Missing Bailey

The single most painful part of coming up here was leaving my granddaughter Bailey. I’ve always lived close enough to see her regularly, and in the last months before I left, she and Haley and I lived together. She was my bud; we went swimming and to the parks and the store together, read at night, and played games of her devising. A grandchild really is an opportunity to relive the best parts of being a parent; it’s a bonus, a chance to see the world again through a beloved child’s eyes and as far as I’m concerned, life doesn’t get much better than that. I shed more tears over leaving her than over any other ten things put together. You’d have thought I was shipping to Tunisia for a six-year stint in the Foreign Legion. I was very nervous about telling her I was leaving, and it seemed like an opening when she wanted to play with the styrofoam peanuts in a box in my room.

"No, I need those because I'm going to move after Christmas." Little face becomes solemn.
"I'm going to move up to Tallahassee to go to school -- look, here it is on the map." Face gets longer.
"You and Mommy will stay here and you will have your own room." Mouth pulls down and lip sticks out. I wait for an outburst. What will she say? What if she begs me not to leave? How painful is this going to be? What if I start to cry?
Then, finally, she speaks: "Can't I have just ONE peanut??"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This is an example of what so delighted me, and what I miss so much now – the daily interaction with her. The three of us drove in to work and school together for a while and I noted this conversation in an email to my mother:

This morning we were treated to an interesting monologue from Bailey. First there was question-and-answer time.
“Everyone who meeds to go to work, raise their hand.” I did. (She still has trouble with her "m's" and "n's")
“Everyone who goes to a big school raise their hand.” Haley did.
“Everyone who goes to a kid school, raise their hand.” She did.
“Everyone who goes to a plain school, raise their hand.” We sat in puzzled silence, until I asked her, “What’s a plain school?”
“It’s. . . . it’s . . . uh . . . it’s just a house, and it’s a bad house. It’s a bad school. Guess what they have.”
“What?”
Bailey’s voice lowers and becomes as ominous as a five-year-old’s voice can get. “They have bad kids. And a bad teacher. They fight.”
“That’s terrible,” Haley and I chorus.
Encouraged, Bailey goes on.
“Guess what they have in the yard. A, uh, a boogey slide.” [I thought at first this meant you had to slide down in mucus but soon it became apparent that “boogey” meant scary.] “And boogey swings. And they have bad treats. They have bad ice cream.”
“There’s such a thing as bad ice cream?”
“Yeah. It has worms in it.”
“Okay, that’s bad.”
“And one eye is in it.”
“Oooh, that’s really bad.”
“Just one eye, and worms.” [Longish pause while we all reflect on this horror.]

“And the kids can’t get out. They have a oogey-boogey door and no one can get out. They can’t ever go back to their moms and dads.”
Haley is starting to look upset.
“And they have bad pets. They have . . . they have . . . a alligator. A big one-eyed alligator.”
“The other eye is in the ice cream,” Haley murmurs.
“And the alligator is really mean. He bites. It’s a ba-a-ad school.”
“Well, we won’t ever go there,” we tell her, wondering about the dark corners in a punkinhead’s mind.
She was wearing her Ariel swimsuit because this is the last week of school and they have lots of fun things planned; today was “wet balloons!” she told us.
“Carly and Catherine and Julia will love my swimsuit,” she said happily. “The boys won’t like it, because they aren’t my friends.”
“Boys don’t care much about swimsuits. Not now, anyway. Just wait,” Haley said.

. . . and gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche

I’m here at FSU in the doctoral program in humanities at the [advanced] age of 52 because I want to learn and I want to teach. I love them both.

Throughout my life I always dreamed of teaching some distant day, but ended up stumbling headlong into it during the 90’s, being recruited literally one day before the semester started to teach English for Non-Native Speakers when an instructor shortage hit the local community college. I was asked by a classmate in my master's program who was in charge of the ENS program at Valencia Community College. I almost said no, out of fear, but realized dimly that this was one of those moments when you either find the courage or learn to like living in the basement. In a way it was fortuitous that these were my first students, because I faced a classroom full of people who were slightly more scared than I was – and much more respectful of me as a teacher than any group of American students.

In that class I had students from all over the world, of all ages. I had a very young Chinese woman who had been here two weeks and cried about missing her parents; a Vietnamese gentleman who’d been in the U.S. for 15 years; a math doctorate from Brazil; students who were Peruvian, Puerto Rican, Polish. I had to abandon a longstanding quirk of panicking when speaking with people with thick accents or dialects for fear of not being able to understand them, and intuitively develop a self-taught crash course in Really Listening. I quickly learned how to listen with more than my ears and how to focus on more than their words. I rapidly learned how to speak much more clearly and to give feedback as part of conversation and thus correct effectively but unobtrusively. I must have done well, because they all passed the necessary standardized tests at the end of the term and progressed to the next level.

Then I graduated from my master’s program and signed up to teach a Humanities course. This time I was the only one who was uncertain and terrified, and I had to let the students go the first night after only ten minutes, because I couldn’t get my knees or voice to stop shaking. I don’t remember having to force myself to come back the following week, but I did; and by the end of the semester I felt as at home at the front of the classroom as I’d always felt in a student’s seat.

I found to my surprise that I loved teaching for many reasons, not the least because, like being a parent, it required me to be better than I am. Teaching required me to reach, and stand taller, and look beyond what I was comfortable seeing. Teaching demanded that I put on the robes and speak from a place beyond my personal prejudices and emotions. When I went to the front of the classroom I found myself standing for a little while in the stream of eternity where the nickel stuff doesn’t count, looking backward and forward in time and reassuring my students, whom I was surprised to find that I truly cared about, that beauty and truth and the good things about humanity have been part of our past and can be part of our future. That the arts are the story of our past, written with and on our hearts, and they connect us with ourselves and everyone else. As a teacher I became part of the great chain of learning and immortality, as timeless messages passed through me from past minds to new ones. It was a transcendent experience.

And then there was the time I ate a fly. The air conditioning in the portable building I was using that semester broke down so I opened windows and a door right next to me in the front of the room. I was well into an impassioned speech about something like the wonder and beauty of the Riace bronzes when a bug buzzed briefly before my eyes, and dove right down my throat. I staggered around, clung to the podium, turned several colors, and choked and spat and gagged. The students were absolutely riveted. None of them actually smiled but I could tell from the light in their eyes that I had made their day. For those moments I had their attention more fully than I had ever imagined possible. They seemed to watch me a little more closely for the rest of the semester but I never did an encore. Life sometimes seems to me to be a series of humbling experiences.

A memory that pops up: when I first taught at the community college, I was dismayed at the general lack of writing skills. (That situation hasn’t improved at all.) The students relied heavily on the (then fairly primitive) spell checker, not realizing that for it to work, (a) they had to be somewhat close to the real spelling, and (b) they had to carefully check the replacements it made. I read one paper on Gothic church architecture with many confusing references, which made me wince and instinctively cross my legs, to “the medieval catheter.” The students didn’t even seem to notice when the spell checker renamed them. After a while I caught on and if Delicious Lust turned in a paper, I knew it was probably Delinda Lusk’s work. I even got used to seeing my name as “Professor Bailed” or “Ms. Bailiff.”

Sam 

Kids: You Gotta Love 'Em

My daughters (and now granddaughters) and I have continued the great Bailey/Hahn tradition of family storytelling. Sitting around the table retelling funny stories was a favorite pasttime; as in my own family, and among the Hahn sisters, there would be requests for favorite titles: "Tell about the time Debbie Prayed in the Street" or "Grandma, what about the time you fell through the rotten plank and your rear end got stuck?" or "Mom, tell about the time you drove up to pick us up and we thought you were a bald man" (subtitled "Why I Never Again Paid $25 to Have My Hair French Braided").

In that spirit I'm going to tell a short story each about my three daughters. I'll start with Sam, the middle one. All three of the Weird Sisters have the strange Bailey sense of humor but we all admit that hands-down, Sam is the funniest and weirdest. She is the stuff of legend in our family and here is one of my favorites.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I picked fifteen-year-old Sam up at her friend’s house the morning after Halloween and as we drove home, asked her if she had a good time and what they had done.
“We went trick-or-treating. It was great. We got lots of candy, and then at this one house the guy asked us if we wanted water or candy, so we took water.”
The steering wheel jerked beneath my hands. “WHAT? You mean he brought you a glass of water and you drank it?”
“Yeah.” Sam looked at me as if to say, should we have bathed in it?
“Sam! What were you thinking? Don’t ever drink anything someone just hands you like that!” I glanced at her and she was gazing calmly out the window. I amped it up a notch.
“You can’t do that! Don’t you know that he could have put anything in that water?? If you were that thirsty, why didn’t you go back to your friend’s house and get a drink?”
Sam remained perfectly unruffled, in fact seemed to find the familiar landscape especially calming. I, in marked contrast, was turning red and a fleck of spittle shot out of my mouth during my next outburst.
“He could have put drugs in the water! He could have put LSD in that water! You’d drink it and it would taste fine and then you find yourself hallucinating and you wouldn’t know what had happened!!” I paused, panting with anger, and waited to see if I had scored a hit . . .
Sam gazed placidly out at the scenery and finally deigned to turn and answer me in a disinterested tone:
“What do you mean, purple monkey?”

Sumer Is Icumen In

. . . lhude sing cucku! In modern English: "Here comes the hot weather. Damn." Actually it's still in the high 80's but since everyone here seems to take a sadistic pleasure out of telling me how horrible the heat becomes in July and August, up in the 100's, I'm already sweating.

One week of the first six-week summer term down. I'm delighted at how well French is going -- I really enjoy learning it -- and think I will continue to study it in regular classes and just do the reading exam preparation course for Latin. This degree, like many Ph.D.'s, requires reading knowledge of two languages, preferably one modern and one classical, or fluency in one modern. I've chosen French and Latin not only because I have a headstart in them (thanks to the Sisters of St. Mary of Namur) but because they are good choices for a Victorianist, given that they are incorporated into much of the writing of the time.

Victorian Studies with Dr. Fenstermaker is wonderful, building on my last semester's course but covering different works, including Jane Eyre which I've read two or three times and really enjoy. When Dr. F. remarked that Thomas Carlyle would have had a hard time getting published these days, I suggested that he would have started a blog, and that gave me an idea to do exactly that: create Thomas Carlyle's Blog. It would be amusing. I just have to find the time.

Not wild about getting up at 6:30 a.m., and my Mondays and Wednesdays are long days since Vic Studies lets out at 10: p.m. but there it is.

Recap of Spring '05 and Here We Go Again

Tomorrow it begins again – first summer session, six weeks. I’m taking French from 8 – 10:40 a.m MTWR, and Victorian Studies from 6:45 – 10:00 p.m M & W.

Last semester, my first, was sans doute a learning experience in myriad ways. I realize now (having been told so repeatedly as well as experiencing it) that I was insane to take four courses, especially my first semester. But having survived them, I’m now glad I did.

Modern Humanities: Taught by Dr. Cloonan of the French Department who specializes in modern novels; as a result we read 15, starting with Liaisons Dangereuse and working our way from the 18th century to present times. I enjoyed LD and James’ The American but not Kafka nor some of the rest; I’ll never be a fan of postmodern lit. I remain feeling that I’m out of sync with the sensibilities of my time and place but have come to realize that’s probably a very healthy feeling, given the nature of those sensibilities. However, it’s important to understand them if you’re going to teach - or live in :) - this time period, and the course did greatly expand my understanding of it. I was strongly moved by The White Hotel and Like Water For Chocolate, the latter reminding me of Frida Kahlo’s paintings. I told Dr. Cloonan this and he invited me to give a presentation on her work, which I did and enjoyed very much. For the midterm I wrote on Einstein and Freud’s impact on the early 20th century as reflected in The White Hotel and my final paper was on the evolution of marginalized characters in modern and postmodern fiction.

Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque Humanities: Taught by Dr. Fleming, a former prize fighter who went on to get a Ph.D. from Harvard in Italian Studies. Beat that combo if you can. Again, my comfortable notions about these eras were challenged and Dr. Fleming’s critiques of my papers were extremely helpful. I wrote for the midterm on the changing nature of the visitor’s personal reactions to various souls in the Inferno; gave a presentation on Fra Lippo Lippi; and my final paper was on how self-portraits by Judith Leyster and Artemisia Gentileschi reflected the different values of the northern and Italian baroque eras.

Victorian Studies: Taught by Dr. Kennedy who just arrived here after a year’s appointment at Harvard teaching honors courses. The topic was Victorian periodicals and serialization, and the course was a great blend of history and literature. We read a number of novels that started out as serials in magazines, including Oliver Twist, Vanity Fair, and Tess of the D’Urbervilles. I enjoyed them all immensely and am very taken with the era itself, which is exciting because of the wealth of information they left and the social issues they struggled with as Britain left the agrarian system and was born as a modern nation. It was great fun to visit the archives and read the original opening issues of Punch (very funny still) and other periodicals. I gave reports on Punch and Eliza Cook’s Journal, wrote weekly on the readings, and my final paper compared two seamstresses in fiction (the plight of the poor, and especially needlewomen, was a hot topic of the time). I actually called it “A Tale of Two Seamstresses” which was tacky but I couldn’t resist. I loved learning about the Victorians and so many myths I had about them exploded in the course of the term. I had never heard of baby-farming, a truly horrible practice, and how Dickens and others linked it to the punitive Poor Laws. Very interesting and I’m looking forward to another Victorian Studies course starting tomorrow.

Northern Baroque Art: I wanted to take four courses, not knowing any better, and the pickin’s were slim (new students register last). I saw this course and thought, hmmm, Vermeer . . . okay! And guess what: we ran out of time and spent about thirty minutes on Vermeer. But I loved learning about the Dutch Republic – another amazing era – and art history is just fun. This was a cross-listed course, with about 25 Art History/Studio Art undergrad seniors, for whom it’s a requirement, and then myself and six other grad students. I was shocked when it finally sank in that those other six grad students were finishing their M.A.’s or Ph.D.’s in Art History. They knew one another and art criticism and theory and I felt like a party-crasher – a spectacularly dumb one, at that. I really had to put on my speed skates for this one. Dr. Neumann’s exams were frightful – a slide is thrown up on the screen, you try to contain panic while thinking of a plethora of facts ranging from identity (artist, place, date, title) to (at least) ten statements about the work's art-historical significance -- three minutes later that slide vanishes, another is thrown up, then taken down, and finally two works appear and you have to compose an essay around them that incorporates . . . everything. You start writing like mad and fifty minutes later you put down your pen and slump to the ground like a lifeless thing. I wrote my final paper on a lesser work by Michiel Van Musscher, which I actually got to visit, with Sarah, at the North Carolina Museum of Art, and that was really fun.

All the professors were outstanding and I remain very impressed with the school except for the disorganization of some aspects of the library; but I’m sure that will be resolved.

AND – here we go again. One semester down, I probably have five more to go; then I have Comps (comprehensive exams), which are four days of written exams and one day of orals. If I pass them all, I will be allowed to register for dissertation hours, I write it (sounds so simple), I defend it, I publish it, and there it is.

MIT -- now There's a Fun School

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/06/national/06time.html

They left Dunne's An Experiment With Time out of their reading list -- I think it's an intriguing little book and I worked it into one of my papers this semester.

It's All About Knowing the Lingo

Success in life hinges on mastering the idiom of one’s environment. Here’s some of the CollegeSpeak I had to quickly pick up on/remember/reinstate in the vocab. Just throw some of these puppies out at your next party for an instant social boost:

pathetic fallacy: in literature, the notion that nature has human traits or responds to one’s emotions. In my life, the notion that I can sprint across the six lanes of traffic between my parking lot and the campus as quickly as the 20-year-olds. This has nearly led to my demise on numerous occasions. I learned to resist the impulse to take off with the herd if I hadn’t checked first to make sure both knees were working

unpacking the text: looking for meaning in the elements of a work of literature. With 21 novels to read and analyze in 16 weeks (in just half my courseload), I did more unpacking my first semester than a Victorian chambermaid at a country house during shooting season.

oeuvre (and God help you if you pronounce it “oov-ruh”; the other grad students and I were so afraid of doing so that we stuck our lips out practically into the next room to get it right): total body of work of an artist

quotidian: of the stuff of daily life; ordinary or commonplace. I think it would make a good insult in the right (wrong) hands: “You are so . . . quotidian.” Me, personally, I love being quotidian. Always have. Kids need lots of quotidian in their lives and I’m one of those people who naturally love providing it. I think quotidian is the basis of life, but I wouldn’t want to be without the non-quotidian stuff. Ouch. My brain hurts.

polemic: characterizes your opponent’s argument

reductive: you don’t want your term papers to be this

contextual: you do want your term papers to be this

dystopian: how life looks on Monday morning; holiday celebrations among some families

mimesis: Sunday brunch drink of champagne and orange juice, which you need a lot of when you ponder why some people just arbitrarily pick unusual words when perfectly good simpler ones like “imitation” or “mimicry” exist.

nugatory: At first I thought this might be a particularly bad section of purgatory, where demons give you noogies all the time, or you are stuck at an eternal traffic light with a really zealous picker in the next car, but no: it means “negligible”. And why wouldn’t you just use negligible? Because “nugatory” is a lot more impressive and keeps ‘em on edge, that’s why.

hoary Aristotelian nosology: ran across this phrase in a scholarly article and nearly flipped and died. It caused me to have a dream in which I was in purgatory at a traffic light and Aristotle was in the next car and he was . . . no, never mind.

Conversation With My Car

KATHY’S CAR: Please, can I go back home? I hate it up here. The bus service here is pretty good. You’ll be okay.

KATHY: Why?

KC: Well, for one thing, you keep hurting me. You drive over things.

K: I didn’t know they had great big logs lying around the parking lots! I was upset that day because I had asked a really stupid question in class. And how was I supposed to see a divider that comes up high enough to scrape your guts but not high enough for me to see it at night??? I took you to get fixed, didn’t I?

KC (accusingly, near tears): And I got towed. Do you know how humiliating that was? In public? With all the other cars watching? They could see my --

K: I am truly sorry about that and believe me, I didn’t need to get soaked for $160 to make your bail, either. Do you know what that fee and the cost of repairs did to my budget, how many times I had to eat beans this semester as a result?

KC: I have a pretty good idea, in fact, yes.

K: Look: I will try to do better. I will exert every effort to park in the paved lots and not the rocky ones; I will NEVER leave you vulnerable to towing again, and I will give you a nice big drink of Stop Leak every month. Please stay. I need you.

KC (sniffling and thinking): Okay. I’ll give it one more semester. But things have to improve.

K: Deal.
===============

I have to laugh bitterly when I think about complaining about the parking situation back at Rollins. I didn’t know what parking hell truly was until I got here. It’s just me and 39, 999 other eager scholars jockeying for about 800 spots every day. Once this fact soaked in, I decided to park off campus, walk to it, and either catch one of the buses that circle it or hike up myself (depending on how many anvils I had in my backpack any given day, since the campus is built on a hill). When I got towed I was incensed at the injustice of it all, then extremely sorry for myself. Wending my way to the parking office (and note: while nowhere at Rollins is truly far from anything else, the opposite is true here: wherever you have to be is miles away), I managed on the way to work up some tears which I immediately sucked back into my eyes upon meeting the no-nonsense, heard-it-all manager who gave me a brisk “Mm-hmm, you don’t need to tell me, honey, why do you think I bring a lunch? Do you think I park for free because I work here? Uh-uh, honey. Same all over,” as she gave me the address of the company holding my car hostage.

Term Over, Man. Term OVER!

Total books read in their entirety, and admittedly some were slim but they were postmodernist novels and as far as I’m concerned, one page of them equals 20 in Vanity Fair: 26
Total other books consulted: somewhere in the 30’s
Articles read/ consulted: somewhere in the 40’s

Pleased to say I acquitted myself very well, and equally pleased to say that I have learned two valuable lessons:

1) Get a jump in the first week of the semester to compensate for real problems at the library (horribly backed-up ILL, misfiled books, missing items in archives, etc. – what up with this at a level-1 research institution??)
2) Start writing final papers the first week of the semester to avoid panicky writer’s block in the last month.

Okay. I left almost everything important to me – beloved kids and grandkid, fulfilling and joyful job with a fantastic team of people, friends, apartment, in sum a life – to come up here to pursue the degree. Right now, do I think it was worth it.?

Yes -- but it hasn’t been that easy. I really had the notion that it would be one long romp in intellectual fields of asphodel, but the reality’s been quite different. I’ve been hideously lonely (and for a complete introvert to say that, you know it has to be bad), and suffered a resurgence of all the outcast feelings I’ve ever had in my life. I’ve cringed while riding on a bus packed with 20-somethings, all of whom seemed to be staring at me with the same thought: What is she doing here?, making me wonder the same. But that got tiresome after the first month or so and I decided I had as much right as anybody to be here. And once my classmates started talking to me things vastly improved. I’m looking forward to my second summer session class because all my classmates will be from the IPH program and the professor’s the Assistant Director – so I’ll be with “my” community.

The hardest time I had – apart from loneliness and Parking Mizry – was writing four end-of-semester papers. I remembered enjoying writing papers at the end of the master’s program many years ago and thought I’d pick up where I left off, but oh, no. It was pretty rough. I developed a world-class case of insomnia. Real, no-nonsense, you ain’t goin’ nowhere insomnia where you lie down at the usual hour and several hours later you feel as far from sleep as any four-year-old of whom you ask the question are you tired?

Best time-wasters when in the grip of Writer’s Block so total that the only things you can move are your eyes and the mouse:

1) Anagram Genius free trial (you only get ten names, so milk it for all it’s worth)
http://www.anagramgenius.com/server.html

2) New Yorker cartoons
http://www.cartoonbank.com/

. . . and thinking up an entry for the caption contest:
http://www.newyorker.com/captioncontest/

. . . and just reading the New Yorker. It, and NPR, are educations in themselves. Don’t take my word for it; Ken Jennings of Jeopardy! fame said the same about NPR.

3) Merriam-Webster word games. I like the chicken one best but Wordo’s okay, too. Don’t like Bee Cubed or the second chicken game which merely test spelling or typing skills: zzzzzzzz.
http://www.m-w.com/game/more.htm

4) Spider Solitaire. Never have gotten beyond two suits.

5) Memotest. I have no idea how I even stumbled across this.
http://clippoapesta.com/flickr.memotest.html

6) Blurfing. I resisted this activity for so long, and for good reason. Many blog but few are worth reading.