Light and Momentary

Garden updates

Pete and I went to the neighborhood garden store tonight and loaded up our cart with herbs. Every spring it's fun to see what will come back from last year's herbs. The oregano is unstoppable; the sage and thyme look like they're here to stay. To our surprise, the lovage returned this year, peeking up between the lavender and the tarragon.

So far this year we had only planted a few herbs: golden sage, rosemary, lemongrass, parsley. We have an explosion of tiny cilantro seedlings, and Pete is torn between his gardener self's reaction (BABY GROWING THINGS, HUZZAH! WELCOME BABIES!!) and his gastronomic self's reaction (WHY ARE WE GROWING SO MUCH FOOD THAT TASTES LIKE SOAP?!). We bought a little pot of basil earlier this season but we've kept it inside, shielded from the vagaries of April weather in the Midwest. It has octupled in size here in our dining room, and now that we've moved into May it will make the leap to life on the outside.

We oohed and aahed over the herbs, stocking up on Thai basil and lemon basil and spicy globe basil and Aristotle basil. (I've never planted that one before but I presume it will make me very smart or very boring.) We bought tricolor sage and purple sage and pineapple mint, stevia and savory and nasturtiums.

My Mother's Day plan is to dig another big hole in my yard; Pete and I are going to make a new full-sun bed after the roaring success of last year's shade bed. To that end we bought a hens-and-chicks. We actually bought two hens-and-chicks, because I couldn't decide which one most needed to come live at our house and so I decreed that we would extend the butterfly garden to accommodate the second one. "Mom," said Pete, "maybe we should slow down. We don't have much of a plan for the new bed yet." "Dig up the grass, add hens-and-chicks," I said. "That's a starter plan!"

We paid for our plants and walked toward the car, and I could feel the happiness well up inside me. Pete and I have so much fun dreaming and digging, weeding and watering. Sometimes when it's just the two of us outside I sing silly songs to the things that are growing, like the middle-aged-lady version of Frances the Badger singing to her poached eggs. "Oh, Pete," I said contentedly, "I think I might burst into song."

You should know that Pete is extraordinarily tolerant of his mother's quirks. When I sing impromptu songs for the cilantro, he writes down a verse or two in his garden journal instead of rolling his eyes and hoping the neighbors are all inside with their TVs turned up nice and loud. But even a tolerant boy has his limits, I suppose, because his eyes widened when I said "...burst into song." We were surrounded by people, in search of basil plants or Mother's Day gifts or what have you, and they were probably not expecting a sudden Soprano Serenade to a Sempervivum. 

"Here?" he croaked.

I burst out laughing at the mental image and at the croak, and we laughed together all the way to the car. Once we were safely inside, I did indeed burst into song. It's the bursting-into-song time of year.

Vanless

You guys, our van was so ugly. It was the ugliest car on the whole block. It was not beautiful when we bought it, and then two of our kids learned how to drive across the years that we owned it. The left-hand sliding door would open but not shut. The right-hand sliding door would usually close if you knew the secret closing handshake. The tailgate had taken to opening spontaneously for reasons I never could figure out. The battery would drain mysteriously when it rained, so we usually kept the battery cable disconnected to prevent that particular surprise. The power steering fluid reservoir had an unfixable leak. Months ago it had slid in my mental ledger from the Ugly (But We Don't Care If Our Vehicles Are Ugly) column to the Nope column: time to get rid of the van.

However-- I am married to a man who is much more sanguine about moribund vehicles than I am, and in his view those things fell in the mildly annoying category of vehicle troubles rather than the unsafe category. "The van is fine," he would say soothingly. "All right, then, you can drive it," I would reply. "I want to donate the van," I had been telling him for more than a year. "I think we should sell it instead," he would say.

On Sunday I said, "Okay, if you want to sell the van, call the guy tomorrow. Otherwise, I'm setting up the donation on Tuesday." And LO, our van is gone. There's only a power steering fluid stain in the place where it used to live. (The number of dollars for which we sold the van has three digits, if you needed any more information about its condition.)

We are going to see how it goes with one car. For the first 20 years of our marriage we had either one car (1993-98, 2003-2013) or zero cars (1998-2003), and it mostly worked. We live in a very walkable part of a fairly walkable town with decent bus service; Joe can bike to the gym and to work after he comes home, and the other kids aren't doing much in the way of activities right now. We reserved a rental van for our big family get-together next month. A person could spend a fair amount of money on rental vans and occasional Ubers before those expenses even started to compare to the cost of buying and insuring and maintaining a van.

I just signed up for a summer Adoration hour (hurray!), and we will need to think a bit about logistics for that to work: church is a 25-minute walk or a shorter bike ride. Joe may see this post and think to himself, "...oh. I was hoping I could drive to work more often this summer." But I guess we can figure it out as we go along. 

I'm thinking about the times I slid into the driver's seat and discovered that the battery was dead, again, for reasons no one could figure out or address, and eventually got the van started only to have the sliding door make angry alarm noises at me because it didn't want to close, and then after the door hushed up I noticed that the engine was making its "need more power steering fluid" hum again. That vehicle was such a nightmare! And now -- whee! -- I never have to drive it again.

Our old friend Mme. Beurre-Noisette considers llama farming again

Do you happen to remember Mme. Beurre-Noisette, the beleaguered instructrice from L'École de Pâtisserie et Logopédie? She is having a tough week of it, friends, so send her some sympathy if you would be so kind.

She is dealing with yet more students who have misappropriated the words of the noble Escoffier and his fellows. The frustrating part is that this comes at the end of a semester spent attempting to convey the message in every possible way: Escoffier's words belong to Escoffier. Use your own words.

I MEAN, you GUYS, what is a person supposed to do???

Week 1: they complete a fairly thorough online plagiarism module, which should have put paid to the idea that a sprinkle of plagiarism is no big deal.
Weeks 2-6: in small groups they address fake plagiarism, created by their instructrice specifically to illustrate the kinds of issues that have been most problematic in the past. Their mission, whether or not they choose to accept it: Hunt it down! Make it right!
Weeks 7-10 or so: they continue to work in these small groups, focusing now on the parts of their own papers where they're finding it tricky to avoid over-reliance on their source texts. They write plain-language summaries.
Weeks 11-15: they complete structured peer-review tasks focused on their big final papers, which explicitly ask them to look for any spots where the writing voice doesn't seem consistent.

WHY OH WHY, then, are we dealing with plagiarism in finals week? 

I do not know the answer to that question.

Some musings about work email

I mentioned that I'm reading Cal Newport's book A World Without Email, and thinking about what kinds of strategies might bring down the volume of email I get at work. Our department culture involves a lot of reply-all -- too much, if you ask me, which no one has done yet. It's nice to get the email saying it's someone's birthday today, a thing that happens every couple of weeks, on average. It's not so nice getting 12 replies wishing the person a happy birthday. (That's not just me being grinchy, is it? Would you also be a little grumpy about getting 12 messages wishing someone else a happy birthday?) It's pretty pervasive. Our chair emailed earlier this week to say "Congratulations to X, Y, and Z on their election to the A & B committees!" I read this as "Guess what, guys, you have a lot of extra work coming up next year but I will spin it as an occasion for congratulations!" There were even reply-all responses to that message, echoing the chair's congratulations.

I may or may not be able to lobby for changes on that front. I probably have more latitude when it comes to my students. I am thinking about adding a section on email to my syllabus, to say essentially "the more email I get, the harder it is for me to respond promptly to high-priority student concerns." If I am not gentle enough, I will alarm the easily alarmed students. But if I am too tactful about it, it won't make any difference.

I think I can easily reduce the number of emails I get asking to set up meetings. I think I'll try to front-load the work of scheduling meetings with my TAs and independent study students, and I might also try something new with office hours. Maybe I'll have an open office hour, when anybody is welcome to stop by for any reason (but might have to wait), and another couple of office hours where people can use scheduling software to sign up for ten-minute slots. They'll have to plan a little further ahead, but they won't have to wait and they won't have to email me.

I may also be able to reduce the number of email conversations I have about grades. You would be surprised, I bet, by the number of students who figure it's worth sending an email to see if they can get a few more points on a recently graded assignment. I would like to say "conversations about grades require in-person meetings unless the concern is a straightforward arithmetic error." I don't want a shy student who spotted a legitimate goof on my part to face unnecessary barriers in pursuit of those points. But I am so over the emails from students asking if I'll overlook their plagiarism or lack of preparation and give them a better grade. Even if I could just reply to the finals-week pleas for "just 5 more points" with a screenshot of the syllabus statement, I think it would bring down my stress level.

Would it be weird to say "I prefer to address questions about assignments in person; there will be time for questions at the beginning of every class"? I appreciate emails from students who let me know that something isn't right with an online assignment or quiz. But I get so much email, you guys -- so much email. And the ones that say "do I really have to follow the instructions?" -- those are not my favorite.

#EAMDRAL, the PLAN

All righty, friends, it's going to be fairly painful here for the next few days. The thing about grading big batches of student writing is that there's always plagiarism somewhere. I thought I had been SO careful about making sure I wouldn't be dealing with plagiarism in finals week, but it seems to be inevitable. So! When you are being walloped in the face with the very worst part of your job, do you say to yourself, "a nice fat Dickens novel would make me feel so much better right now"? Because I do.

Let's read Little Dorrit together!

We can go to the south of France in fiction, even if we can't go there in reality. We can discuss whether Little Dorrit is a believable character or not, and why Dickens was so determined that his female lead characters would be mostly meek. We can also talk about the least meek mother in all of Dickens, and the 19th-century fictional predecessor of a 21st-century criminal who just appeared in the obit pages. We can return to the Marshalsea debtors' prison, which we haven't visited since we read Pickwick a few years ago.

I am going to start on Monday and read about 40 pages a day. If you get a free Kindle version, take a careful look at the first paragraph before you dive in. It should say, "Thirty years ago, Marseilles lay burning in the sun, one day. A blazing sun upon a fierce August day was no greater rarity in southern France then, than at any other time, before or since." I am telling you this because I downloaded a free Kindle version of Oliver Twist last year and I wondered briefly if I had slid into Looking Glass World. I think someone must have plugged the Project Gutenberg version into some kind of translation software twice -- so that it was rendered automatically into Dutch (or something) and then back into English -- and uploaded the resulting bowl of not-quite-word-salad to the Kindle store. 

I have been reading Cal Newport's A World Without Email for weeks now, and the ratio of interesting to dull is less than favorable. It's partly that there's too much business-speak for my taste, and partly that the changes he is suggesting seem likely to meet with a lot of resistance and I'm tired right now. But I am going to FINISH IT, because Little Dorrit awaits. I have also been reading This is Happiness, which I am finding pleasant but not especially riveting. I am going to FINISH IT TOO, because Little Dorrit awaits.

Wouldn't you like to escape into Victorian England for a little while? Join me!

Recommended

Thanks, everybody, for your kindness in response to my post from yesterday. Much appreciated.

Completely changing the subject: tonight we tried a new recipe that caught my eye last week, and you might want to try it too. If chimichurri and guacamole had a baby, it would be something like guasacaca sauce. We had some sad wilting pork chops left over from a meal last week, and I suspected that this sauce would dress them up enough to get them out of the fridge's Pre-Garbage Zone -- those leftovers you know are unlikely to make it into anyone's belly.

You guys, it was so yummy. Fresh and zippy, creamier than chimichurri and zingier than guacamole. "I might dab this behind my ears," I said. "Or perhaps bathe in it." Pete does not like cilantro and was a little more cautious about trying it, but wound up liking it despite the cilantro. He says he wouldn't eat it with a spoon, but I most certainly did.

Elwood and I agreed that zesting a lime was a little much for a weeknight recipe with a lot of other intense flavors in it and so he skipped the lime zest, but then I found that I did want a little more lime flavor. I'll probably try it with the zest the next time I make it. I'm certain there will be a next time.

An introduction

My second child, my 21-year-old, identifies as trans and has asked me to write a post about it.

I've had a post in my drafts folder for a while now. I began it after a longtime reader told me in January she didn't think she'd be back to my blog again, in a comment she larded with anti-trans sentiment. 

We seem to be stuck in a bad spiral in the church, in which the bishops keep saying things to the LGBTQ community that sound like they don't actually know very many LGBTQ people, and LGBTQ people keep leaving the church, which means the bishops have fewer opportunities to know LGBTQ people.

So I want to tell you a little about a saint who has become dear to me over the months that this has been unfolding, in preparation for telling you more about the trans person who is dearest to me.

St. Euphrosyne of Alexandria lived in the fifth century. As a young woman she left home to avoid getting married. She dressed as a man and entered a monastery full of men, and she lived there under the name Smaragdus for the next 38 years. You can read more about her story and her eventual reconciliation with her father here, if you'd like.

I think the story of St. Euphrosyne tells us some things that Catholics might do well to remember here in the 21st century: first and most importantly, that a person can live a holy life while presenting as a different gender. St. Euphrosyne's defiance of the gender norms of her day did not prevent her from being canonized and venerated. And second, a person can live a holy life that is not at all the life her parents expected her to live. 

My 21-year-old has asked to be called Marie on the blog, and so that's what I'm going to do. Not long after Marie came out, I saw a Facebook discussion in a group for Catholic women about how to handle an acquaintance's request for a new name and pronouns. It was discouraging to see the number of responses saying "The most loving choice is to ignore their request because it's obviously disordered!" I commented with the story of St. Euphrosyne, only to be told that it wasn't relevant in the present day. 

In a world where too many Catholics assume that transgender identity equals libertinism, I think it's important for us to figure out pastoral responses to people who are both Catholic and transgender. Marie texts me to effuse about her favorite canticles in the Liturgy of the Hours, and may wind up with a Psalm 110 tattoo one of these days out of a particular fondness for Sunday Evening Prayer II, and attends a Catholic Bible study faithfully, and believes wholeheartedly in the Real Presence. And yet she remains uncertain about whether there is a place for her in the Catholic Church.

My biggest worry about posting on this topic was the comments it might attract, and the harm they might cause. My usual comment policy is that debate is welcome as long as it's reasonably courteous, but the standard is different for this post because my children will be following this conversation. There's plenty to discuss as the Church figures out what its response to the transgender community will look like, but this is not a post about hypotheticals. It is a post about a real person who loves Our Lord, and his Bride the Church, and who also wants to be called Marie in this space.

Gladly Family Annals

On this date my 16yo got up on Saturday morning and started on his weekend chores, unprompted. He took the recycling outside and thought to himself, "Huh, the grass is pretty long and it's my turn to mow and it's only going to get warmer. I'd better do it now." He mowed the grass and put the mower away; he came back inside and went about his Saturday morning business. (He opted for the motorless mower, so this was a quiet undertaking. And our lawn is tiny, so it only took 20 minutes or so.)

I am now in my second decade of mothering teenagers and this is the first time one of them has ever said, unprompted, "You know what I think I'll do? Mow the grass, that's what." I was outside admiring the blooming bachelor's buttons when it dawned on me that the grass was mysteriously shorter than it had been and there were severed bits of it lying on the lawn. What could have happened? Was it, like, an alien crop circle except in a rectangle? 

I scrunched up my face in puzzlement and turned to Pete. "Did you...mow?" "You noticed!" he said.

Tonight at dinner we were talking about all the years in which there was all that seemingly endless peeing on the floor. "Having kids sounds really hard," said Pete. "Is it worth it?" "Yes," I said, "a thousand times yes." And even though this is the fourth time I've watched it happen it's still the coolest thing to see: the way that the little tiny person who needed so much help grows into a teenager who wants to give back.