Light and Momentary

First day of school

I have always loved the first day of school. I love a fresh start; I love the time of year, with the Queen Anne's lace at the roadsides like summer's last hurrah. In my last couple of lazy days I found myself excited, finally, for the start of the new semester.

Somewhere recently I was talking to someone who reads my blog but rarely talks to me, and I discovered that she thought I was less than thrilled with my job last year. I love this job and I am so grateful to have it, but I think I blogged more about the hard parts than the great parts. It's a fantastic feeling to get a roomful of people excited about something, to share knowledge they can use to make life better for families in a hard spot. One of my summer students, in her course evaluation, said, "This class changed my life." What a gift!

Sometimes this whole career path feels like a string of gifts: the initial epiphany that I was being called into this field, not knowing at the time how many seemingly disparate bits of me it would weave together; the mysterious drive to go and get msyelf a PhD with four and then five children at home (not to mention the mysterious enthusiasm on my husband's part); the perfectly timed plopping into my lap of a part-time academic job in my very own neighborhood.

At the same time, I had no idea how hard I would work last year. I never let myself tally the hours I was working, because it would have been too discouraging a number. When my summer class ended I was wiped out. There was always grace to do the work willingly (except maybe tackling the piles of student writing, which required some self-bribery with chocolate), but there was a LOT of work. I prepped 4.5 upper-level classes last year, you guys, only one of which was in any way a specialty of mine.

I was really grateful for a summer off, I tell you -- grateful every day.

But now I'm ready to go back. I have been absurdly excited to see the students again. I called a hello to one of them across the parking lot yesterday, wondering if it was a little stalkerly. (Know what I mean? There's an acceptable distance for greetings from acquaintances, and this was probably beyond it.) Today, though, another student sought me out from way down the hall -- "Hi, Dr. Gladly!" So at least I'm not the only one who's enthusiastic about seeing familiar faces again.

I think the workload will be more manageable this year. I am more confident, at any rate, and I have taught both of these classes before. Last August I spent many many many fraught hours getting ready to give a lecture on neuroanatomy. Today I thought, "Psshhh, I can totally talk for an hour about neuroanatomy." I spent an hour, maybe, updating slides and reviewing notes, versus the -- I don't know -- eight? ten? that it took me to prep the lecture initially. It seemed to go just fine.

It's a little messy sometimes, working with young adults who are trying to get into or stay enrolled in a competitive program. (I was a little shocked to learn that a former student had been dismissed from the program over the summer. They're pretty serious about their standards, it turns out.) I might write about the messy more than I write about the "it changed my life" moments. But for today, I am absolutely certain that I'm in the right spot. That quote about God calling us to the place where our deep gladness meets the world's deep need? For me, for now, this is it.

Three Years

The students are back.

Classes start Monday and they are making the most of their weekend. I just ran out to the liquor store (because I was jonesing, weirdly, for a Kahlua and cream -- unlike me but sometimes you just go with it) and they were out in force. There were two women in the liquor store whose ensembles made me want to say, "Honey, did you forget your pants this evening?" As I was pulling out of the parking lot I saw a knot of young men, none of whom had dressed for our freakishly chilly weather, and I gasped a small gasp as a result popped up on my mental calculator.

In three years my Alex will be a freshman in college. Three years is nothing. Three years ago I was smiting head lice and smacking dissertation data around and singing while a crawling baby ate a book. That was, like, half an eye-blink ago.

There are so many things I want to teach him, and he is not a very willing pupil these days. "Why do we have to clean the house when you are the only one who cares?" he asked me today. "The Catholic Church says ONCE A YEAR for confession," he announced, arms folded, when I tried to shoehorn him into the car today after his summer away. He was unmoved by my pointing out that you probably wouldn't wind up with scabies if you only bathed once every couple of months, but it's still prudent to do so more often.

I think back to myself at 17, leaving home for college. There were so many things I didn't know. I muddled through. I guess he'll muddle through too. Right?

Prodigal

The most powerful Olympic moment I've ever seen was by any reasonable standard a fiasco.

During the 1992 Olympics I clicked on the TV and found live coverage of the men's 400m semifinals. Not far into the heat, a runner slowed and then fell. He lay there, in obvious agony, while his cohort churned toward the finish line. Slowly he picked himself up. His face contorted in pain, he hobbled along the track.

You have probably seen some version of this clip repeatedly. His name was Derek Redmond, and he turned into the Agony of Defeat Poster Boy for the Barcelona Olympics. In the moment, though, there was no slo-mo and no swelling music behind him. The announcers, frankly, were puzzled. "There's some sort of disturbance in the stands," they said, "some sort of scuffle with security." The "scuffle" was Redmond's dad, refusing to be deterred from his attempts to get onto the track. He went over to his son, and supported him as he finished the race in his own lane.

"This rather bizarre scene," as one of the announcers called it at the time, hit me hard. I did not choke up briefly; I did not wipe away a discreet tear. I blubbered like a baby, watching that father and that son together. Seven years later, wandering in Barcelona with friends, we wound up in the Olympic stadium and I started crying again, trying to tell them the story. For a long time I could not articulate why I found it so evocative, but I think I understand it better now. I think I was sobbing because Redmond illustrated a hard truth: sometimes you work unrelentingly for something that you just can't have. And then you can pick -- you can lie there and cry, or you can say, "This is brutal, but I'm not quitting." I think I was crying because his dad illustrated a fundamental truth about parenting: sometimes you can't fix it, but you can walk alongside anyway.

I have been working through Grace for the Good Girl slowly, mostly in my Monday Adoration hour. It is hitting me hard, chapter after chapter. When she writes about the prodigal son the author asks, "What do you think about the father in this story?"

Now I've heard that story a million jillion times, just like anybody else who grew up going to church. And I've thought about the younger brother, and I've thought about the older brother, but I'd never given the dad much thought. He's supposed to be God, and I'm not accustomed to critiquing God. I was a little surprised to see I had an answer right there, just waiting for the question to be asked. What do I think about the father? Bad idea, that's what I think. You're going to get taken, old man, that's what I think.

Whoa.

I've been thinking a lot about this one. It's important for me as a daughter, because I am certain that I could live a freer life if I knew I had room to fail. It's important for me as a mother, because I want to be the kind of parent who sees a child facing some kind of brokenness and walks alongside anyway. The kind of parent who pushes past the security guards, the kind of parent who comes tearing down the road in welcome -- not the kind of parent who thinks, 'Did he squander all that money and come crawling back to me? Because he needs to know that is just not okay."

It is a crazy implausible quixotic truth and I want to own it in both directions: love means seeing a child disappointed and in pain, and running -- heedless of transgressions and taboos -- to throw your arms around him.

Madeleines

My family moved to southern West Virginia in August of 1980, a week before I started sixth grade. In September of 1987, a college freshman, I moved to the Midwestern region in which I have spent most of the intervening 25 years. I was astounded by its flatness. I cannot remember when the cornfields started to feel like home, cannot remember when I began to expect that streets would be laid out in a tidy grid. It was strange to be back in the mountains, remembering my leap from girl to young woman.

There are no flat streets in the town where we lived, and few straight ones. The roads there follow the mountain contours; they twist and swoop and change their names unpredictably. They made me grateful that I will be teaching my kids to drive in the flatlands.

There are memory grenades in every block: kerpow! --it's the Dunkin' Donuts where we drank coffee late at night. Kerblam! --it's the Wendy's where my dear friend Becky shook pepper in my hair. (Proust wrote about memories and cakelets; I'm all about explosives. That's what four sons will do to you.) Some of those memories I tried, fumblingly, to explain to my husband. Others, like the darkroom kiss that was the benchmark to which I compared kisses for a long time afterward, I kept to myself. "There's the newspaper building," I said as we drove by, remembering not only my crush on the photographer but also the pleasures of laying out our high school newspaper there in the years before Word and Publisher: running articles through the wax machine and sticking them down just so, trimming the border tape with the X-Acto knife I carried to school every day. A person could get expelled for that these days, but in 1986 the media teacher issued X-Acto knives to our entire class and we were expected to keep them handy.

Four of my particular friends were there for the reunion: Angela and JJ, both theater pals, and Chris and Patrick, both newspaper/yearbook pals. For most of high school I had a colossal crush on Patrick, who had green eyes with impossible eyelashes and zero interest in me. For reasons now obscure to me, I used to ask him questions I already knew the answers to in hopes of getting a conversation rolling. The first time we were standing at our lockers. "Patrick," I said, heart pounding, "how many esses are there in 'assassinate'?" Oh, Jamie, you vixen, you.

I tried to take the kids to a movie, only to learn that the movie theater I remembered had been shuttered. It sparked another memory, of a night when I had been given permission, unusually, to see a midnight movie with Chris and Patrick. The midnight movie was canceled, but they ran into an older friend of theirs who sold them three beers there in the parking lot. We went back to Patrick's house because his mother wasn't there. I'm pretty sure I was too much of a straight arrow to drink any beer, but they took a picture of me holding a beer can. (This is yet another moment in which I am grateful there was no Facebook in 1987.) I went home and opened my Bible to the spot where I'd left off the night before in Ephesians. It was my first Bible Zinger experience: "Be not drunk on wine, for this leads to debauchery." I could practically hear the Twilight Zone music.

These days my memory is not what it used to be. The kids are constantly saying, "Hey, Mom, remember that time when [I don't even remember what it is I've forgotten but there are plenty of things that could go in these brackets]." I usually answer, "Ummmmmm?" It was surprising to see how crisp my West Virginia memories remain: what I was wearing (and how I felt about it), where I was sitting in whose car, the feel of a nascent beard on my cheek, a precise tone of voice within a long-ago conversation.

I took the two oldest to see the Theatre West Virginia production of Rocket Boys. It is Homer Hickam's story, and his yearning to get OUT of coal country was particularly resonant for me. I remember how fiercely I wanted to go somewhere else, somewhere far away, and how afraid I was that I would be stuck there.

In 25 years there have been 14 deaths among my classmates, and at least 2 have lifelong disabilities. My husband's graduating class (smaller, but not that much smaller) has only seen 2 or 3 deaths. I am thinking of it as a place that wrings people out while they are young, but I am not, as you may have noticed, impartial about the kind of place it is.

It's strange to think that it used to be the place I knew best. I drove those crazy roads every day; I hardly heard the accent that struck me so forcefully on this visit. (I wanted to ask one of our tour guides if he would run through a little word list for me so I could analyze his liquid vowelization patterns, but I thought it might be a mite disruptive for the other museum visitors.) It is still strange, days later, to think it over here in my cozy yellow house-- how familiar it all was, and how foreign.

Lighter

So you guys, I have a confession. All of that fitness stuff I've been doing this summer? Part of my motivation was this class reunion. I mean, a big chunk of my motivation was that I wanted to keep up with my running group, and I wanted to work on strength training to see if it helped me avoid joint pain this season, and it has, which is fantastic, and also I like being able to open jars all by my own studly self. But that wasn't my only motivation.

In high school "thin" was part of my identity. When my BMI eased up to 17, I was aghast. Since then I've gained 25 pounds, 10 or 15 of which I need for things like strong bones and normal ovarian function, and 10 or 15 of which are a perpetual vexation. I envisioned myself (okay, preposterously, but also persistently) walking into the reunion and hearing whispers along the lines of "That Jamie Most has let herself GO."

It turns out that (a) two months isn't enough time to make big changes in a body plodding through its fifth decade. And (b), the thing about high school reunions is that everybody else has aged just as much as you have, so they're almost all carrying some extra poundage and they'd rather chat about how you've managed to have five -- FIVE?? really, five?!? five as in one more than four?? -- kids than about what size pants you're wearing these days. The comment I heard most often was "You haven't changed a bit." Which is ridiculous (do you know what my HAIR looked like in high school? before I discovered gel? when I blew it dry every day? I have pictures; I refuse to share), but I'm not complaining.

I'd spent so much time thinking about my teenaged body that I hadn't given much thought to my teenaged psyche. Last Saturday, though, I met some friends at a state park for a picnic lunch. A few minutes before I had to go, one of them said to me, "Jamie, I have nightmares about you."

I assumed it was a joke, because I am awfully bossy with an obnoxious streak, but he wasn't smiling. He said he still regretted being so mean to me in our geometry class. He said he had liked me, and he had wanted to be cool and flirty, but instead he had just been mean. He mentioned an incident I didn't even remember. He looked stricken.

It brought back a welter of memories. One day he tied a length of broken cassette tape to my belt loop, so that when I marched down the hall to the cafeteria it unfurled behind me, yards and yards of it, like a tattered sail. I was mortified, in the way that only a 14-year-old can be mortified. I felt so lost that year, uncertain why I was so lonely. By graduation we were friends, though, and I would never have expected to hear him sound so remorseful.

"All forgiven," I said. He looked grateful, and relieved.

The exchange reminded me of the relentless soul-sucking stupidity of high school -- the posturing, the gossip, the putdowns, the casual ugliness. I am so grateful, thinking back, that I don't live like that these days. I can tell the people I love that I love them. I can know that I am loved in return. My friends are usually careful about gossip. I no longer worry about being trapped in a coal country small town for the rest of my days. I have learned that I would rather be kind than dazzling, and that the laughter that follows a joke made at another's expense is a uniquely unsatisfying kind of laughter. (Candor compels me to admit that the tone of voice I use to admonish a child to be kind to a sibling is not always what you'd call a kind tone. Working on that one.)

If you'd told me in high school what my waist would measure after 25 years and 5 children, I would have been appalled. I would have envisioned myself as something on the scale of Jabba the Hut, doomed to a life of muumuus and self-loathing. I wonder if my high school self would have believed what I could tell her: that her post-pregnancy ribcage would no longer fit in that prom dress, but that it would hold a fuller heart -- a heart less afraid of what other people might think or say. I wonder if she would believe this thing I know to be true: that she could gain 25 pounds, and still feel a thousand pounds lighter.

Back

I was in West Virginia this morning. I hadn't been to West Virginia since 1994, because my parents moved away in 1995. My 25th class reunion was last weekend, though, and so our whole family made the trek. We don't take many road trips because my husband hates long drives with squabbly kids, but to our mutual surprise it went pretty smoothly -- even with a "short cut" involving a closed US highway and a crazypants detour in the wrong direction. In our hurry to get home we didn't stop for dinner, and I suspect I will wake up in the morning with a bit of a sugar hangover, since my evening meal consisted of a few leftover Starburst and Hershey's nuggets. (Can't remember where I read about state line treats -- must have been Lissa Wiley or Elizabeth Foss. Kids loved them. They also morphed into "smell that dead skunk" treats and "who can spot the golden dome of the WV state capitol?" treats.) But the zucchini plants were busy while we were away, yielding up three monstrosities about the size of my upper arm, so perhaps I will make zucchini fritters for breakfast to salve the sugar hangover. Petely skipped straight from the car to the garden, to see how it had fared in our absence. "Mom!" he shouted when he saw the zucchini, "you have to see this RIGHT NOW. It's unbelievable!"

The kids will know vacation has ended, with an unmistakable thudding end, if I serve them zucchini for breakfast, won't they? More soon!