An Open Christmas Letter...

This is an open letter to all of those for whom Christmas has been tainted by the overwhelming social pressure to conform to forced generosity that seems to darken the act of giving with the rot of obligation.

It is to those for whom Christmas is borne from a religion that does not speak to the heart, though the story is a beautiful one of shining deeds of love and wisdom in a bygone time.

It is to those for whom days become irritatingly counted and shortened by the joyous displays that come to us when the days are still warm and the leaves are still dancing on late summer breezes.

It is for those who find the season the most painful time of the year for these reasons and for countless others.  My message is simple, but it comes from a heart that has learned to look past all of this to find the small joys and the deep warmth that can be all around us despite the cold days, the cold commercialism, the cold rush for the latest purchase, the cold bustle of days growing shorter even as the list of stresses grows longer.

Brush these disconnects aside and what is left...

Christmas is love; it is a time for family and warmth, for friends and laughter, for good cheer and good wishes.  I will forever believe that the holiday spirit can sink into even the bluest of hearts and so this is my Christmas message to those who need greater words of warmth, of happiness, of comfort, and of good wishes…

You have the power to touch lives; I know this because you have touched mine.  Each day I spend in this world is made brighter because you are a part of it.  The sun shines brighter, the snow is more beautiful, and the smiles come more willingly.  Friendship in all its myriad forms is one of the most powerful gifts we can both give and receive, and I am honored to call you one, even in passing, and I know I am not alone.  The love between you and your dearest friends is an amazing thing – two people who can be across the world, across the street, or across the room and share so much using whatever means are available and making them come alive.

Those who love you are never alone…for even when you are lost in a busy store or a thousand tasks, you are always in their hearts.  You are in thoughts and, for some, the arbitrary lines between family and friend are forever blurred.  Your friendship brings smiles to faces even though you may never see them.  The thought of you warms a heart, cheers a dark evening, brightens a snowy day.  Christmas, then, is 'just another reason' to remember all of those who have touched our lives and celebrate them.

In light of these thoughts, I will share my good wishes for you...

May the blue in your heart find red and green and the silver of a shining star. May your days be full of sunshine and blue skies…and should it snow, may a snowflake stay on the tip of your nose until you cannot help but smile.  May you feel the Christmas spirit you so richly deserve.  May you know that you are loved, that you have touched lives, and that each day you draw breath is cause for celebration.  Each day you spend on this earth is a day that brings someone – numerous someones – joy.  May this thought be what cuts through the darkness and may you know, now and always, that the darkness need never overwhelm your heart because you are, to me and countless others, a blessing.  You are the greatest gift.

Merry Christmas.

Fun with Language, II

As a writing teacher and a lover of language, there are always things that are the earmarks of problematic writing.  Any writing educator will tell you that you cannot correct or even point out every single wrong in a paper or it would crush the already fragile confidence of a standard student.  Especially the community college student in an entry-level writing course.  These students have been told they can’t write for so long that they will write a two page essay explaining how they can’t write and be completely unaware of the irony of that.

So, we learn to address the bigger issues, target some of the smaller ones, and take it in small doses and move slower than the writer and perfectionist in us wants to move.  There are some big ticket items that I’m sure most (if not all) writing teachers will address, of course.  We would be remiss if we did not talk about thesis statements and transitions, for instance; additionally, many of us probably address sentence level things such as run-ons and fragments.  Beyond that, however, I would imagine that many of us have our ‘pet peeves’ – the things that fall under the more minor errors (in the big scheme of things) that we always seem to gravitate towards when working on feedback for a student.  Comma splices, dangling participles, passive voice, and the like are nails on a chalkboard and we hone in on them as if fixing this one small thing will open countless doors for students as they move deeper into the academic world.  And who knows, honestly...perhaps it will.

One of these items for me is the use of second person.  It’s my own personal crusade to rid student writing of inappropriate uses of the word ‘you’.  Note I say inappropriate – there are times when it’s a great writing device, but the problem is that students were taught to never, ever, under penalty of agony and pain, use ‘I’ in an academic paper.  So, where they would say “there is no greater joy than to hold my son” becomes “there is no greater joy than to hold your son.”  Now, as previously discussed in this blog, I don’t have children and, at this point in my life, I don’t plan to ever have them.  Now, it isn’t exactly insulting, but it’s not a very appropriate comment to make about someone whom you don’t know very well.  I am a fairly happy person and I’ve experienced heart-deep joy in my time – and it wasn’t with the child I don’t have.  Students do this all the time – one of the most telling moments for me was when a student wrote a paper arguing for stricter drunk driving laws and he told me how I would feel as a victim of such a driver – and he was wrong.  What he described did not fit my situation, and I had been there.  It only took the introduction for the student to alienate me and irritate me.  It was not my most comfortable grading moment.  Most uses of it are fairly innocuous, however, with students telling me what I expect when I read a story or what I see when I walk into their bedroom (Don’t panic – I’ve only seen this in a paper where they explore identity by describing a place).

For these more light-hearted uses, I’ve been known to write things in the margins like “I DO think that?  How do you know?!” or “Should I be worried that you can read my mind?” and I’m not sure that this is tremendously right of me to do, but my tendency towards sarcasm gets the better of me.  If it’s any consolation, though, I add a smiley afterwards.  And let’s be honest, my students expect sarcasm from me at this point...

There are also uses of it beyond the classroom and I tend to employ a healthy dose of sarcasm then, too.  It happens all the time in everyday speech.  Listen to those around you, and I’m sure you’ll find you’re doing all sorts of things of which you weren’t aware.  “When you walk into the store,” ”When you order at McDonald’s,” “If you hold your iPhone in a certain way, “You should get your first prostate exam when you are 40” and all sorts of fun things that, quite frankly, don’t apply to you.

Or is that me?

Introspective Volcanos

My home life is interesting of late.  Not in terms of relationships or family or anything of the sort; it is simply that our physical space has been uprooted in a way that I find to be more fundamentally unsettling than moving.  We are in the process of completely renovating our kitchen.  On Hallowe’en, friends and family gathered to help us remove all of the cupboards, the ceiling tiles, the plaster and lathe walls, the mice nests, the nails, and everything else that was in the way.  Then, on All Saint’s Day, the two of us chipped away at two layers of horrid flooring that was glued and brittle.  There is no better word than ‘chipped.’  We used ice choppers.

Before all that, however, there was an interesting rearrangement of the entire downstairs.  This shifting called into question something that we generally take for granted; for, when it comes to layouts of rooms, a certain number of conventions are generally followed whether we are aware of them or not.  We store our food and cooking implements in the kitchen, our fancy eating accoutrements in the dining room, the comfortable seating in the living room, and some odds-and-ends of welcoming in a foyer or vestibule.  This, in our house, is completely upside down and as a result, much of our sense of place is also turned upside down.

This is what we did.  We slid the fridge into the dining room and plugged it in.  Then we realized it was on a slight dip in the floor so we have to push the door hard to make sure it stays closed.  In front of the fridge is a large cardboard box filled with various food items.  There is no rhyme or reason – the box has everything from tea to oatmeal, from crackers to spices, from granola bars to peanut butter.  I don’t even know what’s on the bottom anymore. We just keep peeling things off the top to get by.  We also moved the stove into the dining room, which is making the somewhat small, burgundy colored space look a little cramped.  Especially with the food-preparation table, the toaster, the dishes, and another cardboard box.  The stove, which is gas, is not actually plugged in, so it’s being used as a dust collector and Holder of Things.  We also had the microwave in here, but it turns out that if we ran the microwave for more than 30 seconds, it blew a circuit because of the fridge.  So, the microwave, and the crock pot, are both on TV trays in the foyer.  It makes perfect sense – writing desk, lamp, globe, slow cooker, dust.

Our living room has nothing living in it because, along with the layer of dust, it is filled with approximately 18 cabinets in various stages of not-put-togetherness.  Tall ones, fat ones, drawers, parts, toe-kicks, cardboard corner-protectors, squishy foam protective wraps, shrink wrap, directions, dust.  When I look at it, the thing that runs first and foremost in my mind is gratitude that it is not me who has to make sense of it.

We also ripped out a closet (which, ironically, was not a very good closet even before all of this happened) and now have a back hall that is as empty as the kitchen.  But at least it is not filled with inadequate closet any longer.

So, what does it all mean? Our foyer is a squalid apartment kitchen, our dining room is a studio apartment kitchen with a bad landlord, our living room is a self storage area for disorganized people and, until recently, our kitchen looked like an attached shed.  It has upgraded now, with drywall, but it still has a ways to go.  As I paint and watch cabinets go in, I’m sure my ideas will change.  For now, however, I’m mystified by how unsettling it can be to put one’s house into a contractor’s snow globe and then wait for the drywall snow to settle.  It feels a little like the dust is but ashes and our living space is but a smaller version of Mt. Vesuvius.

All of this said, however, I must side with the optimists.  They say that the kitchen is the heart of any home, and what I’m learning during this process is that it keeps beating even when you gut it completely and coat it with a fine layer of white dust.

But, still, I long to bake cookies.

Happy Birthday, Bimmie

Today is my brother’s birthday.  This is for him.

A month ago, I wrote about the relationship I had with my sister and how special it was to me.  What I have with my brother is no less important to me and has had no less influence on who I am today.  But that influence is very, very different.

I made mention in that blog of how I spent more of my time with him and as I think back to those years, it amazes me to think about how much of who I am I owe to him.  I’m not sure I can entirely blame the tomboy part of myself on him, but he certainly had a big hand in it.  I don’t know if he ever really thinks about it, but I am who I am because of him. I read fantasy novels and mysteries, I’m a gamer, I love computers and technology.  All of these are such an integral part of who I am and they all came from him in some way or another.

I may have been socially awkward, but when I borrowed books from my brother, I could get lost in Pern or Xanth or Middle Earth.  I don’t have a conscious memory of wanting to read those books because he did – I don’t recall looking up to him that actively.  It may have simply been a case of there not being any other books around that looked interesting to me.   But, it didn’t matter.  What mattered is that I started reading them and was hooked.  Fast forward a couple of decades and I wrote doctoral field exams on contemporary fantasy fiction and wrote a dissertation on Harry Potter.    Those moments in my career had their seeds in him.

I may have had no idea how to keep white clothes even remotely clean, but I could explore the world of computer games pretty well.  I remember sitting in a brown comfy chair that my brother had in his room and playing Nethack on a monochrome monitor in the times I had when he was at school and I was not.  I remember playing Gauntlet on a split screen as we sat side by side in his room.  I would drag my desk chair into his room and we played for hours.  I may have gotten yelled at for not being very good at them, but in those hours together a gamer was born and from those roots as a gamer, a love of technology was born.  Fast forward a couple of decades and find me firmly established as the Humanities professor whose niche is technology:  I sit on technology committees, I use technology in my classrooms, I go to conferences centered on its use.  I married a gamer whom I met in a game, some of my friends are gamers, I still play games.  These moments in my life and career had their seeds in him.

In short, when I say I am proud to be a geek -- it's because my brother helped make me one.

There are so many little things we shared growing up – from the nickname he gave me to Monty Python and Sherlock Holmes.  My brother was no less socially awkward than I was, but we had such fun times regardless of that.  We hung out and watched movies, listened to music, played games.  We worked together, even, when we got older.  We used to go to the mall all the time, and it was a very different trip than with my sister.  In fact, I can’t even remember anything we did there – I just remember walking around relatively quickly and having a great time.  We went to concerts, too.  We used to go see REO Speedwagon every year, including the year I was in the hospital until just a few days before the concert.  I always felt safe with him, despite the noise and the crowds.

Even when I went away to college, he would come up and spend the weekend in my dorm room and we’d do all the same kinds of things.  He joined a group of us who went up to Toronto to see The Phantom of the Opera.  I think he drove entirely around Lake Ontario that weekend.  When I went on to my Masters and my Doctorate, he’d do the same thing.  We may not have talked much on the phone or wrote letters, but we got together often enough that it didn’t matter.   A perfect example of this kind of unspoken relationship we have happened in the early days of electronic communication.  It was birthday season in my family and, being a college student, I was running low on cash.  I wrote to my brother and asked him if he could help out -- just a little something to help me get by.  My parents were coming up that weekend and they brought with them some new CDs that I had ordered through his CD club (back when Columbia House was cool).  It wasn’t until after mom and dad left and I was opening the CDs that I noticed one of them was slit along the side.  When I opened it the rest of the way, there was a $20 bill inside.   This is the kind of thing he does – he may not be demonstrative of his affection for his little sisters, but it’s always there.

I owe a good portion of who I am to the influence my brother had on me growing up -- he is goofy and fun and weird and a little crazy.  I can’t even really express how ecstatic I am that he has found someone who loves him for who he is and makes him happy.  He deserves it; though, I will admit that sometimes I miss the dedicated time we used to have to hang out at the mall, eat fast food and stay up too late playing games before I crashed on his couch.  I love my brother and I admire the personal strength he has had to get through the tough times and I’m so proud of where he is now.  He will always be my big brother and I will always treasure the memories we have made and the ones I’m sure we will keep making.

So, big brother, want to go to the mall?

Edith Cady

This is not a new piece, but it's one not everyone has heard -- or seen with the italics intact.  The italics are phrases that were lifted directly from the newspaper accounts of the event told therein.  Enjoy...

***

It was May, 1940 and with the coming of warmer weather, Mrs. Cady had returned to her upstairs bedroom.  She had been accustomed to sleep in the lower floor when the weather was cold, but spring was in full bloom the night that he drove from his cabin…lifted his carefully-tended 12 gauge semi-automatic shotgun and went to her home.  I do not know how deeply she slept, or what dreams she had, but it would seem she did not hear any sound as Morris picked his way up the stairs.  He had already unlatched a screen door and gained entrance to the first floor… 

Earlier that week, Morris visited Mrs. Cady and was warned by her to stay away.  But this night, the boarding house was quiet, and it seemed she had no reason to fear for her life.  Her boarders were sleeping in their rooms, two old-age pensioners who made their home with Mrs. Cady.  It is true that they lived in the sparsely settled Fox Hill section, but she was a native of Batchellerville.  She had always known the town and had lived there all her life.  On this night, however, that life would find its end…

Mrs. Edith Cady is Slain in Home.  The headlines sound cold, even now.  She was 61 years old and I can find no other records of her life or death.  Three yellowed newspaper articles pulled from an envelope in the attic of a house where my grandfather lived.  Mrs. Edith Cady was my second great grand aunt, the daughter of the late Stephen and Sarah Blodgett Cady.  Her sister, Sarah Cady, would marry my great great grandfather and continue the family tree through their daughter Blanche, who married my great grandfather.  They bore a son, who bore a son, who bore me. 

It is no doubt that family trees are webs of fascination and mystery, and as I build mine from the scraps of names and dates on a century’s worth of scattered pages, my mind keeps returning to Mrs. Edith Cady and what her life and death meant.  I try to imagine what it must have been like for her…

“I was awakened by a shot” one of the boarders told officials, and as he opened his door, Mrs. Cady fell out of her doorway onto the hall floor.  They found her murderer in her room, lying on a mattress on the floor after he turned his death-dealing shotgun upon himself.   There are precious few other details given.  Only dates and times, an incorrect list of Mrs. Cady’s survivors, and a brief comment that her death was the execution of a threat made a year ago, according to Dr. Eaton, the Saratoga County coroner, who heard it from Erwin Conklin of Northville.  Tantalizing details that tug at my imagination until I think I hear the sad voice of a woman who longs for a legacy beyond simply the victim.  Indeed more is told of his life than of hers; he is the lumberjack and World War veteran who creeps into house, shoots her out of jealousy, then wounds self.   I read over and over again that he lived at the boarding house for about two years subsequent to leaving his wife.  Two months prior to this fateful May night, he went to live in a cabin about two miles down the Fox Hill road.  I wonder why…just one question in a series of them that roll through my mind in an unending series of echoes.

I wonder who she was.  I wonder about her story.   Sometimes I imagine that she spurned his advances, uninterested in this day laborer who was sixteen years her junior.   I imagine he loved her, and yet she was aloof from him.  In her strong and willful way, she ejects him from her boarding house for some unknown transgression.  Aye, she is always strong in my mind…a woman of iron will who had no fear about living in the boarding house with just two octogenarians to keep her company.  She casts off his threats and refuses to change her life for his whims.  He is the spurned suitor struggling to control the blind rage of jealous rejection and carefully planning her death and his own.  Sometimes, the story moves from the heart to matters colder and sometimes more powerful.  Perhaps his jealousy was born from watching this fiercely independent woman succeed with no husband at her side.  For, in the manner of the time, she is called Mrs. at every instance, but no detail is given about whom she had once married and she retains her Christian name.  Even has my mind’s pen scrawls stories in the pages of imagination, I am confounded by the mysteries.  Her ghost dances alone, and I wonder if she perhaps never married at all, and only took the honorific to soothe judgmental sensibilities.  For I can also find no other mention of her daughter Mrs. George Edwards, of Gloversville or of the grandson and great grandson who survived her.  Burial was in the Edinburg cemetery, where ten years later, her brother was buried by her and despite the 24-hour vigil at the hospital as her killer lay languishing and the coroner’s plans to carry the investigation further before rendering a verdict, there are no other scraps of paper.  The story just ends.  But it will never end.

To everything...

Time is interesting to me of late.  Perhaps it’s because I’m finally utilizing a calendar and it’s actually helping me to not forget meetings.  Perhaps it is because I’m more aware of the days and seasons because of events that have unfolded over the last year or so.  Perhaps it is simply because I’ve been so ridiculously busy that I’m more aware of how I’m occupying each of my days and I’m accepting the sacrifices I have to make to keep my head above water for at least long enough to breathe.  All or none of these, it’s just something I’ve been mulling over.

One of the things that I have been thinking about is how, no matter what we do or say, time moves forward at exactly the same pace.  Each second counting out the minutes counting out the hours, the days, the weeks and so on.  I’m no scientist, nor am I a purist, so I’m not going to go into the kinds of anomalies with our clocks and calendars that make us, for instance, add a day every four years just to keep it right.

Rather, what interests me is our linguistic need to control time in ways that are really psychological tricks designed to give us the sense that we have some power over that which plods on, relentless and uncaring.  It does not slow or speed up, it does not stop or wait.  It just moves forward, the steady passing of moments that lead into ages.

We talk of the things that time does, and the language of control relating to time is so prevalent that I imagine few ever stop to think about it.  No matter our words or thoughts, time can only ever move forward, endlessly marking the passing of our lives through our imperfect devices.  We speak of it in words of control, as if to lessen the blow that there is this thing that controls us in every way and we have no power over it.  It is unyielding in its march into eternity.  Our language cannot change the fact that we cannot stop it, change it, manipulate it, or touch it...in any way.

We have it or we do not, as if it were a commodity, the latest fashion that needs our attention so that we can be cool.  We save it as if it were money, as if it were something that could be gathered and set aside for a rainy day.  We spend it, as if it were that same money and we have traded it for some moment dedicated to a task in which we find regret or satisfaction.  We claim to make time – as if we were some grand artisan who could fashion such a thing from the unlikeliest of materials.   We lose track of it, as if it were a small child momentarily slipping out of our sight in a crowded store.   Sometimes, we find it again, easing our lives because we can accomplish that much more by clever manipulation.  We speak of time management, as if we simply need to corral a cadre of workers in need of our guidance to become a well-oiled machine.  We pass time like a quarterback to a wide receiver on a lazy Sunday afternoon in October.   We have down time and leisure time; we have standard times and daylight savings times.  We waste, take, run out of, bide, and ask for more time. 

We even kill it.

Our language even gives time autonomy – breathing life into it so that perhaps we can learn how to bend it to our will, as we bend others to our wills during the course of any given day.  Time flies, time crawls, time will tell, time heals, we can race it and be ahead or behind it,

We measure its value by our own standards, having and finding good times, lamenting the bad times, enjoying quality time, celebrating the perfect time; time can be wrong or right, time can be trivialized to be just a matter.  Time goes by.

The Byrds and the Bible speak of time in much this way, telling us that there is a time to every purpose under the heaven.  This may be true, but it is to the chagrin and pain of mankind that this moment will not be of our choosing, and we are ever the slaves of each tick of the clock, each shift of the sun, each tide of the ocean, each phase of the moon. 

And what really gets us?  The truth was told by an Irish actor and playwright by the name of Dion Boucicault.

“Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them”

And with that, my time here has ended...

Be well, gentle readers.

Happy Birthday, MBS

Today is my sister’s birthday.  This is for her.

My sister and I have not always been close.  Because I was a seemingly incurable tomboy, I spent far more time with my brother than with my sister.  This is not the blog about him, however, so suffice it to say that my tastes were much more in line with his than with hers.  In those years, I was more likely to be tagging along with him, picking on her, the middle child.  When I wasn’t the target as the youngest, that is.  One of the lasting memories from this time was when we took her huge stuffed panda and hung it from the ceiling.   I don’t think she was amused; in fact, she still complains about it from time to time.

As we grew older, things didn’t really change that much.  The timeline of our lives was such that we didn’t really cross paths very often.  I have only been half-joking when anyone has heard me say that while she was at the mall, I was climbing trees.  Despite these differences, or perhaps because of them, I know part of me always looked up to her, though I called it jealousy at the time.  My memory is not always the best when it comes to my childhood, but I do remember playing in her room when she was out; the shag orange carpet hiding a bee one afternoon, as I recall.  It was sunny that day and I don’t remember where she was or even what childhood game I was playing – I just know I wanted to be in her room.  It was special and somewhat off-limits, generally.  My big sister’s room.

I think at some level, part of me wanted to be like her because she was, in many ways, quintessentially feminine in ways that I was not and had no conscious desire to be.  I never thought I could live up to her anyway – she was popular and beautiful and socially skilled.  I have no delusions that her life was perfect by any stretch, but it looked a lot more perfect than mine.  Around her, I felt even more awkward and weird.  I enjoyed computers and poetry more than nail polish and make up; I lost myself in books and in melodramatic writing that makes me laugh today at the dire seriousness of my middle-school self.  In short, I was nothing like her; we didn’t really feel like we could be sisters and as I grew older, I found myself wishing more and more often that I was like her.  I was tired of being bookish and clumsy.

So, I slowly became aware of a need to become more outwardly feminine at least some of the time.  It surprised me that I wanted to be a girl, sort of, but what did not surprise me is where I turned for help with that.  I remember afternoons with curling irons mishaps and smeared mascara; I remember trying on her clothes and being told I could keep some of them.  Basically, I remember laughing and tentatively starting the friendship that I’ve come to value more than I can easily express.  I wore her senior prom dress to my junior prom.  I borrowed her make-up and experimented.  In short, I tried to figure out how to be less awkward and a little bit more graceful – and she was one of the best role models around.  I still hung out with my brother, but now there was another facet of myself to explore.

When she left to go to college, part of me was heartbroken.  I was just beginning to find a friend in her, and she went away.  I retreated back into my old loves, but I was not the same tomboy anymore.  When she came home, we would sometimes hang out and it was fun, but still a little awkward.   As my own high school graduation approached, I ended up applying to only one school – the one where she was.  I don’t remember how that came about, but I know that I was excited about having my RA sister close by as I got used to being a college student.  I had her there with me for a year before she graduated and moved on, and in that year we spent time together now and then.  I loved those times.  Though they were somewhat sparse as we moved in different circles, it was often enough to know that if I needed her, she was no longer far away.

From those days onward, her and I have done nothing but grow closer.  She is my best friend above all best friends – and there are so many memories that I cherish.  We’ve gone through heartaches and happiness, laughter and tears, heart-to-hearts and meaningful silences.  I remember reading at her wedding and making everyone cry – including myself.   I remember shopping trips and closet cleanings that felt like shopping.  I remember her with her infant sons and knowing that she was going to be a better mother than I could ever be and that she was doing yet another thing that I don’t think I could do.  But now there was no jealousy, there was just pride and admiration.

One of the most important moments for me over the last few years was my wedding and how I could finally ask her to be my maid of honor.  There were times when that awkward little girl inside me thought I would never find the right someone because there was still so much of that stubborn tomboy around.  So when I did find him, there was no hesitation about who to ask to stand with me.  I never really pointed this out at the time, but having her do my makeup was so beautifully surreal – suddenly I was 14 again and my big sister was helping me look as beautiful as I could for the high school dance.  This, though, was so much more – and what we have, now, is so much more.  I cherish those memories, but the memories I am making with her now, I would not trade for anything.  She is strong and beautiful, kind and funny, smart and accomplished.  It is women like her that inspire women like me to be more than perhaps they would have.

I may be a doctor and a professor, a wife and a daughter, a poet and a thinker…and there are countless whys and ways I have become those things; but, I can honestly say, I am the woman I am because of the woman she is…

Love you.

-T