June 27: English Sparrow, Strep Throat, Love Letter to the World

Today, I am going to open up my copy of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek to a random passage and write a gratitude post about it: 

On my way home, every bird I saw had something in its mouth.  A male English sparrow, his mouth stuffed, was hopping in and out of an old nest in a bare tree, and sloshing around in its bottom.   A robin on red alert in the grass, trailing half a worm from its bill, bobbed three steps and straightened up, performing unawares the universal robin trick.  A mockingbird flew by with a red berry in its beak, the berry flashed in the sun and glowed like a coal from some forge or cauldron of the gods.

Well, sparrows and robins and mockingbirds.  Nests.  Red berries glowing like embers from some divine Crock Pot.  Each creature in this passage is hopping or bobbing or swooping, mouths filled with food.  It's a passage that's bursting with life and abundance.

You know, I spend a lot of time talking about things I don't have.  Today, I'm going to focus on something that makes my life feel abundant:  writing.  One of the most peaceful moments of my day is when I sit down to type my daily blog post.  Author Anthony Doerr says, "A good journal entry ought to be a love letter to the world."  That's what a good post should be, too:  a love letter to something or someone.

Tonight, both of my children are packing for Bible camp.  My son is going as a camper.  My daughter is going as a camp counselor.  They're both pretty excited.  There have been a few bumps in the road today (my daughter was diagnosed this afternoon with strep throat--she's on antibiotics; the material for my online class wasn't uploaded properly, and I had to spend two hours figuring out the problem).  But those were minor distractions, and they have been resolved.

So, the abundance of my day is medicine for my daughter's sore throat.  My online class, which is providing extra income for the next month or so.   I have good kids who really love the Lord.  And I have a laptop on which to write this love letter to the world.  And I don't have to pay for said laptop; it's given to me by the university.

And Saint Marty has a comfortable bed that is calling to him.

June 26: Contingent Professor, Economic Injustice, Classic Saint Marty

Sunday.  12:56 p.m.  85 degrees outside.  Cranky daughter just got out of bed.

I have some work to do today for the online class I'm teaching.  It starts tomorrow, and I think I'm pretty much ready.  I just have some small details to finish up.  A quiz to post.  Lecture notes to work on for next week.  I am feeling much more confident than I was last week at this time.

Which gets me thinking about being a contingent professor at the university.  For the work that I have done/am doing for this class, a full-time professor would be getting paid about four times as much as I am being paid.  I have a terminal degree. I have been teaching at the university longer than most of the full-time, tenure-track/tenured professors in my department.  And the full-timers rule the roost.

Sorry if I'm sounding a little like Bernie Sanders, but it is true that there is a great deal of injustice in the world.  In the academic world, too.

Two years ago, I was saying the same thing:

June 27, 2014:  Going Home, Elitist Intellectuals, Once Upon a Toad

"Charlotte," said Wilbur.  "We're all going home today.  The Fair is almost over.  Won't it be wonderful to be back home in the barn cellar again with the sheep and the geese?  Aren't you anxious to get home?"

E. B. White loved the life he led as a child.  He loved the summers he spent in a cabin on a lake with his family.  He loved the horses his father owned.  Later, he loved his life in farm country.  The barns.  Cows.  Chickens.  The spiders and geese.  In fact, White made a career for himself writing about everything he cherished from his youth.  He was constantly going home.

I have been an adjunct instructor at a university for going on 20 years.  That's a long time.  I've seen professors come and go.  Retire.  Die.  I've taught through the administrations of about five or six English Department Heads and six University Presidents.  I have never been offered more than a one-semester contract.  At the end of each semester, I'm not sure if I'll be teaching one class, two classes, or no classes the next term.  It's a tenuous existence at best.

One of the reasons I've never been offered something more permanent is because of a bias that exists in academia.  The English Department is full of professors who think they're better teachers and scholars because they've studied in such exotic locations as Indiana or Texas or Canada.  They went on a Holy Grail quest for a tenured position at a university and lucked out.  They've made sacrifices for their careers.

These elitist intellectuals are of the opinion that their sacrifices have somehow made them worthier of their privileged lives than others.  They look down on the likes of me, who elected to stay put, raise a family, and pursue an academic career closer to home.  I've sat through department meetings where contingents and adjuncts were treated like inferior children by tenured colleagues.

I think it does take a lot of courage to leave home and pursue a career wherever the academic winds blow.  I admire my colleagues.  They're smart, talented people.  However, I also think it takes a lot of courage to stay home, get married, have children, and roll the academic dice.  In fact, it may take more courage because there are more obstacles in the way of success, not the least of which are the opinions of elitist intellectuals.

Sorry for the rant, folks.  It's something about which I've been thinking quite a bit this summer.  I had to get it off my chest.

Once upon a time, a toad lived in a swamp in the middle of the woods.  The swamp was his home.  The toad was born there, grew up there.  He spent his days sitting on the same rotten log where his father sat his whole life (until a rather cranky snake came along and ate his father).

One day, a lizard from the other side of the forest moved into the swamp.  The lizard said to the toad, "Don't you ever get bored of sitting on this log, eating the same kinds of bugs, day after day?"

The toad just blinked at the lizard.

The lizard cleared his throat.  "I think life is too short to fritter away.  A life without change and adventure isn't a real life.  It's a wasted life."

The toad just blinked at the lizard

The lizard licked his eyes.  "Are you hearing what I'm saying?  You don't deserve this log or this swamp.  You can't appreciate it the way I can."

The toad just blinked at the lizard.

"I deserve this swamp more than you," the lizard said, "because I've been to other places.  I'm worldly and smart."

The toad just blinked at the lizard.

"And, furthermore--" the lizard continued.

Just then, the cranky snake came by and swallowed the lizard.

The toad just blinked.

Moral of the story:  don't fuck with a cranky snake.

And Saint Marty lived happily ever after.

Something like this...

February 29: Fall Like Adam, Leap Day, Poet of the Week, Matt Gavin Frank

I am puffed clay, blown up and set down.  That I fall like Adam is not surprising.  I plunge, waft, arc, pour, and dive.  The surprise is how good the wind feels on my face as I fall.  And the other surprise is that I ever rise at all.  I rise when I receive, like grass.

Falling and rising.  Like Adam on that apple day, making a choice, accepting the consequences.  With one bite of that naked fruit, he sentenced Annie Dillard and me and you to a lifetime of falling, plunging, wafting, arcing, pouring, diving.  That's what life is:  a constant lesson in falling and learning how to rise, reaching down and then up again.

Today is Leap Day.  February 29.  It happens once every four years.  Always in a presidential election year in the United States.  Always in a Summer Olympics year.  On February 29, you're supposed to make a leap, do something you normally wouldn't do.  Sometimes, like Adam, you fall.  And then you pick yourself up, add some water, and turn your face upward.  Toward the sun.

This morning, it was snowing.  Blowing.  Cars were in the ditch, on top of snowbanks.  It felt like a day when something bad could happen.  Or good.  That was my state all day.  Waiting for something bad or good to come my way.  And I waited.  And waited.

I did not make a conscious leap today.  In the past, I've bought weird hats to wear.  Worn strange earrings.  Gone on trips.  Instead, I went to work and started taking an online class.  Nothing earth-shattering.  I haven't taken a class in a long, long time.  Don't like following other people's schedules, I guess.  Perhaps that's my leap today:  I am a student for the next four weeks.  For better or worse.

Hopefully, I will rise, not fall.

This week, I choose Matt Gavin Frank as Poet of the Week.  Matt is a friend of mine, a writer who always takes chances, makes leaps.

Saint Marty hopes you take the leap with him. 

Elegy for the Whitefish

by:  Matt Gavin Frank

The grandfather, surrounded by Illinois doves,
does not see his wife in the rowboat.  She imagines

smothering him in his sleep, his hair pulling off
with the pillowcase.  The greenest feather

remembers the earth.

The whitefish dive, their beds behind them. 
Women, tighter than glass, forget,

happy...

They raise their fingers before their hands,
whitefish hanging in the seaweed, throat

and spine disown their avenue, begin
to take in air.

Down the street, the synagogue closes its doors,
Rabbi Kaminker packing blue prayer books

into a blue duffel bag.  My grandparents can no longer
buy him lunch, but they still remember the pink

of his wrists.

He holds his son to the radiator vent.  Mrs. Papier
upstairs singing a Polish opera.  In the morning,

he writes my family name on a piece of yellow paper.
He forgets to prepare breakfast,

writing and writing.

February 27: Silver Eels, Ennui, Amy Uyematsu, "Zumba Gold at 9 AM"

The sentence in Teale is simple:  "On cool autumn nights, eels hurrying to the sea sometimes crawl for a mile or more across dewy meadows to reach streams that will carry them to salt water."  These are adult eels, silver eels, and this descent that slid down my mind is the fall from a long spring ascent the eels made years ago.  As one-inch elvers they wriggled and heaved their way from the salt sea up the coastal rivers of America and Europe, upstream always unto "the quiet upper reaches of rivers and brooks, in lakes and ponds--sometimes as high as 8,000 feet above sea level."  There they had lived without breeding "for at least eight years."  In the late summer of the year they reached maturity, they stopped eating, and their dark color vanished.  They turned silver; now they are heading to the sea.  Down streams to rivers, down rivers to the sea, south in the North Atlantic where they meet and pass billions of northbound elvers, they are returning to the Sargasso Sea, where, in floating sargassum weed in the deepest waters of the Atlantic, they will mate, release their eggs, and die.  This, the whole story of eels at which I have only just hinted, is extravagant in the extreme, and food for another kind of thought, a thought about the meaning of such wild, incomprehensible gestures.  But it was feeling with which I was concerned under the walnut tree by the side of the Lucas cottage and dam.  My mind was on that meadow.

It's a weird sight to contemplate:  silvery white eels wriggling/slithering across land toward the gurgle and rush of stream and river, which will carry them to the roar and crash of sea and ocean.  It's not a migration I would care to witness. I am not a fan of serpents, and there's nothing Biblical behind it.  I just find the idea of eels invading land a little . . . well, creepy.  Intriguing, but creepy.

The world is full of these kinds of sargassum sights.  Creatures that have adapted to survive.  Animals of the sea becoming animals of the land.  Animals of the land taking to the water or air.  Flying squirrels.  Flying fish.  Deep-sea mammals.  My life is fairly sheltered.  I don't witness too many of these wonders.  I have seen albino deer in a blizzard.  I even saw an albino skunk once.  But wonder is something that makes me a little nervous.

Last night, I wrote about a person whose life has sort of spun out of control in unimaginable ways.  That's what happens, I guess.  Just when you have it all figured out, when life is comfortable/predictable, something happens.  Forest fire.  Heart attack.  Car accident.  Shark frenzy.  Whatever.  Suddenly, you're an eel crawling through a meadow toward the sound and smell of salt water.

It's almost fifty degrees outside right now.  The snow piles are quickly dwindling, and the streets are turning to soup.  It feels like everything is shifting from snow to mud.  Tomorrow, there will be snow again.  This whole week has felt like that to me--changeable, unstable.  I don't know why.

It may have to do with spring break at the university, which just began.  Or the fact that I have to take a four-week online class, starting tomorrow.  Or my ennui with work, in general.  There's this blossom of disquiet in my heart.  I want something, but I don't know what it is.

There is no easy way to end this post.  No piece of wisdom to reveal.  There's just a silver eel slithering through the mud, under a silver moon, toward the promise of a wider, happier Sargasso Sea.

Saint Marty has a poem for you this evening.  A poem that makes that blossom in his heart a little smaller, easier to prune.

Zumba Gold at 9 AM

by:  Amy Uyematsu (published in Rattle magazine)

We are a throng of older women--yes, we are silver- and white-haired, or in my case, color-enhanced reddish brown, some with new knees and hips, others sporting flashy neon wristbands to tally how many steps, all of us ready to rumble in our rubber-soled shoes.  Our teacher Yvonne used to weigh 300 pounds.  Now she zumbas and runs, sports a modified Mohawk, sparkly bracelets stacked from wrist to forearm, and pink, lime, or lavender tank tops and sweats.  Her constant command:  "Smile!  This is spose to be fun!"  And it is, though a few in the crowd just don't get the steps, their faces so labored and lost.  Most of us, though, are having the best time we've had in decades, feel like we did in our teens, maybe better since we don't care anymore if we look uncool--heck, no pressure anymore from ogling adolescents or lascivious men.  Now nothing matters more than the way this Latin music pulls us in--our bodies set loose to congas and timbales.  We learn salsa, very New York City smooth, while Dominican merengue is frenzied and almost too fast to keep on beat.  We all like the song where we gyrate our hips, follow Yvonne in an unhurried blend of hula and belly dance, then raise arms and hands to shoo away something toward the sky, all of us joining the chorus, "amor--amor,, amor, amor"--not sure if we're sending love out to the universe or saying goodbye to a lover, our voices rising as one.  But my favorite, as always, is the cha, cha, which we got from Cuba.  I didn't know this in the '60s, when I cha cha cha'd to Chicano and Motown discs, doing it Eastside style with a swivel and dip.  Cha cha feels like I'm coming home, so easy and free, just a zumba-crazed grandma with bad knees--that's me.