Light and Momentary

Fruit

If you've been around for a while you might remember the Heartbreak Paper. At a meeting for junior faculty about networking I had a genius idea. I emailed someone who is a huge name in her field, which is adjacent to mine, and asked if she'd like to collaborate on a paper. I mean, what would you do if you were a huge name and some random assistant professor in an adjacent field asked you to collaborate on a paper? You'd delete the email, right? Instead she wrote right back. Sure, she said. You write the first draft and I'll write the second. At the time I kept saying, "I feel like I cold-called Beyonce and asked her to record some duets with me, and she said yes."

In this fashion we wrote a really excellent paper and sent it off to a journal in my field, where the peer review process was woefully mishandled. I bet I put a hundred hours' worth of work into revising it based on the reviewers' input, and then after I addressed all of their comments they rejected the resubmission. When I got the decision email I closed my office door and cried at my desk. It turns out that creating a toehold for interdisciplinary work is really hard -- harder than you might think. But I kept going back to the manuscript and thinking to myself, "This is the best damned academic writing I have ever done, and it deserves a home." So I persevered, and eventually I got it published. I turned it into two publications, actually, because that first set of reviewers made me add so much stuff that it wouldn't all fit into a single paper. Both papers were published in a third-tier journal, but it was a peer-reviewed outlet and it was also a venue that's easily accessible to clinicians, the target audience.

On the strength of that first paper, my co-author and I received an invitation last summer to present a 3-hour seminar at my discipline's national convention, a special seminar that would cost attendees extra money. (That part felt like extra responsibility, above and beyond the 3-hour seminar part.) We worked up our presentation and gave it in November. Over the years that we had worked on these two papers, I had started thinking of her as more of a colleague, less of a rock star. But let me tell you, she blew the room away. So much experience, so adroitly presented. Afterward I said to my roommate, "I feel like I got Beyonce to give a private concert at our convention."

Just yesterday I got our ratings for the session: 4.77 out of 5. I tell you this not to brag on myself as a presenter, because I deliberately kept my segment modest in scope. "I think they'll really want to hear what you have to say," I kept saying, and it appears that I was right.

Some days my job feels fairly thankless. I do not love curriculum debates. I do not love repeated conversations about why that half-point deduction is reasonable and will stand. Sometimes peer review makes me want to turn to fiction writing instead of science. But I looked at that email and thought about the roomful of people who had been able to learn something new, something valuable, something to help the families they work with, and who had appreciated the opportunity. And it made me glad that I had persevered.

Think of the children

Maybe for Lent I will give up complaining about the weather. It is the very opposite of an eternal perspective, getting grumpy about something that is guaranteed to be temporary. But today is Mardi Gras, so in that festive spirit I will tell you that this morning's weather was absolutely foul. I was out in the weather a fair amount today (I mean, okay, a fair amount for a person with a desk job, which is to say I spent half an hour walking in it), and it was unrelentingly disgusting. The sky couldn't seem to decide whether to snow or rain so it plopped slush down upon our heads in the morning. Then in the afternoon there was freezing rain like needles and a vicious wind. Also mud, because the air is cold but the ground is not. 

So it wasn't a great day for walking to school, is what I'm saying. I had planned to send Stella with an umbrella, but we got caught up reading Two Towers and I wound up giving her a ride. 

Now I've told you before about the neighborhood grade school. It's on a narrow older street, with signage that says clearly that no one is supposed to park during pickup/drop-off hours. These signs have always been ignored, but the ignoring has risen to a new level recently. Instead of pulling over to the curb and dropping off a kid who then runs down 30 feet to be greeted by the school staff waiting in the driveway, parents are now parking their cars, turning off their engines, unstrapping their kids, locking their doors, and walking with them to the teachers.

It's not just the kindergartners; it's not just kids with special needs. It's a widespread thing: parents are escorting their 9- and 10-year old children 30 feet along the sidewalk. 

Under other circumstances I might feel that this is a "to each her own" kind of deal. In these circumstances, though, I do not feel that way. This substantially increases the time it takes to drop a kid off, which increases congestion (and driver irritation) on a narrow street. This makes the zone around the school less safe. The thing they're doing with the idea that kids will be safer thereby is having the opposite effect. 

I usually deal with this by ignoring it. Stella mostly walks in the mornings, but when I drop her off I generally don't turn the corner. I believe in my 11-year-old's ability to walk 20 yards without her mother, because I am reckless like that.

Today, for reasons that now elude me, I turned onto the street where the school was and was greeted by a whole string of opportunities to grow in patience. Parents on the street were very carefully poking their umbrellas out of the car first, and then very carefully holding the umbrellas over their kids' doors as the kids emerged, so they could walk the 30 feet to the school driveway without getting slushed on. 

"Maybe their kids have sensory issues and you shouldn't be so judgy," I said to myself. "Maybe they have immunological issues and their parents are worried about them getting wet and chilled during cold and flu season. They get to decide what works for their families just like you do."

But OH my friends, I did not succeed in squelching my side-eye. People of America, most children thrive on small challenges. Falling slush is unlikely to break them. They can probably even handle the combination of falling slush AND walking 30 feet down the sidewalk. Try it! You might like it! 

It feels like no time at all since Joe was at this school and he will be starting college in the fall. I started to say "Obviously no one is going to hold an umbrella over a COLLEGE STUDENT'S head!" But you know, I wouldn't want to speak too soon.

Bright Spot

For Christmas Alex gave me a membership in Ysolda Teague's Colorwork Club. She is probably my favorite knitwear designer: I think she does a fantastic job blending traditional elements and innovative approaches, and I often learn something new and fun when I make one of her designs. 

At the beginning of February, on a notably gray and discouraging day, I pulled a parcel out of the mailbox. I frowned at it, because I was feeling pretty frowny on that particular day, and then I saw the label. I ripped it open before I even took my coat off, and it was a most excellent antidote for that recalcitrant case of frownosis. 

Packed inside were 5 50g skeins of yummy Norwegian yarn, squooshy and lavender-scented. Two were oatmeal-colored, two were a fabulous rich reddish-orange, and one was a lovely blue-gray-green shade. There was a beautifully produced print pattern booklet and a download code.

This first pattern is for a cowl called Brunstane. I love cowls. I once read an Iditarod champion's assertion that keeping your neck warm is the key to winter comfort, because so much of your blood supply flows through your neck. Is this true? I do not know. Do I wear a cowl almost every day in the winter as I trudge to and from work in the snow and ice and sleet? You bet I do.

The Colorwork Club is aimed at people who are new to colorwork, so it is a simple 8-stitch repeat. It's fun and rhythmic, and I've been inching my way through it while Stella and I work our way through The Lord of the Rings. ("How do you like The Two Towers, Stella?" asked a sibling. "It's pretty landscape-y," she said, but we should get to the White Rider chapter tomorrow and I can't wait.) It's making a delicious fabric. I decided to go down a needle size, since Ysolda seems to be a tighter knitter than I am, and I wanted a cowl that was sturdy enough not to flop down around my clavicles. I need my ENTIRE NECK to stay warm when the north wind doth blow.

Yesterday, though, I hit a snag. Do you see this picture of winter happiness -- cozy knitting, happy reading, and the aforementioned print pattern?

I looked at the pattern to figure out where to start the next round, and my entire brain froze up. It was as if Lewis Carroll had sneaked in from beyond the grave to swap out my pattern for one of the White Queen's. I kept tracing my finger up and down the end-of-round column of stitches, and feeling utterly baffled about why it was in the wrong place. Had I started the chart too soon? I felt confident that I could avoid that particular mistake even dead-drunk or delirious, but the evidence was right there in front of my eyes: my cowl didn't match the chart. I set it aside and came back to it hours later, but I was still flummoxed.

Finally in desperation I picked up the booklet to flip it to the facing page, at which point I realized that it was upside down. The chart has vertical symmetry (which is why I didn't notice the error) but not left-right symmetry. (I am guessing you probably did not look at the pattern booklet in the picture and say, "What?! That's upside down!" even though it is still upside down.)

There's much to be said for print pattern booklets on nice paper, but at least electronic patterns don't rotate themselves 180° when you're not paying attention.

I love to see the inside of stranded knitting. It reminds me of the long-ago Scots who looked at a persistent problem (it's really cold on the North Sea) and found a solution (two strands are warmer than one) that is both effective and a joy to produce. I am not sure how many people share my enthusiasm for wrong-side fabric, but perhaps it's a larger group than you'd think. Alex went to two different textile museums while he was in Malaysia and Indonesia. "I just really like interesting textiles," he explained. In case you too like interesting textiles, here's some wrong-side fabric for your delectation.

Bees, swarming

I am carrying around a bunch of accumulated anger, my friends. Some of it is about national issues that might be making you mad as well; some of it is about very specific and painful stuff that's been going on in our family over the last six-ish months. I am writing a letter in connection with one of the most frustrating pieces of that stuff, and the longer I work on it the more enraged it sounds. There's a part in which I have described the reader's anticipated response to my chief complaint with the phrase "insert self-serving and nonsensical mouth-noises here" -- because I would like to be perfectly clear that I have listened to all the yammering I care to hear. It deploys the word "loathsome" with more fervor than I have ever applied to it before. I will need to dial it back before I can send it off.

But in many spheres I am feeling UP.TO.HERE with nonsense. Tonight I was talking to Stella about some unkindness she's been experiencing at school and I said, "That story makes me want to spray that kid in the face with a Super Soaker! I wish I could just walk up to him and say, 'Hi, I'm Stella's mom. Do better.' as I unload the entire reservoir." She laughed, because she knows I am never going to do that. And I laughed at myself, saying, "Oh, yes, that's definitely the remedy for unkindness. Way to set an example!" But do you know, I can still imagine the heft of that pretend Super Soaker in my hands.

The pastor of the evangelical church I attended in college said something once that I have never forgotten: he said "forgiveness is the DRAIN in a Christian life." He talked about how gross and unusable a kitchen sink becomes when the drains are clogged. When we hold on to hurts and anger, we back up the flow of grace. We cannot allow living water to move through us if we are nursing our injuries.

I am put together, temperamentally, as a person who reflects on past events. This tendency to relive things that have happened to me does not make it easier for me to move past them. This is a season, in both my citizen-life and my mom-life, when anger is appropriate. It's the balance that gets me, though. Part of the question is practical: if I am rudely dismissive to my correspondent, it's less likely that she will make the (reasonable. so reasonable) decision I am demanding she make. But the bigger piece of it is ethical. I'm always skeptical when Christians say "Well, Jesus flipped tables!" Not being the sinless Son of God, I am less well equipped to express anger without straying into self-indulgence.

I don't know what to do with all this anger, is what I'm saying. I don't like it -- that's another thing I'm saying. I will not be Super-Soaking any fifth-graders, but my rage-ometer is spiking into the red zone on a regular basis. Tell me it's not just me.

Pancakes of Power

I used to cook out of La Leche League's Whole Foods for the Whole Family all the time. One of the most spattered pages in the book is full of pancake recipes, including a recipe for cottage cheese pancakes. A Twitter pal mentioned those pancakes earlier today, and I was swamped by a surge of nostalgia. I used to feed these to my two oldest children all the time: quick, easy, tasty, cheap, filling, full of protein. Who could ask for anything more? They are not actually called Pancakes of Power in the Whole Foods for the Whole Family index, but that book is overdue for a reboot anyway. Here's all you have to do:

Chuck 4 eggs, a cup of cottage cheese, and a half-cup of whole wheat flour into the blender. Add about a third of a cup of milk, depending on your preferred pancake consistency. If you'd like, you can add other ingredients: a bit of salt, a little vanilla, or a tiny pinch of baking soda if your cottage cheese is very tangy. You don't need any of that other stuff, though; you can just blend those first four ingredients and fry up your pancakes in butter. Serve to hungry children along with your preferred pancake toppings.

My mother-in-law gave me that copy of Whole Foods for the Whole Family for Christmas in 1996. Alex's due date was December 24, and all of my in-laws were at our house the next day to open presents and eat dinner. (My suggestion that perhaps Elwood and I could have a quiet Christmas on our own had been met with snorts of derision. OF COURSE we would all spend Christmas together! If I couldn't come to them, they would come to me! I had been firmly instructed that I WAS NOT to wait too long to have the baby. Alex and I failed to heed that particular part of their instructions, though; his birthday is December 30.)

I pored over those pages as if they contained the Secret to Good Mothering. In the process I learned how to make homemade whole grain bread, and how to grow my own sprouts, and how to eyeball a batch of white sauce so I didn't need canned cream-of-whatever soup in my pantry. I learned that when you make multigrain pancakes, you should thin out the batter a little bit and turn down the heat a little bit. I learned that carob brownies are not actually very brownie-esque, but I took them to potlucks anyway.

Somewhere along the way I moved on to other cookbooks. But the phrase "cottage cheese pancakes" can take me right back. I can see myself at 27 with toddler Alex on my left hip, pouring pancake batter out of the blender jar into sizzling butter.

Dear Jim Justice

Dear Governor Justice, like you I am a graduate of Woodrow Wilson High School who no longer lives in Beckley. Like you I appreciate the power of team sports to foster self-discipline and build community. Like you I am-- wait, we have literally nothing else in common. No, that's not quite true. Like you I am white. But that's where the similiarities end, I do believe, because unlike you I am pretty concerned about the impact of angry words thrown around by white people in positions of power. Unlike you, I think it's pretty foul to label a community of young people -- one of the most diverse communities of young people in your overly homogenized state -- "a bunch of thugs." And also unlike you, apparently, I know how to apologize when I've put my foot in my mouth.

Here's the story as I understand it: a spectator rooting for the girls' basketball team you coach had caused problems at previous games. When the WWHS assistant coach went over to speak to him, some of the WWHS girls left the bench. Sure, they shouldn't have done that. But maybe, just possibly, your security detail shouldn't have knocked the assistant coach flat on the ground in the absence of any aggression on his part. Maybe, just maybe, you could show the merest soupçon of concern about the issues we've been having in this country with armed police officers causing bodily harm to unarmed black men. Maybe -- I'm just spitballing here -- you could acknowledge that it would be a preposterously poor use of the state's time to pursue the criminal citation pending against that assistant coach.

Instead, you announced on the record that the WWHS folks are "a bunch of thugs." When you were informed that "thug" is a racially charged word these days, you doubled down instead of apologizing. And when the pressure mounted, you only managed to issue a sad mealy-mouthed non-apology: you were sorry if anyone might have been offended.

Here's the thing, Governor Justice: back in the years when we were at WWHS, people in southern West Virginia used to talk about racism as if it were a binary phenomenon. Did someone know better than to use That One Offensive Word? Not a racist. This is woefully insufficient here in the third millennium, though, where we know (or should know) that bias falls on a continuum. Where we know (or should know) that the absence of malicious intent doesn't necessarily rule out the presence of harmful impact. Where we know (or should know) that life for girls in poverty-stricken racist pollution-befouled southern West Virginia is hard enough without the GOVERNOR of the entire damn state calling them a bunch of thugs.

Do better, Governor Justice. You're allegedly a Flying Eagle, but you're acting more like a turkey.

In solidarity with the WWHSers awaiting an actual apology,
Jamie Gladly

Valentine's Eve

Elwood suggested that we go out for a Valentine's Eve dinner tonight. I was looking around last week in search of reservations and realizing I'd left it a little late, but there's a lot less restaurant traffic on February 13 than on February 14. We dropped Joe and Pete off at the climbing gym, and went to a cozy little restaurant we enjoy.

"Do you know how many Valentine's Days we've spent together?" I asked. "This is our 33rd."

"Wow," he said. "I don't remember our first one but I'm sure you do."

He was right, of course.

In February of 1988 I was a freshman in college. A group of friends made a last-minute plan to go to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, and I drove south from Chicago with them. This was a BANANAPANTS decision, my friends-- straight-up bananapants. One of the crew had an uncle who was a priest in New Orleans, and he agreed that we could stay at the rectory/convent associated with his parish. My parents were (rightly) horrified about this trip, so I turned off the ringer on my dorm room phone so they would stop bugging me. (Attention, any Gladly children who read this post at any point in the future: this was a terrible plan, a genuinely terrible plan. I do not recommend this plan.)

We left Chicago on a frigid February night. The weather in New Orleans was sunny and mild. In my memory the crowds were also sunny and mild, although I do distinctly remember thinking, "There is a seedy underbelly here to which I was completely oblivious when I lived here as a child." The Sunday before Mardi Gras was Valentine's Day, and our group left a restaurant to find a man busking on the sidewalk. As we stood nearby he started singing "You Send Me." Elwood and I had only been dating for a few weeks at that point. "Go on and dance, you two," said our friend David. So we did. I remember it vividly: swaying on the sidewalk, basking in the warmth of the night and the warmth of the voice.

So tomorrow will be our 33rd Valentine's Day. There are no trips to New Orleans planned for this year; during the day I will do some exciting revising of a manuscript and some even more exciting grading, and perhaps we will hear a classical music performance in the evening.

"Do you suppose we have 33 more Valentine's Days in our future?" I asked him at dinner. "Hm," he said, "I don't know about that." He'll be 85 in 33 years; I'll be 82. It's strange to think that at some point we will cross the line -- if we haven't already crossed it -- where we have less future together than past. But as Elwood leaned across our shared plates to kiss me he said, "I love getting older with you, Jamie."

Gladlyville is cold and snowy tonight; there are no parades, no holiday atmosphere, and there are certainly no buskers. Maybe New Orleans would be a more romantic destination. But I have the good fortune to be married to someone who sees me exactly as I am and loves what he sees, and that is the perfect amount of romance for me.

Almost Antipodean

My firstborn is not exactly on the opposite side of the world from me, but he's pretty close. He's in Malaysia, telling me that the beach is beautiful and the sun is shining and he is staying in the shadow of the highest mountain in SE Asia (although he's not 100% sure about the mountain's height relative to other mountains in SE Asia, since this is a geographical tidbit he picked up from the cabdriver).

This morning in church I sat two pews behind a former student, who was there alone with her two small children. I slipped out of my seat before Mass started to let her know I was available if she needed a spare pair of hands. I remember vividly the trials of being the only adult at Mass with two little ones.

I wouldn't have guessed, all those years ago, that the letting go would be its own kind of trial. It's been a long time since my firstborn needed me to wipe his nose or distract him while he was bored. These days he is sending me enthusiastic texts about Malaysian scenery. This is the most stereotypical island paradise I've ever seen in my life, he tells me. He'll be in Malaysia for one week and in Jakarta for another, a blend of work and play.

Meanwhile I'm having vicarious travel anxiety. The caves in Kuala Lumpur were amazing, he told me, and I thought "CAVES ARE VERY DANGEROUS PLACES." He's snorkeling with friends on Thursday, and I would like him to know that THE OCEAN IS ALSO A VERY DANGEROUS PLACE. I am trying to be calm and reserved in my replies. He told me he started his day with a combo of kimchi, sushi, and papaya, and I did not say SUSHI IS A DANGEROUS FOOD while wondering which parasites might have taken up residence in his innards. "Breakfast of champions," I texted back, impersonating the kind of tranquil mother who feels more pride than panic when her firstborn wangles an invitation to present at a conference on the other side of the world.

It's not that I'm wishing for a return to those days of wrangling two small children alone at Mass, you know. It's just that I have a keen appreciation for the simplicity of the needs of small children. If they needed me I was right there. Today I am almost 9000 miles away from my Alex. Probably it will all be fine, and in two weeks I will get a postcard from Malaysia to tack down in my 2020 photo album.

Probably.

Waiting

I picked up a bulletin on my way into church yesterday afternoon. It's the Presentation, the cover announced, and I thought with a rush of gratitude about Simeon and his patience.

One of my kids has been waiting, bravely and patiently, for a while now. We were expecting some preliminary resolution by Friday, and when no resolution materialized the bravery and patience temporarily collapsed. I offered comfort and logic and prayer, but my heart was still heavy when I walked into church for choir rehearsal. And then I saw that bulletin cover. The only thing we really know about Simeon is that he waited, and that at the end of his waiting he proclaimed God's sufficiency. I can die in peace now, he said to the Lord; you are faithful to your promises.

On the way out of church this morning I saw a friend who asked me how the waiting is going. She is waiting, too; her husband has been searching for work for months now. She asked me specifically if I would offer up this current suffering for her family, and I was glad to have a purpose for it. The idea of "offering it up" was something I'd never heard of before I went through RCIA, but it made immediate sense to me. It clarified a previously puzzling verse in the letter to the Colossians; it assured me that in yielding to an affliction, in deliberately uniting it to Christ's suffering on the cross, I could engage in a form of wordless prayer.

Our family's hour in the Adoration chapel is right after choir practice, and I prayed there for all the people I know who are waiting -- my own kid especially, but there are so many of us wrestling with one kind of waiting or another. I'm not the only Inigo Montoya in the bunch, I feel certain.

I hate waiting

I burst through the door when I got home, shouting "Isaiah 40!" (I was thinking specifically of the end, but I love the whole thing.) Something somewhere in that combination of spiritual seeking and parental encouragement and inner resilience eased the crisis yesterday, but I was still grateful for today's readings. Simeon had the kind of vision I want to have, with his certainty that the redemptive presence of God among us is enough. More than enough. Worth waiting for, however long it takes.