Author: Monda

Declaring a Major

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‘Round these parts, students take a class called “Freshman Experience.” It’s designed to keep first-timers around by giving them some actual study skills and a realistic view of what’s expected at the university. Not a bad idea. If I’d had such a class maybe I wouldn’t have received that “invitation to take a semester off and think about your priorities” letter I got in the mail after my freshman year.

One requirement of the “Freshman Experience” class is to interview a professor about their first year in college and include that information in a lengthy, culminating paper assignment.
It’s that time of year, I guess. Students say they come to me because they think I’ll tell good stories. Or long ones. Either way, I’m interviewed quite often. I like doing the interviews. It puts my fabulously unsuccessful first college attempt to good use.

I’m a cautionary tale.

I did so many things wrong as a college freshman that each year during these interviews I’m able to give a different slant to the cautionary tale. It keeps things interesting, I hope, for the professor who actually has to grade these papers. As a Iraq war/abortion/gay marriage paper-reading veteran, I do understand the value in a fresh piece of student prose. Believe me.
This year’s theme is Choosing a Major That Won’t Be Obsolete Before You Buy The Cap And Gown.
My first semester in college I took typing, shorthand, business machines, accounting, and sociology. I was a business major that semester and had a really, really good time, but not in class. It’s a good thing that business degree dream died quickly. No one needs shorthand anymore, the type of “business machine(s)” I learned were the clickety-clack ten-key variety, and accounting was a hand-entered ledger workbook. Believe it or not, these were core business major courses.

Sociology was handy, though. Still is.
Since successful CLEP testing threw me into my sophomore year, it was instantly crunch-time when I began. I had to Officially Declare a Major. So I did that. Several times. I majored in philosophy, psychology, speech, and broadcasting briefly and at various moments. I toyed with art, theatre (I never forgot the proper university spelling), and English. Only the Math department was completely safe from me.

As a broadcasting major I took a few interesting classes. Mostly I learned to spin reggae and bluegrass records, although not usually in the same radio show. I learned how to edit and splice audio tape with a razorblade, and how to cue up records so they gloriously began the second I flipped the switch. Even if I get the radio-bug again, my pre-digital recording skills are completely useless. FM radio itself is almost extinct, and it will be for sure when all the Generation Jonesers and Boomers get iPods. It might happen this Christmas.

In my recent research on Generation Y, I ran across some interesting information: by graduation, most college students will be taking jobs that haven’t even been invented yet. What? It took almost thirty years for my college skills to become obsolete. It will take these Gen Yers only four or five. Facebook, it seems, is better training for what’s to come than their business classes. What’s scarier is I think they already know that.

And that English major I finally decided on? While it sounded useless at the time, I’ve found that writing never goes out of style. There are entirely too many people who feel they can’t do it, making those of us who do write feel pretty special. In an online, global world it’s the difference between success and slinging burgers at McDonalds. It’s likely that soon face-to-face skills may not get you hired – your writing may be all prospective employers know of you. It’s not going to matter how you look on paper, it’s going to matter how you look online.
And all that major-hopping? Well, it turns out that may be a good idea since the average Gen Yer can expect to have half a dozen different careers in their lifetime. Careers, I said, not jobs. It’s an excellent argument for a Liberal Arts education, if you think about it. I won’t mention that in the interviews, though, because they all have parents paying godawful amounts of money to get them in and graduate them out. It’s too expensive to Find Yourself in college by major-hopping now. That revolution will have to get more affordable.

Oh, I’ll probably still include something about the importance of attending more classes than frat parties. With a college education, you must be present to win. As far as choosing a major goes I’m sure I’ll tell them to find their intellectual passion and hang on for the ride of their lives.

And to look me up on Facebook.

Running off with the circus

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My parents told me I could be anything I wanted to be when I grew up. It made me think the world was a gigantic circus where I might crawl right out of the peanut gallery and onto the high-wire. Ta-da.

Well, it is. Kind of.

This morning I watched The Perfect Grandson will his left fist into his mouth. It took a long time and many unsuccessful attempts, but he stared down that fist until he had it right where he wanted it. Determination.

Very soon I’ll tell him he can be anything he wants to be when he grows up. I won’t mean it, though. I’ll let my daughter work out the finer points on this when he’s older, but for now my mind is clear: there are some things he simply cannot become.

During his last months in utero and ever since, my daughter and I have made a running list. We add to it as the need arises, or during particularly worrisome Discovery Channel documentaries. Levi can never be…

1. a prisoner. Of any kind.

2. a Bering Sea crab fisherman.

3. a Pro-rodeo bullrider.

4. an ice climber.

5. a firefighter in Southern California.

6. in any branch of the military stationed in an oil-producing country.

7. a bum.

8. a drug addict.

9. a Republican.
I have no doubt this list will grow. He’s only four months old. There’s time. If you have any more to add to the list, let me know.

I understand that telling him he can be anything he wants when he’s grown has more to with the limitless possibilities than with dangerous choices. Fine. I’m perfectly aware that someday The Perfect Grandson will be a hairy-legged, back-talking, reckless-driving, hormone-driven teenager. Those things happen.

I just don’t want him to run with scary boys or vote Republican.

History Lesson

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Antoinette wears her skirt too short for some and her voice too loud for most, but she takes coats, seats patrons for light suppers before the symphony and has history with too many married men who glide their Blackglama’ed wives with a light hand to their seats while giving Antoinette a brief nod that says, yes, I know us, I know you’ll say nothing, of course I’ll call.

She wants to know who recommended us so I tell her, and even though she hesitates, there is a smile as she scribbles a note inside a matchbook that I don’t read then or even later when I slip it into my coat pocket.

When I see the doorman the next day it occurs to me he looks more like a fireman than a doorman, so when I call him aside, tell him, this – offering the pocketed matchbook from Antoinette at the Café Allegro – this is for you, he takes it with confusion until he reads the note and smiles like a man who’s known Antoinette far away from the Café Allegro and far away from the curb at the William Penn Hotel where he hails cabs fiercely like he’s fighting a backdraft, and I see the history of their night or their week or that one regretted refusal settle on him before he says, thanks, and looks on the back of the matchbook for a continuation that isn’t there, that even he doesn’t expect, and again he says, thanks, and I look away because their history is something I stole and it’s lonely shoplifting moments from someone else’s life.

Mixing metaphors instead of cocktails, or why I’ll never write The Great Novel

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I don’t know how to write a book. I’ve read thousands of them and some were quite good, I just don’t know how to write one.

I make poems instead. So many that they’ve become a long string of ribbons tied to my arms and legs and waist to flutter behind me all the way into the needle point of the horizon line, all the way back to my first fat number two pencil. Making poems is the only weapon I ever had against growing up or growing old.

It wasn’t much of a weapon, though, because I’ve done both.

I still have these twisting poem ribbons. That’s a comfort. They tie me to my life like gauzy lifelines. Without them I’m an astronaut unleavened by oxygen strings and invisible radio waves carrying my labored voice. Without poetry I’m a rudderless kite. I’m Major Tom.

I’d really like to write a book, though. I really would, but the world is too viscous and I can’t slog through to the end. Every moment is a handful of soap bubble images, stuck together and popping and wondrous and consuming. I can’t take my eyes off the tiny things long enough to understand the underlying chemistry of soap, so the bubbles open up into singular lenses and I can see perfectly through each one. To write a book takes larger thinking, an ability to truck the lens back and chart the progress of fifty soap-bubbles heading for open air.

I’m always afraid that seeing the Big Picture means eliminating handfuls of exquisite gesture, split-second connections, the texture of the moment. The world is too thick with story. I might miss something important.

I’m a beribboned astronaut paper kite losing soap between my fingers, afflicted with literary pointillism. Maybe that’s why I can’t write a book.

An argument for hazard pay, and a poem

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At a workshop I attended this morning, I sat next to a high school teacher I taught with a few years ago before I jumped ship. He told me an interesting story about proctoring an ACT test during which one young lady became horribly, projectile-ill. All over the sacred testing materials and admission ticket. All over everything, it seems, mid-test.

I guess it was time for a break at that point in the testing. That kind of thing tends to start an unstoppable puking chain reaction. And the clean up…there’s that.

A quick phone call to the testing service found them all without protocol for vomit-covered testing materials. The answer, they said, was to put the answer sheet, booklet, and admission ticket into a plastic bag and mail it back to ACT.
That’s right. That test had to be accounted for. So into the ziplock bag it went.

Somewhere soon, an unsuspecting ACT employee will open a box containing a plastic bag…

There are days occasionally stretching into weeks that I’m wracked with guilt over leaving public school teaching. Those students were my light and my life, despite the fact that most of the time I felt like the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe.

In all the time I taught high school English, no one ever put me in a position requiring me to stuff a baggie with puke-covered test booklets. For that, I’m thankful. I’m also thankful for the former colleague who sat beside me today who did, in fact, have to stuff the ziplock. On a Saturday, no less.

Bless his heart.

The whole thing makes me a little misty, so I’m throwing in (at no additional cost) a poem I wrote for my students back then. All of them.
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,

my night flowers, my
charming rascals.

We, the geezers who teach and mother you
want you to know
we delight in you absolutely:
the last-five-minute rising buzz and cackle of
your unwasted youth,
the parlay, dip, and spin of
your endless afternoon,
burst-blooming from your time-lapse
adolescence,
unfurling into women, men.

The thing is, I want to say
you must come back on Monday.
let me count the fingers and toes of you.
Let me convince you poetry can exponentially alter
the mathematics of the universe.
Gravity is not a trick.

You are not just another number.
This is not just another day.

This Week’s Epiphanies: Telephones, Presidential Hopefuls, and Big Hair

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You know, I don’t have epiphanies as often as I used to. I guess it’s important to write these things down before I disappear into old age and can’t remember my phone number.

__________________________________________________________

Epiphany #1: I won’t have to remember my phone number. Hell, I don’t remember it now because I never really dial it. My cell phone owns my number memories now. Click, click, click and I’m calling. Sometimes, just a couple of click will do.

Epiphany # 1 and a half: I said “dial” and I don’t think I’ve “dialed” a number for a very, very, very long time.

Epiphany #2: The Perfect Grandson might begin his toddler years with either a woman or an African American as President. It’s likely. And none of this will be a big deal to him or to any of his little buddies. All their lives. Imagine that.

Epiphany #3: I’m middle-aged. Hmmm. I guess if I live to be ninety, that’s true. I know this because my mother introduced me to one of her acquaintances as Monda, my middle-aged daughter. In public.

Epiphany #4: I knew big hair would come back. It was just a matter of time.

Boo, y’all

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We didn’t have a single trick-or-treater last night and now all this candy is sitting in a bowl, just staring at me.

I suspect Halloween is out of style ’round these parts. That, or I don’t live on a street that looks candy-worthy. Maybe a little of both.

This was my Perfect Grandson’s first Halloween, but as he’s four months old, sans teeth, and can’t even crawl, the holiday was a little lost on him. My daughter stuffed him into a dinosaur costume and he promptly fell asleep. It’s a good thing he did, because I’d have burned his little retinas to a cinder with the camera flash. I never miss an opportunity.

So where are all the trick-or-treaters? Did all my curmudgeon retiree neighbors run them off? Maybe our local Bible Belt tightened a notch and kept the holiday at bay. Who knows. I’ll fight the urge to throw down a lengthy “in my day we trick-or-treated the hippies” rant. You don’t really care what what costume I wore when I was five, anyway.

Next year the Perfect Grandson should have teeth and land-legs and everything. We’re going to find some hippies and trick-or-treat them, by God.

Audience is Everything

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I scanned a few poems in a 2006 edition of the Virginia Quarterly Review and I know now that I’ll not ever really be that kind of poet. I can’t right now. I’ve lost my fearlessness. There are subjects I won’t touch, and I suspect it’s the mother/daughter/sister in me that keeps me from the hard edge of things. Maybe.

Alan Shapiro’s piece in the VQR about his suicidal son is an excellent example. He writes honestly and the whole piece is in fact a father’s panic. But there it is in the VQR, after all, an essay typed up, refined, rewritten, sent in an envelope with a cover letter for possible publication, and the part of his brain that wrote and rewrote and mailed it actually had no trouble with the father part of his brain that witnessed his son’s anguishing moments. He has no trouble converging personal tragedy and marketable commodity. Maybe he thought of it as a gateway for others to understand their own parallel experiences. Maybe. If that were so, the piece would have been sent somewhere besides the Virginia Quarterly Review. I actually see this as an ethical problem. I’ll have to think more on that.

Where does that come from? When my mother made me throw out the journals she’d found buried in my secret jeans drawer, was it a heavier weight than I realized at fourteen? Maybe it’s taken me thirty years to hear the real message in that afternoon – words can hurt, so be careful what you write. It’s the lesson learned in Harriet the Spy, really. I should read that again.

Over the years that afternoon has protected my writing with an easy-to-swallow coating and made me constantly aware of a disapproving audience lurking out there, ready to pounce.

Audience is everything.

It never occurred to me that I must be published to be a poet until I began teaching at a university, which is ironic since one of the darlings of the writing department is the National Writing Project. The NWP is a haven of scribbling that insists you are a writer if you write. Period. They’ve made almost a religion by throwing tent revival summer institutes where tired public schools teachers raise their lives to the ecstasy of finally having something to say and the opportunity to say it on paper. I know because I’ve spoken in tongues with them for seven years. The Writing department loves it for the grant money and the exposure and the fine ideals, but the unarticulated truth is they understand those thrilled public school converts are only teachers, not really writers. If they were really writers they’d have PHDs, teach at fine universities, and be published. Oh my.

The university is, after all, a machine we feed with published words – our proof. Despite any high talk we are all invisible wanna-bes if not publishing, even though the words constantly stream on the page and I am everyday a writer.

To sustain that little publishing voice, the one that insists every piece I write can or must be publishable, is to suspend a highly critical audience in my head, and the audience has my mother’s horrified face telling me to throw out the words, and the raised eyebrow astonishment of some colleagues who, wearing their PHDs from everywhere and nowhere are openly surprised an emergency hire, ex-high school teacher actually writes anything at all.

So the writing becomes smaller, and I’m suddenly aware I have the wrong audience in my head. That ghost audience has to go away so my writing can take chances and believe itself again.

The bottom line is that all our lives we are collecting audience, and some of them simply shouldn’t be there. I can sit here at the page wondering if it would be different if I were a man, or childless, or an orphan, or could wear a PHD like some once meaningful football jersey number, proof I’d been an intellectual quarterback on some winning Big Ten team. The censuring and disbelieving voices are really rattling away in my head. It’s much worse than that – they’re listening. I’ve gathered an unfriendly audience of silent readers and allowed them to sprawl on all the furniture in my head. They put their feet on the coffee table and leave empty bottles everywhere. It all muddies up my writing and I suspect it’s time to clean house.

The best and bravest writing I’ve done in my life birthed through a mountain of emails to and from a small group of writing women I never met. They were all of them stunning writers. Stunning. I didn’t have to shop at the grocery store with them or wonder if they knew anyone I knew. Those gals were intimately anonymous, and we all wrote fearless, intensely guttural pieces. It was the perfect girls’ night out of writing. Looking back, I realize now we were taking enormous personal and literary chances every single day, and the writing was very nearly perfect. All of it, because we were the best possible audience. It lasted about four years and then one by one we fell off into our busy lives. I miss us, but more importantly I miss the freedom we gave each other as writers and readers. Their disembodied collection took up all the chairs in the jury box and there was no room for the doubters or the disapproving in my head.

Ultimately it’s about who I let in as audience. If I make invitation to the negative, that kind of jury will simply walk right in, set themselves up in uncomfortable highback chairs, and squirm like unhappy toads while I feverishly try to please the unpleasable lot of them. Even now as I write this I’m aware I’m trying to be a Very Good Girl, so I have work to do.

I’ll just keep on writing as if I were actually a writer.