates a vehicle that would have been useful at the siege of Stalingrad.

Larry is retired and he first began re-cycling to get some exercise and lose a little weight. It enables him to get out in the fresh air and move around. And the alleys are an El Dorado. His son sometimes helps out; it’s worth it to net a grand or two per year. On summer mornings when the windows are open, I hear Larry’s soft, patient prodding of the barrels around 10 am. These are a retiree’s hours. I call out and he responds with a wave and a smile.

Today we term this work recycling or re-purposing; it connotes extra effort associated with higher values. Monochromatically “green,” earth-friendly, with a whiff of the virtuous. But such current discourse is pallid compared to the vocabulary of the past. Colorful, motley English terms---rag and bone, grubber, tosher and mudlark---refer to people. Like the tinkers, itinerant menders of kitchen pots and sharpeners of knives who extended the life of valuable metal. Smelly at best, disreputable if not illegal at worst, nevertheless, in the nineteenth century, re-cycling had a human heart.

Lest I wax too nostalgic, it’s worth remembering the crass practicality of the more distant past, armies melted down bronze statuary for weapons, roads were laid with the stones from the monuments of the defeated, new towns were built on the convenient rubble of their predecessors. Today in some European cities, you have to walk down steps into churches, the street level having risen several feet over time.

The online “Solid Waste Management Glossary” (from Aerobic Composting to Worm Culture and Yard Waste) is encouraging for the global environment, but, alas, not much fun in my daily life. A 2007 article in The Economist details impressive improvements in recycling in Europe, Japan, and Britain, as well as the US. National rates for waste recycling have risen to over 50 percent in some European countries. New developments like sustainable packaging and spectroscopic sorting have streamlined the recycle process; markets for recycled materials have emerged. It’s scientifically and technologically inspiring, an intellectual G-up as I haul my bottles and cans to Meijer here in Flint.

I miss Larry though. At least my Flint paper goes to the Neighborhood Association’s collection where there’s always some chit chat with the volunteers on Saturday mornings---a bit of human connection as we manage our waste.

Read this essay and others at The East Village Magazine, http://www.eastvillagemagazine.org/

Social Utility

2011-01-01T16:24:00.000-08:00

I am into Facebook. This past October when I got the urge to be social, I could not log on to the Facebook page. Panic. How to find my login name, what was my password? I am locked out of society. My retrieval system to the rescue: rummage in my briefcase for the piece of paper on which various passwords---campus email, university libraries, journals, credit cards---are scribbled horizontally, vertically, obliquely.

My friend Jan wrote a sharp essay about Facebook. It’s somewhere on her blog, Nightblind. I can’t find that online now either---too much time has passed for me to remember the month she wrote it or the tag it might have. She and I are in the same age cohort; we are boomers, as the pop sociologists say. What are we doing here in our early 60s posting on an electronic social network? You’d think if we didn’t have a social network by this time we might just hang on until we are in “assisted living” and go with what’s there. We are old enough to have grown up with another social network, one that monitored now forgotten minutiae of behavior: gloves and hats, invitations and thank you notes in the mail. And yet here we are: pursuing the socially networked life online.

I can’t scorn these new ways. One night a couple of months ago my side of the city of Flint suddenly resounded with booming sounds like fireworks. Only it was October 3. Facebook friends were flummoxed---what was the reason? No answer online, but comfort comes from communal clucking about mysterious and perhaps alarming events.

Facebook is the preeminent social network service or, as Google and founder Mark Zuckerberg categorized it, a social utility. Social utility is not new. It is the backbone of the nineteenth century fiction. Austen, Thackeray, Dickens, Balzac---the utility of social connections for status and success is the driving force of their plots. Where would these novels be without the filiations, gossip, and intrigues of social networking? If the characters had had a reliable service, think of the possibilities for the climbers, poseurs, parvenus.

Back in the day, certain behavior used to “have social utility”: an advantageous marriage, a promising business connection, joining the right church. My maternal forebears were keen observers of these social stratagems to advance in the world. They had phrases they used privately to describe people who deftly or disastrously deployed them. Today we openly, indeed brazenly, network, log on and link in to the socially useful.

When people post obnoxious statements, I can “hide” them. Not just the present irritating opinions, but the people themselves and everything they say on Facebook in the future. They disappear from my News Feed, retrievable later when I feel up to it. Exiled from my trough of web-based chatter, chit chat, or per uno chiacchierare as the Italians say---the natively gifted in this field. What a change from the past social life in the flesh when I mentally strained to marshal a smart retort, or physically had to dodge and dart to avoid people. And then the guilt. My mother ---who as a young woman was fully armed with social skills to deflate such verbal irritations---would be impressed with this new, painless convenience.

Our city newspaper has gone to three days a week. The task of recycling has eased, but the consequences for local democracy are negative. What has come to the rescue? Facebook. Flint civic and cultural organizations---most all are on Facebook, the FIA and FIM, Buckham, Steady Eddy. Along with the Mayor and the young urbans renewing the city.

My neighborhood association now has a Facebook page. We can join efforts to maintain our neighborhood, to advocate with our Councilman, to discuss city problems. We find the “Affordable Handyman” to keep our old houses going. Most of all, the neighborhood Facebook page helps us with safety---the bedrock social utility. We keep the neighborhood page up on our laptops in the kitchen, ready to alert others about “scopers” roaming our streets. A Facebook member sends text messages to our phones as an alert. Highly efficient when compared to email which is fading along with dusty answering machines.

My students are on Facebook, of course; they reinvent themselves there, play games. A new profile picture, an update of personal information, album after album of pictures---their doings, their relatives’ doings, their friends at indecipherable and generally uninteresting events. Scores of people whom my Grandmother once would have dismissed icily remarking, “I don’t believe we have met.”

So now a librarian colleague has taught me how to use “delicious” to save my teaching and research bookmarks. It’s wondrously efficient for organizing sites and has brought order to research and teaching. And it has a social networking feature. Maybe my Facebook network would like to know about my primary sources or 19th century maps of Central Europe? Probably not.

Several of my former students have invited me to Linked In. I don’t think I can take it; I’m not building my career, I’m trying to dismantle it. Toward the close of last summer I went to see friends for a twilight glass of wine and some chit chat. Where was her husband, I asked, as we walked to the candle-lit screened in porch? Oh, he’ll be out soon; he’s just back in the dining room in the dark---facebooking.

Read this essay and others at The East Village Magazine, http://www.eastvillagemagazine.org/

Conversations with my house, revised and continued

2010-12-20T09:25:00.000-08:00

A year or so ago I was thinking once again about my house as a chapter in my life gradually approaching a close. Our relationship was changing: each year I move closer to retirement and selling the property and moving on. A poignancy had crept into our conversations. I have always loved the layout of the house, its coved ceilings, the views of the golf course through the windows, its airy and open position on a corner lot. This house taught me about the capacity of the right real estate to frame possibilities for a changing family--- a newly single mother, a teenage son, an aging grandmother, a dog. And at one point a visiting Doberman who did not do stairs. The arrangement of its rooms had enabled three people to invent a new life successfully.

When my partner Dennis was here that October he replaced the screen doors with glass for winter. The last tomatoes were picked and the plants pulled up. He hosed the gutters clean and our high school helper Grant raked leaves to the street for city cleanup. All the annual fall tasks, the rhythm of the last ten years. But I knew then that things were not the same between us, the house and I. After Dennis left, my relationship with the house did not return to its slightly bittersweet equilibrium. The mortgage crisis had disturbed our formerly philosophic dialogue. My side of the conversation grew querulous. How will this house sell in a depressed Flint market a few years from now? Reproaches about market value loss had replaced gratitude for shelter and security. The house stopped talking.

In other times in America, in other centuries and other countries, people lived in houses for generations. Tragedy often struck and families sold off goods and furnishings until finally the house would have to be sold to a new owner. In a final, sacrificial service and now a shell of former self, a house would generate cash to pay its owner’s debts. The colonial mansions of Jefferson, Washington, and Madison went through this process until restoration societies could salvage them. Memoirs and autobiography, novels and drama often convey the connections between human life and houses. Psychologically and metaphorically the house has been understood as an analogy for the self and human relations. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard described the fortitude of the house which anchors us in the swirl of the universe.

How can the value of a good house be measured?

The mortgage crisis has advanced since the fall of 2008 when these ruminations began. Those fortunate enough to still have their homes have gone bi-polar, lurching between dismay at drops in home values and hope for floors or plateaus so that at least we’d know we are at the bottom. The federal incentives have hit snags. The mortgage modification options have not been implemented well by the Great Lenders. Unemployment now causes mortgage defaults, pushing more properties on to the market.

Meantime I began to size up the condition of my conversation partner and to list the repairs: roof, garage door, basement walls, yard. The list was not what I would do, of course. Parallel to the column of tasks were the names of those who had always worked on the house before, back in the duplicitous days when our real interest lay in marketable improvements---“updates,” as realtors say. Maintenance was an irritation.

Ron the builder, Tim for heating and plumbing, Bill the glass man, Big Dan the tree man, Lewis the painter---a roll call of repairmen. Flipping through an old rolodex it appears that about a third of my Flint social life is connected to house maintenance. My house has been kept together by friends. They were respectful. My house provided them work and displayed their talents. Each noisy, dusty day of a project brought hoots of amazement or humor at finding out how things were constructed sixty years ago when the house was built. Or disdain at previous owners’ cheap and un-workmanlike fixes. I’d be called upon to make decisions about the quality of materials to purchase or the cost of extra hours of labor to do it right. Extended deliberations ensued.

One summer my mother, then about 85, set herself up on the front porch with a novel and the New York Times while eaves troughs were spread around the lawn, scrubbed and repainted. The dog slept under her chair, my son went off to friends, I went to work; everyone was happy. That was over ten years ago. The mortgage crisis makes it seem so far away.

After a winter of sulking and silence, my house unresponsive, I galvanized myself this past spring. I returned to the rolodex, got some estimates, and then a surprise. A new friend for the house turned up---Kyle, the part-time landscaper. He’s from the neighborhood association on Facebook. By late summer he’d laid out a new plan for the front entrance with hardscape design and shrubs. Long deliberations about which plants to choose, trips to the nurseries and the gravel yard. This time Dennis sat on the front porch; about 5 o’clock the beer came out. Everyone was happy.

The house is talking to me again, our conversations have resumed. The house has taught me something again, this time about flexibility and imagination in hard times. Oh, and our philosophic dialogue reminds me that I’ve found a man who likes house repair.

Read this essay and others at The East Village Magazine, http://www.eastvillagemagazine.org/

Books and Life

2010-12-19T20:17:00.000-08:00

A dozen boxes of my Mom’s books, stacked in the garage since her death two years ago. I remember them in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that covered one wall in the living room of the house where I grew up, the colors of their spines, the illustrations on their dust jackets, the titles read sideways. As an only child I gazed at them in the vacant time I seemed to have. I am sorting them now. To keep are the sets: my Mom’s Anthony Trollope novels, the political novels and the ecclesiastical novels, in the Oxford World’s Classics edition. They are small, just 4 inches wide, 6 inches tall (not quite octodecimo in book sizes). Hardcover but lightweight, they fit in the hand, easy to read despite the small print. Their jackets not as bright as I remember them, but still multi-colored. Next is the complete Jane Austen novels in the London J.M. Dent edition with Brock illustrations---all were ordered from England. Then there are her old college books inscribed with her older brother’s name; he’d passed them down to her. Their mottled buckram spines and musty smell uninviting now but in the 1930s a world of learning to a young man and woman able to go to college when so much of the population was struggling to survive. Her father had only a grade-school education, but ran a hardware store in Portland, Oregon. Barrels of eight and ten-penny nails, cans of paint, tools and lawnmowers---the store produced enough to pay for private tuition for my Mom and her brother. And for these books.

My sorting project migrates to my own bookshelves, to old books I’ve been meaning to cull---Signet Classics marked 95 cents in the upper right corner; I can barely read the print any more, at least not for pleasure. Notes edge their pages, angled obliquely to the text which itself is underlined in the days before highlighters. I had been enthralled by these books in graduate school; they had been my life of study and intellectual exchange. What was I tracking as I read Anna Karenina? Some analysis demonstrating that it wasn’t really a love plot, it seems. Shabbier are the books bought in communist Poland with cheap paper and ink; weak glue in the spines. They fell apart like communism, only faster.

One year, after my income had improved, I decided to invest in some quality hardbound editions---In Search of Lost Time in 6 Modern Library volumes in the translation by C.K. Moncrieff-Terrence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright. Twenty bucks or less a book. I read up to volume 5 the first year my Mom lived with me. Having the set stacked at my bedside got me through the day, anticipating the night when I could finally be alone with the next chapter. While perhaps not elegant, they were sufficiently handsome, a pleasure to hold. Then a year or so ago, I learned that there was a new translation of Swann’s Way by Lydia Davis, part of a project to re-translate the entire Remembrance of Things Past, with six other translators, each for a different volume---the twenty-first century “Penguin Proust.” Maybe the publishers worried that a single translator might die during the lengthy project, or maybe gearing up for 2013 and the centenary of the publication of Swann’s Way. I ordered the Davis translation and discovered a new world, fresh and direct. I’m hooked on another set.

The first week in December brings The New York Times Book Review with Holiday Books, “100 Notable Books of 2010” followed the next week by “The 10 Best Books of 2010,” and then The New Yorker’s “A Year’s Reading. Reviewers’ favorites from 2010.” Publishers are pushing for strong Christmas book sales, but for me it’s an extended winter project: mark the ones to review online, which ones to peruse at Borders, which ones to sample on Kindle.

There are drawbacks to the Kindle, of course. Why is it hard to remember what I’ve read on a screen? Somehow I can’t visualize the place on the page where I recall a certain passage. Not having page numbers displayed disconcerts. And it’s easier to quit reading a book on Kindle. It seems to work best for short fiction and essays. On a plane, its bright yellow zippered cover promises an hour or two in my own bookshelves. At my bedside it reminds me it’s not true that I’ve got nothing to read.

Sitting on the floor, I add my own books to my Mom’s. It’s our common project now, hers and mine, this cull from both our lives. I shift books from her boxes into bags, along with some of my own---re-read the inscriptions, smell the pages, and stack them into bags marked for the Flint Public library and UM-Flint Thompson library, choosing what I think would be good for each. They will dispose of them according to their own lights, of course. Hers here, mine there, a few to save for a while. I mark the calendar to haul the bags to the loading dock manned by the understanding volunteers from “Friends of the Library” on the first Saturday of the month. Why don’t I sell the better ones on Amazon or explore this website book exchange thing? When I’ve bought from an individual seller some books come in thrice used jiffy bags, former addressees blacked out, my name in crabbed handwriting; I visualize some strange book hoarder. Others come in fresh, new bags with a computer generated label. A pretty professional set up. Neither appeals.

Beginning in January, the Flint Public Library will close on Mondays, holding on until finances from a successful millage take effect. Branches of the Library will be open only 2 days a week. Even when the millage kicks in, the Library tax revenue will be almost 20% less than what it was in 2009.

Books from another person’s life and from a past stage in my own. Four bags ready to go. I get out my checkbook and join the library Friends, a small contribution to help out the library. But it’s more like Charon’s obol, the coin placed on the mouth of the dead so the ferryman would take them to Hades. An offering out of respect to these books, hope for their safe passage to another life. It makes the parting easier.

See also http://www.eastvillagemagazine.org/

No pawnshops for old stories

2010-02-15T12:45:00.000-08:00

I turn the key in the lock and gaze distractedly through the lowest pane of the back door window. A slight but unaccustomed disorder in the dining room. Chairs at an oblique angle to the table, the rug somewhat crooked. Now that I’ve walked in, why are the winter draft rolls in the middle of the room? The hall door to the upstairs unaccountably open? No one seems to be here, but I feel a sense of someone having rushed by rapidly. I call out my son’s name questioningly---the only other person with a house key and who might enter at any time. Maybe an emergency search for tools or auto parts still socked away in attic and garage. And then it hits me; someone else has been in my house.

I stare hypnotized at details not yet part of a picture, like a gawker at a highway accident. Treading carefully through my own house as if not to disturb it more, I move from the dining room, through the hall to the bedroom. Why are the dresser drawers open, underwear and socks rising like yeasty bread dough overflowing the sides of a baking pan. Of course: this is where ladies’ loot might be tucked into little private places, or nestled in sateen-lined boxes with lids that snap shut, or laid out in the efficient squares and rectangles of the burgundy faux felt compartments that organize everything.

On top of the mahogany dresser sits the pottery dish where the jewelry most a part of me was dropped each night---empty. Pearl earrings received at college graduation, my dad’s signet ring, a watch fob from my grandfather made into a pendant. What else had been there just hours ago? Each piece was bound to a family story. Everything was old, laden with memories. Only this morning everything had been tangled in the dish, linking my life to those now dead but daily remembered.

I reach out but can’t touch the disarray, its surfaces tender like a wound. I retrace my steps and exit, but this time through the front door. I need to tell someone that my things are gone, grabbed in haste by someone who did not know them. I stride with purpose across the street, ring my neighbor’s bell, and blurt out my distress. She and her daughter are more alarmed; could someone still be in the house? We call the police there and then return to my house. A kind of post mortem begins, though the body is gone.

The next morning I sit at the dining room table, trying to list the missing items, to describe their shapes, name their materials, and estimate their ages. Their identities derive from their history. In my grandfather’s time, gentlemen wore stick pins and had monogrammed watch fobs; they carried small penknives, engraved with their initials, relatively useless but indicative of elegance. One stickpin had been made into a ring for my mother and a watch fob had been mounted as a pendant. New sorrows emerge as lost pieces come to mind that I hadn’t remembered initially.

Unlike princes and warriors of the ancient world, we are not buried with our treasure; it is handed down. My grandmother and mother would give me some small piece for an important birthday, a coming of age gift. Closing the tale of a ring or pin I admired, they would say, “You may have this when you are older.” And so it was that the story melded to the object. A ring or a bracelet marked the passage from childhood, to adolescence, to graduation, to marriage. Small pieces just lay in the drawer, waiting perhaps for another young girl to grow into them.

The household insurance did not cover these losses; I had not lost enough, it seemed. The agent needed valuations in the thousands. The city police station sergeant, impatient and patronizing, had much more serious, life and death issues in his office distant from the front desk. I should just leave my list of items with the somnolent officer behind the cage. In any case, the goods were probably long since out of the area, on their way to Detroit. Pawnshops might help---although they aren’t supposed to deal with hot goods--- but I could take my list around to them.

Steeled by loss, I set off for the local pawnshops, remembering their locations out of disdain and now fearful in their parking lots. Weaving through dusty tunnels of tools and tvs at the entrance, I make my way to the back and the jewelry counter. The clerks vary. One takes my list to the backroom, perhaps smokes a cigarette and returns: “no descriptions match.” Another, more conversational, confides that he has so much jewelry in the back safe that every three weeks some of the stuff is just shipped off to be melted down. Once chosen with care, engraved, presented as gifts marking important occasions, my family jewelry might return eventually to its original state. A fate more appalling than theft. Sold at market price, re-cast into ingots, my family jewelry could simply revert to its elemental state and re-join the world supply of precious metal.

A neighbor tried to console me with urban lore. Every once in a while, a local drug bust turns up a cache of stolen jewelry. The stuff never makes it to pawn at all. Dealers hoard it, give it to favored women; the goods are traded internally. Just hang in and wait.

It’s been several years now since the break in. From time to time, I stop in at the pawn shops in town, following clerks’ advice that the stock in the cases changes every few months. I’ m almost a regular. Now comfortable, I slowly walk the cases. Bending over the glass, I see bracelets and necklaces, mostly gold, their designs clichéd and rarely distinctive; perhaps their lack of originality makes them easy to move on the pawn market. Twelve to fourteen feet of wedding ring sets arrayed in rows, the rank and file of failure. Engagement rings with sad, small stones; the purchaser could afford little, but wanted to be proper. The recipient was thrilled at the new stage of life this tiny diamond signified. But now through disappointment or desperation it’s in pawn along with the wedding band. Sadder stories than my own.

Some of my losses I can still visualize quite clearly, their color, engraving, detailed filigree, or how a ring felt on my finger. Thinking of the objects fondly, I wish that I could tell their stories to the new possessors---it’s the stories that can still pierce my chest. Other losses I’ve forgotten. No longer a young girl anticipating the occasions of adult life that they marked, I wait to pass down what is left. With their stories, of course; that’s the most important part.
See also http://www.eastvillagemagazine.org/

Turning 60

2009-11-14T12:41:00.000-08:00

For Jan at 60

Round and full

complete in itself

Eternal.

At the top of a column

you climb and climb---a decade’s worth of years

then pause

at rest in the equilibrium of a perfect number:

a year of evenness and self-sufficiency.

Moving down the column (although up in numbers)

even at midway---it’s nothing, really,

not very far from the top.

But then close, close come those latter years that crush together

and I forget which one; I am just older until

another symmetry is attained, again a cause for celebration.

Now on the right hand of the ranks,

Columns approaching the edge of the ledger

March toward a double perfection, entirely theoretical.

November 14, 2009
at Steady Eddy’s
Flint, Michigan

April Drama: the Tulip Tree

2009-06-09T17:14:00.000-07:00

It’s really a saucer magnolia, magnolia x soulangeana, or tulip tree, or Japanese magnolia. This year in Flint they bloomed the last week in April, flamboyant and glorious when all other trees are still bare. Only the willows have begun to look like yellow-green spaghettini. One discussion in Flint this spring concerns community gardens: volunteers plant in the vacant spaces left from demolished houses close to downtown. Their empty rectangles rapidly greening in early spring reveal the outline of century-old landscaping. Dogwood pokes through vines and brambles marking the perimeter of a city lot where a house once stood. Although the old houses were multi-storied, the average city lot in the early twentieth century was small by today's standards. Ideal for planting.

By the first of May the Flint magnolias are past their best; the petals are falling and their glory is fading. They still overwhelm the weeping cherry, a more delicate and thoughtful tree, prissy when pruned into umbrellas. Here and there dense clusters of deep magenta poke through---crabapple? Near Hurley Hospital tulips stand erect and optimistic in front of an empty house, the red and yellow bulbs that have returned are large; someone tended the beds around the foundation not too long ago. Now the metal siding hangs askew, peeled back. Faux brick siding shows underneath, an earlier attempt at modernization to cover wood and avoid painting. They've survived another winter, these hulks of houses with their flaking paint, vandalized metal siding, cracked steps, sagging screens.

Urban decay now appears in the context of mortgage crisis. Commentators intone that we’ve gone too far with everyone wanting to own their own house, with becoming a nation of homeowners. What utter folly; we should have been renting all along.

My parents and their friends in the early 1950s were very tired of renting. During the Depression and then in wartime they had moved a lot. Family businesses were lost; colleges closed their doors when tuition could not be paid. They moved from hometown to jobs---and grateful to have them---elsewhere in the state or the country, to a navy port or army base, lucky when taken in by a relative on one of the coasts. Always room for another relative or friend in three-story houses like those now being demolished in Flint. Pillar to post, they said. “We met new people from all over the country, we lived in walk-ups with Murphy beds, not enough room to swing a cat, went roller skating on dates, dined for a few dollars in North Beach---wine included.”

After the war, what was there to go back to? A small town banker took a chance on a mortgage for a veteran. And so it began: decades of gardening, slow improvements---from septic tank to sewer, concrete steps poured with a neighbor, a room added on. No furniture and hardly any light (so it seems in the old photos), but enough space to raise a child and bring impoverished grandparents to live with them. I saw my grandmother's social security card recently; she and my invalid grandfather were saved by a postwar house. Those old Flint houses, many on their way to demolition, deserve respect. They did service to generations in their day; the least we could give their plots is a nice garden.

Re-connecting with my skis

2009-01-19T12:31:00.000-08:00

It’s been several years since I was last out on cross-country skis, since before I got a partial knee replacement. I’m not as confident as before. Never having really learned how to scoot along properly, my motion is awkward until unexpectedly the skis fulfill their design and I begin to glide. The movement doesn’t seem practical until I think that having this much snow for half the year and few other means of transport would make it logical.

I live on a corner in Mott Park, across from the golf course. Whoever built this house must have been a skier. There is a rack of dowels in the basement from which to hang skis and poles. In winter when we have a foot or so of snow I can go out my front door, snap on some cross-country skis and be off. Usually I head down to the cul de sac, unhitch my skis, and walk down a hill too steep for my skills to a meadow alongside the Flint River. The days that I try this cannot be very cold; my baseline temperature is about 20 degrees and no wind. The exertion warms me up and in the meadow it is very quiet. Bending over to clamp down the baffles back onto my duckbilled ski shoes, I can see little web shaped indentations from animals and two long swathes cut by midnight skimobiles.

My skis are old---bought more than two decades ago. Åsnes tur-langrenn are among the last wooden skis produced before the switch to fiberglass. Wooden cross country skis were constructed from a composite of woods; mine seem to be hickory on the bottom. The poles are bamboo. Flexible and resilient materials. Wood has its devotees; people even make their own birch skis. On the internet dedicated craftsmen, woodworking offspring of Mother Earth News and Foxfire, plane away. Or see the process of treating the skis in six steps, three kinds of wax (including the enigmatic, never translated from the Norwegian, klister), and pine tar, the application of which requires a hot air gun or a propane torch with a fare tip. Easy. Once this is finished, you can carry different kinds of wax for changing temperatures with you in your back pack; gracefully pull up to a tree and re-wax your skis en route.

The skis date back to my marriage, from its closing era when we thought that doing some family activity together would improve our lives. After dinner we could ski under the lights of the nearby park---even take the dog with us; we would warm our hands around mugs of hot chocolate afterwards looking like the people in an Eddie Bauer winter catalog. We might still make it. What happened? Endless fiddling with wax, debates about the temperature and which wax to fiddle with. The dog was not an eager to please golden retriever (catalogs must have entire kennels of goldens), but a beagle mix who shot out of the garage and disappeared for hours. The flatness of the park got boring. Snow soaked through our socks (it was in the days of low cut ski boots). We came back to the house mid-way to apply more wax and change socks. Second trip back to the house the project sank into disagreements and not very good hot chocolate in front of heaters festooned with wet socks and jeans. The skis dripped in the basement. Plans for gaiters and more authentic (and presumably more comfortable) clothing faded, eventually subsumed by divorce. Somehow the skis made it from broken family to apartment storage, and finally to a house in Mott Park where as if by some omen (that I only now recognize) a basement ski rack was waiting. There my skis have hung, clapped together with a bungee cord but without, alas, the requisite block between them to maintain their camber---the arc beneath your boot that presses to the ground.

Last week, when we had fresh snow and the temperature was in the mid-twenties, I remembered my skis. With a quick waxing the skis slid along pretty well, or at least as well as I could manage. I still need to get my wax tins organized and find an old iron to melt in the klister. My son, a former snowboarder, says ironing the trick. The pine tar base layer is another story---that propane torch deal. If I can convince my partner Dennis, we might drive north to a cross country ski place and seek out a native to apply a new coating of pine tar. One of those bearded craftsmen from the internet.

Leaning in the corner next to the back door, the skis remind me to do a little scraping and waxing. I am less impatient with the care they require and more respectful of their nature. This week the house creaks and groans; the temperature has dropped and it is too cold to ski. I can wait. We have survived, these skis and I, from another era.

Michigan Women

2008-12-26T08:42:00.000-08:00

Here they are; three generations: Tina, Nikki, Emma. Mother, daughter and granddaughter. Flanked by helpers Ewa and Gina at Nathan’s Place. Their skill and capabilities are amazing. They create the Thanksgiving holiday for their adult foster care residents, an extended family come together in the frailty and desperation of old age. They produce a community out of American traditions. It is the Michigan women’s first Thanksgiving as an adult foster care home.

Wikipedia’s history of Thanksgiving shows how constructed this American holiday is, created out of relief at having survived, having had enough to eat or having escaped being killed, having found dry land, or being able to stop trudging and rest. For Anglos, the Virginia colony and Plymouth plantation; for Spaniards, St. Augustine, Florida, and San Elizario, Texas. They were all just glad to be here and be in one piece and not too hungry. All stories of desperation.

Of course, Thanksgiving isn’t the only holiday of deliverance, of being spared by the Almighty; Passover precedes it by millennia. But in addition to its etiology shared with ancient religions, Thanksgiving has had a special national utility. Witness the Wikipedia-cited proclamations from Washington and the Continental Congress, through Lincoln and the Civil War, FDR and the Depression, to Truman and the turkey pardon. No American president can omit Thanksgiving which enjoins even the most dysfunctional family or nation to practice an hour or so of mealtime civility.

And so here we are, my Mom and I, along with several other adult children and their spouses and elderly parents. We have been desperate too. Trying to find good care for a surviving parent. And now the Michigan women have put together a Thanksgiving meal that rivals most I had growing up or helped prepare myself. My mother (in her younger years critical and demanding) would have been impressed. Food is laid out artfully in the small kitchen, plates and silverware all to hand. Tina serves the residents who cannot fed themselves; a system for everything. One resident has snoozed off, another claps and sings, my Mom periodically calls out with the involuntary cries that result from stroke. Bonnie, the violinist, plays carols and Bach. The most alert resident smiles in enjoyment at the grandchildren who move so effortlessly among in this collection of humanity.

Several weeks later when I was packing Mom’s things after her death, I had to bid Tina a temporary farewell. Her words as I left were, “thank you for trusting us with your Mom.” I thought, thank you for the nicest Thanksgiving of my Mom’s life. My life too.

First in line

2008-12-21T13:39:00.000-08:00

Some weeks ago a student in class mentioned to me that his daughter was disappointed about school being cancelled because of snow. Why? That day was her day to be first in line. Cupcakes were involved as well. I can recall grade school life and these “firsts.” The elation of leading everyone else, of being called by name and moving to the front of the line.

Now that my Mom passed away the idea being first in line seems entirely different.

I now realize how close to death my Mom was in the last weeks. Seeing her often, I noted small degrees of decline, but somehow thought she was really as she had been, only diminished. The hospice physician listed coronary heart disease as cause of death. My mother suffered from chronic hypertension, a symptom of cardiovascular disease. Medication helped keep her blood pressure down. After she’d retired, she sold her house in Mill Valley, California, the 1980s. She returned to the city where she grew up, Portland, Oregon, where as Virginia van Hyning she graduated from Washington High in 1934. She moved into an apartment with a panoramic view of the city and the river. Life was good.

Then suddenly she learned that the new owner in California was suing her over damage from cypress trees on the property during a storm. Mom was beside herself; she went to court and during the hearing suffered a stroke. Mom recovered and the case settled, but damage was done. Chronic hypertension remained and became her nemesis. No longer able to live on her own by 1998, she moved to Michigan---and so began ten years of life with Virginia for me and my son Chris.

Calling elderly friends proved difficult. I have to speak loudly into the phone, repeat my phrases. Then the phrases have to be abbreviated. No modifiers, nuances. Details of my Mother’s decline are lost. The conversation is too simplified to satisfy my need to convey to Virginia’s old friends how it was for her. The elderly high school classmate in Portland sounds both philosophic and forlorn. She too is unable to share shades of feeling. It’s unsatisfying.

The days since Mom’s death vary. Small stabs of grief or loss or loneliness unpredictably puncture the last days of the semester. Just get through; I know that Christmas is coming. It seems like a custom from another culture. More importantly, Dennis arrives December 17. The initial disorientation is passed. People remind me that a new life is beginning. I am first in line.

Green tomato relish and an unexpected anniversary: November 14

2008-11-26T07:20:00.000-08:00

It is five years this November since Dennis and I met, or more accurately collided, through the efforts of good friends, Jan and Ted. Each of them liked each of us; why not put us together and then there would be four where there had only been two? This idea which I had last encountered as a high school senior now seemed---at late middle age---wise and sophisticated. There might be some hesitancy and humor at the beginning, but the underlying logic would carry the day. There we would be, Dennis and I, compatible together as two with our compatible friends which makes four.

Not so. I was deputized by Jan to pick up Ted and Dennis at the Flint airport; the guys were arriving in late afternoon from Los Angeles, flying in for a long weekend to celebrate Jan’s birthday cum housewarming party. Unlike their grade school counterparts, grown-up birthday parties can be attached to mature events (buying a house). They are still attended, however, by 90 percent friends and 10 percent people your mother made you invite (former spouses, difficult co-workers, people whose party you attended). Useful too for social engineering.

Having driven the men to Jan’s house (which is also Ted’s Flint home), I returned home to change clothes, check on my mother, and then re-appear at the party. By the time I arrived, the birthday revelers were in full swing, warming the house from wall to wall. People sitting on the stairs, smokers banished to the basement, Motown and ZZ Top in the living room, university administrators and deans amid younger faculty dressed in their grad school best. Dennis found me, we talked a bit, and then not knowing anymore what to do than I had in high school, I dived into shop talk with favorite colleagues while Dennis made time with a beautiful woman sitting on the stairs.

The rest of the evening is lost to legend. Dennis needed to buy a bottle of Bushmills as a birthday gift; we left the party to shop, decided to go by my house for him to meet my mother, and finally return to the party. The conclusion of the evening has now merged with a dinner later that weekend and a long talk at The Torch (Flint’s oldest and smokiest hangout). Dennis won me over with his total ease, his humor and funny stories of his family’s past, his courtesy and kindness. We communicated daily on email for the next four months until I arrived with Jan in Los Angeles in February of 2004. A new life had begun; it’s now the only one I know and it’s full of amazing joy. Like Dennis here in our Michigan kitchen. He is making tomato relish out of the last green tomatoes left on the vines before winter of 2008. We should label the bottles “Happy Anniversary.”

Conversations with my house: Relationships in good times and hard

2008-11-19T07:52:00.000-08:00

A couple of months ago I was thinking about my house as a chapter in my life gradually approaching a close. Our relationship was changing: each year I move closer to retirement and selling the house and moving on. A poignancy had crept into our conversations. I have always loved its layout, its coved ceilings, the views of the golf course through the windows, its airy and open position on a corner lot. This house taught me about the capacity of the right real estate to frame possibilities for a changing family---a teenaged son, a single mother, an aging grandmother, a dog. And at one point a visiting Doberman who did not do stairs. The arrangement of its rooms had enabled three people to invent a new life successfully. And to welcome others into this life.

When Dennis was here in October he replaced the screen doors with glass for winter. The last tomatoes were picked and the plants pull up. He cleaned the gutters and our high school helper Grant raked leaves to the street for city cleanup. All the annual fall tasks, the rhythm of the last ten years, as usual. But I knew that since late September things had not been the same between us, the house and I. After Dennis left, my relationship with the house did not return to its slightly bittersweet equilibrium. The financial crisis stemming from bad mortgages had disturbed our formerly philosophic dialogue. How will this house sell in a depressed Flint market even a few years from now? Gratitude for shelter and security had been replaced by percentages of loss of market value. In other times in America, in other places, and in other centuries and countries, people lived in houses for generations. Memoirs and autobiography and often fiction convey the connections between human life and its houses. How can the value of a good house be measured?

Moon over Obama

2008-11-06T06:15:00.000-08:00

Election night, Dennis and I sat on the front porch waiting for east coast returns to come in. Dennis had voted absentee; panicked by forecasts of long lines, I had gone down to the City Clerk’s office and voted at 8 am Wednesday, October 29th. Here is the moon over Flint, Michigan, just before 8 pm November 4, 2008.
It’s November 6 now and still warm. Unseasonably balmy weather in the 70s began just before Halloween and continued through Election Day until now. The weather pundits have forecast a return to normal by tomorrow, Friday, and certainly by the weekend. It will drop twenty degrees and we'll return to rain and the general ramp up to winter. For friends in the Flint community the warmth seems to be an additional sign of grace at the close of this election season. My neighborhood election efforts began in August when my neighbors James and Sharon hosted an Obama open house. A slender field worker named Erin, no more than 20 years old, energetically hit her talking points; she had taken a semester off from college in New Hampshire to work for the campaign. We signed in and provided our phone numbers and emails on a list that evening of not more than 10 names. Later, in October, I found my way to the downtown headquarters. A vacant building in defunct Windmill Place, a 1980s center of shops and eateries that had failed by 1990, provided space for “Campaign for Change.” Beneath homemade signs “We are the Change” and oblivious to the dusty cement floor and dirty windows, they worked at laptops and phones, doing data entry late at night. Fed and housed by local Democrats from August to November, they worked in one of the ruins of the local Flint economy. They had answered a call like the one I remember with first with John Kennedy and then with the anti-war movement. Erin must have returned east now; her cell phone number here no longer works. I'll call Sharon to see if there's an address for Erin, some destination for my thanks to her and everyone who gave part of their lives to this campaign.

Going to see my Mother

2008-09-30T18:53:00.000-07:00

My Mom is now 90 years old. After a stroke or strokes in May 2008, she can no longer live in assisted living, so she is here out in the country in an adult foster care home. "Assisted living," "adult foster care" ---today's descriptions of ways to live when we are no longer living on our own. In the distant future they may sound as strange as asylum sounds today. There is an Asylum street in Flint which makes me wonder what once was there. So I drive every few days to the countryside. First the highway, then a two-lane road, and finally unpaved county roads; out here people know their bearings by what county they are in. It feels good to make the left turn and feel the oiled and gravel ground beneath the tires. Now in early fall some trees are spotted with red apples, trees and fruit not tended by anyone, remnants of orchards now gone.

In summer the green trees provided shade and breezes came across the green fields. My Mom and I even sat outside on the lawn, she in a wheelchair and anxious, no longer able to enjoy the summer air. That season is over now and I wonder if she will live to see it next year. This week Christopher and Kristin came with me to see Mom. We brought her absentee ballot and she voted in the 2008 presidential election. She opened her eyes and smiled, happy to see her family and to make her mark for their future.

Facebook

2008-08-24T17:50:00.000-07:00

What's happened in my academic world that Faculty colleagues are now blogging and listing their favorite films, books, and movies on Facebook? I recently experienced a new anxiety: I can't remember my login password on Facebook. Facebook? My essential social network is the University of Michigan-Flint Outlook, full each day with organizational, pedagogic, and institutional communiques. And I must change my login every 90 days. Then there's the bank, the bills online. And in a once energetic effort to separate my personal email from professional, a google email account. And I'm stressed out at Facebook? I spend some time on it, but not nearly as much as friends. Well, mostly I still have difficulty recalling how to get on. So I remain there, frozen in my social network. Not too up to date. Much like my life in the face to face society of old, rather as if I'd left my engraved visiting cards somewhere. Empty-handed facing the maid at the front door.

Screen door

2008-08-24T16:37:00.000-07:00

The front door to our house was in the middle of a ranch-style porch that ran the length of the house. No screen or storm door, just a wooden door with rectangular bevels. On balmy nights my father would read in his favorite chair in the living room; the door would be open. Nighttime was for serious reading, the newspaper had been dispatched before dinner. Our old cat, large and independent, battered from feline jousts, would wander in and out until around midnight my father would close the door, perhaps lock it, and batten down the house for the night. The ritual closer of things, my Father made the final rounds of doors and locks and checked the clocks before he would go to bed.
I wonder now at that open front door, its easy threshold between indoors and out in northern California with no semi-permeable barrier between the lamplight inside and the night outside. No metallic slapping shut of screen doors during long twilights. Nothing to disturb my father’s concentration as he read, periodically penciling notes in the margins in that time before highlighters.
The California front door had been painted several colors, the last time brick red. That must have been my Mother’s idea; a red door would have reminded her of things Asian that she loved. My Father had been a merchant seaman and left on his own would paint porches, steps, and doors with a waterproof marine paint that was always gunmetal gray.
Midwest houses have more thresholds between indoors and out. Old screens have to be taken to the local hardware store to be re-screened. As it gets colder I'll think about switching the screen to plexiglass for winter. But not just yet.

Roses

2008-08-08T06:48:00.000-07:00

It's August, so this is the second blooming of the three roses in the back yard. They are small, weaker than in June when they first appear. The smell is still wondrous, that old fashioned smell that is just rose. It's taken several years for the bushes to get strong and I spray their leaves with soapy water to keep bugs off. In winter they are covered with styrofoam cones to survive. Such labor in comparison to southern California where, around Torrance, the roses just bloom in canopies and seemingly without attention.

May in the backyard

2008-07-31T19:23:00.000-07:00

Each year after the tulips these poppies arise, tall and brazen, tilting in different directions on their fuzzy stems. A surprise after the compact and organized tulips which even in scattered spots seem under control. The poppies here are redder than the photo shows and a brief web search on poppies reveals how many varieties and colors exist. They get a bad rap from the opium trade but websites suggest that poppies have a devoted following among gardeners. My poppies have come back for nearly ten years now and probably before that when another family lived here. Their many-branched and fuzzy leaves creep into the cracks of concrete wall, ready to expand on the level below. They collapse when cut and do not survive in a vase. After blooming a bulbous pod remains. It is a long wait until next year.

Home since 1997

2008-07-18T10:51:00.000-07:00

This corner Cape Cod-style house enabled 3 generations---my mother, myself, and my son--to live together for several years. Basement, ground floor and upstairs provided just barely enough space for us, our border collie mix Snoopy, and briefly Doberman Ajax, to manage elderly, midlife, and teenaged needs. Despite its economic and social woes, Flint has extensive housing stock. In the inner city much is abandoned or gone to the Land Bank or demolished. But in its neighborhoods like Mott Park many houses testify to how much a traditional family home from the early or mid-20th century can help with life changes. Mott Park celebrates 90 years of existence in 2008. The neighborhood was developed to house GM workers who lived in tents in the early days of the auto boom in Flint.