Since the Episcopalian religious order that I entered in the summer of 1973 was of a traditional kind, with a traditional rule internally, suitably modified for our work in St. Hilda's and St. Hugh's School (Kindergarten through Grade 12), it was no different from others with a Rule of Augustinian type (viz, not Benedictine) and need not be described by me. It was traditional also in regarding its own life, like respectable family life, as private, and 30 years later I shall respect that privacy now as I did then. No one should imagine that anything curious or disreputable lurks behind privacy. Of course, the religious life as such seems exceptional. But nothing of its meaning is revealed by trying to lay it bare. I have said enough to show that I did not enter anything like a 1970s commune or like a New Age cult. The sisters were fully habited, and under the aegis of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine—at that time under Canon West. Since my years there, I know that the order has evolved, as religious orders often do, especially as regards their work, but I am no more privy to changes than other outsiders. Interested persons can find them by Googling. The school no longer includes an upper school, grades 9-12.
I can say that I learned how to read square-note musical notation (neums) and to sing the morning and evening offices (we read the midday offices alone during the school day) and wished that I had a good singing voice. I learned the church calendar and the offices particular to each season. I learned how to care for the appurtenances of the altar. For the requirement of spiritual reading I found classics that I loved, like François de Sales, and early 20th century Anglicans like Bishop Gore of Oxford, just to name two. Luckily, I was not so young that I did not know how to do housework and mending. It must have been hard for girls who had been raised in post-War houses and had never seen shoe polish.
Though I was assigned to the upper school and to teaching Latin and the Ancient-Medieval part of World History, we all, on a rotating schedule, were assigned to Kindergarten naps and to after-school play groups. Some of the Kindergartners didn't like naps any more than I had at their age. We had an enclosed roof deck for the play groups after school, and we sometimes took groups across Riverside Drive to the park when they could be closely enough watched. The after-school programs were needed, for parents who worked until 4:30 or 5:00 and had to get uptown on public transportation afterward. We had some children in the middle and upper school who had known one another since Junior Kindergarten at age 4 and some alumni who knew their classmates better probably than most of their cousins. Though in my time the school had as many as 800 pupils, most of the sisters knew most of them and loved them, difficulties and all. The religious rule forbidding partiality and private attachment was actually an advantage. Upper-school children who would not or could not study in a study hall period sometimes were sent to the kindergarten or the nursery (in which we had a few toddlers, but they had to be at least somewhat toilet trained) where they very happily joined in constructive play. Literally constructive: the school had splendid sets of large building blocks. From parents at Columbia University, we had abundant supplies of folding paper from computer printout; I quickly learned that little children loved considering colors in rainbow order or in the form of a color wheel. Magic. It was the quisenaire rods that correlated color with unit-length that inspired me to set kindergartners to using their crayolas to make repeating rainbow sequences produce predictable patterns. After school, of course, when it rained the play school had to be indoors, where, I can report, children really loved to be read to and to play singing games, some of which I had played in 1939-1940 and have seen very recently when I chanced to see a bit of "Barney". I think that Daniel Pennac is quite right that, to produce lifetime readers, it is important to read aloud to children stories that actually interest them and to do so throughout grade school. Simply because a child can cipher the words off the page does not ensure that he or she can grasp the phrases, can get the meaning of syntax, or do so effortlessly. It is pretty harsh to ask him to read for himself at that stage; it is not a pleasure; it is not yet really meaningful. Besides, if his family and teachers really loved him they would not quit reading to him, would they? Reading aloud to children is love. I remember Mrs. Cheda in Grade 2 and Mrs. Lyman and Miss Hamilton in Grades 4 and 5 reading aloud to us in the last period of the school day, almost every day. So far from discouraging our reading for ourselves, this reading was a reward at the end of a good day, and, speaking for myself, it sent me to the public library almost every Saturday. I remembered them when I was at St. Hilda's.
I do not know whether the Reverend Mother, the headmistress (and founder of the order), had any idea of the difference between teaching hippies in Oregon (or university undergraduates in any decade) and teaching middle- and upper-school adolescents within a stone's throw of Columbia University. Their popular culture wasn't so different: they all loved The Doors and the other groups, and I'm afraid that some of them knew more about street drugs than I did. Eventually we had a school bus for the younger children, but the adolescents used the public bus and subway, and they could mix with university students and with those who were attracted to the university students and even socialize in the jazz club and other cafes, especially if they could pass as undergraduates. Keeping street clothes in their lockers of course was practiced. It could not really be prevented. But a spaced-out private-school kid could not, in most cases, be discussed with his or her parents (and certainly not by a Sister), since, famously, the parents were certain that they and their children were completely open with one another. And the school, though not among the most expensive, did ineluctably depend on fees, only a few being on scholarships. So the 1970s culture was largely shared, though the setting was different, but as a secular I could sympathetically confront an undergraduate about drug use and as a religious sister and with adolescents still children I could only try to offer some silent security and assurance, unspoken, of care for them and to teach them as well as I could.
Most of my pupils, of course, were NOT into drink or drugs or even much sex (judging by antennas that though not infallible are not worthless in staying attuned to one's students). And, so far as parent conferences can be pleasant, their parents were mostly delightful persons. My first realization was their mental immaturity; I mean, the human brain does develop in tandem with the body, but in Grade 8 or 9 both are still just beginning to be capable of algebra or formal grammar, and the first sentence of de bello Gallico is formidable: Caesar shot his wad right there. My books were provided, and I learned positively to like Jenney's. It wasn't silly, like the New Chardenal, from which I'd learned French. But how to use it for Grade 8, ages 12-13? First, I asked the school to issue those mottled black-and-white cardboard covered composition books, one per student, and required them to copy into them everything we did on the chalk board (while forbidding writing or drawing anything else in them). This included the English-to-Latin sentences which, dividing the class alphabetically, had to be put on the chalk board, then corrected, politely and without a waste of time, and the corrections were added in color in the composition books. Ecce, they liked using color. I had the school give me a box of colored chalk, and the class got their own colored ballpoints or pencils (only, the main text had to be in black or blue-black). Every Friday I collected the composition books, checked them for neatness and accuracy, and graded them * or + or OK or - (the latter only rarely, but so was *). Fact was, I was given no time for grading homework (besides, they phoned each other or copied others' in homeroom), this not only took the place of my marking it but lay bare who was just copying someone else's bad handwriting—and, if they did, at least they wrote it correctly in the long run. Add to that, they could use the composition books to study for tests and quizzes, and the better their work, the more useful it was. Further, as they learned this routine and did it more and more efficiently, we had more time for other instruction, some of it participatory. Though Winnie-ille-Pu is not all that easy, Cur ursus clamat / cur adeo mel amat / Burr, burr, burr / quid est causae cur? was not insulting, after all, and even provided an idiom. Writing stories of their own had to wait a while but provided an incentive to confront the 3rd declension. That early efforts had to be ludicrous explained why poor Mr. Jenney made them say such inanities as the first chapters abound in. Since the diagramming of sentences (1) was no longer taught in Language Arts and (2) does not work for an inflected language, I began writing out the more difficult sentences and underlining the subject of the finite verb, double-underlining that verb, using arrows to show what adjectives agreed with (their gender, case, and number being wholly dependent), circling adverbs (not declined) with an arrow to the "verb, adjective, or other adverb" that they modified. At this early stage, the most useful was simply [bracketing] all the prepositional phrases, usually leaving a very obviously simple main clause.
This device began very simply, and the class and I decided how novelties, such as dependent clauses, should be treated. The part of the alphabet that had been spared putting their homework on the board in time had the privilege of using the colored chalk themselves to mark the hard sentences. By the time we got to Caesar himself, in Jenney II, they usually could "mark" sentences mentally, once that formidable first sentence had been conquered.
Of course, that wasn't all there was to teaching kids. I'd have quit doing it if it hadn't worked so well and helped to produce more than our fair share of Advanced Placement scores. Only, I really did want them to understand an inflected language, and I really did want to teach them, and I learned to be especially well disposed to 13-year-olds, as possessing some of the best qualities of both children and adults. One necessity is to do everything one can, in class, to level out the girls and the boys at an age when the girls are often taller. But, if you don't make them use the language lab, boys do just as well in language as in algebra. I mean, conjugations and declensions and their uses evolved, too; we didn't make them up, and they have their own interesting quirks, just as Darwinian genetic isolates have.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Crossing the Continent in a Small Car
I have crossed the continent, or most of it, several times. One trip was in my Yugo, with a student who had never seen a real ocean, in 1990, a round trip from Louisiana to Oregon mostly via I-10 and I-5. The others were alone. I may be too old to do it now, but I love being in the middle of nowhere, driving, alone. The first time was when I drove in a 1967 VW Beetle to NYC to become a postulant in the Community of the Holy Spirit in the summer of 1973, which I shall try to recount now. The second was when I drove a newly acquired 1975(?) VW Rabbit from Oregon to Louisiana. I had been cross-continent before, on Canadian Pacific across Canada to meet the Empress of England to cross the Atlantic and, in the opposite direction, on the train to Chicago to take the Union Pacific train to San Francisco, and also had flown in a DC 6, which was anything but non-stop, from Oregon to Chicago, whence a DC 3 took me to Urbana, Illinois, to be interviewed for a position. That short flight was wonderfully close to the ground, so one could see houses and even count cattle, a mercy since these WW II planes were not pressurized and later, when Olympic Airlines took us over real mountains in one, it made me quite sick. The essential thing before I make basic errors is to remember which route I took on which trip. What I do not remember I shall omit.
I remember stopping at what may have been a truck stop on the freeway at Reno. I had never been to Reno and did not go into town then. It did have lots of slot machines on the premises, which I had never seen in California, let alone Oregon. I mention this and other dull facts to show how very little I knew the USA. I mean, one knows the Grand Canyon but not the states it passes through, the reputation of Reno for divorces and gambling but not the place as such, New Orleans but only for Mardi Gras in Holiday magazine, the Carolinas but only, in the same magazine, for photos of belles in flounces posing at plantation homes. I remember driving across the Salt Lake desert and hoping, trusting, that nothing would go wrong, such as a flat tire. I remember very heavy wind and seeing a tornado on the horizon in Nebraska, which was (and remains) all I wanted to know of them, since the opening of The Wizard of Oz was indelibly in my memory. I can't remember live footage of a tornado in any March of Time or Movietone News, but, of course, my movie attendance had been rationed and I still had never owned a television set. On the other hand, the first time the skirt of a serious hurricane affected my part of Louisiana, until I actually experienced it, hurricanes too were something in Life magazine photos, silent and still. And dry! And no one had mentioned six days without fans or AC or lights in the heat of late August, even when you were about 70 miles up the Mississippi.
As I drove east on I-80 I began to remember where I'd first heard of the places I was driving through, in popular songs or in movies or in fiction. In Wyoming I thought of "My Friend Flicka" and its sequels, and saw that the light was different from what I'd imagined. Not imagined, exactly. But Hollywood films don't bother to go all the way to Wyoming for filming; one of the reasons for the industry's taking root in California, after all, is that it possesses reasonable facsimiles of so many landscapes. I saw an exit for a town called Green River for fuel and a late lunch. I remembered where I was going and why and stopped to go into a church, RC, in Green River. I understood the piety of votive candles but had never ventured to engage in it. For a child raised Presbyterian, they were in the category of holy water and genuflection, and maybe more so. But no one would know if I said a prayer and bought a candle in Green River, Wyoming. I only prayed that I might travel safely and left to deity whether it was right to leave a prayer behind me as I drove on. That night I stopped at a motel on the outskirts of Laramie. I chose motels for economy, and that one was typcial. Clean and safe. Period. But the next morning I drove through town, and, I must say, Laramie in 1973 looked as perfectly a western town as one could have imagined.
This was not a museum trip, or even an urban trip. That came later. A couple of decades ago I'd have been embarrassed to admit to the free associations that I made with only my own fancies as company as I made my way to New York City. By now I was following I-70, but I didn't go into Indianapolis. I stopped at an old motel, one with separate cabins, at a small town and thought of the only idea of Indiana I ever had had, from my grandfather's pleasure in the verse of James Whitcomb Riley and from some old movie in which someone sang "On the banks of the Wabash". It was not only that US geography had been taught no further than memorizing the names of all the state capitols; it was a state of mind induced by the idea of renouncing everything I'd identified with. I could not think of Greece, for example, without complex anguish, so I wasn't thinking of Athens or Berkeley or even Eugene. But this was no being stripped bare, only being reduced not to childishness, exactly, but to things simple enough for a child to deal with, perhaps. Here and now is the first time I've stopped to consider the fortnight I took between saying goodbye to my 87-year-old grandfather, beyond words or tears, because he cried, which I'd never seen before. In fact, in mundane terms, I really had burned all my bridges; I no longer had a way to support myself or savings sufficient to live for six months. I thought I had a vocation to religion, but it was entangled with nihilistic stuff, too.
I stopped for a night also in Zanesville, Ohio, which looked exactly as I had imagined. A town of dark red brick. It has remained my key idea of the midwest of America, though I might have chosen a more eminent city in Ohio. But I stopped there because, when I was in art school, the teacher of the course in creative writing that helped to keep the College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland fully accredited, and for Veterans, too, not only had introduced us to Dreigroschenoper but to Sherwood Anderson. I must admit that today I regard Sherwood Anderson with the greatest disapprobation one can have for an author, and that not for his politics but as a writer. Even then, I hadn't read him since the early 1950s but I wanted to get an idea of, literally, where he came from. Better I had taken the southern route through New Mexico and recalled To a God Unknown by Willa Cather! I stopped in Maryland at Frederick, for no other reason (though it was near sunset) than to stay where John Greenleaf Whittier had celebrated Barbara Frietchie: "Shoot if you must this old gray head, ...". In one of my last years in grade school, I had memorized it for recital in class. It is doggerel, which is always hard to forget. But, one more thing I didn't know about America at that time, I was on the wrong side of the tracks, racially. The African-Americans who ran the motel had no objection to my staying, but when I located an Episcopal church for Sunday service the next morning before leaving town and finding my Berkeley friend, M., by then in Fairfax County, the people at the church were visibly appalled by where I'd stayed.
I think it was while I stayed, for several days, I think, with M. and her family that on the occasion of a birthday party she sat the children around the dining room table, provided them with beans and embroidery floss and squares of felt and had them all, girls and boys together, making decorated beanbags to take home as favors, having first played a tossing game with them. It was on that occasion that I learned how to use chain stitch to fill in embroidered outline, a small skill that I put to use in the convent, when the annual bazaar was approaching and during Recreation we were doing every sort of salable handwork that we knew.
And so in a few days I drove into the parking area at the convent school. I am not sure whether my friends from Eugene, Sam and Betsy, were already at George School; if they were, I certainly stopped to see them, too. It is at Newtown, Pennsylvania. But I saw them once, too, at Leesburg, Virginia, where Betsy's family had lived, and it might have been in 1973 that I visited there. It is appalling that I recall so badly particulars concerning some of the finest and dearest persons I have known.
Indeed, having to write this post truthfully is the most difficult effort I have made so far in this blog.
I remember stopping at what may have been a truck stop on the freeway at Reno. I had never been to Reno and did not go into town then. It did have lots of slot machines on the premises, which I had never seen in California, let alone Oregon. I mention this and other dull facts to show how very little I knew the USA. I mean, one knows the Grand Canyon but not the states it passes through, the reputation of Reno for divorces and gambling but not the place as such, New Orleans but only for Mardi Gras in Holiday magazine, the Carolinas but only, in the same magazine, for photos of belles in flounces posing at plantation homes. I remember driving across the Salt Lake desert and hoping, trusting, that nothing would go wrong, such as a flat tire. I remember very heavy wind and seeing a tornado on the horizon in Nebraska, which was (and remains) all I wanted to know of them, since the opening of The Wizard of Oz was indelibly in my memory. I can't remember live footage of a tornado in any March of Time or Movietone News, but, of course, my movie attendance had been rationed and I still had never owned a television set. On the other hand, the first time the skirt of a serious hurricane affected my part of Louisiana, until I actually experienced it, hurricanes too were something in Life magazine photos, silent and still. And dry! And no one had mentioned six days without fans or AC or lights in the heat of late August, even when you were about 70 miles up the Mississippi.
As I drove east on I-80 I began to remember where I'd first heard of the places I was driving through, in popular songs or in movies or in fiction. In Wyoming I thought of "My Friend Flicka" and its sequels, and saw that the light was different from what I'd imagined. Not imagined, exactly. But Hollywood films don't bother to go all the way to Wyoming for filming; one of the reasons for the industry's taking root in California, after all, is that it possesses reasonable facsimiles of so many landscapes. I saw an exit for a town called Green River for fuel and a late lunch. I remembered where I was going and why and stopped to go into a church, RC, in Green River. I understood the piety of votive candles but had never ventured to engage in it. For a child raised Presbyterian, they were in the category of holy water and genuflection, and maybe more so. But no one would know if I said a prayer and bought a candle in Green River, Wyoming. I only prayed that I might travel safely and left to deity whether it was right to leave a prayer behind me as I drove on. That night I stopped at a motel on the outskirts of Laramie. I chose motels for economy, and that one was typcial. Clean and safe. Period. But the next morning I drove through town, and, I must say, Laramie in 1973 looked as perfectly a western town as one could have imagined.
This was not a museum trip, or even an urban trip. That came later. A couple of decades ago I'd have been embarrassed to admit to the free associations that I made with only my own fancies as company as I made my way to New York City. By now I was following I-70, but I didn't go into Indianapolis. I stopped at an old motel, one with separate cabins, at a small town and thought of the only idea of Indiana I ever had had, from my grandfather's pleasure in the verse of James Whitcomb Riley and from some old movie in which someone sang "On the banks of the Wabash". It was not only that US geography had been taught no further than memorizing the names of all the state capitols; it was a state of mind induced by the idea of renouncing everything I'd identified with. I could not think of Greece, for example, without complex anguish, so I wasn't thinking of Athens or Berkeley or even Eugene. But this was no being stripped bare, only being reduced not to childishness, exactly, but to things simple enough for a child to deal with, perhaps. Here and now is the first time I've stopped to consider the fortnight I took between saying goodbye to my 87-year-old grandfather, beyond words or tears, because he cried, which I'd never seen before. In fact, in mundane terms, I really had burned all my bridges; I no longer had a way to support myself or savings sufficient to live for six months. I thought I had a vocation to religion, but it was entangled with nihilistic stuff, too.
I stopped for a night also in Zanesville, Ohio, which looked exactly as I had imagined. A town of dark red brick. It has remained my key idea of the midwest of America, though I might have chosen a more eminent city in Ohio. But I stopped there because, when I was in art school, the teacher of the course in creative writing that helped to keep the College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland fully accredited, and for Veterans, too, not only had introduced us to Dreigroschenoper but to Sherwood Anderson. I must admit that today I regard Sherwood Anderson with the greatest disapprobation one can have for an author, and that not for his politics but as a writer. Even then, I hadn't read him since the early 1950s but I wanted to get an idea of, literally, where he came from. Better I had taken the southern route through New Mexico and recalled To a God Unknown by Willa Cather! I stopped in Maryland at Frederick, for no other reason (though it was near sunset) than to stay where John Greenleaf Whittier had celebrated Barbara Frietchie: "Shoot if you must this old gray head, ...". In one of my last years in grade school, I had memorized it for recital in class. It is doggerel, which is always hard to forget. But, one more thing I didn't know about America at that time, I was on the wrong side of the tracks, racially. The African-Americans who ran the motel had no objection to my staying, but when I located an Episcopal church for Sunday service the next morning before leaving town and finding my Berkeley friend, M., by then in Fairfax County, the people at the church were visibly appalled by where I'd stayed.
I think it was while I stayed, for several days, I think, with M. and her family that on the occasion of a birthday party she sat the children around the dining room table, provided them with beans and embroidery floss and squares of felt and had them all, girls and boys together, making decorated beanbags to take home as favors, having first played a tossing game with them. It was on that occasion that I learned how to use chain stitch to fill in embroidered outline, a small skill that I put to use in the convent, when the annual bazaar was approaching and during Recreation we were doing every sort of salable handwork that we knew.
And so in a few days I drove into the parking area at the convent school. I am not sure whether my friends from Eugene, Sam and Betsy, were already at George School; if they were, I certainly stopped to see them, too. It is at Newtown, Pennsylvania. But I saw them once, too, at Leesburg, Virginia, where Betsy's family had lived, and it might have been in 1973 that I visited there. It is appalling that I recall so badly particulars concerning some of the finest and dearest persons I have known.
Indeed, having to write this post truthfully is the most difficult effort I have made so far in this blog.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
The House with the Weeping Willow on East 32nd St.: Part II
Josette and her Son with Isis under Willow Tree
Myself at Dinette Table from my Grandparents with Curtain in Kabuki colors
Farewell luncheon at the Langs' on 18 June 1973
Some of my students at my house in Eugene
MDR, my department head, spoiled me in many ways. I got an office made over from a passage way, rather spacious, with two full walls of cork board and two long 'retired' library tables and the oak chairs that went with them. A short wall was painted white for projecting slides, and I taught graduate courses in the office with all the books and photo files close at hand, besides having all the pictures I loved and all those currently related to the graduate course of the term on the walls where I could dwell on them all the time.
For the house, my grandparents repaired and refinished a Victorian walnut table (it had suffered a severe cigarette burn where my grandfather set in a patch of old walnut) and fixed, in some cases supplying a missing leg or part of the seat, four mixed-wood, early 20th-century, common chairs (one is at right in the photo above), which completed my little dinette. I still have those things and even the old bookcase that filled the wall: the dinette had windows on the east, opposite that wall. They even repaired and refinished a spool bed, for which new slats had to be made, for me. I gave that away when I entered the convent. The house had oak flooring, though not of very high grade.
I got from Goodwill Industries a metal-tube, formica top table, and two of the chairs that go with such post-WW II kitchen tables, for the kitchen. Student friends twice came over and we made taffy, pulling it over that forgiving surface. Also, for a seminar in sculpture we made copy photos from books for seminar reports, on Panatomic-X Kodak film and using a bakelite ElKay developing tank, which was useful because it drained quickly enough to get the next chemical into it promptly, we used Kodak's chemical kit for direct reversal of the negative film to positive. Deftness and timing and temperature were critical, but the slides were very good. A few dozen still survive. When such work was being done, I'd call Chicken Delight which delivered as much fried chicken and cole slaw as was needed. Surely, it was in Oregon that I acquired the habit of doing myself everything I needed for teaching. When lecturers came to our Eugene Society of the Archaeological Institute of America, I took wedge tipped felt markers and hand-lettered the small posters for bulletin boards in our building and those of other departments that might be interested.When I think back I find it remarkable that the students both socialized with me and respected my scholarly authority. Equally remarkable, I do not recall much gossip or any backbiting either among my colleagues or the students (that cannot be quite true, but when I look back I can think of nothing to call it all but 'very Oregonian'). On the other hand, as time passed and my grand affair, as I thought of it, ended as it had to, I sobered up, I read more, and what with lots of Augustine and Karl Jaspers and reflecting on the ruin of the lives of my mother and brother, from whom I could hardly keep my own identity really separate, I found myself thinking that all the great traditions of Greco-Roman, of Medieval, of 19th-century thought and belief could hardly be foolish (Elgar's "Dream of Gerontius" suited me perfectly, and I had the Barbirolli recording of it). Not suddenly but in the space of a couple of years I became an Anglican. Rome was too hard for me to accept, and the Greek church (like Buddhism) was, one had to admit, not of my own culture. I loved Greeks, but I couldn't pretend to be one. So I also attended other churches' services, learned all the liturgies, and, once Episcopalian, rather yearned to be a priest. Partly to atone in some way (not rationally) for my brother, I also taught at the state penitentiary at Salem for a year. In all this I was indulged and cherished by all my friends, including many whom I haven't mentioned here, and not least by St. Mary's Episcopal church in Eugene. Even then I sensed the spiritual and psychological mismatch of superior knowledge of theology and of church history with the green state of the new convert but decided to let it be. And at church I met persons whom I had to respect purely for themselves, a rare privilege for someone who had been trying to become Something—artist, scholar, academic—all her life. Some of my colleagues, though, who were themselves devout, had contacts with the Community of the Holy Spirit in New York. Eventually, after visiting the convent, after keeping a lay person's Rule for a year, I gave a year's notice to the university and gradually broke up housekeeping (all my friends helped me pack). Even then, no one rebuked me, though some, certainly, were appalled and saddened, either in Berkeley or in Eugene. It was true, just a further complication, that the likelihood of my having to live in Eugene forever, as I was approaching another academic promotion that would put me out of competition for mobility, and as the economy and the society were souring, besides, seemed like something I needed to break away from. I had enjoyed Eugene so very much, but it had never become real. I never had become part of it. CHS was glad to receive me as a postulant, and I was glad to try a vocation (and in NYC), but neither of us knew what we were getting. The vocation would fail, and eventually the raison d'être for my fervent belief would fail, without rancour, too. In 1981 I was very fortunate to get a tenure-track position, and I have been in Louisiana ever since.
Here, at the top of this post, is a picture of the going-away party at my dear friends' house on June 18, 1973. In two days, in my VW beetle, I'd be on my way to New York.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
A Sidebar on Brucie
The third child in our family was Brucie, born in 1939. Some might think that by clinging to his baby nickname, Boo (because he liked to play Peekaboo and it resembled his first baby talk for himself), my mother contributed to his problems, and so far as these were environmentally acquired her own problems didn't help, but the underlying problems could be easily identified now. It should be emphasized, too, that my mother was normally healthy during the pregnancy and not alcoholic nor, yet, heavily involved in medications. It was the post-war uncertainties, coming off wartime economy, and a hysterectomy at age 30 without any follow-up medical attention, that triggered her worst problems, so far as I can remember.
As soon as he could gather his legs under him in his crib and long before he crawled or walked, he rocked constantly and vigorously, bumping the top of his head incessantly, compulsively against the side of the crib, making a large lump, eventually breaking open, on top of his head. The doctor dressed it, had my mother change the dressing frequently, had my parents replace the wooden crib sides with screening. As soon as he sat, then walked, he bounced. Compulsively. Sharing the back seat of the family car with him is still unforgotten. I did realize that he wasn't doing it deliberately, and he had to be in the back seat since a bouncing toddler in the front was too dangerous. No one nagged at him; we knew it would do no good. It continued in the car, as I remember, even when he was six and seven. And, of course, there were no constraining seat belts, let alone constraining and containing baby seats. I can only wonder how a baby and a youngster such as Brucie might have responded to them.
He did not learn to read well, and spelling was hopeless: the classic case, in which GRIL and GIRL are indistinguishable. This continued into adulthood, when I received letters from him when he was in prison.
The bicycle accident, when he was taken unconscious to Highland Hospital, when we lived on East 25th in Oakland, is just part of a larger picture, which began, I am convinced, with the infantile rocking and head-banging and included the episode with nephritis (conflicting diagnoses) which, with the experimental live cross-transfusion, led to my father's death after hia becoming yellower and paler day by day for a week. These and other calamities also are somehow part of a larger picture.
The school psychologist at Elmhurst Junior High, when we lived on Kains in West Berkeley (shortly before I left home), said that his IQ was above average, notwithstanding. He did well in arts and crafts classes, which he also enjoyed when he was sent to the Juvenile Hall (a group of boys, Brucie among them, were caught stealing automobile tires, and by that time my mother, widowed, was deemed unable to handle the situation). At some time he was sent to my grandparents in San Luis Obispo, where he did well and the school chose him to be Fra Junipero Serra (the founder of California missions) in a pageant for Public Schools Week, when presentations were done for parents. He loved this. All else being equal, he'd have loved acting, having roles to play, over all else, I think. When he was sent home, and his big long-haired black cat was flown home to him, on his pleading, the cat was plumb crazy, and would not settle in. I guess it was not sedated for the trip.
When he joined the Air Force, barely old enough, after a few months he took someone else's car from the base at Biloxi and headed west; of course, he was caught.
When he married and had two children with a third on the way, he was caught giving alcohol to teenage boys of the neighborhood in Santa Rosa where they lived, with whom he also was sexually involved. Need I add, he was nearly 27 and they were in their mid 'teens, so it was homosexual statutory rape. Worst of all, for my grandparents (and for Brucie) he was sent to the prison that had been Camp San Luis during World War II, just on the outskirts of San Luis Obispo. It was from there that I received letters from him, the first I'd ever received from him. Later he was in a more serious correctional facilty, from which, being paroled, he fled to Mexico. And so on. Thereafter, I don't know much firsthand, because I was in Oregon or in Greece. He did have the usual problems in prison of a homosexual young man (but without any of the cultural smarts of educated gays). I'd never known prison was like that, with sex being currency, etc. But I alone, who knew a number of educated gay men, had recognized the likelihood that, married and with children notwithstanding, he was gay. I never figured out whether it was inability to get past adolescence or an innate part of his whole person.
I was in the convent in NYC when I heard from my sister Lorna that he'd been found with a knife in his back in the outskirts of Denver. By then, too, I'd seen him once earlier asleep, drugged, in his car, but I don't know how far back street drugs were involved. I knew nothing of street drugs, only of those dreaded medications of my mother. I knew there was nothing I could do to help her, and I doubt I could have done anything for Brucie. There is no possibility of truth to reality among the addicted. Some will say that, if there had been corrective medications in Brucie's early childhood, his life would have been different. I don't know whether or not. He was not like regular gay men, most of whom mature and grow old in enduring partnerships and friendships—precisely what, I fear, Brucie could not have done, though I don't know. My mother and my brother are my enduring hungry ghosts.
As soon as he could gather his legs under him in his crib and long before he crawled or walked, he rocked constantly and vigorously, bumping the top of his head incessantly, compulsively against the side of the crib, making a large lump, eventually breaking open, on top of his head. The doctor dressed it, had my mother change the dressing frequently, had my parents replace the wooden crib sides with screening. As soon as he sat, then walked, he bounced. Compulsively. Sharing the back seat of the family car with him is still unforgotten. I did realize that he wasn't doing it deliberately, and he had to be in the back seat since a bouncing toddler in the front was too dangerous. No one nagged at him; we knew it would do no good. It continued in the car, as I remember, even when he was six and seven. And, of course, there were no constraining seat belts, let alone constraining and containing baby seats. I can only wonder how a baby and a youngster such as Brucie might have responded to them.
He did not learn to read well, and spelling was hopeless: the classic case, in which GRIL and GIRL are indistinguishable. This continued into adulthood, when I received letters from him when he was in prison.
The bicycle accident, when he was taken unconscious to Highland Hospital, when we lived on East 25th in Oakland, is just part of a larger picture, which began, I am convinced, with the infantile rocking and head-banging and included the episode with nephritis (conflicting diagnoses) which, with the experimental live cross-transfusion, led to my father's death after hia becoming yellower and paler day by day for a week. These and other calamities also are somehow part of a larger picture.
The school psychologist at Elmhurst Junior High, when we lived on Kains in West Berkeley (shortly before I left home), said that his IQ was above average, notwithstanding. He did well in arts and crafts classes, which he also enjoyed when he was sent to the Juvenile Hall (a group of boys, Brucie among them, were caught stealing automobile tires, and by that time my mother, widowed, was deemed unable to handle the situation). At some time he was sent to my grandparents in San Luis Obispo, where he did well and the school chose him to be Fra Junipero Serra (the founder of California missions) in a pageant for Public Schools Week, when presentations were done for parents. He loved this. All else being equal, he'd have loved acting, having roles to play, over all else, I think. When he was sent home, and his big long-haired black cat was flown home to him, on his pleading, the cat was plumb crazy, and would not settle in. I guess it was not sedated for the trip.
When he joined the Air Force, barely old enough, after a few months he took someone else's car from the base at Biloxi and headed west; of course, he was caught.
When he married and had two children with a third on the way, he was caught giving alcohol to teenage boys of the neighborhood in Santa Rosa where they lived, with whom he also was sexually involved. Need I add, he was nearly 27 and they were in their mid 'teens, so it was homosexual statutory rape. Worst of all, for my grandparents (and for Brucie) he was sent to the prison that had been Camp San Luis during World War II, just on the outskirts of San Luis Obispo. It was from there that I received letters from him, the first I'd ever received from him. Later he was in a more serious correctional facilty, from which, being paroled, he fled to Mexico. And so on. Thereafter, I don't know much firsthand, because I was in Oregon or in Greece. He did have the usual problems in prison of a homosexual young man (but without any of the cultural smarts of educated gays). I'd never known prison was like that, with sex being currency, etc. But I alone, who knew a number of educated gay men, had recognized the likelihood that, married and with children notwithstanding, he was gay. I never figured out whether it was inability to get past adolescence or an innate part of his whole person.
I was in the convent in NYC when I heard from my sister Lorna that he'd been found with a knife in his back in the outskirts of Denver. By then, too, I'd seen him once earlier asleep, drugged, in his car, but I don't know how far back street drugs were involved. I knew nothing of street drugs, only of those dreaded medications of my mother. I knew there was nothing I could do to help her, and I doubt I could have done anything for Brucie. There is no possibility of truth to reality among the addicted. Some will say that, if there had been corrective medications in Brucie's early childhood, his life would have been different. I don't know whether or not. He was not like regular gay men, most of whom mature and grow old in enduring partnerships and friendships—precisely what, I fear, Brucie could not have done, though I don't know. My mother and my brother are my enduring hungry ghosts.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
The House with the Weeping Willow on East 32nd St.: Part I
Parking-Lot Autocross on a Sunday in July, 1968; me in 356A
Early Spring, early 1970s, by the apple tree
The early Spring photo at the head of this posting shows me with my friend Jean's black cat, Angus, by the apple tree. There were so many prune-plums in late summer that one couldn't even give them away. Continuing to live out my postponed adolescence, I became a pretty good frisbee player in the long back yard. In the front yard, bad for the house's foundations but beautiful, was a large weeping willow, its branches (though occasionally trimmed) reaching the ground, a place for summer picnic lunches outdoors. One year I had the help in keeping the house in order of the French wife of a graduate student in English literature, who came twice a month and brought her little boy with her; there are slides, somewhere, of them picnicking in the shade of the willow, along with my own black cat Jason (I had been using Greek myths for my cats' names for years). I'll scan and post one here if I can find them. Anyhow, I had a house of my own, and it cost only $8,600; my monthly payments, which decreased as the principle did, eventually were only about $80. I had a home of my own, but I wouldn't have a washer and dryer of my own until I got my present home in Louisiana.
Just south on East 34th were the Langs, the son, Bob, being one of my best friends among my coevals on the faculty. By this time, I had a real network of variously related friends in Eugene, some of them now from St. Mary's Episcopal Church, one of whom was Jean, who later became a Mormon but whom I knew because she sometimes served as organist at church. But some of my friends were gay, too, and some of those from Church, for that matter, were gay. Others were as agnostically humanistic as I had been. Of these, one was my lover for quite a while, and I got to know the guys from his fraternity, too. Several of them had rented a house near campus; to the tune of "Alice's Restaurant" we celebrated when one of them, to avoid the army draft, joined the Navy. We made with poster paint on butcher's paper a sign the full width of the house in order to document our party for his departure; it said, in letters two feet high, FUCK THE NAVY, and we all lined up beneath it. I had my Nikon F on a tripod with the timer set to 10 seconds and a place was left for me to run into just in time. The neighbors across the street called the Eugene police, who came, a nice young officer as young as any of the fraternity members. We explained the occasion and invited him to get in the picture, too. He couldn't keep a straight face, but he had to refuse. My dearest friend of all, M. D. Ross, of my mother's birth cohort, watched all of such socializing unbecoming a professor without nagging me about it, never a part of that intricate network of younger friends, most of them in fact also younger than I was. None of us thought of ourselves as hippies, certainly, but the late 60s indeed is the decade in question. Anyone who wishes to could call all this "finding oneself", but I did not engage in the inspection of my own navel, as the saying was, until later and for other reasons.
Shopping now was easy, not only because of the car but because a new Albertson's, of the then new and still Mormon grocery chain, opened only three or four blocks away, and then a large Safeway opened up the hill and farther south, while we still had the nice family-owned small grocery up where East 32nd met Willamette. There was a steak-and-salad eatery up on Willamette, too (where on Sunday afternoons several times the Emerald Empire Sports Car Club ran parking-lot autocrosses in assorted sports cars, beetles, mini-coopers, and so on; for real autocrosses we had to go over to the desert; for rallyes we used Oregon's quarter roads and others of later origin all over the Willamette Valley and up into the Coast foothills). It was at a car show near Roseburg, OR, where (quite unqualified) the Emerald Empire Sports Car Club was serving as judges of the restored antique cars, in the public room of the resort motel where it was held, we watched the first Apollo moon landing.
Just south on East 34th were the Langs, the son, Bob, being one of my best friends among my coevals on the faculty. By this time, I had a real network of variously related friends in Eugene, some of them now from St. Mary's Episcopal Church, one of whom was Jean, who later became a Mormon but whom I knew because she sometimes served as organist at church. But some of my friends were gay, too, and some of those from Church, for that matter, were gay. Others were as agnostically humanistic as I had been. Of these, one was my lover for quite a while, and I got to know the guys from his fraternity, too. Several of them had rented a house near campus; to the tune of "Alice's Restaurant" we celebrated when one of them, to avoid the army draft, joined the Navy. We made with poster paint on butcher's paper a sign the full width of the house in order to document our party for his departure; it said, in letters two feet high, FUCK THE NAVY, and we all lined up beneath it. I had my Nikon F on a tripod with the timer set to 10 seconds and a place was left for me to run into just in time. The neighbors across the street called the Eugene police, who came, a nice young officer as young as any of the fraternity members. We explained the occasion and invited him to get in the picture, too. He couldn't keep a straight face, but he had to refuse. My dearest friend of all, M. D. Ross, of my mother's birth cohort, watched all of such socializing unbecoming a professor without nagging me about it, never a part of that intricate network of younger friends, most of them in fact also younger than I was. None of us thought of ourselves as hippies, certainly, but the late 60s indeed is the decade in question. Anyone who wishes to could call all this "finding oneself", but I did not engage in the inspection of my own navel, as the saying was, until later and for other reasons.
Shopping now was easy, not only because of the car but because a new Albertson's, of the then new and still Mormon grocery chain, opened only three or four blocks away, and then a large Safeway opened up the hill and farther south, while we still had the nice family-owned small grocery up where East 32nd met Willamette. There was a steak-and-salad eatery up on Willamette, too (where on Sunday afternoons several times the Emerald Empire Sports Car Club ran parking-lot autocrosses in assorted sports cars, beetles, mini-coopers, and so on; for real autocrosses we had to go over to the desert; for rallyes we used Oregon's quarter roads and others of later origin all over the Willamette Valley and up into the Coast foothills). It was at a car show near Roseburg, OR, where (quite unqualified) the Emerald Empire Sports Car Club was serving as judges of the restored antique cars, in the public room of the resort motel where it was held, we watched the first Apollo moon landing.
One winter, perhaps 1968, Oregon had serious snow, as Washington DC had this year: it was 2 feet deep on the roof of my little FHA house, so that after boys were hired to shovel it off the house had to be re-roofed; Croesus the cat had gone under the house (not just on brick pillars as in Louisiana, but with enclosed foundations) and after a couple of days when I had to imagine him entombed in snow as the inhabitants of Pompeii had been in ash I heard a pitiable mewing and, estimating the location of the opening to the under-house where he was wont to enter, I shoveled and shoveled and out he came, indignant and hungry. In that snow, it was impossible to drive my 356A Porsche (very second hand but the most fun I ever had with a car and a joy on the Interstate, when the speed limit was 80 and the Porsche cruised at 80-plus and never got stopped), because with streets of frozen ruts and ridges it just got hung up. I hiked into campus, over three miles, in ski pants and boots I'd bought in England, serious boots with thick soles and fleece lining.
I see that I tend to think that everything happened in 1968. Probably not everything, though a lot did, and not only in the nation at large.
Friday, March 12, 2010
Thoughts intersecting
The last post, on the cottage, was chaotic, but, excluding my work, so was my life: not defined at all.
This is a good occasion to essay the intersection of two trains of thought, each of which has tributaries.
Sometime in the early 1960s, reading C. S. Lewis or Dorothy Sayers, I noticed discussion of Sir Thomas Browne (and in Sayers a whole paragraph on a performance of the Bach Concerto for Two Violins). I don't have Miss Sayers' novels in the house now, but it is not unlikely that I picked up both Browne and that concerto in her "Gaudy Night". Some authors describe furniture and railway stations to authenticate their fiction, but not a few use authors and artists. Several authors, I noticed later, seem to have owned the same famous Gramaphone Society recording of that Bach Concerto. My beloved mentor and thesis adviser at Berkeley had advised me to do something about my own prose by reading Virginia Woolf's "Common Reader". It may seem an odd choice, being idiosyncratic, but so was Sir John Beazley, of the same generation, and together they brought me to understand that writing involved more than grammatically defensible statements. Besides, I wasn't quite so dense as to attempt imitating either of them, and, but for his intervention, I might have kept writing like the worst of Miss Alcott's works for the rest of my life. I learned to pay attention to how I wrote. That it is, as T. R. Reid said in an interview last week, very hard work all who have tried it will agree.
Sometime after 1958, when it was published, I acquired a very nice C.U.P. editio minor, by John Carter, of Thomas Browne's "Urne Buriall" and "The Garden of Cyrus". The title page of the original edition was reproduced as a frontispiece:
This is a good occasion to essay the intersection of two trains of thought, each of which has tributaries.
Sometime in the early 1960s, reading C. S. Lewis or Dorothy Sayers, I noticed discussion of Sir Thomas Browne (and in Sayers a whole paragraph on a performance of the Bach Concerto for Two Violins). I don't have Miss Sayers' novels in the house now, but it is not unlikely that I picked up both Browne and that concerto in her "Gaudy Night". Some authors describe furniture and railway stations to authenticate their fiction, but not a few use authors and artists. Several authors, I noticed later, seem to have owned the same famous Gramaphone Society recording of that Bach Concerto. My beloved mentor and thesis adviser at Berkeley had advised me to do something about my own prose by reading Virginia Woolf's "Common Reader". It may seem an odd choice, being idiosyncratic, but so was Sir John Beazley, of the same generation, and together they brought me to understand that writing involved more than grammatically defensible statements. Besides, I wasn't quite so dense as to attempt imitating either of them, and, but for his intervention, I might have kept writing like the worst of Miss Alcott's works for the rest of my life. I learned to pay attention to how I wrote. That it is, as T. R. Reid said in an interview last week, very hard work all who have tried it will agree.
Sometime after 1958, when it was published, I acquired a very nice C.U.P. editio minor, by John Carter, of Thomas Browne's "Urne Buriall" and "The Garden of Cyrus". The title page of the original edition was reproduced as a frontispiece:
As a budding archaeologist, I found him delightful, and I was fascinated by the interface of embryonic archaeology and, more than impressive, awe inspiring knowledge of Authors (to which, now, I'd add his familiarity with Roman coins found in England). And his prose was as lucid as enchanting, just as promised. He must have had an impressive private library, because it is the books that one lives with, I thought, then as now that become one's own, not some sort of database but a part of one's mind. To this day I haven't read all the Authors that Sir Thomas Browne knew intimately. So I was not surprised that Leslie Stephen's daughter, Virginia Woolf, in her early novel, "Night and Day", at the end of Ch. 5 (in the Hogarth Press Uniform Edition, pp. 72-73) chooses a "very lovely edition of Sir Thomas Browne" from which to have Denham read "a passage which he knew very nearly by heart". The young Virginia Stephen probably knew it from her father's library and used the book that she remembered, but certainly did not have in hand, since she cited it as four titles. I mentioned the Uniform Edition, because it is what I had; the American editor emended it, and her friends had caught the error immediately. I was shocked and puzzled; I did not know until years afterward how very ill she had just been in 1919. Besides, she may have recalled from girlhood reading the really puzzling "Garden of Cyrus" rather than the "Hydriotaphia".
A friend and I were discussing by e-mail what makes Tolkien more likable (to me) than C. S. Lewis, and I had said that it was that Tolkien's scholarly infrastructure was incomparably vaster and stronger and more wholly digested than Lewis's. It seems unkind to point out that Tolkien actually had children of his own to write for ("The Hobbit", anyhow), but it may be important. It was in that context that I remembered how I forgave Virginia Woolf practically any scholarly sin (rightly or not, I do not believe that she really mastered much Greek), and I had to conclude that I liked the way that she wrote, that I read her for her writing. Here, in any case, I only want to explain how it was that I located my own copies of Sir Thomas Browne and re-read (so far) the "Urne Buriall" (by now the preferable title, since the vessels shown are not what we'd today call hydrias):
In fact, I still do not know what to call them, but not, I think, 'Roman', unless chronologically speaking.
But here is the intersection of trains of thought that led me to record it here. Timothy Ferris, a science writer, has published a book, The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature, on which he spoke on BookTV last weekend. I listened twice. I have not yet decided to buy his book, for two reasons: he used charts projected in Powepoint, and in me he was preaching to the choir. Not only Virginia Woolf's friends had inculcated the Age of Enlightenment, as well as her father and Edmund Gosse, but, as I think I mentioned in an earlier posting, Hans Reichenbach's "Rise of Scientific Philosophy" and Karl Popper himself had helped form my mind in the 1950s. What interests me is, I suspect, a revival of the thought of my youth, opposing Liberal to Totalitarian (for example), and valuing what I might regard as a blend of Stoic and Epicurean points of view. In fact, it was just last year, if I remember rightly (time passes more quickly for the elderly), that a new translation of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius was presented on that same BookTV. So, when I was enjoying the "Urne Buriall" again after at least twenty years, I noticed how perfectly his reading of the ancient Authors was brought to bear on the ancient cemeteries that in the 17th century were already known and how critically, as a doctor but not only as a medical doctor, he assessed the contents of burials for the evidence of the tools and ornaments and coins, or absence of coins, in them. Today he would be the perfect amateur numismatist, studying hoard evidence closely but refraining from drawing unwarranted conclusions from what he realized must be very partial evidence. In fact, medical doctors today do tend to like numismatics and epigraphy, too. I suppose I ought to find out whether Timothy Ferris used him as a witness.
Since I respect Ferris's ideas (though on looking it over I decided that I didn't like his prose so well), I am delighted if a generation that, like mine, will not be able to take prosperity for granted will be sustained by the kind of thought that sustained me. I am used to seeing Ravi Shankar revived with every new form of sound recording, but empirical thinking is not quite so marketable. It makes me wish I were not retired and might enjoy undergraduates responsive to ideas that excited and continued to inform my own mind.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
The Cottage on East 20th at the Alley
Certainly I moved into the cottage, at 1460 1/2 East 20th Avenue, where the alley divided the block, just south of the UO campus, but the full width of the campus from the Architecture and Allied Arts building (which by chance happened to be named for someone with the same last name as mine) where I taught, when I no longer had to shop on foot, in the absence of much public transportation, when I had a car: I had the red 1963 Beetle by then, for that reason and because I needed it to go visiting, too. I have no photographs of the cottage, and it is not visible on the satellite photo of the block in Google Earth. I did buy my first Nikon F, in 1965, when I was there: I remember taking a test roll of black and white film with it in and around the cottage. As usual, with any new camera, my first pictures were poor, except for optical superiority of a good Nikon lens, but I don't have any of them now.
Measuring mentally, I can say that the cottage, on a concrete slab, was about 40 feet wide and 20 feet deep, with living space reduced by the 10' X 20' garage at the west end. It was meager in design, a feature of Oregon houses, but extremely so. Minimal sills, minimal overhangs, minimal stoop for a door mat, linoleum tile floors throughout. A living room, which also held the oil-burning furnace, and a kitchen were across the front, looking out on my landlady's back lawn (one interesting thing about Oregon, I thought, was that in the Spring robins actually did pull very long earthworms out of the earth, just as in picture books of my early childhood). The rear rooms (and having measured the "study", the NW corner room, for bookcases, I now use it to estimate the total living space) were only 8 feet deep. The landlady said the small room had been intended as a starter nursery; I put a student desk and some book cases in it; for the first time I had a separate room for a study at home. The rest of the rear was a bathroom and a bedroom. I remember that I did not have a bed frame but just a mattress on box springs on the floor. Having no raised foundation, the cottage had windows only about 30 inches from earth to sill on the exterior; I put screws in for security and usually had the kitchen window open just high enough for Croesus the Cat. The landlady said his muddy feet (and Oregon is muddy) were staining the white paint, so I took a cloth, merely dampened, and gently wiped off the mud, to show her that she needn't worry. She didn't like the cat, because, when her short-legged dog chased him, Croesus just turned around in the corner of the yard and welcomed the dog to 20 sharp claws, sending him yiping (and giving him a wide berth thereafter). I remember her new car, too, a brand-new first edition Ford Mustang, now regarded as a classic, but merely pseudo-snazzy to my Berkeleyan inverse snobbery. No, I didn't tell her so. Yes, I always have regarded the Mustang as a middle-aged lady's sports car.
In any case, the cottage was my first free-standing residence, and it did permit me to play music without sharing it with the unappreciative, and it did garage my car. A student in architecture who played violin brought it and played it in the front room. Until you have heard a violin in a concrete-floor, 7-foot ceiling structure, you have no idea of how loud it actually is.
The cottage had one visual amenity. I had the kabuki-theater colors corduroy curtains that accompanied me from 2308 Haste in Berkeley, when my friend C. let me have the apartment for which they were made, to every place I lived in through to my first real house on E. 32nd Street in South Eugene.
My sister Lorna and her family, I'm almost sure, visited the cottage once; I remember the boys on the lawn. Writing this, I realize that I am not sure of the dates. Part of my life, which I thought of as making up for having had no adolescence (which, of course, is not true, but I had no adolescent 'social life') and which by the 1980s I regarded as typically Thirty-Something (even though I saw that TV program only once, I got the idea), took place in the cottage. Since nothing I did was illegal or even interesting and did not keep me from earning tenure, I am leaving all of it out of this blog; I merely assert that it was like everyone else's. I was ashamed of one episode, for all the typical reasons.
I already have spoken of my colleagues, whom I regarded highly. My colleague, Dean Mackenzie, who had been the teaching assistant when I started Art History at Berkeley, was now at Eugene, and, as professor emeritus, he still is there. But the cottage was no place to entertain, however simply, and generally evening parties in Eugene were for sets of married couples.
Measuring mentally, I can say that the cottage, on a concrete slab, was about 40 feet wide and 20 feet deep, with living space reduced by the 10' X 20' garage at the west end. It was meager in design, a feature of Oregon houses, but extremely so. Minimal sills, minimal overhangs, minimal stoop for a door mat, linoleum tile floors throughout. A living room, which also held the oil-burning furnace, and a kitchen were across the front, looking out on my landlady's back lawn (one interesting thing about Oregon, I thought, was that in the Spring robins actually did pull very long earthworms out of the earth, just as in picture books of my early childhood). The rear rooms (and having measured the "study", the NW corner room, for bookcases, I now use it to estimate the total living space) were only 8 feet deep. The landlady said the small room had been intended as a starter nursery; I put a student desk and some book cases in it; for the first time I had a separate room for a study at home. The rest of the rear was a bathroom and a bedroom. I remember that I did not have a bed frame but just a mattress on box springs on the floor. Having no raised foundation, the cottage had windows only about 30 inches from earth to sill on the exterior; I put screws in for security and usually had the kitchen window open just high enough for Croesus the Cat. The landlady said his muddy feet (and Oregon is muddy) were staining the white paint, so I took a cloth, merely dampened, and gently wiped off the mud, to show her that she needn't worry. She didn't like the cat, because, when her short-legged dog chased him, Croesus just turned around in the corner of the yard and welcomed the dog to 20 sharp claws, sending him yiping (and giving him a wide berth thereafter). I remember her new car, too, a brand-new first edition Ford Mustang, now regarded as a classic, but merely pseudo-snazzy to my Berkeleyan inverse snobbery. No, I didn't tell her so. Yes, I always have regarded the Mustang as a middle-aged lady's sports car.
In any case, the cottage was my first free-standing residence, and it did permit me to play music without sharing it with the unappreciative, and it did garage my car. A student in architecture who played violin brought it and played it in the front room. Until you have heard a violin in a concrete-floor, 7-foot ceiling structure, you have no idea of how loud it actually is.
The cottage had one visual amenity. I had the kabuki-theater colors corduroy curtains that accompanied me from 2308 Haste in Berkeley, when my friend C. let me have the apartment for which they were made, to every place I lived in through to my first real house on E. 32nd Street in South Eugene.
My sister Lorna and her family, I'm almost sure, visited the cottage once; I remember the boys on the lawn. Writing this, I realize that I am not sure of the dates. Part of my life, which I thought of as making up for having had no adolescence (which, of course, is not true, but I had no adolescent 'social life') and which by the 1980s I regarded as typically Thirty-Something (even though I saw that TV program only once, I got the idea), took place in the cottage. Since nothing I did was illegal or even interesting and did not keep me from earning tenure, I am leaving all of it out of this blog; I merely assert that it was like everyone else's. I was ashamed of one episode, for all the typical reasons.
I already have spoken of my colleagues, whom I regarded highly. My colleague, Dean Mackenzie, who had been the teaching assistant when I started Art History at Berkeley, was now at Eugene, and, as professor emeritus, he still is there. But the cottage was no place to entertain, however simply, and generally evening parties in Eugene were for sets of married couples.
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