Before the fire, wood
arrives in the converted bed
of a pickup truck, scarred
paint a match for hands
that wrench the tailgate free.
“Extra to stack it,” he says. Continue reading “Warm You Twice”
Tag: work
Tell-Tale Art
I tell him learning anything new takes practice. I tell him he isn’t yet an expert at chess and if he wants to be as skilled as his friend, he’ll have to keep taking lessons. I tell him he’s not good at all kinds of stuff yet. I tell him he’ll become talented at just about anything he wants badly enough to practice like crazy.
“You’re being mean!” he yells. He stomps into his room and slams the door.
When I go in later, he is curled up under the covers. “All I want is to play basketball,” he mutters. “That’s the only thing.”
I start to tell him something else but it’s probably a waste of breath. What good is it to keep telling at him like this? I reach to stroke his head and he actually lets me. “Do you know why you’re good at basketball?” He doesn’t answer. I lean in close to him. “You’re good at it because you’ve been doing it over and over and over again for years. Guess what? When you were really little, you couldn’t make shots at all.”
“Yes I could. I was always really good.”
“Sweetie, you were a baby once. And a toddler. Like that girl at the park today. Remember?” His classmate’s sister was there, trying to hurl her neon pink soccer ball up, up at the basket. She chased it down the hill, over to the fence, around the field. She could barely keep it on the court let alone shoot it anywhere close to its intended target. “You were like that once. Guess what else? You don’t play as well as those college players your daddy takes you to see. Not yet, but you can if you keep at it. They’ve had a lot more years to practice.”
“Yes I am! I am as good as them!” He hmphs around and pulls the blanket over his head. I sigh. I’m clearly blowing this.
“Listen. Just about everything in the world that you like was built or made by someone who didn’t know how to do it once.” I’ve gone right back to telling. There’s no stopping me now. I tell him someone didn’t know how to make pizza. They learned. Someone didn’t know how to make giant water slides. They learned. “Baby, if people decided that the things they are good at when they are seven years old are the only things worth doing, we wouldn’t have a whole lot. We wouldn’t have video games or houses or running water or cars or legos or anything.”
“Yes we would. I could make video games.”
I should shut up. I really need to learn to shut up. This is futile. A frustrated person is as deaf as granite and about as yielding. He doesn’t want to sign up for chess. Or piano. Or soccer or swimming or art or Spanish. His reply to every suggestion? “I don’t like it. I’m not good at it.”
But I don’t shut up. I keep going. I explain that reading used to be hard. He didn’t like practicing. He still doesn’t like practicing. But the more he does it the better he gets, and now he can find his way into stories without my help. Once he couldn’t read. Now he can. The bridge between the two is practice.
He says, “I could always read. I was just pretending I couldn’t.”
Okay. Message received. I close my trap, hug my boy, and give him a giant kiss on the head. “I love you, buddy. Let’s go get breakfast ready.”
He’s grumpy eating waffles because there’s not enough syrup. He’s mad when I brush his hair because it’s tangled and it hurts. He doesn’t want to take the bus but it’s too late to make it to before-school care. I ask him how his morning is going on a scale of one to ten.
“Zero”
“Great!” I say. “It can only get better from here!”
It matters that I stand on an incremental idea of intelligence. I’ve had to tell myself I believe it often enough that now I actually do. As opposed to seeing intelligence as a fixed entity, the incremental approach holds that effort and practice can change not only how smart you are but the ways in which you are smart. You can’t measure intelligence and even talent may be an illusion. Training grows skill like a muscle. Where you focus is where you become strong and where you don’t is where you won’t. A brilliant physicist might be a monstrous manager and the world’s worst dancer. As an accumulation of behaviors, intelligence is a habit of mind rather than a meaure of it.
It matters here because this conception has been the ladder I’ve used to climb out of a lifetime of self-talk so defeating it borders on abuse. Only part of mental health is explained by physiology. Like talent, depression is as much a habit of mind as it is an expression of seratonin levels. Choosing to see intelligence as a verb helps me recognize that feelings of resistance have absolutely nothing to do with whether or not I am cut out for a particular endeavor. Stuff is hard and it is especially so when it’s new. Every beautiful or terrible thing our species has fashioned has required perseverence. It would always have been much easier to give up.
It matters too because trusting in this version of intelligence might keep me from passing on to my son this legacy of globalizing distortions. Belief in fixed capacity is fertilizer for depression. I want both of us to practice the art of speaking out loud all the ways a person can grow more proficient in any number of languages. I want Bug to learn early the vocabulary of self-efficacy. Sure, he’ll be awkward. He’ll hit walls. Some new skills will be much tougher to acquire than others. Maybe my parenting optimism is on steroids today, but if I know my son is perfectly capable of mastery and that he will learn how to chart his own course, I can be his touchstone as he does battle with his limits.
But let’s be real here: it also doesn’t matter. My kid isn’t buying it. If he believes intelligence is fixed, guess what? It is. For Bug, being good at something means it is supposed to be effortless. A person is naturally talented at some things and those are the things he should do. This idea baffles me.
“I hate this day,” he says as shrugs into his jacket. It is only 8:40 a.m.
When I walk Bug to the bus, other parents and kids are there waiting. Anxiety about my son’s attitude is a backpack full of wet concrete. I can talk up one side of Mt. Everest and down the other telling the world what I believe but my child is only going to want to learn new things if they are beguiling enough to make him want to trade in his ease for the effort required.
What is the currency for a seven-year-old? This: whatever other seven-year-olds decide has value.
But I am a loner of a mother. Where would I begin to plug my son into the allure of new activities if he’s already decided he isn’t interested? Which kids in my son’s school play saxophone or collect snakes? I don’t have a clue what the names of Bug’s classmates are, let alone their hobbies. What I know of their parents wouldn’t fill a teaspoon. My son has been in this school for nearly two years and I couldn’t identify his best friends if they rode up past our house on a St. Patrick’s Day float.
Besides, I’m not good building community.
Making new friends is scary. Remembering names is hard. I don’t like it. Why can’t I just stay inside my cozy house and write and dance and bake pumpkin bread with my son? I like doing that stuff. I’m good at that stuff.
Thanks, universe. Got it.
The dad at the bus stop nods a hello as he has on all the other mornings. My turn to endure the telling. It whispers, Every single amazing, effortless activity in the world was hard once. I take a deep breath and re-introduce myself. I say I’m looking forward to seeing his girls out now that it’s getting warmer. Maybe we could all go to the park? He mentions that his family goes to Nationals games and that they’d love for us to join them when the season starts. “You know what?” I say, pulling out my phone. “We’ll never make it happen if we don’t exchange numbers.” He texts me his name, his wife’s, his children’s.
I’m not good at it this. The vulnerability makes me squirm. On my way home, I run into another neighbor in the hallway. It would be so easy to pass her with a polite hello but all that telling is still clanging around. The degree of difficulty of an endeavor bears no relation to its suitability. I force myself to slow down long enough to have a conversation. After the requisite small talk, she confesses she’s been having a hard time getting to know neighbors since moving in last fall. Also, could she come by to see my bamboo floors? She and her husband are remodeling and want to replace the carpet with hardwood.
Baby, the telling whispers, if people decided that the things they are good at when they are forty are the only things worth doing, our world would be a dismal place indeed.
I tell her I’d love for her to come by.
As I head out to my car, I feel a bouyancy breathing under the anxiety of these new commitments. The telling whispers, There was a time before Thomas Edison knew how to work a telegraph machine. Before Langston Hughes could pen a verse.
Thanks, I tell it back. Nice work.
Keep Moving
Anxiety is love’s greatest killer… It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him but you know he will strangle you with his panic.
– Anais Nin, February 1947
It is when the air tilts. The ground splits open. You tip over the edge of the only map you have and don’t know if you will land, let alone where. It happens thousands of times in a life. If you are willing, you could find yourself there as many times in a day.
To keep moving when no way is clear and every choice uncertain is at the heart of mortality and motherhood, of art and work and love.
Damned Spot
A year at least.
A splash on the threshold
in the shape of a star
if stars were ink
or soup. From the long slate
corridor into this rhomboid cocoon
breathing in the milk perfume
How can I help you?
step the fresh and the fretting
alike. They pass over
and over months, we tuck
paper into tray, stand up
the silver frame and spiral
notebook at right
angles to the phone,
slake the incessant thirst
of the philodendron and before emptying
the recycling bin, fan
pencils into bouquets of pink buds promising
industry
or at least
the pleasing semblance of it. Continue reading “Damned Spot”
Keep Stirring
When you heat the sugar and butter, you have to keep the temperature low. Never stop stirring. This means either working backwards or having a helper handy. Ideally both. When it is time for the vanilla, you will not be digging in the cabinet for it, unless you like your caramel smoked. The candy thermometer will become goopy and steamed, the phone will ring, and you will remember you forgot to butter the pan. Do not turn around. Whoever is on the other end cannot chop the pecans for you, and that person has already bought Christmas cupcakes for her kid’s class.
You wanted to use your hands. This is what you get: a burnt fingertip from believing the thick taupe suede to be a solid thing, just because your tongue was fooled into longing for something it would have had anyway, given one teaspoon of restraint.
Nothing you buy from the store will be half as good as even your most mediocre effort. This is what you know to be true, even if the sequined and tiara-studded confections behind the glass case whisper their siren song. Keep stirring.
Do not check the recipe again or grab ice for your blister. You know the steps by heart. You know the hard-ball stage cannot be rushed and will never be passed – never, because the kitchen clock always moves as if treacle has gummed the gears. Turn down the flame. You should not be able to hear it roar. The only sound that will come is the low moan of the air making its sluggish escape from the candy as it roils. Keep the spoon moving.
The recipe card is written in your grandmother’s script. Shaky, even then. What a thing, her hand: here and also not. Perhaps alive somewhere, in its way, because of microbes and the relentless pull of decay and rebirth everywhere, even in that crimson box they lowered into an Oklahoma hilltop a decade ago. A decade!
This, too: she, alive and also not. The jagged flourish of her script is frozen in motion all the way onto the next line. The 3×5 card is yellowing and blotched with boiled fat, caramelized Karo, and something hard. Another dish, maybe? This recipe, caught in the holiday crossfire. Cornbread stuffing, perhaps, or the clove and orange peel glistening on the crusted pink hide of the sacrificial ham.
She did not stop until her heart did. But which was she? The heart? Or the girl whose powdered cheeks betrayed a heady blush as the boy whirled her across the dance floor? She kept her hands so pliable, the old lady skin as delicate as honeysuckle petals and just as fragrant. How she managed this is one of life’s great mysteries. She stood over boiling sugars and popping Crisco. She took up the catfish who’d been, just that morning, blissfully sucking mud at the bottom of Murray lake, and dragged the poor fellow through bread crumbs and egg before releasing him to his oily fate. She donned the apron and held at least one corner of that restaurant’s kitchen on the hollow bones of her narrow scapulae.
Even so, nothing caved in. No part of her contracted into hardness. The blisters didn’t callous and the wounds of her unplanned servitude never thickened into scars.
When she was in her final year and no longer venturing near the stove, she asked me to rub her hands. Beneath that most delicate tissue purpled like Monet’s garden were thick, arthritic roots delving down to the springs below, blocking the way. She ached all over. “Oh, sugar, it hurts something awful.” She had spent a lifetime trying to restrain the tears ducking just behind her voice. She’d spent that same lifetime failing.
I took her hand and pressed into the tender meat between the thumb and forefinger, holding back my full strength because by then, she was made of air and moonless night. Her marrow had long since leached out into the prairie grass for the copper cattle and oil rigs to pull back up when the time is right.
Those last years, she was draining away but age had not taken her best self, only the extra, the unneeded weight, the constraining thoughts. The only things left were softness and pain. Also those relentless tears. Also the bottomless hunger for touch.
They say that if luck favors us (or scorns us, as the case may be) with a long enough life, each of us returns to infancy.
With my fingers, I drained what I could of the useless strength in her hands. What was the use of muscle and its dedicated ache? What did she need with holding? I had taken up her place at the stove, the ink, as the bearer of a name on my own more robust shoulder blades. My only job was to help guide her back gently to the womb of a woman waiting on a hill in the morning sun. That matriarch had herself returned to forgiving clay. At last, the serrated edges were worn from her mother’s tongue.
In the trunk I hauled from the foot of my grandmother’s bed into my own home 1500 miles away, I find the gloves she had worn in an earlier life. The embroidered delicacies are white kid and cotton, hand stitched and studded with graying rhinestones. Also from that steamer trunk rises a gust of the same aging honeysuckle that clung to her and forever softened her.
This was her secret? Something so simple? The gloves do not fit over my swollen knuckles. Thick digits already leathered in the first third of my time on this planet strain at the seams (though I do try to force myself into that silken sheath. Who wouldn’t?) I put them away for a keepsake since they will never grow to envelop me nor will I, God willing, ever shrink sufficiently to squeeze in.
I close the trunk and wonder if her determination to stay soft was the toughest part of her. Her man may have cornered her in that crucible in the back of the restaurant. Necessity may have demanded she plunge her hands into whole chickens and dice bushels of yellow onions for the soup. She may not have had any real choice but to stir and stir those cauldrons of beef and butter beans for paying customers. Kids and mortgages greeted the young, bewildered families at the end of the war. And maybe it was impossible to buck a man built of the same stuff of stud bulls and dust bowl hickories.
Maybe all of this is true.
Also, she chose.
Do not be fooled: selecting from among just one option is its own act of defiance. Submission is never truly complete as long as the one doing it decides to submit. Somewhere down below even the most bending grass is one deep root that cannot be split, not even with the sharpest spade.
And so she stayed. With him, she stayed:
Soft, the most tender, and forever threatening to tremble into a watery mess. She stayed:
Alive ten years beyond him, then a few more. She was the one whose hands rested in the warm grip of her grown sons and granddaughters during her final months. It was her timeline that claimed a stretch in which the tears could come without reprimand. She let them come and found, to no one’s surprise but her own, that on the other side of pain, when someone finally rubs it free, all that’s left is a heap of stupid giggles, memories of first kisses and big-eared boys, and a craving for the caramels made in the cluttered kitchens of the women who taught us to keep stirring.
Studies and Honorable Pursuits
Cedit amor rebus; res age, tutus eris (Ovid)
Object of the Game
It isn’t the gray. It is not the shaft of air tunneling down the black or even the thin promise of light. It is not the howl of gears in need of oil and spit and breath, the places where teeth rub against brittle skin worn to rust and grit. It is not the blood even or the lost child or the empty wallet or the anticipation of want.
It is a recollection. Become a parent and everything changes. Down we go, compelled.
Once I played Mancala on the sofa of a shelter with a girl who had a child.
Her own mother stayed there, too. Three generations in one borrowed room. She told me her mother had taught her the game. In the smooth divots of that wooden palette, she doled out glass beads. Our turns shifted the place they needed to land. Each play altered the number of beads in our hand. The little marbles dropped, leading us around the board. We were Hansel and Gretel following gemstone breadcrumbs, trying to find a way home. Count, calculate, move, hold your breath. Nothing stays. Someone comes like a crow to pluck your shiny things. She told me she learned so well her mother refused to play her anymore. She needed someone who would be willing to lose. She had never lost.
We sat in front of the ceiling-high windows. The panes of glass looked out onto a street in her neighborhood. It was the place she had been born and raised, the place she could not find that just-enough combination of work + babysitting + bus fare to make rent. Who would have taught her how? Her mother was on the other futon in their room upstairs. She slid the gleaming bits of glass, 2-3-4. She said she decided she was going to master this game. She didn’t care if it made her mom feel bad to lose. She needed to win. This was her chance.
I was no help at all working there. I had no job leads, no contact at the ANFC. Nothing but the key to the locker where donated diapers and spaghetti-os lived. That, and keeping watch. In the heart of a city both cagey and caged, I could bar the doors and ensure an unmolested night.
There on the sofa, I was merely a convenient opponent. Company. This was more than nothing, though not by much. Do we not know this now? In a situation so dire, who can endure remembering without pause? The relentless press of need will cripple the very capacity required for filling it. Who can hold awareness of how much is required, how many miles the blistered feet must still cover, without curling into a ball? Without giving up entirely? I was a vehicle for distraction. For collecting glittering baubles. Anything but the Real for that precious pause.
You work and work and work just to keep getting up again to work some more. You are an accident of birth and the blind flailing towards some kind of coherent life. From the time you are little. You do your homework or you put it off, you start a lemonade stand or you peddle drugs. You aren’t getting closer to anything it all it seems until one day, there it is: A door. One of your company walks on through and the other is still trying to stumble down the corridor. Then it whispers shut. Then is gone and with it that first one, the one who was only just steps ahead. Behind a wall without a way through. That other self. That could-have-been.
That doppelganger.
Who sits across you from the couch, offering nothing but company. And a silencing of the noise of everything that still must be done to keep your child safe, to give her some chance of getting down that dark tunnel faster than you ever did before the door slips shut.
In the low light of those oversized windows, the girl with no place to live taught me her game of strategy and luck. She beat me every time until I learned. Then she didn’t stand a chance. I was young. She was younger but had more years under her belt by far. Ages. Epochs. I held all the advantage and forgot to let her win there in that one place where she could. We put the board away. She went up to the room to rouse her child from her hot nap. I went home.
Her baby would be 20 now. Older than the girl was then.
Did her little one make it? Did she arrive? Did she beat her mother at the game?
There are doors here. We find them. For our children. We push our way down that black tunnel. Push past the terror. Down past where we know others have gone. Some have tipped over the edge into pits we dread. Others slipped out into those places just beyond, those places we ache to be.
We feel blindly at the edges of damp concrete and steel, press our hands down into those cracks where the grime collects. Where the gears bite and groan. We know the danger. We also know there is a treasure there. A lever to pull. A place where things fall open. We seek the shape of the doors we only vaguely recognize. We have seen the shafts of light. Even if we missed our own chance, we remember the feel of the air blowing through. That noise, that thump and howl, it could just be the empty wind. Also, it could be a trumpet song trying to find its way to our ears. It could be music somewhere here. A stage door opening onto string and brass. The velvet curtain lifting. A trough of glass beads. All of what was lost and more, glittering there for our children to claim as their own.
Happy 100 Days: 43
After a conversation with the boss-lady this morning about how to avoid getting sucked into the minutiae of the job, I printed off Stephen Covey’s time management matrix and gave her a copy.
“Oh my God,” she said. “I live in Quadrant 3.”
“Don’t we all,” I sighed.
In my personal life, I am much better at staying up in the desired Quadrant 2 where leadership and quality are nourished. I choose to write every night before bed, not because this is pressing (the world will go on if I don’t post on my blog), but because I have decided it matters. The same is true for morning Zumba, the nightly walk, the ongoing tasks associated with the housing search, and immersing myself in human development literature to support my son’s growth. These projects came about not because someone demanded them of me but because I chose to make them priorities. The urgency was not there, so I had to create a sense of urgency. These practices allow meaningful activities to enrich my life. I feel closer to my purpose. Also, new possibilities keep opening up and piquing my curiosity. I feel almost no pull towards the mind-numbing stuff that populates the Quadrant of Waste.
Work looks very little like that. At least, it doesn’t anymore. The first six months at the job, I was focused and directed because I had so much to learn and only 8 hours in which to learn it. Mastery required organization, and so I created it.
Two years later, it is easy to let myself coast. I respond quickly to the immediate but trivial items that fill up a calendar. Like so many of my university’s administrators, I am excellent at managing the little realm of my position and providing a useful service to my 150-ish students and assorted faculty and staff. All of us on this team are resourceful and efficient. We keep things humming.
We live on the left, skipping between 1 and 3, the Quadrants of Necessity and Deception. We feel like we are working hard because we are. Our students, supervisors, and faculty members commend us for doing very well at keeping on top of the complex admistrivia of our programs.
The cost of all this availability is that we fail to cultivate growth and change. When do we craft vision for new ways of operating? When do we turn off the immediacy and dig ourselves down into the deeper projects? We all have those phantom items on our to-do list, those things we know would open up new doors for us in our work and improve the practices in which we engage.
The top 10 items on my wish list include the following:
- Writing a monthly post related to PhD student development on the school’s news website
- Attending an annual conference of my professional organization
- Reaching out to the directors of two other university offices to craft a writing group on our campus for doctoral students (and possibly faculty) to support each other in writing for publication
- Calling up the woman who runs the lifelong learning institute to find out about partnership/teaching opportunities for our students
- Seeking out folks on the main campus who have similar roles in their units in order to begin building a network of graduate student services professionals
- Doing the same as in #5 with folks from the consortium of Washington area colleges and universities
- Teaming up with a faculty member to re-establish the teaching methods workshop series we ran in 2011
- Kick-starting the monthly lunchtime social hour for PhD students and faculty
- Involving myself in the university’s 10-year visioning process
- Cobbling together ideas to enhance wellness offerings for grad students on my campus
This is the first time I have ever written these items down in one coherent format. I am only peripherally aware of this list and am only marginally willing to acknowledge it, even here. It is a little frightening to write into existence the bigness of all we want to create in our professional lives. Considering how much sweat the small items require, who would want to take on more?
Unless that “more” can become both manageable and fun. Having uninterrupted time as an individual or a team to play with some of these projects might even turn them into play. It won’t work unless we know that the other urgent tasks will have our full focus at some pre-determined point later. Then we can relax enough to turn the attention towards grappling with bigger ideas.
It appears that a more systematic approach to the daily schedule is called for.
For me, the first step is tracking — and then letting go of — all the ways I let myself drift into the Quadrant of Waste during a workday.
This afternoon, I gave it a go. I am lucky to have good practices at home to guide me. There, I sit down an hour or so before bed and I simply begin writing. No aimless wandering, no trolling the internet, no pausing to watch a show on TV. Everything else steps aside and I write.
I did the same at the office. I told my boss I was shutting the door.
“Are you calling your realtor?” She asked.
“No! I’m going into Quadrant 2!”
“Oooh,” she grinned. “Good luck!”
And I did it. Two solid hours of reading, research, writing. I left the email for the end of the day when I knew my brain would not be on the bigger tasks anyway. By 4:00, I had completed the following:
- Read two dense scholarly articles on glucocorticoid responses to stress and their effects on learning
- Signed up to participate in the university’s Appreciative Inquiry visioning process next month
- Drafted a post for the department website
- Became a member of NASPA
- Navigated the university’s travel authorization system
- Began the process of registering for a spring conference in Orlando
I’m fired up for all the little seeds now germinating. Tomorrow and after the holiday break, it will be fun to start giving clearer shape to my work day so that I can water and weed as necessary.
Quadrant 2, baby! It’s my new home away from home!
—
More on Steven Covey’s ideas here.
Happy 100 Days: 84
Some days, happy is not a feeling. It is taking a blowtorch to the invasive species. It is burning off the tangle that has choked off the native leaf. Remember those parasitic cuttings you pushed into your soil when you did not know better? Remember when the blossoms made you stupid and the fragrance made you swoon?
Remember the beautiful lie?
Those fine tendrils have twisted into steel coils. You see now, can’t you? How it happens?
Your folly then can be forgiven. Your devotion now cannot.
Some days, happy is not a bouquet. Some days, it is the making way.
It is the slash and burn.
And so, the purge.
(In the absence of a conflagration, an industrial shredder will do.)
Some days, happy is not a state of being. It is a trowel and a bucket of wet cement. It is an intention. A slog, even.
Some days, you are down below the frost line, down at the foundation only just dug, cramming blocks against the cold mud and plastering them into place. You are following the plumb line. You haven’t seen the sun in days.
You do not need to look up. It is still there. Trust me. It will be there again. But now, you are building a floor. You are making your shelter. You are climbing towards the sky.
Some days, happy is not.
And yet, you still find a box full of tools right there at your feet, and your hands are still at work, and the ground still holds.
Some days, the evidence suggests otherwise. But yes. The ground holds.
Happy 100 Days: 88
At the end of a long Friday at the end of a long week, I am missing my son’s birthday dinner because I have to work late. This is really okay, I keep telling myself, because I took him out to breakfast at Bob Evans and walked him to school myself. We carried the brownies for snack time in a hand-painted shoe-box. I will see him for a few hours on Saturday, and I have taken the day off on Monday because his school is out even though my university is not. And we were up late and up early, and then there is the actual swimming-pool birthday party next weekend, and and and.
But it is 3:50pm on the Friday of my son’s birthday, and I am upstairs in the windowless meeting room rolling around pre-fab tables to prepare for a series of presentations by doctoral students on public policy research.
This is my job. I love my job. I love my doctoral students, and I am curious about their passions, even when they start growing breathless over things like “financial liberalization in emerging market economies and international capital flows.” Yes, even that.
Several times in any given month, I seat myself in a room like this and drink from the information fire-hose. Sometimes it is a dissertation proposal. Sometimes it is an actual dissertation defense, the candidate as crisp and polished as a new apple but damp at the temples and speaking too fast. At weekly brown-bag lectures, faculty members talk about their projects. Peppered throughout the year are seminars by visiting professors, mini-conferences, and workshops like these where budding scholars present current research in a faux-conference setting in order to prepare for the real thing.
This program does a fine job expanding analytic capabilities and policy expertise, but most of the PhD students are just sort of expected to figure out how to present. Some are further along the curve than others. I have been wowed by a couple of rising stars who have employed both art and editing to design trim presentations with moments of humor woven into tightly organized structures. Most, however, cram 197 words on a slide, whisper and “um” through 25 uninterrupted minutes, and slog through table after table swimming with microscopic bits of data. Without a hair of irony, they refer to the endogeneity vs. the exogeneity of their various stochastic models, and their committee members let them get away with this gobbedly-gook. Everyone in the room, it is assumed, understands this language (where do you think the students learned it?) and anyway, the rest of the feeble-minded masses can just sit in the back and smile pretty.
At most of these things, I try to pay attention to the presentation itself. Masters degree notwithstanding, I usually only kind sorta comprehend the first and last quarters of each presentation. The middle chunk? The part that starts when the chi-squared flashes up on the screen? That’s where my bulb dims. So, I shift gears and attend to the presenter’s tone, body language, slides, tempo. The topic is beyond me, but I hope to give the student decent feedback on areas of strength and potential improvement. I am a quasi advisor, after all, so it’s nice to have something about which to advise when the best I can offer on the subject matter is, “Love how you had both an independent and a dependent variable! Super cool!”
So now it’s 4:00pm on the Friday of my son’s birthday and we are starting late because a few faculty members who had volunteered to provide feedback are not here yet. The students are here. More show up to support their peers (At 4:00pm! On a sunny, 81-degree Friday!), then more, until almost every chair in the room is taken, and professors keep sneaking in and grabbing the coveted back-row seats. We all finish our supermarket cookies and settle in.
The first presenter begins.
And she is good.
I mean it. Good! Her topic is fascinating. She is a stronger speaker than when she started the program a year ago. Her research explores the relationship between childhood obesity and participation in certain kinds of leisure physical activity. Specifically, she asks whether spatially expansive activities (she explains, God bless her, that this means things that need lots of room to do, like soccer on a field) are more significantly correlated to low body mass than, say, activities like playing Wii, jumping rope, or even recreational swimming.
Relevant! Easy to follow! Her data, though problematic in ways that the peanut gallery discusses with her, are clear. She actually takes time to explain them. She even had the foresight to keep the research questions simple enough to tackle in a 20-minute presentation.
It is 4:35pm on the Friday of my son’s birthday. After a short break, the next presenter begins. I take a breath and prepare to busy myself with my to-do list. My list does not stand a chance. Another fascinating topic. This one is about land use in Lahore, Pakistan. He has big maps illustrating population growth in the developing world, and I learn all sorts of things about suburban sprawl, corruption, and the history of colonization.
By the third, presentation, I have stopped watching the clock. This one tracks the policy implications of the de-institutionalization of people with intellectual disabilities in Virginia. This, in a state with active institutions 40 years after the Supreme Court case that was supposed to do away with such approaches to the special needs population? Curious! Appalling! So much more to explore!
It is 5:35pm on the Friday of my son’s birthday. I have a heap of questions to ask every presenter, and we have to cut off discussion because half a dozen hands hover in the air, people are sitting forward in their seats, and we were supposed to be done five minutes ago. I help one of the student organizers pack up the equipment. “This was really so good,” I tell her. “This was the first one of these I’ve been to. . .” I stop, realizing I’m not sure how to say it without insulting the entire student body.
“Where all three presentation were actually interesting? I know!” She says, laughing. We fold up the cords and tuck them away. “Usually once the equations come up, I’m a goner,” she tells me sotto voce. “I know I’m supposed to understand that stuff, but boy, it’s nice to hear a presentation that doesn’t take so much work to follow.”
We grin together. She actually had to get a half-decent score on the GREs to get into this program, and I know she has received high grades in her statistics courses so far. It’s comforting to know the bright people I revere occasionally feel like dimwits.
It is 5:45pm on the Friday of my son’s birthday, and I explode out onto the sunny plaza and stride to the metro. On the ride home, I give myself the delicious pleasure of reading a Jonathan Lethem short story in a rumpled New Yorker I found in my office. I have missed my son’s birthday dinner, but traffic smiles on me and I catch Bug at home a few minutes before his dad comes to pick him up. We open the last of the presents. We cuddle on the couch and read a sweet little Patricia Polacco book called Mrs. Katz and Tush. Larnell shares a Kugel with Mrs. Katz who is alone on Passover after her Myron dies. (“My Myron,” she sighs. “What a person.”)
It is six years to the day after my son pushed his way into the world. Life looks absolutely nothing like I imagined it would. That night, someone dropped onto my naked chest a real boy. I felt him land there, that complete and living human, and I whispered, “Welcome to the world, little guy.”
The world, you know. Such as it is.
It is 10:40pm on the Friday of my son’s birthday, and I am alone in the spare room of my parent’s house. The night may not be as sweet as I expected, but oh, how rich the flavor.
Shannon E. Williams 