Thank you for praying for my friend Jennifer and her husband. She is asking especially for prayers to get through the baby's funeral, which I believe will be this weekend. Please do keep lifting her up.
***
Yesterday I took the kids who weren't in school (#1, #4, and #5) to Chicago for the day. We caught the early train and went to the Field Museum. The Field Museum is one of my very favorite places. I love the way it captures the diversity of life, and our hunger for order and understanding. It feeds my soul. I wasn't sure how long Pete and Stella would last there, but they were entranced. We closed the place down and took a Lyft over to Greektown for dinner. I want to remember the lake, chill and dark on our right as we headed up LSD, and the way the city skyline shone through the snow as we turned onto Balbo, and Stella's enthusiasm for the Art Institute lions, and Alex and the driver chuckling quietly in the front seats at the conversation in the back. Also: Stella flinching away as gouts of flame shot up from our saganaki, before she ate every bite of her portion.
She curled up across two train seats to sleep on the way home, while Pete and I sat across from her and talked. It would have been a late night for a medium-sized girl otherwise.
***
My 17yo is feeling chatty. He is reading The Scarlet Letter unenthusiastically. He is my most enthusiastic reader, generally: he just finished the Divine Comedy (the whole thing! dang!) and dove right into the Iliad. He is three years into a long-haul experimental fiction project. (He thinks the idea of a Dickens project is revolting (that's a quote), but a multi-year experimental fiction project = AWESOME.) He would like my opinion on an essay called "Lipogrammatic Writing and Its Relationship to the Theme of Physical Fitness in Hawthorne." I would read that, I told him, but I love you more than your English teacher does. He nodded. "I've noticed," he said. (I think this essay is mostly a platform in which he can tell his teacher that A Void is a better book than The Scarlet Letter.)
He's still musing next to me. "Somewhere I'd like to work in the phrase 'Pavlovianly ultra-paradoxical.'" I have confidence in your ability to work that in, I tell him. "You can thank Pynchon for that phrase," he says.
***
I promised him I'd read The Crying of Lot 49. It seems a little wimpy to say that I do not love mid-20th-century American literature. So I won't say it.
But perhaps the amount of time I have spent on chapter 1 speaks for itself.
***
I had a really helpful conversation with my chair this afternoon. She is back from sabbatical and I am glad. I've never had a better boss. Somehow she manages to be generous with her time and encouragement while also getting All The Things done. I think she will probably retire in another year and a half, but I hope not. I went in wincing to read my fall semester teaching evals, remembering that brutal spring grad class, and guess what? They were all fine, all three classes. I had been especially worried about one of the undergrad classes, based on an ominous conversation with a senior faculty member in December. "More than 90% of those students said you were effective in your role," my chair said kindly, reading some snippets aloud to me. "Even students with complaints also have good things to say about you. There is nothing here that concerns me at all."
Phew. I hadn't realized how much anxiety I had been carrying around.
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