September 2015
Monthly Archive
Sep 24, 2015
Fall is my favorite season because it is fleeting. Last week was brutally hot–one of summer’s last fevered gasps–and this week is much cooler: brisk in the mornings and downright chilly at night. These in-between days when you can still wear shorts and sandals but appreciate the extra layer of a sweatshirt are my favorite days, a bittersweet time when summer leisure is fading away with a fanfare of gold and orange.
These days are precious because they are fading: the light is waning and the days shrinking. I often say I’d be happy if every day could be fall, but this is impossible, a wish that defies the laws of physics. Fall by its very nature is a season in motion–a time of decay and decline–and every year I find myself wanting to slow down that progression, as if time could be moved.
Fall is my favorite season because I love the things associated with it: pumpkins and cider and a new crop of fresh-eyed freshmen. But fall is my favorite season, too, because it’s a tender and tenuous time. Fall isn’t a season in its youth or prime but a season slouching toward old age. Fall is my favorite season because I know what comes next. In the summer, we live for the moment, languidly wasting our days because it seems they will never end. In fall, we come to our senses, saving up sensations and basking in beauty like a squirrel hoarding acorns against lean times.
Robert Frost was no stranger to New England autumns, so I believe him when he insists that nothing gold can stay. In late September, I want to bottle the long-angling light like a jar full of lightning bugs, but I know there is no catching nor containing it.
Sep 17, 2015
It’s the third week of the semester, so the dust is starting to settle from the start of another school year. Because I teach first-year students, the first few weeks of fall semester are inevitably spent getting everyone acclimated to college, college schedules, and a college workload.
Right now my students and I are discussing Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, which is this year’s common reading selection at Framingham State. In the second chapter, Philbrick describes the bumbling confusion new crewmen, or green hands, feel as they set sail on their first whaleship. Ordered by their captain or first mate to unfurl the sails, the green hands nervously look around, realizing they haven’t yet learned which ropes go with which sails, much less how to man those ropes. Newbie whale men need to (literally) learn the ropes before they can work together as a well-organized team.
This morning my students peer reviewed rough drafts of a narrative they’re writing: their first experience reading their writing aloud to their new peers. As my students sat with their desks huddled into small groups, I stood at the front of the room, eavesdropping as my students read and then talked about their writing. Listening to the quiet murmur of students reading and commenting on one another’s work is one of my favorite tasks as a teacher: on good days, I feel expendable, my expertise needed only if something should go awry.
With the story of the whaleship Essex fresh in mind, I imagined each huddled group of students as the crew of a whale boat, my students diligently clustered around their laptops like whale men plying their oars. Three weeks into a four-year voyage, these once-strangers are unifying around a common task.
I first blogged these photos of the Charles W. Morgan–the last remaining wooden whaleship–in July, 2014, when she visited Boston Harbor during her 38th voyage.
Sep 6, 2015
It’s been a whirlwind couple of weeks, without much time to process all that’s been happening. A few weeks ago, I accepted a last-minute one-year appointment as an assistant professor at Framingham State, so I’ve been in the curious scenario of being “new” faculty at an institution where I’ve been teaching part-time since 2012. Right as I was navigating the day-long orientations, benefits-related paperwork, and last-minute schedule changes this surprise appointment necessitated, our cat Snowflake had a medical emergency involving several days in the intensive care unit followed by a labor-intensive, messy, and ultimately doomed recovery period at home.
On Friday night, after I’d survived my first week back to school with my new job title and new responsibilities, we put Snowflake to sleep. Perhaps not coincidentally, Friday night was the first time in weeks I had a full night’s sleep, relieved that Snowflake was out of his misery (and the school year was started) at last. For the past two weeks, I’ve been scrambling to prepare for the semester, scrambling to keep up with the usual errands and chores while making umpteen trips to and from the vet, and just plain scrambling. Too many days have gone by without me finding a spare minute to write in my journal much less blog, and I’ve missed it.
Writing in my journal is how I make sense of my life: you might call it an inexpensive form of therapy. When I don’t have time to write, I feel uprooted, as if my center of gravity has shifted. Psychologists say that happy changes can be just as stressful as unhappy ones, and I agree. I’m happy about my new position at Framingham State, I’m sad that Snowflake is gone after a miserable struggle, and both realities feel stressful: developments I need (but haven’t had time) to make sense of. Writing is one way I stay grounded in the midst of life’s changes, so when I don’t have time to write, I feel scattered and un-centered.
Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living, and I think I know what he meant. When I’m not writing, my life seems both foreign and shallow, an insubstantial and flimsy thing I observe as if from a distance: someone else’s life, not my own. When I’m writing regularly, I feel more present to my life as it unfolds: I’m present and paying attention, inhabiting my own existence rather than watching it flash before me without conscious consideration. Forget about trying to walk in someone else’s shoes: first you have to learn how to walk in your own.
I’ve been writing long enough to know I always come back to it eventually, even (or especially) in the aftermath of upheaval. These past two weeks have felt like the moment when you’ve been unexpectedly plunged into deep water. Your rational mind reminds yourself you know how to swim: after the initial uproar of immersion, your body will naturally and inevitably rise. But in the interim, everything everywhere is fluid, and you can’t tell which way is up toward air. Before your body remembers how to float, first it must fall, and you struggle to see anything that isn’t a blur of bubbles and blue.
Hoarded Ordinaries 