History Lesson

There are, of course, rules that guide the traditions of writing, as there are rules for sports, sex and religion. One of those rules seems to be that when one writes, the scenes need to be set, so that the reader can see the main characters in context and understand something about them from an analysis of the place they occupy.  Many years ago, I read a well-regarded book by Carolyn Chute, "The Beans of Egypt, Maine."  Truth to tell, I never got very far in it; I knew from the scene setting what to expect in the rest of the novel, and I wasn't convinced I wanted to read that kind of story. But I am no different from most writers, and I find myself setting the scenes here... come to think of it, I always do that, and I think I always sort of explain it. It's what writer Roger Rosenblatt calls "throat clearing" before you actually start to write. So here's today's harrumph...Hopefully, you will get beyond the point at which I closed Chute's book.

In 1840, Martin Van Buren was President of the United States, followed in 1841 by William Henry Harrison, but Harrison only served one month, having contracted pneumonia. He was succeeded by his Vice President John Tyler. These men set policy for a nation of 17 million people which had grown nearly a third  from the prior census. The influx included those fleeing poverty and religious persecution in Europe and beyond. The census recorded the names of head of household; numbers of free white males and females; the names of a slave owner and the number of slaves owned, and free "colored" persons. But there must have already been flux in attitudes toward slaves as in 1841, the Supreme Court of the U.S. stated that in the case of the slave ship Amistad, the Africans who had wrested control of the ship had been bound into slavery illegally.  

It was a time when the nation's growth was marked by the first wagon trains that left Missouri for California, and the citizens would have been watching the connection by railroad and the invention of the telegraph which was another way of connecting, and in 1845 President Polk announced the Monroe Doctrine that settled the West and established the principle of Manifest Destiny. In 1845 in New York, the Knickerbockers baseball team established the rules of baseball for the first time, and on January 1,1840 the first recorded bowling match took place at Knickerbocker Alleys, New York City.


There were 26 states, and New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Virginia  had populations of more than 1 million people. The map looked like this with the black lines in dispute.


In Vermont, where we live, 1840 saw the early arrival of immigrants from Ireland and Russia who reclaimed agricultural land in yet another boom-bust cycle that has characterized the state for all of its recorded history. There were Welsh immigrants who arrived to work in the Slate Valley to the west, and an agri-industrial base began in the cities and surrounding countryside to the North and East. French Canadians moved South from Quebec and somewhere between 1840 and 1860, one of those early settlers named S. Morison made the Great Wheel (spinning wheel)  that stands in our living room. He lived in a town about 20 miles away and was buried in a Quaker cemetery beside his second wife.

In 1860, President Abraham Lincoln was elected President but had to travel to Washington secretly because of an assassination attempt, and in 1861, the Civil War began. In 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation was signed and in 1865, President Lincoln was shot. Between these years, the Homestead Act began, 1000 people died in the draft riots that would have allowed people to pay to escape the draft, and the battle of Gettysburg saw one-third of the 150,000 troops that fought, maimed, missing or dead. Between 150 and 500 Cheyenne and Arapaho men, women and children were killed waiting for their terms of surrender, and the Grand Canyon was explored by the "first scientific team", a contemporary phrase that reflects painfully on our continuing views of Native American history on this land. In addition, Alaska was purchased from Russia, the Ku Klux Klan was founded, the first typewriter was invented, and Women's Suffrage passed in Wyoming.

In New England twenty thousand New England shoe workers (Lynn, MA) struck and won higher wages and M L Byrn patents the "covered gimlet screw with a 'T' handle" (corkscrew).

There were 33 states and the map looked like this:


One more event occurred in 1840. A house was built in Middletown Springs. It was probably simple, and housed a cobbler or leather maker and his family. There are pictures of it in the history of the area. The family added on a second two-story section twenty years later.

Here it is today. It is on a piece of wooded and open land with a view of the town. It is about 3/4 mile from the General Store, Library and Post Office, and the Elementary School that was built in 1904.

Remember that celebration we are planning?  We will be holding it here.  At home.

Remember that event we are planning?

Stay tuned for details, but there will be pizza and champagne involved... Pepperoni anyone? Vegetarian pizza? Goat cheese?
We'll be looking for recipes for easy-to-make snacks!

Mud Season Turns to Spring

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You're one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you're two months back in the middle of March.

Robert Frost, "Two Tramps in Mud Time"

It wasn't until I started dating a Vermonter that I ever heard the term "mud season."  Mud season is somewhere after winter and before spring, when the snow is melting and all of the soil is soft and slick.  You can sink a car up to the axles if you park on the wrong part of the lawn (as I have).  The town roads, heavy clay over gravel, are as hard packed as tarmac during the summer and fall, but in mud season, they're greasy and unpredictable, like driving on Thanksgiving gravy.  Snow tires are useful on snow, but the tread packs in during mud season and they turn to slicks, heavy and unhelpful.  There's a reason why tractors have tires five feet tall.

But this year, mud season only lasted a couple of weeks, during late February and early March.  We went for a long walk this morning up Buxton Road, dry as August; we looked down onto the Poultney River, flooded after Irene but looking like a vestigial arroyo now, broad expanses of rocks emerged from the flow and baking dry in the morning sun.  

We hooked up the outdoor water today, and Nora washed the patio furniture after a winter in the garage.  Yesterday, we vacuumed both cars, and washed all their windows inside and out, before taking friends up for a drive to Middlebury and dinner.  The four of us walked down the sidewalks of Middlebury after dinner at 8:00, in shirtsleeves and no hurry to get back to the car.

I have an extra day this weekend, given that the third Monday of April is Patriots' Day in Massachusetts, commemorating the Battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775.  We'll be using some of that day tomorrow swapping the winter snow tires for the summer performance tires on both cars.  I'm looking forward to the drive to Boston tomorrow, not so much for going back to Boston as for the first drive back on the new Falken tires, letting Habañero have a little extra leash.  Of course, the sheriffs and Staties know that mud season is over, too, and pay a little closer attention to little red cars on Vermont 4.  I'll be good, mostly.

We bought a pile of books in Middlebury, as we usually do when we encounter a good independent bookstore.  There are a few of them around here, Northshire Books in Manchester and the Vermont Book Shop in Middlebury—bookstores with personality, with literary intention.  Yesterday's take included Are You My Mother?, an illustrated novel by Alison Bechdel; the 2011 Best American Essays edited by Edwidge Danticat; When Women Were Birds, a writer's thoughts by Terry Tempest Williams; and Religion for Atheists, the new book by Alain de Botton.  I'm a complete sucker for anything de Botton writes; he's like a sharp car with its summer tires on, a little bit off-leash and completely captivating.  It doesn't matter where you're going, architecture or Proust or work or religion; you're going to have an exhilarating drive.

I got my course evaluations on Friday (I teach a pair of eight-week courses, so my semester was finished on March 23rd).  This semester felt like an auspicious confluence of events:  a small cohort, 26 undergrads in one course and 27 masters' students in the other; a strong blend of students in both courses; a syllabus that I get a lot of control in designing and delivering; and the possibility that this will be the last semester that either course is offered, due to some changes in curriculum starting this fall.  And that fortunate alignment of planets showed up in the course evaluations.

• "I can be the designer I want to be."
• "I learned to think of myself as a valuable person."
• "Where would I lead the world?  What is my purpose?"
• "I am not crazy or alone; I can ask questions and get help."
• "...made us feel as if we were in control of our destiny/future."
• "Being okay with life being unpredictable."
• "I learned to recognize what I want out of architecture."
• "I think more about how buildings can change and affect the world in a local and global sense."
• "Each voice is important and there is not one sole answer for every problem."

They weren't talking about the course, or about me.  They were talking about themselves.

It's springtime.  Good things happen when you let yourself off the leash a little.

Pushing the bar

There is something in the writing of a blog post that is like bellying up to the bar and having a chat with your favorite bartender...not that I have one exactly, but some of you may remember that H and I went to a place in Bennington and watched two young women do aerobics while filling the alcohol needs of their customers... Anyway, that's another story.

I have had a day of emails that are related to each other, and none of them seem to make it possible to get closure. Each one triggers another, and in frustration, I finally just made a phone call. Should have resolved it, but the person I had been emailing with (let's call him "Bob") wasn't in his office, so I left a message. It won't surprise you that Bob returned the call in the 5 minutes that I was on the phone with H reporting the email transactions.  And that Bob asked in his voice mail message for information that was in my last email. So how should I resolve that? By phone? By email?

I am going to trust that he can go back to the email and find that information.

All of this was triggered by my efforts to get someone else (we'll call her Betty) to do something that she had agreed to. Bob had to intervene to get it done, but a week after Bob took action on his end, Betty still hadn't returned the call. Bob had asked me to remind him that Betty was supposed to be in touch. And that's what started a day of about 20 emails...

"Bob? Has Betty been in touch"? 

"No."

So I had to email Bob to ask if he could reinitiate the contact through Ben who was supposed to contact Betty for Bob. Ben? Yes. Ben. My email to Bob required an email to Ben which ostensibly prompted a call to Betty. And my email to Bob required that I call Bill who is supposed to be helping resolve issues with Betty for H and I, but Bill wasn't in, so, you guessed it, I sent him an email... (sorry about that... I should have changed H's name to Boris!)

(Note from Boris:  I LIKE that name!!)

So I have spent the day borrowing time from the work I need to do, so that I can contact Bob and Bill about Ben and Betty. And my day has been so full of blather that I can't get the work done. I keep pushing the "Send/Receive" button on my computer to see if anyone has been in touch....I told H this. I told him that I had turned into one of those rats who keep pushing the bar. H laughed and said, "yeah, but they are usually trying to get food, not another electric shock." I didn't laugh because I had just finished watching three gruesome videos that recreate an old study by Stanley Milgram, that showed that 60% of people will push a lever to shock someone because they can't remember a word pair, and because the "experimenter" tells them the experiment requires that they do so. They shock them until they appear to have had a heart attack or died. They shock them despite the fact that the switches are labelled "extreme danger". Here's the link if you can stomach it... it makes me physically nauseous.

Why, you may ask, was I watching this? Because it is part of what I need to do to prepare for my class on research ethics. It is where the idea came from that there are only certain things we should do as academics, and others that we should avoid. It is where we (as scientists) realized that the ends (knowledge) don't necessarily justify the means (stress, embarassment, fear, self-loathing).

Anyway, there is something in this that is familiar... We keep pushing the lever at work when all we get is shocked. And sometimes those levers are labeled "extreme danger." And of course there is something in the lives that many of us live - on the bus or the train at dawn to get to jobs that don't respect us, where we work for eight or ten or more hours and then back on the bus or the train to get to marriages where ... (nah... you know the rest of this particular nightmare). 

And then we have the computers that require that we respond to emails that mean we don't really have to speak to anyone face to face, that mean that we can leave a message and go on with our lives, expecting that the other person will respond when they have the chance. Except that's not the way it works in real life. We keep pushing the bar. Even if we keep administering shocks to ourselves.

There is an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about a young woman who has created a virtual study hall so that students can post questions and faculty members can answer them for everyone to see, and one of the Harvard faculty members said, he thought it was making students lazy..."The service is so easy for students to use that he worries people are using it as a crutch. 'I got the feeling that students were asking the questions because that was easier than thinking,' Mr. Morrisett said."

He is considering "intentionally leaving questions unanswered for the first 24 hours, to encourage students to work things out on their own."

Hmmmm...leaving the email to "age" for 24 hours rather than spending my day pushing the bar.... Might give me a chance to think.

It's enough to make me want a drink....

Tangled Months

The past couple of months have been a wild swirl of locations and tasks.  Middletown, Medford, New York, Grand Rapids, Washington DC... You name it, and if it's east of the Mississippi, at least one of us has been there in 2012.

But over dinner tonight, we compared schedules... and it's going to get worse for the next three months.  Aside from the regular weekly "commute" between three states, I'll be in Baltimore for a week, in Baltimore for another week, in Trenton for a week, and in Portland ME for a week.  Plus the end of the semester(s), the annual Academic Indicators Report, our accreditation annual report, finalizing a major national conference that I'm co-chairing, two separate retention studies, the late-May portfolio review (with probably 60-80 portfolios submitted), the ongoing curriculum planning, attempting to write a business plan, and other general life stuff, itself a suitcase currently overpacked.

If you want something done, ask a busy person.

A week ago, I was sitting in the airport with a friend, sharing stories of being the runner-up on various job searches (that's happened to me four times that I know of).  She relayed some research that shows that Olympic silver medalists are far more likely to be depressed than bronze medalists.  And that makes sense.  If you barely finish in the medals, it's likely that you might just as well have finished sixth, and you had a terrific effort on the right day.  But if you get the silver, you COULD have gotten a gold if... well, if what?  If you'd worked harder.  If you hadn't made a tactical error somewhere.  If you'd been born with one-half of one percent different DNA.  Who the hell knows, really?  But you certainly blame yourself for it.

That runner-up-ness doesn't keep an endless succession of people from asking me for help.  Running a national conference, for instance, while the organization is without leadership between executive directors; putting on workshops for faculty from schools across the country; serving on an accreditation review committee for a new college's initial accreditation; holding the accreditation success of my own college; seeing students in life crisis who come to me because they know that I listen to them; seeing colleagues in professional crisis who come to me because they know that I listen to them.  My office guest chair, and my e-mail inbox, are always occupied.

And if you're not the gold medalist, you never say no.  You always work harder, always take on another task, and another, and another. 

I dream of retirement.  A retirement in which I only work as hard as, and do the same things as, a college faculty member, teaching and doing the research and writing that I was trained to do and love to do.  A retirement of working in a single city for a single organization.  A retirement in which I live in the same house as my wife.  Or at least the same state.

{Editor's note:  Do you remember the apocrypha about how some Miss America chose, for the talent contest, her ability to pack a suitcase?  Well we can both qualify for Miss America's talent contest, though I think the swim suit segment might leave us out!  Of course, if we won, it would mean more travel.}

Strong Language

I’m in the Gerald R. Ford International Airport in Grand Rapids (Jerry Ford’s hometown), waiting another three hours for my flight to Newark.  There’s not much in Terminal B — six gates, one bagel shop, and a corridor snack/magazine kiosk.  C’est tout.  Long stretches of blank wall, everything in the same tone of gray-green.

Funny place, West Michigan.  When I arrived on Friday, the person I was supposed to meet had been delayed, so I asked the woman at the Travel Information desk how I could get to Calvin College.  She immediately called the college's conference center, and got me added to the shuttle bus list.  I thanked her, we talked, and I said that I’d grown up in Muskegon but had never been to Calvin College.  “Oh, gravy!” she replied.

That’s really the tone of the place now.  Kind, eager to help... but always just a little uncomfortable with how the 20th Century has turned out.  Never is heard a discouraging word.  A place where “Oh, gravy!” is a strong oath.

Back when I was growing up, West Michigan was an industrial place, full of hard-living third-generation Irish and Poles and Italians, people who brawled and drank and smoked and laughed.  But the industry is largely gone in favor of management and finance, and the blue collars are also gone.  Their habitat is now claimed by shiny young JayCees, evangelists both secular and Calvinist, men on the make.  Smiling, shaking hands and making friends, always moving forward, always ready to claim another convert/customer.  It’s the home of multi-level marketing, dreams of greatness, relentless self-improvement.  Willy Loman would recognize Grand Rapids. 

I went out to meet the shuttle bus, and waited far past its appointed arrival time.  I carried my bags back in to the info desk, where the same sweet, grandmotherly woman was still on duty.  She didn’t recognize me at first —as with all salespeople, she’s fully attentive with each client but carries little of that into long-term memory — but I explained what had happened and she remembered and was shocked that the shuttle was so late.  “Oh, my heart!” she said.  Not as in clutching your chest and exclaiming, “Oh!!! My Heart!” but in the way you’d say “Oh my goodness.”

OMH!!

There’s something brittle about that kind of living.  I once read, “A person without humor experiences life like a wagon without springs, unpleasantly jolted by every bump in the road.”  Business self-help books and motivational speakers are part of that life, constantly reminding yourself that you can be great, that greatness is your due, that hard work will unfailingly be repaid tenfold.  From Good to Great.  The Purpose-Driven Life.  The CEO of YOU.  They don’t advise on how to deal with the bumpy road; they promise instead that the road will soon be pearly smooth.

And it won’t.  And they’ll always be a little surprised, a little shocked that imperfection is still allowed.  Oh, gravy.

One of the unstated goals of liberal education is that it creates another population distinct from the blue and white collars. A community of people able to absorb change, and to help frame it.  A community with enough historical perspective to have some humor about the current world while simultaneously being serious about making it better while simultaneously knowing that other people have competing (and yet reasonable) definitions of what "making it better" would entail.  It doesn't matter whether you're studying English lit or architecture or agricultural engineering — good education has larger and more crucial outcomes.

But that IS a third community, with its members drawn from but no longer fully at home with their working or the professional class roots.  This Grand Rapids, and my own Muskegon, are both foreign places now.

Little Fish, Big Fish

I'm about to go to bed at 10:00 in order to get up at 3:00 to catch a 5:50 flight to Cleveland and then on to Grand Rapids.  That's Grand Rapids, Michigan, The Furniture City.  The 69th largest CSA (Census Statistical Area) in America.

When I was growing up in Muskegon Heights, forty miles away from Grand Rapids, GR seemed like an unimaginably large place.  Sitting in the back seat while my parents were driving through it at night, I remember freeway ramps stacked (what seemed to be) four and five decks high, like a gargantuan roller coaster.  And it was brilliantly illuminated, after having driven for an hour through the corn and potatoes and darkness.  In Muskegon, the freeways were on the ground, as was everything else.  It's an architectural truism that the tallest structures around tell you what people value.  In some places it's cathedrals, in some places it's financial high rises.  In Muskegon, it was smokestacks.  (Now it's highway signs to escape to Grand Rapids...)

Since I left my hometown, I've subsequently lived in the 10th, 11th, 39th and 48th largest CSAs; I've spent at least a little time in 13 of the top 20.  And poor Grand Rapids, so gigantic to my child self, is starting to feel like flyover country, just as ignored by the rest of the powerful as Muskegon Heights was ignored by Grand Rapids.  Little fish, big fish, giant fish, shark.

I divide my time between Boston (#10) and Middletown Springs (there isn't even a number to describe Middletown Springs... let's just say we're two hours away from #199).  The intellectual and emotional whiplash is enormous, most weekends.  And lest I whine too much, Nora has three of them — #1, #10, and #whatever MS is.  She used to navigate New York with aplomb, but now it's draining and alien; Middletown Springs is home.  (She's still plenty confident in Manhattan, though.  I know where about six things are; one of them's an ATM and another a pool hall.  Nora knows where everything is, and what lane you should be in to get there.)

I'm looking forward to being in Grand Rapids, even though it will remind me of all the reasons why I left West Michigan.  It'll be clean, though.  People in that part of the state mow their lawns with tweezers.  (But, as I was reminded by a high schooler from a similar place, never on Sunday.)  In New York and London, the Ponzis are based on finance; only in West Michigan would a pyramid scheme be based on home cleaning products.  It's big Santorum country this year.

The Furniture City was built on lumber shipped from The Port City, Muskegon.  Logs floated down the Muskegon River from Roscommon... "value added" by the sawmills in Muskegon... further "value added" by the furniture factories in Grand Rapids.  Ever wonder why Herman Miller and Steelcase and Haworth are all in Grand Rapids and Holland?  (Of course you didn't, unless you're a commercial interior design geek.)  It's because their predecessor companies, and lots of craftsman knowledge, were all in The Furniture City in the 19th Century.  And pity the poor guy up in Roscommon, felling trees and building log rafts to float the harvest downstream for a buck a day if he was lucky.

Still the case, of course.  The Vermonters work 14 hour days tending their 80 cows, selling milk for pennies a pound to better-paid dairy processors who at least get to work indoors, who sell it for triple that to even better-paid grocers who don't have to lift hundred-pound pails, who send their proceeds to fantastically well-paid corporate grocery managers who don't do anything more strenuous than type.  Social class, it's said, is related to the size of the muscles you make your living with.  Your back, your legs, your arms, your hands, your fingers, your eyes.  When Mitt was at Bain Capital, he probably didn't even have to type much – he just scanned his eyes across his domain and uttered his mandates.

Small places, big muscles, small money.  Big places, small muscles, big money.  Twas ever so.

On my way to Grand Rapids, a very laden place.  Will it be draining and alien, or will I navigate with aplomb?