Category: Uncategorized

All about the beads. A small sample of the take…

It’s been a busy week. We’ve been interviewing ALL OF THE JOB CANDIDATES IN THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE on our tiny campus, and I’ve been trotting between classes, meetings, teaching demonstrations, faculty workshops, research presentations…information overload. I’ve also eaten some delicious meals, which means it’s good that I’m heading out to Lafayette, LA this afternoon to enjoy a bit of Mardi Gras revelry. Perhaps I can shed a pound or two…

Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving. –Terry Pratchett

I have one of those Word A Day calendars on my desk. Most days I look forward to peeling off the previous day’s word to reveal what I hope will be something unknown and inspiring. Most days I am disappointed. Still, I often find enough to keep me pulling away the days, plowing through the year one badly glued page at a time.

Some days the word is one that I want to sit with for a while. Like this one.

I am, generally, one of those people who looks through the optimist’s lens, painting on silver linings, filling glasses till they’re half full. I smile. I recall a colleague who noted once that my smiles hid a lot of pain. I can’t say that she was wrong, but the smiles are generally genuine. I am, more often than not, a plain old Pollyanna.

Lately, though, I’ve been angry. That’s not quite the sort of attitude I like to cultivate. It makes me too–well, everything. Too sad. Too tired. Too quick to answer. Too too too hard on myself and everyone around me. The worst of it is that the things making me angry are the things making others hurt. Sudden, senseless death. Medical challenges. Chronic illness. Untreated depression. I cannot make any of these things better. All that I can do is put on a smile and pray and be there to support, to listen, to suggest. Most of the time, that feels like enough. Lately, though, it’s felt damn near impossible to keep a lid on it, to keep from screaming about everything and anything that gets even close to breaking my skin.

I will get back there, back to that piece of me that smiles and means it, the me who can find the glimmer in the inkiest of nights. My son helps, his little hugs and I love you’s reminding me that the world is full of love and opportunities to give love if you’re open to it. I know that when I do get back to her she’ll be a bit different: wiser, older, a bit more sympathetic to the difficulties of getting through the darkness. For now, though, I’ll just wait it out, hoping for a thread of light to float down soon.

That’s something, right?

A couple of weeks ago I had one of my classes read Eudora Welty’s “Where Is the Voice Coming From?“, her 1963 story in which she imagines the thoughts and motivations of the man who assassinated Medgar Evers. We talked about character and representation, the students grappling with the difficulty of making out the nature of the man who was killed when surrounded–almost to point of suffocation–by the nature of the man who did the killing.

I’m thinking about this now because I’ve visited Eudora Welty’s home and seen where she lived when the news came in about Evers’ assassination. I’ve listened–twice–as Myrlie Evers shared memories and issued challenges to audiences at Millsaps, her strong voice resonant and resolute as she continues the fight this 50 years on. I haven’t visited Evers’ home, haven’t seen his grave, haven’t read or understood what I need to about this man whose assassination stands as a most horrific breach in a state of horrid breaches. Mississippi’s ghosts are legion. As I type this, I realize that I’ve been reluctant to listen to their stories.

What strikes me most about Welty’s story is how contemporary it feels. In the wake of Florida’s most recent legal dustup, I am saddened by how easy it is to imagine the thoughts of Welty’s protagonist–or some close variation–running through Michael Dunn’s mind. I am ashamed that I don’t think about what must have gone through Jordan Davis’s, through Medgar Evers’s, through the minds of so many victims whose lives were cut horribly short by so much hate. I imagine that what’s kept me from visiting Evers’s house is the ordinariness of it all–an average house on an average street that should have been safe from such extraordinarily evil intervention. Teenagers play loud music in convenience store parking lots. Young families live in small houses and drive cars and try to make their lives better. I am afraid to visit the home. It should be an unremarkable place. It isn’t, and that serves as a reminder to me that Welty’s narrator is out there in our culture, waiting for another moment to surface.

I can make it wherever I am because I know how to make a roux. Makes everyplace taste a little more homey.

Gary, I owe my grown-ass woman-ness to you.

Really, I do. Because of you and this crazy thing you’ve been doing on LiveJournal, I found a place to write words–words that mattered to me and, I discovered, others who wanted to read the sorts of words I was putting down on the page. Writing for the competition over the last few years has helped me make sense of so many things and trouble waters I’d long thought placid. Writing has helped me come to terms with who I am and in doing so to make choices about who I’m going to become.

I’ve also had a blast reading what other people have to say about…well, whatever crazy topic is on deck for the week. Hundreds of writers working to solve the same problem with the materials they have to hand–their lives, their imaginations. It really doesn’t get much better than that…

If you’re looking for a place to write and talk about writing with a community of writers–and enjoy a little friendly competition–you can’t go wrong joining the gang at LJ Idol for the 9th and final season. Free to play and tons of fun. I’ll be there…

…I got to see this.

There’s a story there. Now to find it…

I needed more than a day to get my head right for writing, so there you have that. We resume today at 48…

I’m supposed to write about restaurants today, to provide a review of one. Not going to happen–some days some things happen that make writing about nothing seem worse than writing nothing at all. So, instead, I’ll just say on this full moon of a Valentine’s Day that love is all we have to give and all we need to live. Until tomorrow…