My Mother’s Body

The lilac in my back yard bloomed this spring for the first time since I planted it about ten years ago. In one of my early gardening attempts, I placed it on the north side of the house and too close to the foundation.  It struggled, slow growing in its sun-deprived location.  One of those plantings that should have been removed early, the longer it survived the more misbegotten it looked. It was too strong to pull out.  Each season its woody stems got taller, but its three or four branches produced only large leaves that progressed from light green to a dark, waxy green in summer.  A disappointing syringa vulgaris. My mother had been alive when the lilac went into the ground.   She died at age 91 and has been dead for four years.  And now the surprise: three clusters of blossoms have bloomed at the top of the bush where it grazes the second story---its flowers too high to reach and cut.

Other startling things happened this year.  Getting in to the shower I looked down to see my mother’s thighs. I stared, puzzled at the slack, narrow folds of flesh and the skin with a cross-hatch surface.  The body is mine, but I last saw the flaccid rippled flesh on my mother when I bathed her. Sharp-eyed mavens of female aging term such skin “crapey”.  Can this textile metaphor be apt?  I pinch the skin together in my hands and ponder.  The materials I knew as wool or silk crape made wonderful garments.  The women in my family sewed and they valued crape.  With its soft, submissive hand, the material follows the shape of the body line, comforts the flesh and bones beneath.  In silk the fabric’s complex weave does produce a crimpy surface, but I hadn’t noticed.  


I’ve gotten side-tracked from the shower and sit on the side of the tub, transfixed by my corporeality.  At the tips of my fingers I see my grandmother’s fingernails, narrow and ridged.  I grew up with my grandmother and with the curiosity of a child I observed the details of her body never thinking of it as prophetic of my own.  The ring finger on my left hand crooks slightly sideways as I remember hers did when she was old.  She’s come back to me now, fifty years after her death.  She is in my body, this body which now is becoming the body of my female elders---those to whom I was subordinate, those whom I admired and sometimes feared, those about whom I was curious, and those whom in the 1960s I could disdain.  I am them.

Come six o’clock I’ll raise a large goblet and toast these women and their bodies with red wine.  My mother's drink was scotch.  She wasn’t a connoisseur, but had moved from Dewar’s to Johnny Walker Red.  In the evening she’d pour a couple of fingers and say, at age 86, "I deserve it."  This expression repelled and puzzled me.  A year later, we moved it all---scotch bottles and “Old Fashioned” glasses, along with the chests, pictures, rugs, and clothes.  We crammed it into her one-bedroom apartment in an assisted living complex.  But suddenly the taste for liquor was gone, she said, surprised herself that this long habit of the cocktail hour---the reward of the day---had disappeared and she hardly missed it. 

My grandmother was from Kentucky and drank bourbon.  She said that the tradition was “bourbon and branch water,” a strange expression and the kind of odd phrase an observant child recalls.  Later I learned that branch water meant water from the distillery’s stream that kept the taste of the bourbon pure.  She lived to be 88 and I don’t know when bourbon stopped tasting good to her or reminding her of the South. 


My red wine libation is gentler, especially its lighter variants of pinots, Grenaches, and Syrahs.  Reassured by the diet and health experts that a daily glass is salutary, I measure the pour:  6 ounces is generous, 4 is scant.  I try to hit 5.  If I drink two glasses, the bottles go fast.  A friend is crafting a tray made of wine corks, so I feel helpful as another bottle hits the trash.  For a brief hour or so, my joints and muscles ease.  I remember my mother and grandmother with kindness.


If I am like my mother and grandmother, some twenty-five more years of life are ahead.  I’ve landed in new terrain.  As in a dream I grope intuitively among familiar details that combine strangely with foreign elements.  Like a traveler, I’ve grabbed a guidebook for the major monuments---essays and news reports on age and aging in the New York Times.  Cognizant of a major reader cohort, some Times features reassure an audience purportedly still young---the fifty, sixty, and seventy-year old well-fed and well-educated Americans.  Believers in a “shining future” promised by scientifically supported regimens of exercise, diet, and spirituality.   Relentlessly optimistic.  Other essays are darker. How to obtain care for elderly parents, deal with Alzheimer’s and cancer, broach end of life decisions? Accustomed to a sense of competence, readers seem shocked by the demands of the ancient human family.  Their online comments describe frustration and confusion with these tasks.  Worse, in the shadow of assisting our elders, we touch situations that will engulf us in a few decades.  


Grim. But the mothers in my body signal something else.  They tell me that they are there and powerful.  The burden of responsibility for my mother’s last years of life---once so heavy---has floated away, just like her taste for Johnny Walker.  Now she and my grandmother return in the startling efflorescence of an ordinary lilac, just at the time their genetic traces transform my body. Maybe a reminder of the admirable persistence of life in unappreciated and expected forms.  

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The Happiness Light

Until recently I relied what I called my ”happiness light."  It's a faux Asian lamp that sits on an authentic Japanese tansu chest in my dining room. Sipping tea on gray winter mornings I gaze into its milky glow; my spirits lift. It requires a special- sized light bulb.  I have to trek to Wynn's Lighting on South Saginaw Street to buy it.  This is a business that knows the power of light, the emotional atmosphere that just the right light can create.  Entering their showroom floor I raise my face into a cathedral of light. Radiance from hundreds of fixtures washes over me. Electric heaven.  Once, years ago, my mother wanted to replace a lampshade for a treasured 1940s lamp. Sure enough, Wynn's had a decent replica.  The “happiness light” doesn’t have a lampshade.  Its milky glow comes from a glass cover around the globe.  I found that in Wynn’s downstairs storage area where rows of  plank shelving  hold hundreds of replacement globes for lighting fixtures used in wealthy Flint homes going back to the 1920s.

Light is powerful and I need a lot of it.  For many years I thought I had a tendency toward depression.  It began in adolescence and never completely abated.  Over the next several decades it returned, the predictable sequel to other emotional events.   Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area I’d lived with overcast skies almost year round.  Then there was the fog.  Forget Sandburg’s “little cat feet.” [1]  Fog rolls over you in huge, lumbering bales.  Bay Area natives would often say that it “burns off,” by noon; true, but then it returned like a damp shroud in evening.  I wakened to it, drove through it, went to sleep with it.  I walked in it and drank in it.  Forget the smoky atmosphere of 1940s black and white spy movies or the romantic nineteenth-century London of Sherlock Holmes.  For me, fog turned out to be a downer.

My susceptibility to depression is partially inherited.  My mother characterized her own moodiness as bi-polar disorder.  I’m not sure that was true, although one of her nephews was diagnosed with schizophrenia and ultimately committed suicide.  My emotional depression was incomparably milder, but it was persistent.  In my twenties and thirties it was just endless apologies to friends for being “down,“ short-term counseling in really rough periods.  By my fifties, some mild meds were in order.  Then I moved to Michigan.  Here the natives grouse about the grayness of winter.  Worse than the cold, they say, as they pack for Florida. 

The Midwest seasons helped, however.  In summer, it seemed I had no problem.  Even the warm nighttime stillness was pleasurable.  At least half the year was pretty good.  You had time to prepare for the oncoming gloom.  In the early years I’ve lived in Michigan, the 1990s, we seemed to have some winters with heavy snowstorms---snow days for school, the sound of sledding on nearby hills in bright sun.  So much snow that even the depressives were distracted.   In between blizzards, I was still struggling, experimenting with medication and boring my friends with symptoms.  Our winters grew milder, warmer, and grayer.

In a 2009 essay in New York Times, Olivia Judson surveys the applications of chronotherapy (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/22/enter-the-chronotherapists/ ) Her notes reference an array of studies on the relationships between circadian rhythms and obesity, cancer, hormones, and psychiatric disorders.  That last one got me. By now, “seasonal affective disorder” had been in the news for nearly two decades.  Following my circadian rhythms might be good for my health, but what good would it do to become a healthy depressive?  I began to read about emotional calendars.   And that’s how I found chronotherapy, or as they say online, the "manipulations of biological rhythms and sleep” in order to adjust the effects of light and melatonin. 

Columbia University seems to be a nexus for the light people.  Its Center for Light Treatment and Biological Rhythms offers chronotherapeutics ---“a novel set of biological rhythm correction procedures.”  The procedures are used not only to establish normal sleep patterns, but also to “relieve winter depression (seasonal affective disorder, or SAD, or the milder winter doldrums or winter blues)” and “alleviate symptoms of unipolar and bipolar depression, whether or not the depression is seasonal.” (http://columbiapsychiatry.org/clinicalservices/light-treatment-center).   Head of the Center, Dr. Michael Terman, Professor of Clinical Psychology in Psychiatry at Columbia, is also president of the international Center for Environmental Therapeutics (http://www.cet.org/).  My problem is global. Latitudinally challenged confreres live across a band from 45 to 60 degrees North--- France; northern Italy; the Balkans, Ukraine; Kazakhstan; Uzbekistan; China; Mongolia; Hokkaidō, Japan; Ontario, Canada. I feel a bond with fellow American sufferers in the Pacific Northwest and New England.   I’ve woken up late, you might say, to this interest.  Groping intuitively over many years, in the dark, you might say, I discovered light.  No wonder the little Asian lamp was powerful. 

That’s how I got my light box.  It’s called a “Day-Light.”  It comes from "Uplift Technologies."  No surprise; it's made in Nova Scotia, Canada---home of fellow sufferers at 43 degrees North.  Its package alerted me that “Day-Lights" are “innovative light supply systems and are not listed medical devices in the USA."  Well, after some five decades of medically approved gambits, I am ready.  I sit at an arms-length distance of my “10,000LUX Bright Light” for a treatment time of 20 to 30 minutes in the morning. 

This year I've begun the light box early---the last week in October, before we went off daylight savings time.  Why wait until psychosis sets in?  An eerie, gray light comes through the clouds, watery and sunless.  At the ends of the tree branches the last leaves twist in air, amazingly still attached.  Their spinning silhouettes combine fragility with tenacity, a metaphor for my years of struggle.

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---

[1] Carl Sandburg

The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches	5
and then moves on.

Feeling a little subprime

After the financial crisis of 2008 and the revelation that subprime mortgages were involved in the bubble, commentators intoned that we’ve just gone too far in America with everyone wanting to own their own home. This utter folly was attributed to (among others) George W. Bush.

When he came into office in 2002 he promoted an “ownership society” where owning a home would give people a stake in society.(1) Attractive to minorities, lucrative for big donors to the Republican Party and feasible for Wall Street under lax regulation, this was a “win-win” vision.

Then, lo! The financial debacle hit and exposed mortgage-backed securities — tranches of mortgages, bundles of bad loans to the highly unqualified new buyers. The shady subprime world was revealed.(2)

I’ve been following this drama. It’s infinitely more complex, riddled with arcane phrases and acronyms, packed with factors besides bad mortgages. Nothing rivets me to the TV screen like an interview with economists like Joseph Stiglitz or Paul Krugman. Or better yet, someone I can understand, like Sheila Bair.(3) And don’t get me started on the movies — Too Big to Fail, Margin Call or Inside Job.

I have a stake in this topic because I own a house that I love more than it’s worth. My love has grown as the market value has declined. It’s a healthy house from head to toe — with a new roof and a dry basement. Large windows face the sunrise. In its backyard I’ve learned how to grow roses that bloom from June to November.

In good weather my mother read for peaceful hours on its front porch, observed the school bus schedule, noted who got FedEx deliveries. And the house has a congenial setting — a neighborhood.

I’m new to the neighborhood idea. As a kid I lived on the hillsides of northern California. Only a few houses were visible. It was an unincorporated area, outside the city limits. Nobody lived “next door.” We had volunteer fire departments, septic tanks, dirt and gravel roads and sometimes in the summer, a random rattlesnake that a German Swiss neighbor killed with a shovel.

When you saw a neighbor, it was an emergency — for example, a finger severed with a scythe.

Later, I lived in a big city, on the top floor of a high-rise apartment building. I learned the nuances of nods and mumbles, the social forms appropriate to the elevator and the hallway.

After that, on Main Street in a small town. Everyone minded your business, knew what you bought at the local IGA, observed what you wore to church and commented on how you raised your kid. It seemed ingrown and insufferable.

Then, by accident, I came to live in Mott Park. But I didn’t understand its real value until the mortgage crisis of 2008.

The first Mott Park homes were built in 1921 along Flushing and Bagley streets. For the next decade houses went up along Frank, Dickinson and Monteith, then Altoona and Thomas. By 1933, private developers built Mott Park’s remaining homes, including those along Nolen Drive where the houses are larger and more architecturally complex and are situated on picturesque sites along the Flint River across from the Mott Park Golf Course.

Developers marketed these homes to the city’s elite by placing ads in society magazines. Varied building styles, curvilinear streets, public parks and many trees made the area attractive. Urban planning researchers have called Mott Park “a cornerstone American neighborhood community that represents the American dream.”(4)

Photos and reminiscences record this mid-20th century neighborhood in its heyday. Compiled by two former neighborhood residents, The Mott Park Chronicles shows happy 1950s families and children on the sidewalks going to nearby schools.(5) There’d be family car in the driveway (probably a Buick). It was a lifestyle of pride in ownership of a home that lasted several decades — precisely the years of President Bush’s youth.

When I bought a house in the neighborhood in 1995, the Fifties afterglow was still palpable, even though Flint had suffered in the decades-long decline of the auto industry. Now, 11 years later, in the wake of the 2008 mortgage and financial crisis, sharper signs of hardship mingle with new values and new ways.

Homeowners who could afford (and chose) to leave the neighborhood have moved away. Some left for typical reasons. Older folks retire. Even the dogs they used to walk die. Younger couples want better schools or more bedrooms as the kids grow up.

Others have left because of the unaddressed issues with crime and decline in safety enforcement. And still others were unable to keep their homes for financial reasons and simply abandoned them, increasing the number of vacant homes drastically.

On my walks I see that a house is suddenly empty. Through the glass of uncovered windows, rooms at the back of the house are visible. One week all seems normal. The next, people are just gone. How long did these people deliberate before decamping? Perhaps months of desperation were not visible to the Sunday walker.

Meantime, landlords looking to make a quick dollar and out-of-state investment companies have bought up homes in the neighborhood.

Already in 2008, 53 percent of homes were owned by investment companies, 29 percent were real estate owned and 16 percent were privately owned. Of those investors, 22 percent were out-of-state companies, 21 percent located in Michigan, 27 percent in Genesee County, 23 percent in Flint and 6 percent in Mott Park.(6)

My expectations have adjusted to reality. Fewer traditional property owners live here. New people live in a different world than those for whom these houses were built or the first generation of homeowners that followed them. New residents surely enjoy the freedom, fresh air and green expanses that still decent houses in a fairly good neighborhood provide.

But what former apartment dweller moves in with a lawnmower? The yard around the house, the paint and repairs are probably not the renters’ responsibility. Landlords do the minimum, often less. If people are buying on land contract, they can make payments, but not much more.

My unscientific calculation is that a single-family dwelling occupied by renters can last about two years before external decline becomes pronounced. A vacant house goes in a year. And some edges of the Mott Park neighborhood have gone beyond reclaiming.

A Genesee County Land Bank assessment charts the changing status of the neighborhood’s housing stock. A color-coded map of parcels rates the houses as good (rose), fair (pink), poor (violet), or structurally deficient (red).(7) You can see which properties the Land Bank owns and where the tax foreclosures are.(8)

I’m over the shock of the changes, visual ones mostly, and the loss of property value. I’ve discovered something else that seems to matter more. It’s tied to the neighborhood, just a bunch of people all in the same residential life boat. They have grit, like the workers who first lived in Mott Park. The Neighborhood Association is indefatigable. Its members trek on.

For five years or more, members have conducted monthly recycling that raises money to repair the park playground and patch the asphalt on the tennis courts. Volunteers hang new nets and repair fencing. Gardeners plant the neighborhood’s flower beds.

Another neighborhood group has incorporated as the Golf Course Association, a nonprofit to seek grants to maintain the golf course. A small grant funded a “neat street” project where residents adopt a street to keep free of trash. Joining Genesee County’s Little Free Libraries, Mott Park residents constructed four little libraries for kids in the neighborhood.(9)

In October about 30 volunteers from Kettering University, Calvary United Methodist and Mott Park residents joined forces to clean up the alleys behind Joliet and Chevrolet, as well as Bagley, Perry, Dupont and the surrounding areas. The Flint sanitation division helped by picking up an enormous trash pile.

The neighborhood’s Facebook page that holds all these efforts together shows how creative and energetic these neighborhood people are. Many are young, new to the neighborhood, and they have children.

When I drive through other distinctive neighborhoods in Flint, I’m amazed at how solid they still seem, those larger and more imposing houses of the College and Cultural Center or Woodcroft. My eye is canny, however. I know how much change can be hidden. Friends in those neighborhoods worry too.

The mortgage and financial crisis of 2008 on top of two decades of urban collapse has affected all Flint neighborhoods. As for Mott Park, the year 2019 will mark the centennial of its founding, of a historic commitment to the workers of America’s automotive industry. That industry and its workers are mostly gone, but much of their housing survives.

And the people in those homes are not subprime at all. 

­–––––––––––––

(1) Jo Becker, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Stephen Labaton, “Bush drive for home ownership fueled housing bubble,” New York Times, December 21, 2008.

(2) After a two-year investigation by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation, their report, Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse, was released in April 2011. It’s a free download on Kindle.

(3) Chairperson of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), 2006-2011.

(4) “Reclaiming the Neighborhood: Addressing Vacant Homes in Mott Park”. Prepared by Tara AuBuchon & Krista Trout-Edwards, University of Michigan Urban and Regional Planning. May 2009. As cited in Susan Burhans, “Mott Park Neighborhood Stabilization Plan,” Oct. 2, 2012.

(5) Cathy Snyder, ed. Mott Park Chronicles. The Story of an American Neighborhood. Historic Photos and Memories of Life in Flint, Michigan, 1908-2009 (Grand Blanc, MI: Grand Blanc Printing Company, 2009).

(6) Vacant Properties Survey; June – August 2008; City of Flint Assessor’s web site (Aug. 31, 2008), as cited in Susan Burhans, “Mott Park Neighborhood Stabilization Plan” [working document], Oct. 2, 2012.

(7) Genesee County Land Bank, Mott Park Housing Condition Assessment 2012, Nov. 7, 2012.

(8) The Land Bank owns five properties in Mott Park: two have been completed rehabbed; two have rehab in progress, and one is a pending sale. Buyers just need to qualify for a mortgage. The payments are cheaper than rent. See http://www.thelandbank.org/ Accessed Nov. 2, 2012. The Land Bank was established in 2002 after a 1999 Michigan tax law change.

(9) See https://www.facebook.com/MottParkLittleFreeLibrary. Accessed Nov. 8, 2012.

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Animal Life

Smack!  The spindly legs of the chair I’m sitting on seem to leave the floor; my hands pop up from the laptop keyboard. Crackling echoes somewhere in a ceiling corner above me.  A split second and a time lapse tinkling cascades over my right shoulder. I turn and see: the large pane of storm window shatters from the center, lines and fissures radiating outward as if pushed by invisible fingers of an invisible hand. Something’s hit the plate glass almost dead center.  It’s a big, oversized pane, maybe four foot by five.  Custom made for this Fifties house.

Out on the lawn a broad winged hawk rests at a slight angle, momentarily stunned.  Now he begins a hesitant, off-kilter walk. Then a slow taxi to lift off.  He’s gone.     

It’s been quite a year for animal life.  A neighbor says he’s spotted a blue heron in a marshy area in the old golf course.  Earlier this spring three turkeys appeared in my back yard.  I look out the bathroom window to see their springy necks rhythmically extending and collapsing like a multicolored slinky.  They startle and dart into the corner of the chain link fence, not having enough runway to get airborne.  They regroup and try again, barely clearing the jagged fence top.

Small birds are regulars, of course.  They eat year round and flutter in the birdbaths until November. Cardinals, finches, house sparrows, chickadees. Blue jays swoop in, imperious, all tail feathers and ass. Woodpeckers find their insects in the decaying trunks of trees that in better times the city forestry department would have tagged for removal.   The goldfinches like to eat upside down, says my friend Jan.  Her heavily trafficked finch feeder is in the College and Cultural Center neighborhood.  The residential enclave of academics.  Here specialists in the humanities and social sciences hold forth authoritatively about birds and rodents.  Their expertise results in whole blocks overrun by squirrels and birds, happy to have found a chemical-free zone of failed natural remedies for domestic pests. It’s a haven where tortured birds are lovingly pried free from the jaws of bored family cats. The nature-loving politics of liberals.

Over in my neighborhood, Mott Park, the summer drama has been what Mitt Romney with uneasy jocularity once called varmints. Returning from a month long vacation, I was puzzled to see a large mound of newly dug earth next to the back side of the garage. Its powdery light tan the tell-tale sign of recent activity.  And just beyond the pile a hole about a foot in diameter.  Sipping coffee on the back steps next morning I was momentarily stunned when I saw the creature.  A ground hog---and bigger than Ralphie, the twenty-pound orange Persian cat from up the block.  For several days I tracked the new creature’s habits.  Out early in the morning or at twilight, it scuds along the low retaining wall, and then drops into low bushes behind my neighbor’s statue of St. Francis. Religion---the last refuge of scoundrels.

Friends were not surprised.  ONe wh lives down in Carriage Town uses catch and release traps: "Havahart." Except I didn't have the heart.  Web research brought up remedies both murderous and encouraging of animal re-direction.  The first category involved the attachment of hosing to the car exhaust pipe and putting the hose down the groundhog tunnel.  A gas chamber for even these animals was appalling  This left only the natural remedies: a plastic pop bottle filled with ammonia and the cap pierced with holes to let out the fumes, Epsom salts sprinkled alongt he critters' pathway, a pound of moth balls rolled down the hole.  

In the midst of my research thriving pups appeared.  My neighbor Kyle drawled: yeah, get a .22. I didn't feel up to the rifle.  

Later in the summer, Kyle was dividing phlox for me on the front side of the garage.  A groundhog came up from underneath---evidently it had burrowed all the way across from the back side of the garage. When he told me about it, I asked Kyle what he did.  He said it involved a shovel and I should leave it at that.  The phlox flourish.

The ground hogs have disappeared from my backyard burrow. Now it’s early fall; they may have gone to a winter burrow elsewhere.  I learned of their two-abode life style online as well. Neighbors across the street report still seeing them, usually in familial multiples. 

Meantime, Ralphie lumbers along between the back yards, his quotidian ritual. He patrols the perimeters of the grass in that cautious way of cats, avoiding open space in the center, his marmalade leonine face and yellow eyes set in patient concentration.   

Animal drama’s over for now.  By the first of March someone on the neighborhood Facebook page will be asking if anyone’s seen a robin yet.   By mid-March it will be the Flushing Walleye Festival.  And I’ll be checking my yard for burrows.

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The Big R

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. 

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On Reading Parker Palmer late in life

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.

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.

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[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

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/