The unbearable tristesse of grading.

Not that I'm actually grading. Not at all. I'm getting ready to grade. This means making contact with a handful of students who have been there all along, who have contributed in various ways to the class, and yet who have, somehow, managed not to turn in enough major assignments that the inescapable conclusion is--as in I cannot escape it--they will not pass. So: emails. You know, and then waiting for emails.

Perhaps you might say why are you doing this now? why didn't you do this weeks ago? At least these are questions I am asking myself. To which I reply, to myself: I was doing some things. Important things. Or anyway, I don't know, stop yelling!

It's kind of noisy around here, all the yelling, while I'm getting ready to grade.

Today was the last--the very last--day of teaching this semester. My poetry class met and we assembled our beautiful folios and then had a reading. When the students had a broadside from every other student, signed, I watched for a moment as they assembled and reordered their collections. It was perfect. It was everything I hoped for--the work of their colleagues collected in their hands.

This is why, at the moment, I feel a little sad. In fact, I had to lie down for a moment, that's how blue.

The way it works is, you prepare to grade (by grading, if you know what I mean). Then, you face the actual shape and scale of the reading ahead of you. You pace yourself (this is the luxury way of grading--if you are rushed, then your pace is a rush, and it is horrible and I do not recommend this rush strategy). You realize that you will be reading for a few days. You settle in for the pleasures (and frustrations and despair) of it all.

Essentially, you grade your way out of the melancholy, and that is good. It's the way of teaching, and it's a good way.

I am not at the moment on the 'having surmounted the sadness' side of grading. Also, I am still in need of more sleep. Tomorrow, I believe, it begins. And in a few days, I will feel better. If you're a teacher and you're about to grade, you will too.

Perspectival magic.

Today, I read this in the New York Times and it resonated hardcore:

Failure is big right now — a subject of commencement speeches and business conferences like FailCon, at which triumphant entrepreneurs detail all their ideas that went bust. But businessmen are only amateurs at failure, just getting used to the notion. Writers are the real professionals.

Just last night over an enchilada I was telling the historian how tired reading my manuscript makes me.

"But the poems aren't worse than they were. They haven't changed," I said. (Insert adverb, like plaintively.)

No, I'm just sick of them. Or right now I am. So that must mean that it's the downhill slope of summer.

I have had time to become sick afresh of my poems because my Scottish visitors are away--indeed, none of my children are here at the moment. They have been attending a family reunion in Logan and having a good time. Meanwhile, I have been recovering from a sinus cold and feeling a tad bereft. That's how I roll. Good times, sinus colds, limeade, bereftitude. It's a big fat aria of doldrums.

Did you start blogging again just to whine? I hear the people saying. Yes! yes I did, thanks for asking.

Let me start again. 

Here's what's been happening for the past few weeks:

Chalk art and breakfast and cookouts on the patio. Swimming with the cousins. Planting little pot-gardens. Bead necklaces. Stories at bedtime. Malcolm in the Middle watch parties. Doughnut tastings. A visit to the Museum of Natural Curiosity. Gardening in the evening. Laughing, quarreling, tears, and more laughter. Snacks galore. A full glory of summer childhood. 

Their brief absence over the last few days has meant I could take a nap. We went to the farmer's market and bought cherries and peaches and tomatoes. Of course, in the time they've been gone, I've also found the time to become weary of my poems, and to let melancholy bloom into view (as opposed to playing its usual gloomy bass note in the background). It's not like letting melancholy bloom is a great idea, I get that. But I have never been particularly decisive at marshaling my inner resources. My strategy is more to let the clouds cloud the sky--no one controls the weather--and know that they'll pass.

Soon they'll be back. I plan to bake this with them, and, I hope, see more movies, have more cool mornings on the patio, water the plants and discuss the habitat with the girls, make more Lego creations. We may need to eat more doughnuts. We have a handful to people still to see, and we need to finish one storybook and start and finish another. (I also need to unweary myself enough to make decisions about my manuscript...fresh courage take! Fail better!) An ending looms, but we'll all be trying to do that perspectival magic that keeps it at a distant hover until it is actually at the doorstep, with a bouquet of melancholy, a bevy of plane tickets, and an echo.

Dear Linda Ronstadt,

Tonight I had to drive downtown to a meeting. All the way downtown. Past the downtown Target, that's how far downtown. North of downtown, which meant that I had some listening time in the offing.

That could have been NPR time, or PRI time, or Q time, but I have to tell you, Linda, that none of that was cutting it for me. It's October, well into autumn now, and for autumn, you need a soundtrack for melancholy. That's just how it is. Those bright days fading to an earlier night: this calls for the music of your youth. Which brings me to you.

I remember driving around town in my folks' station wagon. These were the days, the seventies, when AM radio had music programming. It was the South Bay, Los Angeles, it was the summer before my senior year. I had a serious crush on a boy and that crush was always and forever going to be mostly unrequited. That was the year of your hit "You're No Good," which I liked to sing at the top of my lungs while driving. I liked to pretend that song was me singing to the boy, even though the boy was good. It still made me feel better.

I had the LP and I had the sheet music. I could play and sing the songs on the piano. You didn't write any of them, but your big, generous voice made the songs yours even so.

A couple of years ago I had a hankering to hear the songs again, so I downloaded the album. And a few weeks ago, I read somewhere that you really can't sing anymore--you've lost your voice because of Parkinson's. I don't know how that makes you feel. But tonight, driving north and then home again, I remembered how I felt when your music spoke for me, made the soundtrack to my summer, my teenage heartbreak, and my memories of a gorgeous time when the ocean gleamed on the horizon, my life was ahead of me, and the car radio played songs like yours.

I won't forget you,

htms


 how

Reset.

Every so often, I find myself in a moment where what I'm experiencing on the one hand, and the words I have on the other, are entirely incommensurate. That is, the words won't do, or the words I can find, or am willing to summon. Visiting and then leaving my daughter and her family, and going up to Idaho with another bunch of children and grandchildren, and my son and his family who are leaving soon to live in Arizona while he does graduate work. I promised myself I would live these experiences and be present for them, and I believe I have, and am.

Interestingly, while we were in Scotland I took a deliberate internet fast, for four days while we were on the road to York and back. And up in Idaho, the wireless situation at the cabin was ruinous. Which is to say for most of another four days, I was for the most part offline.

It's helpful to see, I suppose, that I don't have to be online. But it also means there's an interruption in the words--here and elsewhere--and then, when the means present themselves again, the words seem farther away, and more difficult, and entirely less adequate. I also have the sense that I almost don't want to write--that writing whatever this is would, in some sense, end it more thoroughly. And I still want to have it. I want to have all the experience, the joy and the ordinary happiness and the sadness, too, because while I have it I'm still in it, and when it's over, well, it will be over.

My daughter wrote about what seems to be a similar dilemma yesterday on her blog. She decided to post ten pictures to emblematize what was wonderful about the two weeks we spent in Scotland, and I have decided to do the same--a handful of images of what's been going on for the last month, and a few words about them.

Some of the pictures I've posted before, from Scotland, in one forum or another. Here's one from Alnwick Gardens, at the top of a huge cascading fountain. We spent a wonderful day in these gardens, which were in pretty close to a perfect state because of a long cold spring. These people are among the great beauties of that day.

 

This was one of the best parts of being in Scotland--the every day business, making breakfast and hanging out the wash, feeling the joy of a sunny morning and the promise, perhaps, of a sunny day altogether. We ate breakfast in the garden that morning--waffles, made on a brand new waffle iron. Can you see the children playing on the trampoline in the background?

  

The night before we left, we had planned to have an unbirthday party, since we are almost never together on birthdays. The girls took over the party planning, so it turned into a more straightforward farewell. They constructed a list of activities, which included a "Neatest Drawing" contest, a game of Pirates, Musical Bumps and Musical Statues, Hide (and find) the Book, Bite the Donut, and enough other games and contests that it would have taken days to properly execute them. So we did the best we could. They decorated and assembled prizes. A wonderful time was had by all. (Although the historian did his best, he did not win the Bite the Donut game, in case you're wondering--Raymond, my daughter's husband, who is a champion of many things, won the prize.)

  

In between the Scotland trip and the trip to Idaho, I visited my friend in Sonoma County. In a whirlwind trip, we talked about everything, ate beautiful food, saw the ruins of Jack London's Wolf House, ate some more beautiful food, talked about some more stuff, saw some movies, got me started on The Killing (which is killing me), and bought some stuff. In other news, I wore a dragon necklace that was a hit with the entire city of San Francisco that day.

 I drove with Deacon and Will to Idaho. This is a tradition, I think, since we have done it three years running. The last two years, my daughter who lives in Louisiana was my companion. We all missed her this year, since she needed to stay and work this summer. This year, my youngest son drove with me. I loved the conversations and music of this drive. I loved the company.

One of the sweetest things to me about being up at the cabin with my children and grandchildren is getting to see them with each other. At this point in my life, I can't even track how many moments I've observed. But I do try to notice, still.

Deacon has great confidence in his basketball abilities. With good reason.

Van is the little big man. He likes a ball for all purposes.

Everyone played ball (except the photographer, this time). Here's Lesley, planning her next slashing cut to the hoop.

William having his way with a swing.

 

Deacon makes an awesome action hero.

William wanted to hold Gwen, which he was able to do with a little support.

Here's Gwen having a bath in the basin in the sink, which is also traditional for new babies.

 

Yesterday, Father's Day, we went down to see my folks. My brother and his wife were in town. Both my sisters came over, and some nieces and a nephew, and my aunt. I'm feeling the preciousness of the time I get to spend with these people, and my parents especially.

That's fourteen images. It's been wonderful. I might cry at any moment. But the people, I plan to share more updates, more frequently. So check back soon. Tomorrow, even.

Rainy day letter.

Dear rainy day,

The other morning--Tuesday--when I woke up and you, rainy day, were happening, I was taken aback. I had a plan for what I would wear that was now rendered, entirely, moot. And the new plan wasn't all that helpful--while I had a raincoat, I did not have a hat nor an umbrella. In fact, out of all the clothes and accessories and accoutrements I have for weather, I have never really accounted for the way that rain gets one's head wet. Which meant, rainy day, that I walked to class carrying books and sheafs of poems, not to mention my regular purse and so forth, getting soaked and more soaked. Plus, that morning I treated my alarm like it was just a suggestion, so I was late. Late, panicky, and soaked.

Let me pause to ask: where is my umbrella? My hypothetical umbrella, which I contemplate purchasing every year. There are endless stylish umbrelli, umbrelli aplenty. You'd think I'd have bought one about ten times--but no, I have no umbrella, and thus I find myself periodically in a soaked frame of mind, questioning my judgement and also the weather.

But truthfully, the weather-questioning happens only briefly. I love rainy weather. In fact, rainy is the weather I carry around inside.

Periodically, one of the women in my writing group gets after me a little because--and this is absolutely true--much of what I write is melancholy, too melancholy from her point of view, like a moody teenager's work, except about grown-up subjects, and maybe the subjects are a moody teenager's too. I can't disagree with her. Sometimes I point this out to myself. But to rain and to melancholy I always find myself returning.

I had a big break in my work day today, and because the past few weeks have been full of long, long work days, I decided to leave campus for an hour or so. As I drove, the sky pillowy and pearly, I thought how lovely, how perfect, really. It's mid-April, the weather is cool, the weather is wet. The weather is not sunny, at least not commitedly so. It is the weather I want to be out in, or looking out upon. It is my best weather, and maybe that's why I do such a lame job of sheltering myself from it.

Rainy day, I am looking forward to a great, extended swath of you, with or without a hat.

Please don't let me down,

htms

couplet

And they're off.

Where have you been? you ask. Well, thanks for asking. It has been awhile. When I clicked "New Post," the iMac of Power hesitated a little--"Contacting www.blogger.com," it said, as if trying to remember what Blogger even was. Have we met, Blogger? You look awfully familiar.

The Scotlands left yesterday afternoon, the dad of the lovely family first, then the mom and two girls. And by "the mom," I mean, of course, my daughter, and by "two girls," my granddaughters. Their leaving doesn't abolish the fun we had. But I keep thinking of that fun in elegiac terms. I am an elegist by nature, I guess. Can't help grieving.

My middle daughter texted me yesterday: "Are you lonely? I sure am." The particular magic of this trip was that all the children--everyone here in Utah, and that's almost everyone, save my son the soccer coach--wanted to be with one another most of the time. It was mayhem and chaos and it was pretty much glorious. There were some quiet mornings, just us and the Scotlands, and a few quiet evenings; there were also more full-family dinners than I can count, some going out to lunches or the movies; some slip-n-sliding, some running through the sprinklers, lots of random imaginative games, story-reading, a few tantrums. A large-scale family hoopla, in other words. The full extravaganza.

I went to sleep last night with sense of a palpable absence--no small girls sleeping in bunkbeds downstairs. And woke up this morning to the same. We'll all get used to it and get back to our routines. For now, this quiet just seems empty. Empty-ish.

Utah, I am home.

Why are you unseasonably warm, Utah? Why are you developing a bad case of the smogs? Why does airline travel make one feel as though the blood has thickened ever so fatally in one veins, and also, and curiously, sweaty?

Utah, I have stories to tell about the curious pleasures of airports: a reason to read Esquire, a moment or 200 to oneself, the chance to read a whole book at a time, time to contemplate one's next move, time to think about and feel everything about the trip--how much fun one had and how much one misses the daughter one visited--and about home. But I am glad not to be in an airport now, even giving the airports their props--the flights were on time, people were helpful, my bag made it with me despite having to change airlines and a stop in Denver, both ways.

Mainly, though, Utah, I am glad to reconnect to my own life and routine. I am very glad to be with my husband. Tomorrow, I will develop rolls and rolls of film. I will be glad to have the photos to remind me of my darling daughter and of the wonderful places we visited together. I will take Bruiser (I believe he was named State Dog in my absence) for a walk. I will go to the bank and write a poem and begin reading a new book. I will see loved ones and eat Utah vegetables. I need to be here, I am glad to be here, though my heart, it turns out, my heart is both here and also everywhere.