Summer Time's Come and Gone, My Oh My!

My children have been picking up their school schedules and purchasing back-to-school clothes. The mornings are chilled in Wisconsin this time of year, and we have been clicking on our fire to stay warm. I am preparing syllabi and gathering energies for another semester. On Monday the first meetings are to be held. On Thursday, my daughter gets on the school bus at an absurd hour of the morning.

There is a sense of regret and anticipation at summer’s end. Regret for the end of a time of freedom, albeit, freedom for those who can afford it. I’ve been reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Nickel and Dimed. We have asked all first year students to read that text over their summers, and we will hold study sessions for them as a way of introducing them to each other, to faculty, and to the process of study. Ehrenreich reminds me that there is too great a population of people in America who work but do not make a living wage. I feel privileged to be an academician who has the opportunity to have such a long summer break from regular work. Not that I do not work during the summers—I do—but I do not have to go into neither the office nor the classrooms. Best, during the summers I attend no meetings. I live a broad margin to my life in the summertime. Summer time’s come and gone, my oh my!

And the anticipation derives from the expectation of months of study and intellectual work and questings in meetings with new people and situations. And it stems from the regularity of Nature which carpets the ground with brilliantly colored leaves which will protect my new plantings from the winter’s harshness which moves towards us not far in the distant. I have myself purchased new clothes, and a notebook or two.

Hey, They Say it's Your Birthday. Well, it's My Birthday, Too.

I don’t know that birthdays are all that important the older I get. I suppose they ought to become more significant, because there are less celebrations to anticipate in the future. I should savor these birthdays more! I suppose. But I have for the past twenty or so years—perhaps more, I forget—immediately following the anniversary of my birth defined myself as the next numbered year. Tomorrow, I finish my 58th year, but Wednesday I begin my 59th year. I will think of myself as 59 years old. When the actual birthday rolls up next 16 August, well, I’ve been celebrating the event for the past year. It becomes a non-event. And then I’ll silently, though perhaps not gently, move into my sixtieth year.

Now, the children might anticipate the celebration. But it’s like this: when I was much younger—I mean much, much younger—and I followed the Mother’s Day Celebration with the Father’s Day Celebration, I wondered aloud when Children’s Day would be honored. And the response was always the same: “Every day is Children’s Day.” That’s how I feel about birthdays. Everyday is a day we celebrate my being alive—our being here now. I celebrate myself and sing myself every day. I want my children to learn to sound their barbaric yawps each day of their lives. I hope I’ve taught them something about that celebration. I do not want them to set apart one day and honor me, and then return the next morning to the average, daily non-celebration of my being alive. I’d rather the continuity of struggling with them as we grow up together than this false peace of the anniversary on the day I was born almost six decades ago.

And the cards and presents that suddenly appear from people whom I haven’t spoken to or heard from since last year, well, they seem like so many lost trees.

For years, on my birthday I’ve secluded myself for an hour or two and written a short assessment of my life. The older I get, the more studied the assessment becomes, and the more complex the thought process seems to be.

Tonight as I sit here dreaming, I hope for continued health, continued satisfaction in my work, and a visit from John Beresford Tipton’s emissary, Michael Anthony.

Where I've Been!

I’ve been twice to Canada and once to New York over the past several weeks. I don’t travel well these days, though certainly each voyage out was a satisfying one, even as the voyage in was a welcome relief.

I don’t travel out very well these days. Thoreau said, “Be rather the Mungo Park, the Lewis and Clarke and Frobisher, of your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes,—with shiploads of preserved meats to support you, if they be necessary; and pile the empty cans sky-high for a sign. Were preserved meats invented to preserve meat merely? Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.” When I travel out these days, it is rarely my own streams and oceans which I explore, and I certainly eat too many preserved meats. And alas, I am a vegetarian, and eat nothing which could look back on me—except an occasional ripe potato. As for new channels of thought—often it is all I can do to maintain my equilibrium and sense of direction! But there were these joyous occasions in which I desired to participate—my mother’s eightieth birthday, a dissertation defense, and a wedding. Each in its own way was very satisfying, and I have left a great many cans of preserved meat in my paths, and gained, if not a few pounds, certainly some weight. But alas, there was not much time for new channels of thought.

One day in New York we traveled to Jones Beach. I have, in my former youth (to be contrasted with my present youth) spent many hours tanning the white skin and watching the bodies at Jones Beach. My first serious sexual experience took place there. Some of my voyagings out occurred there on the beach in the heat of the summer’s sun and in the heat of my dreams and passions. I think I have set up my metaphorical tents on many of the numbered beaches of this incredible natural resource, and dug not a few wells in the process.

Often I drove to the beach, and this time was no different. There were a number of years when I lived in New York City when I publicly transported myself—or rather, was publicly transported—to Jones’ Beach by subway, Long Island Railroad and bus, but usually I drove in an automobile. This time was no different. I drove along Northern State Parkway towards the Meadowbrook which would take me to the toll booths and the Beaches. Today, it cost eight dollars to cross the bar, but I think I paid as little as fifty cents in my former youth.

And as I drove along the parkway, and as I rounded the curve just past Shelter Rock Road, in my body I suddenly returned to my former youth, and I felt in my body all of what what I came to associate with the expectation and excitement and angst I experienced in my whole life back then as I then had driven to Jones Beach. I was transported back in that place on the Northern State Parkway, no less than was Proust by his madeleines transported, to a former time, a former consciousness, a former youth. And it all started in the experience of my body!! The event was visceral, and my body’s sensations took me ito my memories and back to my former youth. The instant I turned the curve, I felt as I did then—I experienced my memories first in my body and not in my mind—it was the latter which had to understand the body feeling.

I don’t think this is new news—not even original news. Antonio Damasio (Descartes’ Error) has written eloquently of the relationship between the physical and the mental, and I have drawn on his work extensively in my own (I’m Only Bleeding) to explore the world of the schools, and the violence we inflict on children in our construction of an education which ignores the relationship between the intellectual and the physical, spirit and body, and between thought and activity. But it is interesting to appreciate that each of my places have not only names but events, and that in those events I discover my feelings. I discover in my body my thinking and feeling Self. Damasio:

“From my perspective, it is just that soul and spirit, with all their dignity and human scale, are now complex and unique states of an organism. Perhaps the most indispensable thing we can do as human beings, every day of our lives, is to remind ourselves and others of our complexity, fragility, finiteness, and uniqueness. And this is of course the difficult job, is it not: to move the spirit from its nowhere pedestal to a somewhere place, while preserving its dignity and important; to recognize its humble origin and vulnerability, yet still call upon its guidance.”

That’s where I’ve been. To the beach. In my present youth into my former youth.