I Don’t Have an iPod, But My Mom Does

My parents joke that when I was born in the summer of 1980, I joined my childhood already ten or fifteen years in progress. Like everything really funny, there is a lot of truth to it. In elementary school, for example, I listened to Billy Joel instead of New Kids on the Block and my favorite TV show was “Cheers.” At gatherings of family friends, I preferred salmon and adult conversation to hot dogs and after dinner freeze tag. (Among my first lessons that you can’t always get what you want.) Perhaps the directive, “Go play with the kids” is a bit baffling to all only children, but I was probably exceptionally serious and sensitive. I had a premature sense of irony and the gravity of existence which is basically unchanged from memories of myself early in life.

My outlook and sensibilities have always put me somewhat at odds with my generation. I have usually preferred the company of older people, and I will admit that also unchanged from those early memories of myself is a delight in being considered cutely precocious. To those who have known me for any length of time, it can hardly be a surprise that I’m as happy as I am in a relationship with someone 17 years older. My generational ambiguity means that we don’t have those knee-jerk moments of “Oh God, you’re so old/young” that separate people by age group. It’s true that I can’t help but know most of the words to most of what was on the radio in the late 80s and90s, but those aren’t the songs that define me. Mostly, my own biological generation, with its isolating earbuds and failure to launch cases, has been a mystery, something I assumed I would just have to wait out until everyone was older and more interesting (which, I confess, is to say, more like me.)

But the conversations that began and sustain this new bigenerational relationship have revealed a stamp on my understanding of the world that betrays the time and place I grew up in, and it makes me think that I may have been serious and sensitive because of the culture of 80s America,  not just alongside it. We late Gen-Xers and early Millenials grew up with crack and AIDS, with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer  and skyrocketing rates of violent crime and unemployment. The news (in my outraged liberal household, anyway) depicted a world were things were not getting better and weren’t going to get better. We were filled to the brim with the idea that nothing was certain in the serious matters of life, but that fun had a price, too. I have a vivid memory of standing over the garbage can in the cafeteria the day after the ’88 election and registering real despair as I threw my tray away that I would have to live my life half again before we would have chance to elect a president who would do things differently. If the fashion and synth pop of the 80s seem a little frivolous, I think we earned it, because nothing else was. We were offered no innocence, no comfort that things would work out for the best, no moon landing.

I know that my individual experience is little more than anecdote, and that, since I was actually a child, there are holes in my memories and gaps in my understanding. Still, I see myself more clearly now as part of a generation that was introduced to the world as an uncertain, hostile place and it helps me to better understand and appreciate why we act the ways we do. Not every third grader that lunch period 22 years ago was fretting about the election outcome, but perhaps, by some subtle resignation,  I’m more like the rest of that cafeteria table than I think. And maybe that’s okay.

Posted in Musings | No Comments »

‘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.

Posted in Musings | No Comments »

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.

Posted in Musings | 1 Comment »

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.

Posted in Musings | No Comments »

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.

Posted in Musings | No Comments »

“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.

Posted in Musings | 1 Comment »

One week from today, my parents will appear on the curb outside my Brooklyn apartment. We will load up the artifacts of my adult life and drive back to Portland. My stuff will sit in the garage for a few days while I sort and organize and consider. Several weeks later, it will be back in the garage, as I get ready to settle in Boston. In between will be a summer in limbo.

It seems significant that this year is the 10th anniversary of my high school graduation, since that means it is also the 10th anniversary of that long, weird summer between high school and college. And tonight, I feel very aware that my eighteen year-old self lives inside of me.

At eighteen, I unfortunately had bangs and had tampered with my hair color such that pictures reveal it was kind of yellow. My clothes were sort of deliberately unfashionable. I was prone to viewing any conflict or transition as an identity crisis, and certainly saw myself as a tortured soul. A lot of the time, though, I was quite cheerful. I found that people laughed easily around me, which I liked from the time I was very young. My greatest comforts were in writing, pleasing adults, and expanding my encyclopedic knowledge of the two most important four-piece bands ever: the Beatles and U2.

That summer, I remember walking around Portland, passing by high school haunts like Bagel Works, Java Joe’s and One City Center. I sat in Monument Square and watched people and seagulls go about their business, somewhat disbelieving that the city—my city—would go on without me. I specifically remember being astonished that the Portland Public School system was done with me, that I had completed everything it had to offer, everything it was supposed to offer. At home, I know I bickered with my mother a lot, a lot more than ever before or since. Now I suspect it was because neither of us wanted me held back, but neither of us really wanted me to go, either.

I recognize that girl, and I confess that a few of the small hurts she carried I have not completely put down. At the risk of being writerly: She is me, but I am not her. Not only her, anyway.

I also recognize that this summer will have some things in common with the summer of ’98. I was an ill fit for high school, but, to paraphrase Orwell, I can’t say that I was altogether unhappy. Now, the most important reason I am moving is because I am an ill fit for New York, though that doesn’t mean it will be easy to drive away from that curb and wait for the unknown. As in high school, I made the most lasting friend with under a year to go. Again, I am forced to deal with the reality that a school system can, and must, function without me. Again, I feel like I’ve been unlucky in love, but part of being me is an openness and optimism that that XY set won’t always disappoint. I’m grateful for that hope, even if I can’t explain it.

One thing I know will be different is my relationship with my mother. We have the same bond we have always had, but it has already been tested. We have already come out the other side. She ceases to really care about the status of my laundry (I hope) and I cease to expect her to tell me I can’t wear ripped jeans or have to be home by midnight.

Basically, I have the rare chance to do something again, as an adult. I will spend the summer waiting, and then it will be time to pack up the car and head for another new life, again in Massachusetts. But I can’t swear I won’t sit in Monument Square a little first. And, quite possibly, brood over seagulls.

Posted in Musings | No Comments »

Older people (my beloved grandmother, for example) are often fond of saying that any day spent on the right side of the grass (that is, over it instead of under it) is a good day. At 27 going on 28, I’m not so conscious of the Fates cutting my thread, but as a middle school teacher, I’m constantly reminded of my own version: any day spent on the right side of seventh grade (that is having it in your past rather than your present or future) is a good day.

In the brutal heat a couple weeks ago, the principal of my decidedly unair-conditioned school was forced to amend the usual no drinks in class policy and allow students to have water bottles. It is much cooler now, but the water is one more thing to ask for, another concern to be addressed, so they are still on a Death Valley-level hydration regimen. Just the idea that they can have water apparently engenders a bottomless thirst.

So, this morning then, I was not surprised to see a water bottle on nearly every desk. Except one. Karen had pushed hers so far away from her that it was balancing on the crack between her desk and the next one. If she moved it any further, it would technically be on someone else’s desk, and five years of teaching is long enough to know that that would be a scene. “Miiiiissss! I can’t do my work…Karen put something in my area!” Not good.

“Karen,” I asked gently, “what’s up with your water bottle?” One doesn’t expect water drinking to be a hot button issue, so I was surprised when she turned crimson and wouldn’t even look up.

“I know what happened!” a neighboring student said with more glee than was sympathetic, strictly speaking.

“And?” I queried, tilting my head to listen.

“Miss, one of the boys, he rubbed it on his, you know, the male part.” She blushed and added quickly, “You know what I mean, miss.”

Indeed, I did.

Confident that I understood, the glee returned and Yuleisy pressed on. “And she’s been drinking out of it! That’s like giving a blow job!”

Well, in the real world, no, it isn’t. But in the real world, people don’t go to third base with water bottles, either. Seventh grade is its own jungle, and teaching is a bit like going on a safari (except much, much less of a vacation). It’s interesting to observe the animals in their natural habitat, but it’s comforting to know you can get back in the Jeep (isn’t that the official vehicle of safariing?) and go home.

Posted in Musings | 2 Comments »

OK. So long-shot becomes inevitable and inevitable becomes impossible. Hillary Clinton’s historic moment came and went, or hasn’t happened yet. I would betray my bias if I admitted that I am rolling my eyes a bit today as I think about all the smug Obama people, their BAs still warm from the printer, with their cargo shorts and clipboards. So I won’t, and it’s beside the point anyway. The point is that we are not the party of tired old men. No matter who our favorites have been (mine was actually Richardson—what a long time a year is!), we can all be proud of what we have shown to a watching world.

I’m still not sure which side I’m on in the good-for-democracy argument that has been all over this particularly close, particularly contentious (by contemporary standards, anyway) Clinton/Obama contest. The high voter turnout that has characterized the season is a good symptom. It indicates energy, initiative, and, most importantly, a belief that things can change, can get better if people will it to be so. Those things are enemies of cynicism, and cynicism is the enemy of a functioning democracy. If people won’t say what they want, be it because they don’t know, or don’t think it’s possible, or don’t care if they get it or not, it’s hard for the government to deliver. I’m not sure that we have said, conclusively, what it is we want, but we’ve at least pledged that we will. That, as Democrats, we care about figuring it out. In that pledge, the organism of democracy stirs, breathes, and lives.

This all sounds pretty high-minded, and it is, but I have a confession to make. My hesitation in the good-for-democracy argument is basically because what is good for democracy is not necessarily good for Democrats, electorally speaking. Of course I want the democratic process to thrive, but I want it to do so in a way that will deliver a Democrat to the White House. At the bottom of it all, I’m a partisan. I would be able to express purer ideas perhaps, and more original ones definitely, if I weren’t. But I am, and partisanship, in my case, means that I believe that we are all basically better off when a Democrat—any Democrat, nearly—is elected, and that how much better off we are is roughly proportional to the scope of the office he or she (!) assumes.

I have forfeited my right, and thankfully, my obligation, to have any specific ideas about the strategy involved in getting someone elected. After having a fairly marginal role in a single campaign, I left professional politics for the armchair. I had the heart for it, but not the stomach. So I’ll speak from the former.

We are the party of the educated middle class, but we are also the party of new arrivals, of people trapped in the closing walls of generational poverty, of laborers and single parents and people who always get their own seat on the subway because they smell. Not every single one of these people will vote in November, but if we say that our party is big enough to hold the weak, the radical, and the marginalized, we have to mean it. Some things are too important.

So, to the Obama people: Congratulations on a fair and square win. Have a drink and toast yourselves and your hero. But just one. The smugness and the pumping fists are just annoying to people like me, and absolutely alienating to people like the ones in the paragraph above. You can afford to annoy people like me who will vote Democrat no matter what, but you can’t afford to alienate people who have nowhere to turn. And furthermore, you shouldn’t want to. In short, less audacity, more hope, please.

To the Clinton people: I have loved the idea of shaking up good-ole-boy Washington as much as anyone. You are still as much a part of this historical moment as you were yesterday, before Obama got his magic number. You still get credit for half of it. It’s time now, though, for the stiff upper lip. You, too, should have a drink and toast what could have been. But, for you too, just one. If you are going to say that Clinton’s campaign has been about the “other” Democrats, you have have to mean it. Because they still need a president.

To my party: Among the things that makes us the party of the angels is that we perseverate on an ideal of fairness. It is also part of our difficulty in getting our people to Washington. It’s tempting for us all to continue to squabble and gloat and lament about who is on the top of the ticket and why and how and by how many votes and by which bylaws. But if we do, we risk losing sight of the enormous historical possibility which has been offered to us. In the end, it’s us or the tired old men. Which will it be?

Posted in Musings | 1 Comment »

In college, I was always one for used books. What do I care if the cover is a little bent? And the perfect, crisp binding of a new book is bound to crack, sooner rather than later, so let someone else bear the guilt. Mine came like that.

The best part, though, about a used book is in the underlining, highlighting and marginal notes of its past owner, this person who is a stranger but whose habits of mind, at least, habits of study, are revealed. Does the person highlight entire paragraphs or just confidently underline a phrase or name here and there? What is written in the margins? Some are messages of affirmation like, “Yes” or “Absolutely,” or, I really once saw this, “This is the point!” with an arrow pointing to the last sentence of a paragraph. Other times, there is self-doubt, confusion, and dissent: “Lame,” or “Huh?” or simply a question mark. Also, there is a kind of assurance in seeing that someone else underlined a particular passage for its beauty, or its truth, or its all-important relationship to central themes. It must be beautiful, or true, or important, because someone else thought so, too. Even in something as solitary as reading, there is still safety in numbers.

Today on my subway commute, I began Jane Austen’s Emma. Just looking at the book itself makes me smile a little. The front cover, which is a shade of yellow that nothing has been for at least 30 years, proudly proclaims that the book costs $2.25. That’s about the price of a slice of pizza on a New York street in 2008. Inside, is a simple stamp, “UNH,” and my father’s name in his familiar scrawl.

I have read many such books, looted from my parents’ bookshelves. The history books and contemporary fiction, I confess, I have not read many of. I have also skipped most of the poetry and things with colonated titles like X: A Theoretical Approach. But it is a great place to find a novel. Many of my motives are perhaps obvious: I’m looking for something to read, and these books are already in the house. Plus, $0 is even better than $2.25. But it is also for the marginalia.

My dad’s underlining (and he always underlined, never highlighting and only very rarely bracketing entire paragraphs) and notes tell me things about him that he couldn’t, even if he wanted to. In Emma, there is something underlined on nearly every page until about page 30. After page 36, there is no underlining at all. In its place is the occasional, sweeping note: “Class system at work openly,” or simply “patriarchy.”

It is a conversation with a past incarnation of someone I know in the present. I wonder, did Dad take an intial interest in the book that just tanked? Was he writing a paper on the exposition of the book (you know, phase one on that story triangle we are all forced to learn?) so notes after that point were unnecesary? Or maybe it was just a case of good intentions fallen short, a moment of scholarly exertion which passed.

Maybe I’ll know for sure when I get to page 36.

Posted in Musings | 1 Comment »