MAD TRAVEL


Friends! I depart tomorrow for the UK.

If anybody will be in London from 7/6-7/12, may we please grab a pint together?

From 7/12-16, I'll be in Leeds, where I hope to see many peeps! (My paper is just about done...) Hit me up if we'll be in Leeds at the same time!

Then, my dear colleague and I are hieing ourselves to Iona and Skye for some much needed holidaying.

From about 7/20-7/25, I am aiming for Cambridge. If anybody will be there, can I buy you a pint?

Bitchin'! I can't wait to leave this hellish inferno, where EVERY DAY for the LAST THREE WEEKS has shot up above 90 degrees F. Some days, it's been 105, and that's BEFORE THE HEAT INDEX. It's enough to drive a person mad.

Slaine abhaile.* I'll see you on the B-side!


*That's Irish for "safe home."

LIKE A HOLE IN THE HEAD




One of my neighbors has rescued a pit bull puppy. My own pit bull, giant lug-head linebacker that he is, has fallen IN LOVE with her. He licks her, and nudges her around with his giant anvil head, and simply cannot leave her alone.

AKDP was caring for C. when I was away last weekend, and told me I almost came home to another dog, given how well C. and this new pup got on together. I need another dog like I need a hole in the head. Especially a barely weaned, totally untrained and completely NOT housebroken 8 week old pittie rescue. Having ONE pit bull is complicated. We can't travel to many places, either because of breed restrictions in those states/provinces or because the airlines have breed restrictions themselves. It's hard to find places that will rent to people who own pitties (this is why he is registered to me as a "terrier mix." Wink, wink.) It is hard to get home owner's insurance, too.

People think I am insane with just C.. They recoil from us, when we walk down the street.

Add another pit bull to the mix and you have two fiercely strong, very stubborn, impulsive, muscle-bound, scary-looking clowns running amok all over your life. They must be crated separately when you leave, because there is the risk that they could fight and we all know how THAT concludes. They need to be watched constantly, until it is determined that they won't (literally) kill each other. They need serious and disciplined training to get themselves under control. This takes YEARS. C. is 6 and only now can be trusted off-leash. (And forget it if there's a cat running in front of him...)*

Have I mentioned the fact that I am leaving for the UK on Sunday, and will be gone for 3 weeks?

And, that TF is in cop school until October, which is a 9-hour/day deal? He is also trying to sell his condo, and we are talking about moving in together, and how and why. (One thought is that he should move in with me, and yet my apartment is teeny. We might kill each other. But I am loathe to move, after last summer's debacle.) And, oh yeah, there's also my whole research agenda trying-to-write-a-book thing.

Do I, do we, need to add a lil' pittie to this situation? Pragmatically, of course not.

Then again, C. licks her, and rests his nose on her belly, and licks her. And, also, she looks like this:





We're ruined. We really are.


*Pit bulls are also hilarious, charming snuggle-bugs. They are sluts for love, and they are fiercely loyal, determined, tough, tolerant dogs. They are excellent with children, graceful athletes, and clownish as all get out.

Having two would mean that they could keep each other excellent and sweet company.

THE GIRL TEARS


May I just say that I hate it when (female) students cry in class? (And they are always female.) In my office, (both female and male) tears are totally acceptable, and I keep tissue on hand because it happens so frequently (my being youngish, female myself and generally empathetic seems to engender the weepy sharing.) Private tears are cool! But the public girl tears drive me batty. They demand a certain kind of infantilizing care that is just not appropriate in the college classroom. They demand of the female instructor a certain kind of maternal response, a kind of "oh, honey, don't worry," sort of reaction.

Today my summer writing students took their standardized exam. These kids are fresh from the breast of high school. They don't know where the bathroom is. They are mystified that I have an office and not a classroom.

And of course, two of them were taking their exams, and their computers went on the fritz and lo and behold ain't nobody saved nothing. Somehow, this was my fault and my problem. It was my fault, apparently, because I forbade the saving of papers onto USB drives. So nobody had saved!!! At all. Not even to the desktop.

Then it was my problem to fix with the IT folks, who were not being helpful in the least, and doing that irritating bureaucratic punt behavior. (IT person: "uh, have you checked upstairs in X Lab?" Me: "I did and they said they can't do anything so they sent me here." IT person: "Well, we can't do anything here, so you should go back and ask them...")

The female student to which this had occurred was complaining in her high-pitched voice about how this "always happens!!" to her. And then the tears and the quavery voice and the shaky hands started. She is a girl in love with the highlighter, with the obsessive organizing of notes, with the upticked question at the end of her statements If she spent half as much time coming up with a real thesis instead of making things pretty and dumb, she might pass the course. Sigh.

When she cried, I think she expected me to respond in some way, to comfort her and make it better, to let her off the hook. And I didn't. I couldn't. She has to take the exam again, and it's up to her to do so (in the confines of the computer lab). But she kept looking at me, pleadingly, as if there was something I could do to make it all better. I think that this behavior has worked quite well for her, up until this point. Not so much with me, though.

It takes so long for the brain and the identity to settle into itself, to be able to see that sometimes bad luck strikes and it ain't personal.

It takes years to see that you are not the absolute center of the universe.

ALL OVER BUT THE CRYIN'


My brother got himself wedded, and nobody freaked out or misbehaved too much. Nobody was too rude to me--although my uncle telling me that everyone was worried about me and thought I was "only wanting to get married" because my brother was doing it? That was pretty insulting.

I acted as best man, or at least, best and only sister. I got the breakfast and the coffee and carried the rings and the ring pillow and the envelope with hella tips and picked out the shirt and tie and hefted the suit and fished out the clean underpants and undershirt and dress socks and pinned on the boutonniere. I picked up dog poop, and stepped miserably in cat puke, and appeased sour old female relatives, and ate wild venison sausage. I pitied my poor cousin, trapped under 75 pounds of frump. I located the appropriate poem and read it.

And my new sister-in-law's family leaned in, at one point, to commend my brother's fortitude. "She's a lovely girl, but she can be ... volatile," one auntie said. "And T. is so calm! He is so patient with her, and so kind. I don't know how he does it!"

I looked at her and said, "Wait until you meet my mother."

At any rate, it was lovely to be out of the exhausting and debilitating heat, and in a place with temperate weather. My brother's neighborhood is sweet and garden-y.


There were sour cherries on backyard trees:





I made my brother's boutonniere. He'd requested good smells,
so I foraged some lavender and lemon thyme:



And I made the bride's bouquet. She wanted purple. I plucked the
pollen-y stamens from all those lilies:






And TF joined me the next day and charmed the hell out of everyone:

"IN FRONT OF THESE OUR FRIENDS"


Blogging light until I return from my brother's wedding. Will he and his soon-to-be wife have a (gasp!) Quaker wedding? Nobody knows. There is a contract, which they are calling a "katubah" although ain't nobody Jewish between them. They may be marrying themselves, which is legal in their state. Both of which could quite resemble the way Friends do it. But then again, my brother is under much fewer restraints--especially regarding matters of faith and tradition--than I am. I BEST be having a Quaker wedding!

At present, is my dress pretty and my cork-heeled wedge sandals perilously high? Yes.

Will I therefore tower over TF? Much to his delight.

Has my father apologized for being a total asshole? Shockingly, yes.

Is teaching exhausting the hell out of me, and is my paper for Leeds still half-assed? Yep.

Can I wait to get out of the insufferable inferno that is now Subtropical City? Hell no. I fly to the land of mountains and cool air and splendid views and people doing outdoorsy stuff.

ON FATHERS

"...what did I know
what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?"

--Robert Hayden, "Those Winter Sundays"


I have been thinking and reading lots about masculinity this summer. I still don't entirely get its fragility, its bluster and bravado. Its construction is so dependent upon other men, their opinions and bullying, their respect. And I have been thinking about fathers since reading Clio Bluestocking's post, how much women need fathers, and how awkwardly men can and cannot fill that role. It's like they're just knocking around in a badly fitting pair of shoes, oblivious to the harm they can cause, oblivious to their power to do good.

I haven't spoken to my father since he unleashed a whole bunch of misogynist and sexist vitriol, several weeks ago. He sent me a CD he'd burned, of his usual showtunes/Kurt Weill/Sondheim something-or-other. The gift means he is attempting to apologize. Except, it isn't really an apology, because showtunes are his obsession, and mainly because an apology includes the word "sorry" in it. I'll be holding out on that one until eternity, though. And nothing is gained from insisting on being right.

On the occasion of the day of fathers, our commodified American holiday wherein we are supposed to go out and buy some tacky shlock, I wanted to share a memory.

My father and I were swimming. I was three. We were in Ontario, at our cabin, on the same lake where my paternal grandparents had gone on their Prohibition-era honeymoon. It's a place that my father goes to in order to in some ways "be" with his own father, who died before my dad was 5. And who, as lore would have it, was a strapping example of skilled masculinity. Athletic, charming, tough, handsome, handy.

As the above showtunes example likely indicates, my father is and was and will not ever be an outdoorsman. He's a pretty poncy and intellectual sort of man, quiet, with a sharp and subtle sense of humor. A keen dresser, who smells good, is punctual, and always has a comb and a handkerchief in his pocket. A hard worker, and diligent. But he can't fix things, gets flustered by newness, is easily embarrassed, hurts himself flagrantly, and passively demands all kinds of care. Woe betide you if you brush against that which is "private" information. Or, god forbid, if you point out his lack of capability. He is brittle.

We were out in the lake. I did not yet know how to swim. I was wearing a styrofoam egg, the better to keep me afloat in the deeper water. He could stand. I would paddle to him. We were at the drop-off, where the water turned from greenish clarity to solid ink-black depth and nothingness.

My father goaded me to take off the egg. What did I know? He faced me towards the deep. "Now, go under and open your eyes," he said.

I did. And I was terrified, pouring up through the surface in a panic. Everywhere was emptiness, and I couldn't right myself. There was no light. Anything could be lurking in the water and I wouldn't be able to escape. If ever there existed a definition of "the void," that was it.

He laughed.

I still don't know what the lesson is. My father mocked my fear, after setting me up to be afraid. He did not console me.

But he was there to physically catch me.

JUNETEENTH!


The 18th of June is a big deal down here.

I remain amazed that it took so damn long for the news of manumission to permeate the South. Certainly, that taking so long was on purpose, and once the news actually arrived, there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle. But 18 months after the fact? I mean really.

Y'all know the story, right? Emancipation was decreed in 1865, but news traveled more slowly the further one got from Washington. West of the Mississippi, things were still a bit patchy, communications-wise. So enslavement continued, especially in Texas, even though the war was over and the laws had changed.

It took a while, all through the second and third week of June 1866, the weather heating to inferno levels, for the truth to arrive. And then, the public "no" newly entered the Black vocabulary.

I like to imagine the way the news traveled: on foot, via one human mouth shouting it aloud, from house to house, the jubilation and shock reverberating westward. The joy of freedom, and also its attendant terrors, must have been unbelievable. As in, it probably took a few minutes for things to sink in. And then I imagine that folks whooped out loud, and cut their eyes at each other, and gathered themselves together. And then they left. I think it's HL Gates who talks about the proliferation of freed slaves wandering the roads, after emancipation. Such wandering scared the hell out of white people, who ascribed all kinds of perfidy to that mobility. But really, folks were out there looking for one another, for their families, for their parents and children. They were trying to piece together a life.

Underneath the freeways, these roads are the same roads. Slave feet and free feet walked along them.

Here it's 98 degrees every day, with no rain, the sun unrelenting. I can't believe the heat. I can't believe the lizards in the flowers. I can't believe I just bought a fancy sundress for my brother's wedding, one that cost me some $335. I was partially talked into it because it could do double duty as a nice dress well into October here, given this seasonless clime. A girl needs summer clothes here, much more than she needs wool tights.

And I thought I could wear it also when I am invited to attend further high Black church functions with TF and his extended family. It's tough enough being the only white face in the place, but man, those church ladies know how to wear the clothes. My professor-lady skirts and well-worn Dansko sandals ain't cutting it, amidst the fancy hats and suits and shoes and handbags.

Besides, if everybody's going to keep asking if TF's rampagingly adorable nieces and nephews are our children, I best represent.