Overheard

Student: I love poems! They're so much easier because they don't have to make sense!

Me: Hey, cuff your socks so the logo doesn't show, please.
Student: Why?
Me: It's the dress code. Also, I've heard it's a sign of gang activity.
Student: I plead the first!

Me: What are you doing?
Student: I need to jump to my death from that chair.
Me: . . . ?
Student: I'm playing Aegeus.

What Abraham Meant

And besides all this –

Besides wars and floods,

Besides illness and death,

Besides storms and earthquakes,

Besides random and orchestrated violence,

Besides the sinister, rippling presence of evil,

 

Between us and you –

Between east and west,

Between young and old,

Between shunned and shunning,

Between fruitful and barren,

Between colored and colorless,

 

A great chasm has been fixed.

In the passive voice:

We don't know who fixed it,

or why,

or how.

Just that it’s been fixed.

 

In order that those who would pass –

Would transcend difference,

Would accept a new perspective,

Would warm stone and soften iron,

Would build ladders and weave bridges,

Would step outside of their other-ness,

 

From here to you –

From then to now,

From imprisoned to free,

From stuck to inspired,

From rocky to smooth,

From one to two to ten,

 

May not be able –

Able to embrace,

Able to understand,

Able to smile bravely,

Able to foster renewal,

Able to see through the fog,

 

And none may cross –

None of the lonely,

None of the trapped,

None of the repentant,

None of the ordinary,

None of the suffering,

 

From there to us.

Six Ways to Sunday

Every day these little vignettes pass me by, when Sunday's peace seems a distant memory and I'm just trying to make it through another week. But now that I have a five-day weekend to reflect (thank you, late winter storm!) I find them coming back to me, making me smile all over again.

  1. We've just finished learning venir, to come, and bid goodbye to the early-dismissal track star; as she leaves, I explain to the class that revenir, to come back, is conjugated the same way. "So if you want to ask someone to come ba--," and inspiration cuts me off. I stride to the doorway and shout, "REVIENS!" She halts, bewildered, and the class dissolves in laughter. Meanwhile, the students in the hall get a sneak preview of my new advertising campaign for the French program.
  2. My favorite lesson of the whole year happens to be the day of my annual observation. I guide the class in the rhythmic tapping of iambic pentameter, the beating of the heart through the poet's words. Da-DUM. Da-DUM. Da-DUM. Now cracks a noble heart. Goodnight, sweet prince! Oh no, it is an ever-fixed mark. Titania waked and straightway loved an ass. Hyperbole, metaphor, double entendre. Richly-laden lines twist over and around them until their own are pouring forth: Australia is a lovely place to be.  My doggie loves to play and roll in snow. Morning coffee suddenly sounds poetic, and sunburned afternoons call to them from future summers. When the bell rings, my department chair apologizes for staying through the whole period: "I just didn't want to leave."
  3. Midway through a quiz, a student decides to reword a sentence and spends a good three minutes crossing it out. Her laborious scraping of pen on paper is finally interrupted with the clean smack of a whiteout pen on her desk, delivered with silent reproach by her neighbor who doesn't even look up from her own work. I can't help but laugh: that girl will make a great mom someday.
  4. During a "free" period as I'm hustling through the next batch of papers, I comment on one: "When I die, I want you to write my obituary." I am completely serious. If she can make a paper about Salinger sound as fresh and hopeful as he wasn't, I imagine she could do a lot for my posthumous public image. 
  5. Two separate parents, within a week of each other, thanked me for being hard on their children. "This is part of growing up," one said. "She needs to take responsibility for her actions," said another. My faith in modern parenting ceased its precipitous freefall and actually took a few halting, hopeful steps back toward the light.
  6. In the stairwell, as students jostle each other to get to break and I attempt to keep out of the way, I spot one who is particularly pained by the tangle of backpacks and ponytails. "This is SO not ideal," she huffs. I suppress a smile, but as I consider her words over the next few days, I realize it's a perfect thesis statement for my life. Maybe for yours, too.

Glory to God for All Things

What do you do when you lose your family, possessions and livelihood in one terrible day? If you're Job, you resist the impulse to write country music and instead give glory to God, who blesses you with even more than you lost.

Roughly two thousand years later, another dedicated servant of the Lord was dying in exile from the empire he had struggled to evangelize all his life. St. John Chrysostom, with his final breath, praised his creator: "Glory to God for All Things!"

Another millenium and a half after that, a Russian priest composed a beautiful Akathist, a sort of prayer poem, based upon those words:

When the lightning flash has lit up the camp dining hall, how feeble seems the light from the lamp. Thus dost Thou, like the lightning, unexpectedly light up my heart with flashes of intense joy. After Thy blinding light, how drab, how colourless, how illusory all else seems. My souls clings to Thee.

He knew whereof he spoke: the "camp dining hall" was at a Communist prison camp where Fr. Gregory Petrov, after numerous tortures, died in 1940. From hearing the hymn, you would never guess at the circumstances under which it was written. We sing it every year on the eve of Thanksgiving, and every year I find some new nugget of wisdom to treasure in my heart:

Glory to Thee for Thy goodness even in the time of darkness, when all the world is hidden from our eyes.
Glory to Thee, sending us failure and misfortune that we may understand the sorrows of others.
Glory to Thee for what Thou hast revealed to us in Thy mercy; Glory to Thee for what Thou hast hidden from us in Thy wisdom.
Glory to Thee, building Thy Church, a haven of peace in a tortured world.

Glory to Thee for the humbleness of the animals that serve me. (This one always makes me smile. Clearly, Fr. Gregory Petrov never owned a cat.)

This morning I am mindful of the "endless variety of colors, tastes and scents" as I assemble a salad, stuff a squash, cook down a whole bag of onions into a tiny caramelized pile (for transcendence, just add bacon, bourbon and brown sugar -- oh, Bittman!) and try not to eat ALL of the cookies I baked yesterday. It may seem small compared to what else is going [wrong] in the world, but our God gives beauty in abundance, even to the tiniest moments.

Most of all, I am mindful of the "love of parents, the faithfulness of friends." What friends you all are, especially for calling and writing and grabbing my arm to ask where I've been and why I haven't written. There is no reason besides the busy-ness of life. I thank God for this blog, one of the few relationships I have that doesn't inspire guilt when I let it go temporarily. When I pick it up again it feels just like an old friend. Just like you.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Quoth the Students

“‘The Raven’ sounds like a Dr. Seuss book.  Only … more depressing.”

“What’s ‘surcease of sorrow’?”

“Mrs. Lowe, you read that so well!  You should be, like, an actress!”

“I don’t know what literary devices Poe uses in the fourth stanza, but there’s a piece of paper on your shoe and it’s been driving me crazy.”

“So, he’s basically crazy, right?  ‘Cause birds can’t talk.”

“You look just like my cousin, Mrs. Lowe … she’s 5.”

“That made absolutely no sense.  Who’s Lenore, anyway?”

“Plutonian … Plutonian … OH!  I KNOW!  Pluto, like the dog?”

Modern Love

So a couple of nights ago, instead of grading papers or cleaning the kitchen, I went to the movies.  Ever since I read in The Week that the *average* rating of Drive was four stars, I had wanted to see it — even though I enjoy cars less than probably anyone else I know.

It was just as fantastic as everyone says it is: gripping and understated at the same time.  I don’t want to go into a lot of detail (I’m certainly not a qualified film critic) but I think what got under my skin the most, and has stayed with me in the days since, was the depiction of the side-note love story between the two main characters.

(Possible spoilers ahead, depending on your pickiness; continue at your own risk.)

They meet honorably: he holds the elevator door for her and watches with an eager, shy smile as she enters her apartment on the same floor.  Later, he listens in on a sweet, intimate conversation between her and her son, and he helps fix her ailing car in the parking lot.  As their relationship deepens, we watch as they watch each other, laugh together, care for her son.  They spend a lot of time just smiling, bashful in each other’s presence but unable to shake the wide-eyed adoration they feel for one another.  Physical contact is limited to a squeeze of the hand and one glorious, passionate kiss in the elevator just before they are separated forever.

The things they love about each other are apparent.  She is a nurturing mother with a sense of adventure; he is protective, dependable and comfortable in almost every situation.  They are both beautiful (hey, it’s Hollywood.)  But it’s not their physical attractiveness we see; it’s the strength of their character, strength that’s reinforced as they grow closer together and help each other cope with problems and celebrate victories. And, despite their love for each other, they each choose something even higher — she, her marriage; he, her family’s safety — in the end.

Is there anything that’s more beautiful than this?  And, basking in the warmth and purity of it, how can we stand to be confronted by the sheer drivel of Sex in the City and its counterparts in film, the relentless stream of romantic comedies that washes over us every summer?

I realize a movie is just a story.  But I don’t think it’s too much to ask that it use that hour or two to say something meaningful.  A movie like that can just take your breath away.

The Dialectics of Dialect

It's always a fun surprise to study the Imagists in the midst of studying Gatsby.  Although published within a decade of each other, the works are about as far apart as two works can be: on one hand are Fitzgerald's crazy aphorisms -- "There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired" -- and on the other, this:
so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens.

The students reacted with unanimous delight.  "I LOVE this poem!"  "It's so easy to understand!"  "I can just picture a farm in sort of a misty rain."

I agreed with them: "Every word contributes so much to the image.  It's powerful because it contrasts: white, fluffy feathers against a wet, shiny wheel barrow."

"Wait, what are you saying?" one girl asked. "Wheel barrel?"

"Barrow," I said, slowly and clearly.  "Bear-row."

"I thought it was 'barrel,'" they murmured, almost to a person. "Wheel barrel."

Aghast, I realized their Baltimore dialect had reared its ugly head.  "Barrow," I corrected them.  "There's no 'l' at the end.  See?"  But they didn't.  They tried and honestly couldn't say it.  "Barr-oww?"  "Bear-all?"  "No, there's definitely an 'l' in there."  "It makes sense because wheel barrels roll.  They're on wheels, right?"

They were laughing now, and I was still stupefied.  "You really think so?  What about straw?"

"Strawl?" they responded.

I wrote the word on the board.  "S-T-R-A-W.  See?  No 'l.'"

"Strah?" "Straaaa?" "Stroah?"

Now I was laughing.  "You guys are SO from Baltimore!"

They loved it.  "Do another one!  This is so fun!"

We had to return to the poem then, although I was dying to hit them with "pull," "egg," and the ever-popular "down to the ocean."  With a little luck, they'll remember Imagism for a long time to come.

Down in the Dumps, and Climbing Out

Pascha is always the high point; after it, everything seems to tumble.  End-of-year deadlines approach with alarming speed.  Carefully-made professional plans unravel left and right.  Weekends pass in a frenzy of social events and dump me abruptly back at Monday morning, where class after class seems to have lost all interest in learning:

  • Yesterday one (out of fourteen) students got one (out of eight) geometry problems right.  In case math isn't your thing either, that means there were 111 wrong answers and just one correct one.

  • Other classes struggle with Fitzgerald (Did he have to spend a whole paragraph describing a drunk, weeping singer?) and Eliot (Would Prufrock please stop mooning over mermaids and just make a decision for once?)

  • This evening I asked a piano student, who wore a slightly-sullen expression, whether she was all right. "Yes," she replied.  Then, thoughtfully: "Well, my nose itches."


Somehow it's still only Tuesday, though this week is a short one (we leave Thursday for five glorious days of travel in the South.)  So in case your week is going anything like mine, I wanted to share my best advice for climbing out of the deepest of fogs: friendship.

  • Have pulled pork at Little Havana with people who love you too much to care (or even notice) that your eyes are swollen and red from the atmospheric pollen.  Laugh a lot.  Optional upgrades: coconut custard, Flying Fish Summer Ale and half-price entree night.

  • Watch an episode of Anne of Green Gables.  Preferably one of the first ones, in which her rare and precious friendship with Diana saves her from a life of loneliness and despair.

  • Read this heartwarming portrait of two teachers who stuck by each other through personal and professional difficulties and remain the closest of friends.  In New York, of all places.


Don't get me wrong.  True love is grand.  But friendship is what makes this all worth it.

 

Fiction

They are done with poetry, they say, and in spite of myself I have to agree: as usual, the villanelles were deeply compelling but the epics lacked, well, a certain epicity.  We read in earnest, and I made them laugh and grimace with plot summaries and gory details from the sections we had to skip for reasons of time and sensitivity.  Someday, someday, I will be able to open their eyes to the desperate beauty of Homer the way a professor once did for me.  For now, I revel in the small steps forward: the student who wrote with surprising conviction and gravity about an epic match between football teams, and the fact that most of them can at least differentiate between Achilles and Agamemnon.

Today we begin something new: a new set of texts I will painstakingly select read and reread, agonize about how to introduce and discuss them.  I will have to talk them down from the ledges of convoluted plot and melodrama, convince them that characters with slowly-developed depth are the only ones we can mentally invest in.  I will scour my shelves for new and fresh excerpts, authors they will not have read, premises they will find absurd and inspiring.

But not just yet.  First we will all take a much-deserved break.

We pray, of course: for friends and family who are suffering, fading, departed, and for college decisions, and for the requests they can't bring to leave their lips, which die unspoken in their mouths.

Then they write while I set up the projector amid furious speculation (Is it a movie?  Will we watch it for the whole class?  I hope it's funny.  I hope it snows tonight!)  And I end it by saying that yes, we're going to spend the next two classes watching and discussing one of my favorite movies about writing, creating and justice.  It's sweet, sad and funny.  Oh, and by the way, I made popcorn.

It is this last statement that causes them to erupt into cheers as I open the bag and pass out cups.  But I like to pretend it's partly for the other stuff, too.