I Don’t Have an iPod, But My Mom Does

My roommate my freshman year of college once told me, “You’re a bigger girl, but it works for you.” I recall that at the time, I was pretty crushed. She fretted when clothes ran small and a size 2 wouldn’t fit, once semi-bragged that she never allowed herself to eat more than 15 grams of fat in a day, and even with the glorious metabolism of a teenager, did an hour of cardio a day. She was pretty in that tiny, cute way all women at least vaguely envy, and she had nice clothes and nice things and was intimidatingly well-organized. At 18, I was just learning all the things one could be insecure about, and, despite our differences, she was the kind of person I wanted to think I was more or less like her. Read: the kind of person I didn’t want to think I was fat.

Thanks to the introduction of empty alcohol calories, eating buffet style three times a day, and lots of late night pizza, I had gained some weight since high school, and while I won’t say I liked it, I did see putting on the “Freshman 15″ as a kind of rite of passage. It didn’t make me any more likely to have a salad instead of fries with dinner, or any less likely to drink beer and eat a fourth meal later on.

Later that year, I remember being at a party and that someone’s friend from home was visiting. She was a “bigger girl” with a loud, dirty mouth. She bragged about having had sex with a guy universally known to be “hot” and, hoisting glass (or, in those days, more likely a mug or plastic bathroom glass) said heartily, “Score one for the fat girls!” and made eye contact with most of the other girls in the room, as if surely we identified as “fat girls” and would understand the sweet victory of  a one-night stand with someone who probably has a “no fat girls” policy, even in the case of alcohol-induced hook-ups. (An obvious catch!) 

Of course, this girl was trying to settle the score on a few of her insecurities at once. You can’t make yourself thin just by worrying that you might be fat, but it takes  the edge off if you don’t have to be fat alone. And no woman, of any age, is ever 100% sure that meaningless sex is a good idea. I hope I am never that cynical, and the thought that someone who was only starting out in life could see the world as that cruel and limited has haunted me since. At the time, though, all I could see was that I had been labeled officially as a “fat girl.” That was the club into which I had been inducted, and I could prepare for a destiny as a character actress in real life, a lifetime spent as the romantic lead’s funny friend. 

But, still, something in me understood that the weight equals fate formula is something one has to agree to. And I just didn’t. I just didn’t identify as “fat,” and couldn’t really see that society’s obsession with thinness had much to do with me at all. I will never know how I could have been so wise when I knew so little about so much.

The summer after my sophomore year, without consciously trying to lose weight, I lost the Freshman 15, and have been pretty much the same size since. I never blot the grease off my pizza. I have never had a gym membership. I drink Diet Coke because I genuinely prefer the taste (actually, that’s an addiction probably worthy of a blog of its own…) My exercise is the walking necessary to city life, and while my diet is diverse enough to be nutritious, I don’t deny myself the foods I like. It is almost certainly true that I weigh more than many women my age who are considered attractive. But, since we’re talking about looks here, isn’t it the “attractive” part that counts? 

I don’t know what my old roommate, who was defined by being thin, may have intended me to hear when she said, “You’re a bigger girl, but it works for you,” but what I hear now is: it ain’t broke. Score one for the girls, all of us.

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Orwell was a patriot, a patriot in the sense that he was able to identify things as characteristically “English” which he admired and felt a sense, however intangible, of personal pride in being associated with them. At the same time, he was very open in public and in private about his fierce opposition to British imperialism, and, in fact, to the entire notion of an empire, the driving force of his country’s foreign policy for much of his life. In short, he found a way to stand for “God Save the King” while he sought to destabilize India’s role as the “jewel in the crown,” and perhaps even to destabilize the crown itself.

Critics of Orwell would perhaps say that this disparity is another demonstration of his eagerness to accommodate existing authority, of his lack of commitment to real socialist revolution, or, at best, of his naivete. As usual, I direct a certain hand gesture in the general direction of Orwell’s detractors, but that isn’t my point, at least not this time. 

Orwell was able to rag on nearly every point of his country’s policy and popular culture, and much of its art and symbols of ‘progress’, because he problematized and reappropriated what it meant to be patriotic, to be proud to be English. For any point and place in history, this is pretty nuanced, pretty sophisticated stuff, and there are two kinds of rhetoric in my own country and my own time that make me think of him and hold his example especially tightly. The first is that kind of rhetoric you get from the FOX news-watching, SUV-loving, flag-draped crowd, which is that America is #1 because, well, because we just kick ass and everyone knows it, including (perhaps especially) God. As a late-20s, well educated liberal who has always lived in blue states, it’s easy for me to dismiss this kind of talk as simply moronic.

The other kind of rhetoric is not so easy for me to set aside, since the people I hear it from tend to be my friends, and (in truth) I feel it so often in my own throat. I’m talking about the kind of talk which, in the sprit of rejecting the morons, rejects wholesale that anything about America might be well-intentioned or worthy of extolling. The most extreme example of this kind of talk I have personally witnessed happened, not surprisingly, soon after 9/11 when an acquaintance declared that because of our hubris, we deserved to be attacked. (It goes without saying, perhaps, that said acquaintance isn’t from New York and didn’t know anyone hurt or killed.) Most of the time, people know enough not to say they side with bin Laden (or whoever we should blame for 9/11) in polite conversation, but the sentiment–that America is a big, dumb bully that has whatever happens to it coming–has been the official party line of disaffected liberals (as if there’s another kind!) for the whole of the decade so far. 

The disaffected liberals are my people, and the Bush years were hard. American foreign and domestic policy has involved no small amount of lunch money-stealing, and especially if you’re talking to someone from another country, it’s often easier just to say that the whole thing sucks then try to defend or explain the indefensible and inexplicable. I admit readily that I’ve towed that line to speed up conversations I didn’t want to have. It’s an efficient way to communicate, “I’m not a flag-waving asshole, but I don’t really want to get into it.”

But let’s get into it.

My problem with the “we suck” rhetoric is that it is, really, just as much of an oversimplification as the “we rule” rhetoric. Perhaps it is even worse, in a way, because “we suck” is a reaction to “we rule,” it doesn’t stand on its own. We end up on the side that’s against things because we let the other guys define what the sides were and then pick the better one for themselves. In bowing out and saying that there is nothing about being Americans that we are proud of, we are owning the swagger and simple answers of Bush’s Washington.

The history and texture of a nation is too massive and complicated to say just that we kick ass. We owe it to ourselves, and to the world, not to ignore slavery, Manifest Destiny, McCarthyism, etc. But it is also true that the American Revolution is perhaps the only revolution ever to lead to a stable government, and a relatively democratic one at that. We can depend on elections running legally and power being transferred peacefully. It’s silly to suggest that there is no class system here, but it is not immovable. We maintain more racial, ethnic, religious, and ideological diversity than anyone else ever has, and that still blows my mind, even if we fail to maintain it entirely without hiccups. It’s easy to conjure up the image of Ellis Island as a giant holding cell guarded by TSA on steroids where you had to change your name and forgo the kerchief, but it actually boasted a number of accommodations, like a kosher kitchen, aimed at welcoming variable peoples. And that’s more than a century ago! We’ve never been perfect, but I think history shows that we are essentially committed to progress in the good way, in the way that triumphs over old prejudices and seeks solutions.

As Orwell dismayed his country’s place in the world while nursing a nice cup of tea, we can sip Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and seek the same third way. Not allowing dangerous simplemindedness to define the American brand just may be the ultimate patriotic duty.

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Part of the hiring process in the English Department at UMB is going out to lunch with a group of students so they can check you out and pass along their impressions to the faculty. Yesterday, I was one of these student representatives, and the complimentary buffet isn’t the only thing I’ve chewing on since. (Sorry, that set up is unforgivable, but…forgive me.)

The candidate yesterday was a young guy with a newly minted Ph.D from City College in New York. He looked 18, and his clothes were self-consciously hip in a way that I’ve gotten less used to these months in Boston, but I’m sure he was 30 or so. He was trying to get a feel for how the student demographic at UMB compared to CCNY, and when he figured out that I had lived in New York for enough time to make it count, the conversation changed completely. At first, we were just talking about favorite spots and “It’s Our Pleasure to Serve You” coffee cups. Finally, someone with some idea of what it might mean to teach middle school in Bushwick! Oh, street cred, how I’ve missed you.

But then: “So what’s it like to live up here after New York?”

The question I don’t want to answer, don’t know how to answer. And what I said almost surely didn’t make any sense to him. In fact, I’m not even sure exactly what I meant, but I’ll try to make some sense here.

It’s a trade-off. The things you come to think are going to be hard in New York (and, yes, that list is long), like dealing with any institution, not getting the benefit of the doubt from your landlord, having to live in a dirty din (even if people tell you that you live in a “nice” area), those things aren’t hard in Boston. It’s clean. People can be eccentric but mostly reflect the friendliness of those who aren’t embattled, who haven’t been screwed over or inconvenienced one time too many. Boston does not breed an unspoken contempt for authority, or distrust, or ill will.

But the things you come to expect to be no big deal in New York are hard in Boston. Heading over to a party, you might reasonably think that you can stop at the ATM and pick up a six-pack or a bottle of something. Maybe. But maybe your simple little errand will lead you around a dizzying circle of dark residential streets, leaving you, if you didn’t get lost, trying to rationalize the faux pas of showing up empty-handed. You probably won’t get anything to eat, anywhere, after 11:00 pm, and definitely not after midnight. And if it’s midnight, you should probably be heading home anyway–the assertion that the T runs until 1:00 is just a lie. The T almost never goes exactly where you need it to, so you’ll have to get a bus or take a hike. On a clear, mild night, that walk can be a sweet finish to an evening out. But this is New England, and the weather doesn’t usually cooperate. So, you’re stuck in that no man’s land between the last T and the last bus, which can last for nearly an hour (at Harvard Sq, anyway). So basically, you just left a party (where hopefully your friends with cars were understanding about the empty-handedness) at midnight to get home at 2:00 anyway. 

Dark thoughts emerge. Is it even worth trying to go out when there’s Facebook chat and DiGiorno? Has it come to that?

This is turning into a rant, and I’m going to get it under control, but it felt good. There are deeper, more important things in a city than how easy is to stay out late, of course, but I’m building to a metaphor…

New York is both the party and the hangover. Whatever it promises, it resolutely refuses to be all one thing or the other. Boston is constant: medium-sized, medium-paced. For a soul accustomed to the cycle of being elevated by sights and sounds, then ground down, then elevated, then crushed again, Boston doesn’t, on the surface at least, seem to offer much to fight against or fight for. 

Maybe it’s a little crazy to want to live that way, anyway. And maybe Boston has a spirit I just haven’t been let in on yet. So, the answer is: I don’t know. I await.

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‘We were producing a definitive edition of the poems of Kipling. I allowed the word “God” to remain at the end of a line. I could not help it!’ he added almost indignantly, raising his face to look at Winston. ‘It was impossible to change the line. The rhyme was “rod”. Do you realize that there are only twelve rhymes to “rod” in the entire language? For days I had racked my brains. There was no other rhyme…Has it ever occurred to you that the whole history of English poetry has been determined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?’  –Part 3, Chapter 1, Nineteen Eighty-Four

Passages like these are throwaway gems in Orwell’s work, the literary equivalent of the breezy, effortless melodiousness of a McCartney-penned B-side. It’s rich in a few ways. The speaker is Ampleforth, a poet Winston meets in a squalid cell in the bowels of the Ministry of Love. Clearly, he functions to demonstrate what Orwell had written nearly nine years earlier, in ‘Literature and Totalitarianism,’ that art, which is elementally an expression of an individual’s emotional life, cannot exist under the kind of regime Nineteen Eighty-Four imagines. In Oceania, the ‘art’ is either intended to pacify (the music and porn novels churned out literally by machines to keep the proles happy), or to promote the Party’s ideology (the grand anthems and Newspeak ’scholarship’). It’s also worth pointing out the intertextual reference to Kipling, since Orwell wrote so extensively about his experiences with British Imperialism and is considered by some among the very first postcolonial theorists.

Obviously. But this passage is also a kind of Valentine to English, and I confess that that is why I have always liked it.  Something in me swells with irrational pride at the idea that English is an unyielding language that can only be tamed, molded, and elevated to beauty by the most talented and committed among us. It’s little wonder why Orwell, who wrote against the long odds of poverty, war, chronic illness, and hunger, and railed against the muddying of English with ugly jargon and purple, meaningless Latinate words, is among my very favorite writers. His passion, at least as I understand it (or imagine it, but it comes to the same thing)–to keep English the sort of language one can tell important truths in with style and grace–is the soul of my literary conscience.

As an ESL teacher, I did not enjoy watching my students struggle with silent letters and irregular verbs. I know that English would be easier to learn if there weren’t so many vowel sounds (15 or more, including diphthongs). Still, I think English gives as good as it gets. Once mastered, it offers a massive, grand vocabulary which is constantly being infused with apt words from other languages (and its own dialects) and the ideas that go with them. English has a tremendous capacity for clever euphemism and register shift. In English, you can produce stirring rhetoric that doesn’t sound over-the-top, express dissatisfaction without sounding like you’re going to kill someone, and say sweet things to someone special without sleaze or cheese. 

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell’s invented language–Newspeak–seeks to restrict people by taking away these latent expressive powers in English. The ending of the novel is devastating, but, having read it over and over, I can say that it makes me feel absolutely alive. A bit of that aliveness rushes to the surface every time I reflect on the messy weirdness of a word like “enough,” or a resolutely irregular plural like “children,” or the counterintuitive “had had” verb construction. (The children had had enough!) 

So, rock on Ampleforth. It’s almost Valentine’s Day.

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I come from a very close-knit family, and when I left Maine and moved to New York, it was a big deal. Pestering me about coming home became part of the routine on holidays, a campaign headed up by my grandmother. “Why do you want to be down there, so far from everything?” she would ask. Apparently, those who think New York is the capital of the world have another thing coming––the epicenter of the universe is, in fact, Portland, Maine.

I stayed in New York for five years, a long time to stay somewhere where I never intended to live permanently. There is certainly more than one truth about why this was so, but one controlling reason was that I wanted to be able to set stories there. A place so soaked in art, so packed with people from everywhere doing everything imaginable, and so rife with the issues, and the possibilities, of urbanization seems ideal for a writer. Something about a big city, with all its grit and glamour, is just more exciting and more worthy.

Two years ago, my school participated in a program called “Writing the City,” which was a partnership between the NYC Department of Education and New York University. Writers from the university came into our classrooms to do activities with students to get them to use the city they know–their city–to generate original, authentic writing. One thing students did was draw a map of a part of the city they thought was important as a pre-writing exercise to getting them thinking about community as a physical place. At first, several students wanted to map places like Times Sq, Central Park, and the financial district around Wall St. When I saw that they were having a hard time getting started, I intervened. 

Quickly, the source of the trouble became clear. They couldn’t draw a map of a Manhattan neighborhood from memory because they had no memories. By subway, you can get from Bushwick to Manhattan in under fifteen minutes, but your life has to take you there. Once they started mapping places they knew, labeling favorite hangouts, restaurants, friends’ houses, churches–personal landmarks that were directly connected to their lives–they became engaged and finished the assignment easily, full of things to write about.

I wasn’t asked to create a map myself, but I thought about how I would and realized that it wouldn’t be easy. I could certainly have recreated the streets around my apartment with accuracy––the grocery store, the subway station, the pizzeria––but it wouldn’t have meant what my students’ maps did at all. I cared about my neighborhood, and had many fond memories of people and places, but it was still a far cry from being home, literally or spiritually. 

That lack of home showed in my writing, too. Amid many points that could stand improvement, one aspect of my fiction writing that I think is consistently good is that it reads easily and doesn’t feel contrived. When I tried to set stories in New York, I struggled to find that ease, and never really did. I was too focused on the geography, exactly where characters were going and how they were going to get there, and logistical issues, like (I wish I were making this up) recycling rules and how to avoid parking tickets. I could write dialogue that sounded like the people around me, but it didn’t feel genuine. I had looked at and listened to New York as a writer, but I could only write about my New York experience as “I,” I couldn’t generalize, couldn’t become someone else and see life in New York from a different perspective. I couldn’t make it literature.

“Write what you know” is a truism every writer has heard, and it is true as far as it goes. I thought I could know New York just by knowing a lot about it, that there was some point at which the things I knew about it would reach critical mass. It doesn’t work that way though, any more than knowing biographical facts about someone means you understand him as a friend does. 

My writing mentor from college, by way of encouragement, suggested that maybe just living in a place like New York is so much work that you can’t pull back enough to write it while it’s happening around you. Over time, he said, those details of survival will be cast into softer focus, and what is literary and universal about the place will emerge. Maybe, but this wisdom is coming from an author who only sets his novels in Worcester, his hometown, so this theory hasn’t been tested.

My memories of New York are still sharp, and if they become fiction at some point, it will be gratifying. If they don’t, well, that’s okay, too. I know what place my map shows. And it just so happens that it’s the epicenter of the universe.

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Since I was quite young, I have been told that I have an “artistic temperament.” By some, that was a compliment: I was sensitive, insightful, and curious. By others, it was not a particularly good review. When I made known my intention to be an English major to the professor of my freshman drama seminar, she told me that “you can’t be both a good artist and a good critic.” Her view was that if you identified as a writer of literature yourself, you would sympathize with the author, and this sympathy smoothed out the edges too much for you to be able to analyze and interpret “objectively.”  (As if “objective” reading exists!)

I’ve always known she was wrong. And this semester, the tenth anniversary of my first as an undergrad, I think I know how to say why. 

There is always a lot of talk in pedagogical circles about the importance of giving students the experience of writing their own poetry in order to understand the way the craft operates from the inside. Anyone who has ever tried to write a sonnet, or even a haiku, knows that it’s a lot more complicated than writing an email. In the case of fiction, though, that point may be more elusive. Most people would not bring The Oxford Book of Verse to the beach, but many would bring a novel. Poets are cloaked in mystery and romance, but writers of fiction prose are perhaps often seen simply as people who have the time to observe reality and write it down. Writing a poem takes magic; writing a novel takes discipline. Oh, please.

In terms of student engagement, my most successful units have been novel studies. My students tended to be very reluctant readers, nonreaders independently, and so there was a certain sweetness about one of them swooping up to me at the beginning of a period, asking breathlessly, “Miss, can we read the book today? Pleeeease.” In general, they hadn’t been read to, hadn’t been allowed to sink into a good story without the passive shock and awe of movies and television, into a story that required more than 90 minutes of their lives. Part of my job was to do what I could to give them the experiences with reading I had had that made me love it. 

If students are reading and enjoying it, it’s tempting (especially with rowdy, easily bored teenagers) to take the path of least resistance. But teachers fall short of their goals if they don’t get students to think critically about what they read, which can be difficult when the reading is pleasurable and more accessible. Untrained readers can “get into” a book, but when it’s time to talk or write about it, it sounds like the class is catching up on a soap opera. They blow past any implications of form and discuss the characters and their lives as if they were real. The key, then, is to get students to go beyond caring just about what the author is doing and begin to probe and appreciate how and why he or she is doing it.

First, one small confession: I am a massive Harry Potter fan. My interest in mythology, medieval literature, and teenagers, alongside my taste for British wit and flights of fancy, make it impossible for me to turn away. The first time through the series, I read as fast as I could, hundreds of pages flying by in a single day. Especially in the case of the seventh and last book, I was resolute that no one would spoil it for me, but popular media was so saturated with it that I knew I had to get to the end as quickly as possible. That kind of emotional investment is, I think, an important experience to have as a reader, but it is not literary studies. The second time through, when I was not so bound by suspense, I began to appreciate how clever Rowling is. Having done some writing myself, I noticed things like a device to get certain characters at the same place at the same time, speculated on why characters had certain names, and saw symbols and motifs emerge. (One example: Voldemort, as a half-blood who is obsessed with establishing a new order of only pure blood wizards, no matter what he has to do to rid the world of muggles, mudbloods, and blood traitors, must be an allegory for Hitler and Nazi eugenics movement. That’s deep!)

Writing fiction, that “beautiful lie,” is a series of decisions. As an author, you are trying to present something essentially true about the human experience, but it is a craft in which raw material is shaped into a story. Reality must be observed, considered, and finally cut down to size and packaged. Every author must contend with certain narrative conventions, even (perhaps especially) modern and postmodern authors who want to expose and explode them. People learn by doing, and there is no better way to demonstrate how fiction writers’ craft operates than to make students fiction writers themselves. Having written a short story, or even just a scene, students would understand the decisions authors have to make, like which conversations to have the reader listen in on, and which of the characters’ activities are part of the plot and which are not important or relevant enough. They would, as all fiction writers do, have been forced to create systems that operate as analogues to reality. 

The creation of literature is not a mystery, and neither is literary analysis. So let’s be democratic about it. Making students into authors themselves makes them more likely to care about another author’s craft and gives them a way to talk about the hows and whys because they have asked themselves those questions from the inside looking out. And once people, of any age, have a way to talk about something, they usually can’t be stopped. This post proves that.

So, Professor X, you might have a Ph.D. from Yale, but you got this one wrong.

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My mom was diagnosed with ovarian cancer about a week and a half ago. It was a total surprise and my family have been reeling a bit as the reality has set in. An ultrasound confirmed our fears: that the cancer was aggressive and had spread throughout her abdominal cavity, but that the doctor wouldn’t be able to answer our most serious questions until after a massive, invasive surgery.

Well, that surgery was today. In pre-op, she was absolutely amazing. She had the whole team of doctors and nurses laughing. I have never seen anyone so brave. She was in the OR for almost 7 hours while a team of surgeons removed something like 40 tumors (one the size of a coconut), did a full hysterectomy, and took out her appendix, spleen, and a portion of her colon. When the gynecologic oncologist met Dad and I in the waiting room afterward, he was almost grinning and called her post-surgery condition “optimal.”

Now, in this new world of cancer, good news is all relative. In this case, news can be good while Mom is still not cancer-free. Here, “optimal” means that the docto met his goal of removing every tumor with a diameter of 1 cm or larger. He feels confident that the smaller ones will respond to chemo. In this world, good news means it’s still a long, scary haul.

When the doctor left, Dad and I collapsed into tears. We were grateful, relieved, and exhausted. And I know we were thinking the same thing: Thank God I don’t have to figure out how to live without my best friend.

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A recent move to Boston has given me, among other things, a new fickle friend: the T. 

I think that “the T” refers only to the subway system. People don’t “get on the T” and head for the bus. But as I haven’t found a name that encompasses the whole Boston area transit system (besides MBTA, which I know is uncool), T will have to do.

When you use public transportation all the time, when it is, in fact, your connection to the world, you begin to notice patterns. For example, in Brooklyn, I never once saw a lone B38 bus. The drivers have never quite figured out how to stagger themselves throughout the route, so instead of one bus coming every five minutes, you have to wait 15 minutes for three buses. Mind you, not all three buses will stop. How do the other two buses not get ahead, thus spreading out? I don’t know, but they don’t.

Below ground in New York, there is also plenty to go amiss and delay you for reasons you are unlikely to ever understand. It’s hard not to take it personally when service on your train to work or home is interrupted or changed. It’s bad enough when you are informed of such a change on the platform by one of those irritating chirpy signs, or by a lately probationed MTA employee, who tells you, as though you could possibly have known, that you wait in vain. It’s far worse though, when you are already on the train and a crackly voice comes from nowhere, telling you with far more relish than regret, that he or she is sorry, but this train is going express, and your stop didn’t make the cut.

It’s easy enough to complain about NYC transit, but it’s like a good friend who sometimes takes a while to call you back but always eventually does. You need to get from Washington Heights to Sheepshead Bay at 3:45 on Christmas morning? Bring something to read, but you’ll get there. 

The Boston T is a different kind of friend. This is the friend who sometimes doesn’t call back, but when you run into her a week later at happy hour, she is so happy to see you, full of apologies which seem sincere, and simply insists on buying you a drink. The fact of the matter is that there are lots of times in Boston when public transportation is simply not available. When it is running, you can’t always be sure which track your train is going to come on or if you will mysteriously have to come back above ground and take a shuttle for part of your route. Still, that platform, whether or not it’s the one you want, is sure to be expansive and clean, and when you do get on the train, you can settle into a padded seat which is almost sure to be available. I waited for the bus for more than 15 minutes today, but when I finally got on, the bus driver told me she liked my necklace. 

The NYC transit system is technically always there for you, but it doesn’t care much if you are inconvenienced. It’s doing what it said it would do, and wonders disinterestedly what you are complaining about. The Boston transit system won’t take you from Malden to Mattapan at 3:45 on Christmas morning, but it feels bad about it and got you a gift.

I suppose I may get tired of this slower pace of life, but, for now, I’ll accept the apology and the gift.

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Just to gaze upon its placid surface, this is relaxing summer. Without work or any significant responsibilities, my days are filled with luxury problems like trying to be in bed by one so I don’t sleep past nine or having to decide if I should read and doze in bed, on the couch, or in the chaise lounge out by the pool. Given the chance, anyone can fill up his time with little walks, leisurely reading, cups of coffee in pajamas, and afternoons of sunning and swimming which become cookouts. 

My intention here is not complain. After all, summer is perhaps the one real privilege society is still willing to grant to teachers, and like all teachers, I’m enjoying it. Nearly ten months of our year is spent defending ourselves against administrators with clipboards, and parents who don’t see why they should be responsible for their own children, and colleagues who steal staplers and markers, and that daily look of surprise, mild disgust but mostly surprise, from students when you ask them to produce a pencil at the beginning of class. As a teacher, it’s forgivable and even necessary to squander July and August. 

The question, though, is whether or not it is forgivable, or necessary, if one is not returning to a world of close supervision, apathy, deceit, and boredom. The truth is that I can’t imagine not returning to IS 162. I know that I won’t be, but I don’t really believe it. Whatever it is that happens inside you when you stop believing one thing and start believing something else, it hasn’t happened yet. 

It takes a few years of teaching before you are really able to believe that any lesson you plan will come off more or less the way you planned it, and that, even in darkest March, the school year really will end and there will be summer and then another. Like all cycles, the cycles of teaching have to repeat themselves a few times before they become recognizable as such. Like all cycles, they come to seem normal, organic, and permanent. On a swing, after a little work pumping with your legs to get off the ground, it takes much less effort and you feel like you could swing, back and forth, up and down, forever. 

I suppose I’ve stumbled upon a cliche. Forgive me. That image is certainly what is meant by “getting into the swing of things,” but it’s a good image, even if I didn’t think of it.

Here’s where that image breaks down, at least for my purposes. That feeling that you could swing for hours, days, possibly the rest of your life, is really quite fleeting. After a while, your legs stop pumping and you get closer and closer to the ground, maybe even dragging your feet through the gravel to stop yourself faster. When the swing stops, you stand up and walk away. In the literal sense, that is how you get “out of the swing.” But when you decide, for whatever reason, that you aren’t going to teach forever, you have to walk away when the swing is at its highest point: that moment when the last bell on the last day rings and it’s summer vacation. In swinging terms, that means you have to work your legs and get as high as you can go, then jump.

I jumped. And in the meantime, I’m not complaining about the weightlessness, or the blue sky, or the warmth of the air. I’m just a little nervous about landing.

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“What is this?” Mom asked, holding up a round black and orange baking dish.

No pause. “That’s what I use for artichoke dip. I need that.”

Blink. “Oh.”

I leave New York today, my 28th birthday, having moved here just before my 23rd. A lot of the stuff I’ve been packing up this past week came down with me, but somewhere along the way, things found purposes. The artichoke dip dish is just the beginning. There’s the electric mixer. The preferred corkscrew.

Somewhere along the way, I became someone with tastes and preferences and specialities. This stuff became my stuff, the things necessary to live the way I have chosen to. 

Closing up and taping and lugging and loading endless boxes doesn’t seem like the best way to spend your birthday. But all these boxes of all these things remind me that this adventure has been worth it. It’s been a good way to grow up. 

So, happy birthday to me.

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