This past weekend was sunny, so the trees glowed as if someone had turned them on with a switch.
Leslee has blogged the TVs of others, and Maria has blogged others’ dreams. On a weekend when many New Englanders headed to New Hampshire to peep northern leaves, I was considering the leaves of others in Massachusetts: the neon flashes of foliage seen during my routine weekend morning dog-walks in Newton.
I’ve spend spending my weekends in Newton for several months now, and I’m still not comfortable taking photos of the residential neighborhoods there. In Keene, I’ve been snapping impertinent pictures for over three years, so my neighbors have grown accustomed to that crazy woman who walks her dog with a camera. In Keene, I have no qualms about walking into the middle of a quiet residential street, crouching on my hams, and shooting whatever strikes my fancy; if someone were to question my odd behavior, I’d simply respond that I live here. For good or ill, I haven’t attained that level of comfort in Newton. Although these days I spend more time in Newton than I do in Keene, I still don’t feel like I live there. My mailing address remains in Keene, as do most of my belongings, and Keene is where I pay my own rent, utilities, and other necessities of “Real Life.”
In Newton, I still feel like an interloper, as if at any moment the Propriety Police will come upon me unannounced and escort me from the place: “I’m sorry, but your kind isn’t welcome here.” I’m not sure where or why I’ve gotten this impression: it’s not as if anyone in Newton or elsewhere in Massachusetts has ever treated me like an unwelcome outsider. Perhaps my unease stems from my earliest days in New England, when I was a fresh-faced graduate student at Boston College and couldn’t afford to live in Chestnut Hill, the tony Newton neighborhood near campus. I still can’t afford to live in Newton, even more than a decade (and a completed PhD) later. Profs and professionals abound in Newton, which boasts an inordinate concentration of people with PhDs…and yet when I walk the streets there, I’m acutely aware that my adjunct instructor’s paycheck does not reflect my academic credentials. Although I really am a doctor, I typically feel like I only play one in academe. In a lush and leafy neighborhood where people drive nice cars, live in even nicer homes, and enjoy other accoutrements of financial success, at times I feel like I’m only playing house.
When I first began teaching as a graduate student at Boston College, back when I lived a long subway-ride away in relatively affordable, working-class Malden, my grad student colleagues and I used to discuss our lingering sense of fraudulence. Standing in front of a classroom of freshmen, we felt we were faking it, our knowledge only diploma-deep. Surely if the Real Professors in our midst could detect phoniness like a stench in the breeze, they’d sniff us out for sure. When would our freshmen, we wondered amongst ourselves, figure out that we were clueless students just like they were, only a couple years’ older?
More than a decade (and a completed PhD) later, I still feel like a fraudulent faker: I somehow feel it’s only a matter of time before some intrepid Toto pulls back the curtain and reveals my show as sham. Walking the streets of a lush suburb populated by the Settled and Successful, I feel more like the clueless graduate student I was than the presumed professional I’ve become. At what point, I wonder, will someone figure out I don’t belong in Newton but am simply faking it?
Newton, like other surrounding suburbs, is a bedroom community for Boston, and I’m mindful that most folks don’t like strangers snapping pictures in their bedrooms. On Sunday when I snapped these shots of the turning leaves and neighboring houses I regularly see when I walk Reggie there, I did so semi-surreptitiously. It felt weird to be ogling other people’s leaves, as if leaf-peeping and window-peeping share more than a common gerund. Would people mind if I shot images of “their” houses even if I did so from the public space of a city sidewalk? Would homeowners be rightfully protective of “their” trees? Emerson claimed that poets are the only ones who own the landscape, for “There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts.” But still, the citizens of Newton pay a pretty penny for the privacy their abundantly leafy trees afford; isn’t it somehow criminal–or at least morally suspect–to intrude?
Faced with the ethical question to shoot or not to shoot, I chose the former. Given the number of visiting Massachusetts leaf-peepers I’ve shared New Hampshire roads with over the years, it seemed fitting to return the compliment. There’s plenty of landscape, I think, to satisfy poets, profs, and professionals alike, at least from the suburban safety of Newton’s streets and sidewalks. If we can share the road, presumably we can share the gleaming autumn leaves that right now are screening our sky.
Click here for a photo-set of images from Sunday’s dog-walk. Enjoy!
Oct 23, 2007 at 8:49 pm
There is a reticent quality about these photos, I mean the way the houses seem to be playing hide-and-seek with the trees and shadows already, without your reticence to capture it all! 🙂
And that thing about the poets being the only ones “owning” the landscape? Hogwash… It’s the people who work the landscape who truly own it!
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Oct 24, 2007 at 6:22 am
I was going to say, if it’s mid-day on a weekday, the landscapers own the landscape, and they’re probably not too worried about camera-toting dog-walkers. Walking around Belmont Hill at lunchtime, all I see are grounds crews.
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Oct 24, 2007 at 6:27 am
Yes, Newton definitely belongs to the yard crews, if “labor” is how we determine landscape ownership. I still think, though, that Emerson’s onto something. Yard crews might “own” individual yards, but Emerson was talking about the landscape as a whole, something larger than individual lots.
I guess we might ask who owns Mt. Monadnock, Blue Hill, or Mt. Tamalpais. I’m guessing Emerson would argue the landscape painters, poets, and other writers who have been inspired in their shadow do. But I wouldn’t recommend taking Emerson’s argument before a court of law, for I’m sure the verdict would be “trespassing.” 🙂
And yes, Maria, there’s a definite “hide & seek” quality to these photos that I was acutely mindful of when I was taking them. Because of the very leafy & lush nature of Newton, it’s difficult to get an open shot of any given house or tree, so I decided to play along rather than trying to fight against it.
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Oct 24, 2007 at 12:43 pm
Actually, I’d say you’re one of the least fraudulent academics I know.
Larry of Riverside Rambles blog described an incident recently where one couple got really hostile when he shot a photo of the weeds in the ditch in front of their trailer during one of his regular walks in Hannibal, Missouri.
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Oct 24, 2007 at 2:41 pm
I guess those folks in Hannibal have their guard up, what with all the Mark Twain pilgrims milling about. Except for a far-off shout of “No pictures” when I snapped a shot of the demolition of a factory not far from my apartment–a shout that was distant enough for me to ignore it–I’ve never been accosted for taking pictures. I do, though, often feel uncomfortable about it, probably because my parents & I were once accosted by a woman who didn’t like us looking at a mockingbird on the TV antenna atop her rickety house.
And for what it’s worth, I don’t actually consider myself an academic since I don’t write/publish academic discourse. So in most folks’ eyes, my refusal to “publish or perish” makes me that much less a professor, which I suppose explains why my actual job description is “instructor.” So judged as an instructor, I do exactly what I’m paid to do, which is teach. But compared to a professor…well, I’d be committing fraud if I claimed to be one of those.
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Oct 24, 2007 at 4:12 pm
I expect many of us feel we’re only “faking” our professional lives — as though the real writers, real professors, real doctors, real adults were going to show up and oust us. (“When can I run and play with the real rabbis?”) That lingering sense that we don’t belong, that we have to earn our place, may be part of what makes us so good at what we do and who we are. If we felt our positions in the world were owed to us, by whatever quirk of background (or even whatever pile of hard work we’ve done), we might not inhabit those positions so wisely or so well.
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Oct 24, 2007 at 4:30 pm
Yes, I bet many professionals feel inadequate…but in my case, my employer agrees, which I’m reminded of every month when I pay my own health insurance premiums. “Real” professors get insurance & other benefits. “Full-time temporary” adjuncts do not.
So while I tell myself that I teach my full class load as well as any tenured or tenure-track prof would, there’s a real difference between us. It’s not just something I’m imagining: academia doesn’t consider me & my kind to be “worth” the same as a tenured/tenure-track professor. It’s a two-caste system that is academia’s dirty little secret.
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