Day 42, April 27, 2020
Alligators and Resilience
It is, once again, rainy and cold, though flowers are out, the neighbor's trees are in bloom, and the daffodils have their bright yellow petals open inspite of the weather.This weekend, I Zoomed with my kids, and all three of them are wrapping up classes in the coming weeks. One it taking classes to prepare for applying for graduate school, one is graduating this year, and one is finishing up her sophomore year. They have all navigated this transition with varying degrees of resilience, and I am proud of them all.
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| Daffodils on a sunnier day. |
Clearly, one of the things I used to always turn to was food. I was an avid chip eater for years and one of my managing techniques for making it through a late night study session, and later an all night grading session, was a bag of salt and pepper potato chips, or Doritos. I would leave slightly greasy fingerprints on the onion skin pages of my Norton anthologies, or orange aromatic dust on student papers, and while I still indulge in that decadence once in a while, it is a rare occurrence these days. Sadly.
When I was in high school I went to summer school at Philips Exeter Academy, I got in on a shoe string, was waitlisted and allowed to join at the last minute. And as some snooty kid highlighted, was one of the very few public school kids attending. I had a somewhat troubled high school academic career, so Exeter was the first place I went where it was just assumed that everyone was smart and capable, including me. Because that was the expectation, I pushed myself to meet that expectation. From my dorm window every night, I would watch all the other rooms go dark until I was the last, or one of the last rooms with a light on. I bent over my word processor, which was no more than a glorified typewriter, pecking out essays, or reading Dostoyevsky, or working through my math problems, and somehow, I found I had endurance and could push myself to keep up with the reading, to finish the essay before dawn, and to check my math problems until I knew the answers to be correct.
Fueling all of this academic focus was a newfound drug, caffeine. I made two new friends who were coffee addicts, and bowing to peer pressure and my pubescent crush, I joined in the consumption of cup after cup at every meal. This was long before there was any real understanding that there could be good coffee. There was just coffee in a heavy ceramic mug. We drank it like we were sophisticated, like we were tossing off life without a care, like we were smoking cigarettes, and a little like we were taking medicine. It was like a fiendish passion that left us all jittery and hyper conversational.
I remember that summer fondly, as a turning point of sorts. After that summer, my friends in high school could not remember my earlier self. They didn't connect the troubled kid who struggled with his basic classes, with the kid who now did his homework, sat with the popular kids, the kid who people turned to for help studying for exams. They didn't know that nothing had really changed. I was still the person I had always been, but now I was amplified by coffee.
At Exeter, some friends and I found a rope swing on the river, and we imagined it to be the same rope swing immortalized in John Knowles, A Separate Peace. It gave us a frightening sense of foreboding and incipient danger as we flung ourselves into the air over the slow moving water. I remember one time we were out in the river and a kid from Florida was the last in the river, and when he came to the surface he was sputtering and yelling, "Alligator!" We were all out of the river so fast, we were nearly dry by the time we reach the bank. It was a good moment before we all caught our breaths and laughed about there being no alligators in New Hampshire, he had kicked a sunken log. So that proves, private school doesn't necessarily make a person smart.
But it was a formative experience that shaped several trajectories in my life. It was the summer I started learning to play guitar. I took a few lessons on my uncle's old Yamaha and spent many hours out on the lawn of the quad playing Grateful Dead tunes over and over. I met my friend Miriam, one of the coffee drinkers, who was from Chattanooga and introduced me to The University of the South, where we would both end up in a year's time. I also met Brit, who didn't attend the school, but worked in the ice cream store and would give me free milkshakes when no-one was looking. And later, after the summer was over, we would see each other again and I would understand that she didn't give free milkshakes to just anybody.
So the adversity at Exeter shaped me, gave me an understanding that I had a capacity for resilience. Even if it was tinged with all the accouterments of young teenage angst and hormones. Years later, after my graduate school advisor passed away, I would draw on that reservoir again, as I had many times between, to finish the work that had been left untouched. I had help, of course, my mentor at UMass, all the folks that supported me at GCC, but hammering out the final chapter of the dissertation, I still remembered that primitive word processor where you could edit only one line at a time, and whenever you hit return, the sentence would print to the page in a long stream of consciousness.
At some point, I discovered, penciled on the inside of the lampshade in my room, "God dwells within you, as you." At the time I read it as the forlorn musings of a fellow late night scholar whittling away the late hours by the light of a desk lamp. It seemed somewhat sad, like an epitaph, and I worried about my absent roommate. But in hindsight, perhaps it was more prophetic... something not fully realized, that I was in the process of becoming. Tomorrow I will still be partaking in that process. This pandemic, this dining table office, is also a marker of resilience and I am surrounded by people and events that will impact my life in unknowable ways. There is still more emerging in life, more to discover, more to look forward to.
Good night and be well,
Leo
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| This is Hambone. |
From Our Friends:
From Lillian Ruiz and Pug University:
From Tom Young:
"The Weight" featuring Robbie Robertson, Ringo Star, and a whole slew of global musicians!
Today's Online Teaching Tips:
From Flipboard:
From Inside Higher Ed:
Results from a survey about how teaching changed in the shift to online learning.
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