I slept well, and had gone to bed earlier than I usually do, so I actually got a good night’s sleep for once. My kids behaved well this morning—which is not always the case. Usually my four year old daughter is good for at least one round in timeout before breakfast, typically for scratching her brother for some unknown offense. But not this morning. I also had an eight AM conference with Cormac’s new teacher. He just began second grade, and had a couple of rough days. I was kind of dreading the conference, but it went really well.
(This is a tangent, but his teacher told me one ridiculously funny story. Apparently he refused to do some math work because he considers it boring—can’t imagine where he got that idea—and then when he got really insubordinate the teacher went to remove him from class and he told her that he was going to turn into a vampire and come to her house at night and suck her blood. I laughed out loud when she told me that, and she said that as mad as she was at him at the time, she had a hard time not bursting out laughing when he said that, too).
Then I drove my daughter to school in the beautiful morning sunlight, and listening to sports talk radio learned that the Yankees had won in extra innings and thereby had regained first place in the American League East. It was a good morning.
Later in the day I finished a draft of an article that will be appearing later this semester in UConn Magazine about education in general and Windham in particular. It is not an upbeat article, but I was glad to get it done by deadline, which was 5 o’clock, and I finished by 3:30. So I took a short walk around campus and got myself some coffee, and watched the undergraduates walking to class—all listening to music, texting, or talking on their phones. But there were lots of students on this glorious day sitting beneath trees, reading. Several classes were meeting outside. In fact, I let my class have response groups outside on Tuesday afternoon. It was wonderful moving from group to group, each one in a different but equally bucolic location. It felt like something out of Goodbye, Mr. Chips.
But seeing all the students outside today and having my class meet outside the day before made me a little nostalgic for being an undergrad. I remember how much I loved being an English major as an undergrad because I would do exactly what these students were doing throughout the fall and spring. I would grab whatever novel I happened to be reading at the time, and I would sit myself beneath some tree or atop some stone wall or on a bench somewhere, and I would just read for an hour or two or three till I had to go to class or eat. I took nothing more than a pen with me besides the book, so I could write notes in the margins. (I rarely kept a notebook of any kind).
I had a girlfriend for most of my senior year, and she used to experience such strong envy that it bordered on anger because she was a physical therapy major, and she couldn’t very well lug her copy of Grey’s Anatomy and all her reference books and notebooks to the base of some sugar maple and commune with earth and sky. She also used to get mad at me when we’d study together and I’d laugh out loud at something funny I’d read in a book. Her anatomy texts never made her laugh. But that’s another story.
However, I don’t get to do that much anymore. I spend an inordinate amount of time in meetings or in front of my two computer screens sending and answering emails, crunching budget numbers, and writing reports. And if you have ever been to the CWP office and have seen my private office space, you know I basically have a Bartleby set-up with a window that looks out on a courtyard that has one Japanese maple tree, one glass entryway, and three four-story high brick walls, and that serves as the departmental smoking lounge. Thank goodness for that Japanese maple and the oblique sky and sun I get from above my basement windows. So it was really nice to take the students outside Tuesday.
This past weekend I was mowing the lawn in back one afternoon. While my daughter napped, my son kept me company. As I marched back and forth across the lawn, he sat quietly atop a big rock on the end of a stone wall that separates our yard from a large field owned by my neighbor. The field still has old apple and pear trees in it, and attracts deer and hawks. In the summer evenings it’s fun to take the kids to watch lightning bugs light up the darkness. The kids love this field. And so while I mowed, Cormac sat for a solid hour and just drew picture after picture of the tree line, the field, the clouds. At other times he will sit back there and read to himself, or take a field guide and try to identify trees or bugs. I love that he does this, and hope he ends up with a college major—and later a job—that gives him the chance to always do this, or at least from time to time on sunny Tuesday afternoons in the fall.
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