The Kennebec Report

Ten Things to Like about Bawlmer, Merlind

The title is of course how one pronounces "Baltimore, Maryland" if one is actually from Baltimore. This is a city that I had never spent any time in, other than a day trip with my friend Paree, who lives in D.C. and who took me up one day to see the waterfront. Paree has a keen interest in architecture and urban design, which makes him a delight to wander around cities in; a day trip to Detroit when we both lived in Michigan is one my extremely fond memories because 1) Detroit is fascinating, architecturally speaking, and 2) Paree is a lot of fun.

We wandered around the waterfront, where I spent a lot of my time on this trip in a conference hotel, giving a presentation with my colleague Kathleen on a deliberative democracy project we organized at our school. The conference was the annual meeting of the American Democracy Project, a project of the AMerican Association of State Schools and Colleges (AASCU). Got all that? I never have quite understood the relationship of all the organizations, and it didn't matter. What mattered was a presentation in a new city--a weekend trip that the university paid for, which is fine by me.

Baltimore may be my new favorite city. I say this every time I go to a new city (see my entries on San Antonio in this blog and on Honolulu in my previous blog), but it's always true. Bawlmer is just a very cool city: big enough but not too big, filled with urban pleasures, and unusually friendly. Henceforth, ten things to like about Bawlmer, Merlind:

1) Traveling with Kathleen. Not a Baltimore thing, exactly, but traveling with Kathleen made the Newark airport bearable, where we had an extremely long and tedious layover. Kathleen's usual strategy, when confronted with a flight delay, is to locate a place that sells wine by the glass. This strikes me as an admirable strategy. Newark is not a fun airport. Few of them are, for that matter, but Newark was especially vile. But after some wine, my attitude is, oh well. More Shiraz, please.

2) Baltimore's downtown architecture. I did not stay at the conference hotel, for which  I'm grateful. I stayed on the north end of downtown, which meant lots of walking lots of and gawking at the very cool buildings in Baltimore's manageable downtown. Like most East Coast cities, Baltimore hasn't torn every old building down, so the downtown mix is very pleasing, with new skyscrapers cheek to jowl with old Victorian brick commercial buildings. And because Baltimore is old, there are a fair number of colonial and Federal buildings as well. TGhe architectural melange is a bit odd, but itall works. I suspect it's because it's a generally human-scaled architecture; the skyscrapers don't try to stupefy you into admiration of their gigantic-ness. It's a very walkable downtown with vistas down to the harbor everywhere. Plus there's a coffeehouse about every six blocks or so, something I personally require.

3) Inner Harbor. Inner Harbor is Baltimore's wildy successful adaptation of its working waterfront to urban pleasures, and I have mixed feelings abou it. It's massively touristy, and while it has brought many people into the inner city, most of them don't seem to be Baltimoreans. The excessive number of convention hotels makes that clear. And most of it is standard tourist stuff: Starbucks, Famous Footwear, a Nike store, fast food outlets, a "festival marketplace," the usual. I could've stayed home if I wanted a shopping mall. Most depressing to me was the Power Plant, an old power plant that's been tarted up with a Hard Rock Cafe, a Barnes and Noble, a Gold's Gym, all with these corporate logos bolted to the side of the building. In all fairness, this is not a bad reuse of a derelict power plant, as reuse goes, but I would have preferred that it remain a power plant. Americans don't seem to like or want to look at basic city infrastructure unless, of course, they can shop at it.

That said, Inner Harbor is most walkable. It's especially nice to stroll along the docks. And some tourist attractions are well worth having. I didn't have time to visit the National Aquarium, for example, But I'm told that it's spectacular.

4) Little Italy. Little Italy is adjacent to the Inner Harbor, and it's the real deal: an ethnic neighborhood that caters to its inhabitants more than to the tourist trade. We got a dinner recommendation from a group of elderly Italians playing bocce in a public park, and it turned out terrific. "Tell Luigi that Mario sent you," bocce player Mario told us, and I recommend Luigi's restaurant, Caesar's Den, highly. Have the linguini with smoked salmon in cream sauce.

Little Italy was also hosting a street fair for the local Catholic Church, St. Leo's, that weekend, and it took me back to the annual fair at my own St. Leo's in Flint, Michigan. There were raffles and bingo games and street food and St. Christopher medals and noisy locals enjoying the pleasures of their own neighborhood. Lots ofbeer, which is the mark of any truly successful Catholic pariochial event. The urban layout here is really nice: tight little homes with stoops with, often, businesses below on the street level and homes above them. Even the new developments respect the street fabric and imitate it closely.

5) Great pubs. Baltimore seems to be a really good drinking town. I'm not surprised by this because it was a major port, which immediately means good riffraff. So there are bars and pubs galore. In particular, I recommend Lucy's, an Irish pub housed in a former bank. It sounds odd, but it works; the formality of the bank architecture and interior plays nicely off the "this is your public living room" ethos that makes any bar successful.  I stumbled on Lucy's, looking for a place to have dinner, and am very grateful that I did. Have the shepherd's pie and for dessert, splurge on the custard creme.

6) Walkability. I've mentoined this twice already, so it's obviously important to me. Baltimore is generally flat and its downtown is compact, so it's a city in which one can walk to things. And people do walk; the streets were filled with folks at all hours. I also noticed that there seems to be lots of neighborhood pride. That is, people identified with the neighborhoods they were living in, and they made the city manageable by defining their everyday lives around them. I'm willing to bet that there are many, many Baltimoreans who are able to meet all of their daily needs by walking within a ten-block radius of their home. This is as it should be. I would love to live like this, and I would happily sell my car if I could.

7) The Walters Art Gallery. Hands down, my new favorite museum. It's free, which is highly unusual, because (I assume) it's very well endowed. It's also relatively small, as suggested by its name: its benefactors saw it as a gallery, not a museum. And its collection is extremely choice; the Walter family, a father and son, had lots of money and excellent taste. Wonderful as it is, the Walters is not overwhelming in the way that many art museums are. It feels as if you've stumbled into someone's eccentric house. One gallery, in fact, is laid out much like someone's private living quarters. There are no velvet ropes, and all the artwork is hung on the walls sort of haphazardly, as if the owner of the house just put them there because he liked to look at them. The Walters is not that big, so it's manageable, but big enough to have a relatively deep and choice collection. You can certainly get lost in the galleries--the museum's layout sort of eluded me--but if you do, you just keep stumbling onto fabulous things that make being disoriented worth it. I couldn't figure out how to take the Faberge egg home with me, but I so wanted to. The Walters' medieval and early Renaissance collection is outstanding, which made me very happy. I left, sated with Madonnas and Children.

8) Hon Fest. You have to love a city that could come up with this street festival, and I am very upset that I couldn't attend it. If you've seen the movie Hairspray, you know what a "hon" is: a woman in leopard-print capris, cat's-eye glasses, and big, teased hair. She takes her name from her catchphrase, "How y'all doin', hon?" Bawlmer celebrates this (apparently) city icon with a festival that brings all of her hons together, dressed in full hon regalia. The official hons are required to march in the mayor's Christmas parade. Dontcha just love that, hon?

Okay, so I only have eight things to like about Bawlmer. I'd have more if I hadn't have had to spend most of my weekend in a conference hotel. This does not lessen my affection for the city. I would like to go back and round out my list. It would be easy to do.

Shopping at 26,000 Feet

One of the dubious pleasures of air travel is perusing the SkyMall catalog, which is always in the seat pocket in front of you, next to the instructional booklet that tells you how to deplane in the event of a water landing. I assume that the SkyMall catalog was conceived by some marketing executive who realized, correctly, that most Americans were deeply uncomfortable knowing that they would be trapped for two to three hours in a plane and not have the opportunity to shop, which is, after all, the entire reason for being human.

The SkyMall catalog is amusing not only because it exists (its existence is really more depressing than amusing, but let's not pursue that line of thinking), but because it offers such idiotic stuff. American capitalism is often insane, but the SkyMall catalog takes insanity to new heights. In the world of SkyMall, everything is a need that must be met imediately, even if you're cruising at 26,000 feet. On extended travel and won't be home for three weeks? Doesn't matter! When you finally get there, your new idiotic merchandise will be waiting for you! SkyMall does not offer immediate gratification, but like travel, it offers you the promise of something to come. THis may the reason for its success. (Or what I assume is its success. Somebody must be ordering all the stuff from the catalog because I've seen it in airline pockets for decades now.)

My favorite game on a plane, after I've determined which exit is appropriate for my row, keeping in mind that the nearest exit may be behind me, is deciding what product in the SkyMall catalog is seriously the dumbest product ever conceived. There is a always lively competition for the honor. Here are the runners-up from my recent travels:

Chewy Edge Brownie Pan. If you like the chewy edges of brownies--nay, cannot possibly live unless you eat only the chewy edges on your brownies--then this is the cooking implement for you. It looks like an ordinary brownie pan, but wait! There are edges built into the interior of the pan, so it looks a bit like a labyrinth. More important, every brownie you bake will have chewy edges and no undercooked centers. From the Solutions catalog ("Products that make your liefe easier" [registered trademark]).

Solutions is a bizarre catalog, featuring poducts that are theoretically solutions to problems. In reality, the "problems" that the solutions "solve" aren't really problems at all. Do people seriously lie awake at night obsessing about the problem of having a pan of brownies, not all of which have chewy edges? The Solutions catalog, rather, observes a fact (when you bake brownies, the edges will be chewier than the middle part) and then redefines it as a problem that must be solved with a product. This is a depressing way to conduct one's life.

Foam Pool Chair, which touts the virtue of supporting you in "cool comfort" with your head above water so that your hair doesn't get wet. It would seem to me that if you didn't want your hair to get wet, perhaps you should not be in the pool. Another winner from Solutions (problem/fact: when you are in a pool, the chances of getting wet are increased).

Another pool product is the combination Pool Seat and Floating Bar. This inflatable thing has both seats and inserts for cups, iced drinks, and snacks, so "you don't have to run inside for refreshments." From the Collection, "going beyond the ordinary." Not to mention the sane.

Theater-Style Popcorn Cart. Apparently, making popcorn in a pan is old-fashioned and no fun at all. Why not have a popcorn cart just like the ones you see at the theater? The $250 price, for one, not to mention the fact that a frying pan and lid are far, far easier to store. Also from Collection.

Scuba Snorkel Fin Shoes. These snorkel fins have a special "hinged flip fin" so that the fin itself flips up, allowing you to walk normally while wearing them. I can't imagine how much time scaba divers spend walking while wearing their fins, but generally I would think that they would wear the fins in the water rather than out of it. From The Greatest Gift (" . . . is to help others help themselves." This trademark phrase makes me feel that I must order from this catalog as a benevolent act toward humankind.)

Pet Doorbell. Just what it sounds like; you train your pet to ring his own doorbell and avoid unslightly scratches on the door. Appently, training your dog or cat to bark or meow is just so old-fashioned, whereas the Pet Doorbell is just modern and revolutionary. Also from The Greatest Gift.

"Zombie of Montclair Moors" Sculpture. This garden sculpture is a realistic zombie, clawing his way out of the ground. Just what I'd like next to the daylilies. From Design Toscano, a company which specializes in garden sculpture. You can also get a set of meerkats or a Yeti/Bigfoot or a "Peeing Boy of Brussel"s sculpture for your backyard if you're so inclined.

Pet Crate End Table. This product proves that "a pet crate can be attractive" because it doubles as an end table. I so do not even begin to understand this product. From Improvements.

Electronic Paper Towel Dispenser. Has tearing off a paper towel from its upright holder and not having it tear at the perforation just infuriated you? Let your anger go! Blithely wave your hand at this electonic marvel, and it will electronically dispense one sheet at exactly where the perforation is. "No more wasted paper towels!" Not surprisingly, from Collection.

Mascara Warmer and Eyelash Curling Iron Combo. Warm mascara is easier to apply. Who knew? (And it's a delicious dessert topping!) From Collection.

Bra Baby Ball. This is a plastic ball into which you insert your bra to "protect" it "in the washer and dryer." Protect it? From what? Invading Cossacks? From Collection.

Stainless Steel Wallet. It's the only one, according to the advert, and I have no reason to doubt this; could two people possibly have thought this was a necessary product? It's made out a stainless steel fine mesh so it's actually flexible, and it's "resistant to salts, acids, and seawater," which would make it a fine companion to the Scuba Snorkel Fin Shoes an/or the Pool Seat and Floating Bar. This is from Hammacher Schlemmer, a longtime retailer of expensive and loopy products for rich people.

"Keep Your Distance" Bug Vacuum. An insect vacuum so you can suck up bugs ("suctioned by a 22,400 rpm motor") from two feet away, which then transports the bug to an electoic grid in the handle that "instantly kills the pest." (As if being suctioned up by a 22,400 rpm motor wouldn't do the job.) Flyswatters are just so yesterday. From Hammacher Schlemmer.

PupStep Plus. This is a doggie staircase that allows Fido to climb up onto the couch without jumping. Training a dog to not get on the couch in the first place is apparently un-American, and only Americans would feel the need to provide assistance. (There's another PupStep  in the catalog that converts into a flat surface ramp for the little canine fatty that finds stairs too strenuous.) From Improvements.

I've yet to see anybody on a cell phone calling up SkyMall ("Yeah, three Electic Martini Stirrers. Can you deliver them to my hotel n Reykjavik? Do you take Visa?"), but somebody must be buying this stuff. In all fairness, the SkyMall catalog is infinitely more amusing than the pamphlet that tells you the special features of your aircraft or the in-flight magazine that recounts all the best restaurants in the airline's hub city that you're not going to. But that's not saying much. SkyMall strikes me as one of the most authentically American publications in existence, and I'm not sure how I should feel about that.

The Outer Banks, Part 2

More observations about the Outer Banks week:

1) Robert's family is Methodist, and the wedding itself was Baptist, as was the bride. I had never been to a Baptist wedding before, nor one held on a beach where all the guests and wedding party took their shoes off and went barefoot. (Somehow, the phrase "Baptist beach wedding" just sounds wrong.) Going barefoot made a great deal of sense, given the sand and warmth of the day.

Baptist weddings are dry, something I'm really not familiar with, having been raised Catholic where a wedding without beer is like . . . well, a Baptist wedding. The reception was very nice, but where's the bar? I had to face about 100 people, none of whom I knew, without the social lubricant of a stiff gin and tonic. That said, Southerners are gracious and really know how to throw a party. I would guess that when they have beer, the parties are even better.

2) The beach houses on the Outer Banks are giganto-normous. They tend to be three stories tall, though sometimes that's midleading because so many of them are on stilts in case of the flooding that must occur when hurricanes blow through. (In some cases, houses are four stories tall.) They tend to be rented by multiple families for a week or so, given that the average square footage of the average beach house is maybe 3000 square feet.

They're made of wood, of course, and either painted in appealing pastels or left to bleach to a silvery gray. Being made of wood, they are undoubtedly as fragile as the dunes they sit on, and when the next hurricane roars through, I'll be willing to bet that entire little towns are going to disappear into Pamlico Sound. I understand that the federal government will no longer ensure houses built on the Outer Banks because the risk factor is just too high. I'm surprised that developers were allowed to build so much in the first place. The Outer Banks are overbuilt, and the Department of the Interior has had to insist that long stretches remain off-limits to building so that the ecosystem can retain some of its pristine nature intact. Occasionally beaches are closed to walkers and swimmers, too, in order to allow sea turtles to lay eggs and birds to establish nests--a slightly annoying but necessary and ultimately wise decision.

3) The Outer Banks are mostly treeless, thugh there are low scrubby pines in various groves where they've been able to establish a beachhead. In addition, there are all kinds of low plants, shrubs, and grasses that have grown wherever they've been able to--or perhaps where they've been planted by the Department of the Interior in an attempt to hold the dunes down. Because of the constant winds off the ocean, nothing grows very tall, and everything leans in toward the sound. There's something really appealing about this arrangement, but I can't put my finger on what it is--maybe the huge expanse of sky you get because trees don't block the view and the long sight lines that you get because the coastal plain is so very flat.

4) Okracoke Island is an isolated island in the Banks and makes for a splendid day trip. You get there by taking car ferry (drive your car right onto the ferry and get out for the duration of the half-hour trip) and then driving it to the village of Okracoke. There's not a lot there, and I suspect that this is the appeal of the place. You can look at a lighthouse, buy fish from the local fishing cooperative, and check out the wild ponies that have roamed the island for centuries. The beaches on the island are reputed to be among the best in the country, and they are really isolated. It's very possible to be the only person on them for miles.

Okracoke does have plenty of day-trippers, and I wonder what it must have been like in the early part of the 20th century when it existed in splendid isolation. There's something about living in such a place as this, though my guess is the reality was it must have been difficult and boring. Febraury on Okracoke? I don't think so, thanks.

5) The Outer Banks has a number of lighthouses. I personally don't see what all the fuss is about lighthouses, but they are popular for reasons that sort of escape me. (I bet it's the same "splendid isolation" principle at work; see above.) The most famous one is Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, which you may know was moved 1/4 of a mile inland when the encroaching ocean threatened its base. It cannot be easy to move a lighthouse.

6) Where the Outer Banks really shines, however, is in the number of Wings reatail outlets. Wings is a local t-shirt and trinket shop that has taken over the place. There is a huge Wings (and I do mean huge) about every half-mile in any part of the Banks that is populated. Need a shell keychain? Elvis t-shirt? Crab paraphernalia? Wings has you covered and then some.

7) The OBX (this is how locals refer to it) is windy. Very windy. This is why it's a major site for hang-gliding and windsurfing. In addition, it's where the Wright brothers launched the aviation age when they flew a plane a Kitty Hawk. The National Historic Monument in honor of their achievement is well done, but I have to admit that it's unimpressive in that what you really want to see is a plane like theirs take off. Static dioramas on the subject just can't capture how amazing that flight must've been. (The first flight was actually a very short distance, amybe about 100 feet. But amazing enough.)

8) I hope to go back to the OBX next summer for a Partners in the Parks gig.

The Outer Banks, Part 1

The Outer Banks are a long set of barrier islands off the coast of North Carolina that run parallel to the mainland for miles and miles and miles. They are entirely sand dunes, near as I can tell, which means that they make up a fragile ecosystem. I went down there with Robert to a wedding of his cousin’s son, and, as one should in a place that’s devoted primarily to pleasure, devoted myself primarily to pleasure for a week. Along with members of his extended family, we rented a beach house which we used as a base for beach walking, eating crabs, and hanging out.

Some observations about the Outer Banks week:

 

1) North Carolina is in the South, a large southern part of the United States, and the South is fundamentally different from the rest of the country. This is certainly not an original observation, but one that bears repeating: Southerners see themselves are distinct, as well they should. One hears “sir” and “ma’am” more than one does in the North, which is nice. Two members of Robert’s family, talking about how all the members of the wedding party met while they were students at Virginia Tech, observed that until they went to school there, they never realized that the phrase “damn Yankee” was actually two words. Apparently the War Between the States isn’t quite over. My accent gave me away as a native Michiganian, but they couldn’t really fault me too much; I come from a state that lives and dies for college football, too, after all.

2) Some wags refer to the Outer Banks as the “redneck Riviera,” which reminded me of the east side of Michigan, Lake Huron, where the autoworkers go on vacation. (On the west side of the state, Lake Michigan is the classy lake, where the hoi polloi go instead.) There was a lot of fishing, beer drinking, and such going on all over the Outer Banks, and I noticed one t-shirt worn by a fisherman on a municipal pier that read, “It’s a redneck thang [sic]. You wouldn’t understand.” Well, he got that right.

3) Crabs are my new favorite food. Fresh from being boiled and seasoned with this local peppery seasoning, they are really messy, really fun, and easier to eat than lobsters because they’re smaller. First, you lay down newspaper on the dining table because plates and silverware are pointless. Then you pull the shells apart and suck the meat out of the legs, pull aside the lungs, and dig into the heart of the crab shell. I am a Yankee convert, according to Robert’s cousin Alice. Her husband Skeeter (that can't be his given name, but in the South, who knows)  taught me how to eat them.

 

4) I have never seen a drive-through liquor store, but they are apparently common in the South. You’d think in Michigan, where people would cook in their cars if they could, this would’ve already caught on, but it hasn’t. The Outer Banks have a “Brew Thru”—I am not making this up—every ten miles or so, so you’re never far from alcoholic beverages that you can purchase without the muss and bother of getting out of your car. Is America great or what?

5) The beaches on the Outer Banks are really wide, and the quality of the sand is terrific. I love to walk beaches, and the Outer Banks are among the best I’ve ever walked. There are plenty of shells and lots of people to talk to, all of whom are there for the same reason that you are. There's not a lot of swimming, but there is a lot of sunbathing, a fair number of fishermen, and plenty of just fooling around--you know, beach stuff. I didn’t go into the water all that much, surprisingly, and the surf can be rough; this is the graveyard of the Atlantic because of the currents, shoals, and big storms that the Gulf Stream sends up.

Because the Outer Banks are little more than sand barrier islands, they’re unusually fragile. The islands shift a lot because they're little more than sand dunes, and the Atlantic Ocean keeps rearranging the Banks to her liking. I was surprised at how (over)developed the Banks were. They go on for maybe 50 miles plus, and they are pretty solidly developed, with beach houses cheek to jowl the entire way, except where the National Park Service has cordoned off parts for preservation. (Parts of the Outer Banks are officially the Cape Hatteras National Seashore.) The Banks are hit by hurricanes regularly, and when the next one comes through—and it’s overdue—the whole place will be toast.  

On Marriage, Part 2

As of yesterday, Governor John Baldacci signed Bill LB 1020, making gay marriage legal in the state of Maine. He signed it within an hour of receiving it from the State Senate, which received it from the State House the week before. The pace of change here has been dizzying. I couldn't be more pleased by all this, though there is a provision for opponents to gather signatures for a "people's veto," which would take the issue to referendum and hence statewide vote. The oppponents vow to do this on the argument that civil rights shouldn't be extended to everybody, or at least not marriage.

I take no personal credit for this. I credit the many Mainers who made this possible, singling out the extraordinary work of the lgbt civil rights group EqualityMaine led by the extraordinary Betsy Smith. I have been a member of EQMaine since I moved here, having joined within my first two weeks, before I even had a library card. (That should tell you something.)

The one part of the process I was able to participate in was the public hearing that took place only a few weeks ago in the Augusta Civic Center. It was originally scheduled in the local Cony High School in Augusta, but sensing the huge turnout that would show up for such a contentious issue, the Judiciary Committee of the Legislature wisely moved to the bigger digs down the road. Smart move; about 3000 people showed up (4000 by some estimates) over the course of the day, and I was able to attend the last hour and a half, by which time the Judiciary Committee must have been exhausted, having listened to citizen testimony for 13 hours straight.

I would've liked to have been able to hear the first hour, when the bill was introduced and, I suspect, the most telling testimony from the power players was put forward. In particular, I would've liked to have heard the testimony of the Bishop of (Catholic) Diocese of Portland, which officially opposed the bill -- which is not to say that Catholics uniformly did. I will give the Bishop credit that he did not take the hard and mean-spirited line of the Vatican, that gay marriage will essentially destroy civilization as we know it. Indeed, the Dicoese supports civill unions but not marriage, arguing that marriage is foundational to the raising of children. This seems to ignore the fact that gays and lesbians have and raise children themselves, but I am never astonished any more by the illogical arguments of opponents to gay marriage. Most of the opposition comes down to one basic argument: "I just don't like it," or "I'm not comfortable with this," as if personal bias or comfort should be the cornerstone of the legal system, that we should deny rights to people to make other people comfortable. THsi kind of self-centeredness annoys the hell out of me. My own Bishop of the (Epsicopal) Diocese of Maine supported the bill in a strongly worded statement, and my own rector, himself a gay man in a committed relationship, joined thirty other clergy from various denominations to testify in support of the bill.

I was surprised at the tail end of the day at the passion people were still pouring into their testimonies. More specifically, I was surprised at the opposition's poor showing in testifying. I don't agree with their arguments at all, but I do concede that it is possible to present a view opposing gay marriage with a modicum of sense and reasonable tone. They didn't deliver at all. Several testimonies were utterly incoherent, rambling affairs that with logical leaps that made my freshman composition papers look like transcripts of the debates at the Oxford Club. Among the stupider arguments put forth was that passing this bill would raise health care costs because gays die earleir than straights, I assume because of AIDS. What the hell? One woman broke down, nearly sob-screaming that if this bill passed, how would she ever talk about marriage with her darling, precious grandchildren? Her speech won the "This Bill Is All About Me, After All" Award for Total Self-Centeredness. And one man who testified, I was informed by one of my students who went to school with his children, was a notorious alcohol abuser, wife beater, and child neglecter, though the Judiciary Committee couldn't know that. His testimony spoke volumes anyway -- rambling, pointless, and ugly.

The supporters, by and large, were articulate and smart. I don't just say that because I supported this bill; it happened to be true. Mostly, people just told their stories, which was the best testimony possible. Couples spoke eloqently about having been together 30 years, unable to get basic health benefits, or worse, having partners die on them because they couldn't get health benefits. Children of gay parents testified and said that they were proof that gay and lesbian parents provide loving homes. One Catholic woman who declared that her Bishop and priest told her from the pulpit to contact her legislators, "So here I am. And let me go on record," she continued forcefully, "to say that not all Catholics oppose this, as the Diocese might have you believe." She got a standing ovation.

An editorial in yesterday's local paper came from the opposition, saying that if they had trotted children up there to say that they needed a mother and a father, this strategy would be branded as unfair and manipulative. Of course it would, for good reason. A seven-year-old who says this would simply be parroting his parents' own bigotry; how could he possibly know what it's like to have same-sex parents? But when a seven-year-old supporter gets up and testifies that his moms need the benefit of marriage and that they're great parents, he's speaking from the very real experience about having two mothers. Saying this may be manipulative, sure, but it's also the truth. And when the truth speaks to power, right-minded people listen.

The most poignant testimony came from one woman who opposed the bill. She was clearly troubled by everything she had heard, and she said, almost to the point of tears, "The stories I've heard today from supporters of this bill -- well, they just tear my heart out. We've got to do something to make the system more equal and fair. But, please -- not marriage." Obviously, she had been forced into a position that the opposition never wants to find itself in and does everything to avoid: looking and gay and lesbian people as people as opposed to the monsters that they must be so that they can be hated more effectively. And if the hearing did anything, I hope that it did that. It was easy to find the supporters; in a brilliant stroke, EQMaine encouraged everybody who supported the bill to wear red as a sign of solidarity. The Civic Center was a sea of red, and the opponents couldn't avoid red if they tried. If any good comes out of thism debate, it might be this: that we are all forced to take a good look at each other, hear each other's stories respectfully, and discover that have more common ground than we might have thought. I don't have great hopes for the more right-wing hatemongers who depend on creating monstrous enemies to fulfill their own self-righteousness. But I do hope that a great number of the opponents were of the same frame of mind as that young woman. She may not support gay marriage, but she is now clearly struggling with it, and that's a good thing.

The Rites of Spring

Spring in Maine is a lot like that girl in high school who wears a sweater that's just a little too tight, totters on heels just a little too high, and sways her hips knowingly when sashaying down the hall, fully aware that she's got every boy within a 50-mile radius salivating. In layman's terms, spring is a cocktease. 

It's not that she doesn't mean well because she does. In fact, she means too well. She wants to give you what you want. She wants you to know how glorious she is, and figures that the best way to do this is to ration out her charms. She comes and goes, leaving you wanting more, and you do.

She starts off with the meteorological equivalent of tight capri pants and a sweater set: a few days of 40-degree weather, which to the locals feels utterly balmy. This is akin to showing some leg, and folks in Maine respond in kind by stripping off their winter clothes too. The first day of 45-degree weather, I saw short sleeves, no jackets, and in a few truly crazed cases shorts and sandals  on people who obviously live far, far north and do not remember what the sun looks like. I wasn't surprised by this. When you've gone through mud season and shoveled out your driveway a dozen times since the end of November-- a foot and a half of snow each time -- your brain obviously heads to the Bahamas and you wish it a happy trip, tearing off your long johns while doing so. Everybody heads out into the still sort of thin sun and feels the wind in their hair. Look! I'm not wearing a hat! Imagine that!

Spring knows how much you needed this. She thinks, Silly boy. But he doesn't even know the half of it. I'll give him a 50-degree day and some of the snow will melt, and he'll be eating out of my palm. Here Spring unbuttons the top three buttons of her tight little blouse and gives us a little cleavage. (Spring is stacked, of course.) 

And the boys go crazy like boys in spring always do. They get out on their bikes, they sweep their porches, they put away the snow shovels, they  start working on their cars with their sleeves rolled up and "Dancin' in the Streets" on the radio. Feel that sweet, sweet sun. Spring thinks, Now I'll make 'em really want me. Tonight they're going to toss and turn all night in their own sweat.

And they would, except Spring drops a night of 20-degree weather into the mix and it's too cold to sweat, much less toss and turn. The boys pull out the wool blankets and shiver, thinking, I can't stop thinking about her. She was so gorgeous. Where's the space heater? But the thing is, this only makes them want her more. Come back, darlin', they think in their dreams. I'll be more faithful. I won't take down the storm windows until you tell me to. Please, please, just let me dig in the earth and walk to the grocery store instead of drive it.

This sort of bargaining behavior continues for a few weeks, except that the warmer days are longer and more frequent. Though you can't track the gradual decline of the snowbanks, one day you look out the window and can see pine needles on the ground. More specifically, you see the pine needles that you didn't sweep up last October like you should've. One day all the snow is gone. (That day has not actually arrived yet.) Daylight savings time ends, you lose an hour of sleep, and you can be out in the light as late as -- gasp! -- 8:00 pm. Spring looks best in this half-light, like the gauzy, filmy light of a glamour shot. She's so pretty in this half-light that you just see the pert, upturned smile. You don't see the slight smirk on her face. Oh, she has reeled you in but good.

Then you get up one morning and there's frost on the car windshield. A little snow has fallen -- not a lot, but enough to make you feel so betrayed. You want your Spring back, that fickle babe who's pulling your strings. It's like evening of really good sex: March is all foreplay, and here it April. It is payoff tim. In fact, it is way past payoff time, and the payoff had better be damn good.

Spring knows how you feel; after all, she's making you feel how you feel. She'll tease you a little more, she'll put on a little red lipstick, she'll wet her bright mouth, and the temperature will hit 60. There aren't any leaves on the trees yet -- for all anybody knows, it could still be November -- but the air is warm, the crocuses have decided to pop up and get a gander at her, and at some undefinable moment there's a tipping point. You wake up one morning and you just know that you won't need the thermal fleece pullover any more. You don't know how you know, but you do. You put the snowshoes away till next December. You start cleaning the gutters. You sweep winter's debris from the porch.

For all that courtship, that undefinable moment is your payoff. After all that foreplay, Spring never really delivers. "I'm a good girl," she says, "and I don't do that sort of thing. I never go all the way." And she doesn't; she may know how an easy girl does it, but she want to remain in total control so she can drive you mad again next year when she'll wear her little black dress that fits her to a tee in all the right places. And face it -- after a winter in Maine, you will fall for her. Again and again. You always do. You always will.

But all that happens after that undefinable moment: well, it's absolutely worth it.

On Gradual Decline

Four weeks ago, I woke up with low-level back pain. I have this sort of thing occasionally, so I wasn't terribly concerned. I assumed that I had slept poorly on my stomach the previous night and resolved to make sure that I slept on my side or back the coming night. I also figured that the pain would go away on its own, as it had always done.

Except that it didn't. On the recommendation of one of the Y's trainers, I began taking ibuprofin, a msucle relaxant that would allow my back to heal on its own. I figured, well, it's been three days, I'll take some drugs and monitor it for a few more days. I don't like taking drugs for anything -- I try to avoid even aspirin if I can help it -- but the pain, though low-level, was ongoing. As in 24/7.

I found that to be the most frustrating aspect of my back troubles. While the pain was never debilitiating, it was a constant, like a strong undercurrent in a placid-looking stream, and it made basic functioning difficult. It hurt to get up our of bed, to pull myself up off the couch, even to walk. Sometimes it hurt to stand. Every move I made is connected to my back because it's the core of one's body, and everything I did would make the pain flare up. I have far more respect for people who deal with chronic pain, because it's hell.

Nonstop pain was something new to me. I enjoy good health, generally, and I had no concept of what it might be like to have, for example, severe arthritis and just have to deal with pain all the time. The problem was that it never was so severe that I couldn't function. If it were, then I'd happily claim disability, put my feet up, and expect others to come around and feed me grapes. But I was able to go through the usual motions of my daily life -- grading, teaching, reading, cooking, and so on. I avoided the gym, which made me unhappy and cranky; exercise is a great stress-buster, and my trainer recommended wisely that I lay off the weights for a little while. Even swimming hurt moderately, because stroking in the water involves more of your body than you realize. Your back is connected to everything that you do.

As I've aged, I have gotten better at paying attention to what my body is telling me. When I was younger and more invincible and thus more foolish, I would ignore anything like this, thinking that eventually it would all sort itself out and I would heal naturally. This is why I would work through severe colds and then wonder why I would crash so hard when my body just finally would say, "You moron. If you're not going to take care of yourself, I will. I hereby declare rebellion. I will not function until you stay in bed and do nothing. If you get up, I'll take you back down, and don't think that I won't." Now, of course, I am older and somewhat wiser, or perhaps I'm simply older. When my body rebels, it takes me down harder and faster, and I am obligated to pay attention.

I called my benefits office and checked on my eligibility for chiropractic care. Then I called a chiropractor that I had met the previous Friday in my local coffeehouse, after a brief conversation that went along the lines of my saying, "I am in pain. What can you do about it? Please do it." Dr. Travis's staff got me in the following Monday, and we began the re-torquing of my lower back.

It was seriously out of whack. I was glad to discover that I didn't throw it out because of something like doing deadlifts at the Y; in fact, my spinal disks had been misaligned for a while, apparently, and my general day-to-day living had done something to irritate it enough to switch on the pain mode toggle. So Dr. Travis and I began a three-times-a-week regimen of having some back manipulation done on his funky chiro-bench, where he prods me, "shoots" various discs of my spine with what sounds like a staple gun (I'm not sure how to describe this, but those of you who have been to a chiropractor might know what I'm talking about), and in the long run makes me feel much, much better.

After the first session, in fact, 90% of the pain was gone. I do not know exactly what he did, but he explained that chiropractic is about treating not your back so much as your central nervous system, which pretty much controls everything you do. Though I knew this, it's a very different animal to experience it in such a fundamental way. I've had five sessions thus far, and my improvement has been dramatic. I feel normal again, I've dropped down to sessions twice a week already and am moving toward once a week very soon, then once a month for basic maintenance. My body responded immediately to Dr. Travis's work, which pleased him and pleased me more. I would fully support the canonization process for my chiropractor and his staff. They are that good.

This whole new aspect of my life -- regular visits to a health care porvider that occurs more than once a year -- is frankly a reminder that I am no longer in the prime of my youth. I no longer bounce back from minor injuries and colds and such with the vigor that I used to. I have passed the peak of the physical optimal point in my life, the point when I was in the best physical condition I could hope to be in. I don't quite remember when this was, but it's surely not now. The downward slope that I'm on now is still gentle, but it is a downward slope, and it will continue to steepen as I get older.

Certainly we can all fight this by eating well, exercising, and listening to our bodies, and most of us probably do. With my swimming and weight lifting, it's probably fair to say I'm in the best shape that I've ever been in, and I am likely to get stronger and develop even more endurance. But that does not change the fact that I am now a middle-aged person inhabiting a body that's nearly a half-century old, and that point in my life where I could just bounce back from injury and illness and think nothing of it is now in my past. I probably didn't enjoy that plateau as much as I should have, and of course none of us even really know when it was in our own lives. But I do know that I've crested the hill that I spent the first half of my life climbing toward the optimum peak and my life is now on a downward path, the ohter side of the hill, which ends in death when I get to the bottom.

I don't intend any of this to be morbid because of course it's not. I don't lose sleep over the fact that I'm closer to death than I was, because this is just part of what it means to go through life. (FIve minutes after my birth, I was closer to death. This is true for all of us, if we stop to think about it.) If anything, it's taught me to be far more cautious about my limitations, which is a good thing. I don't take on physical tasks that I think I may not be able to do, I don't push myself beyond what I know my limits are, and if I do push myself past limits, my body will remind me exactly what those limits are. I have accepted the gray hair and wrinkles that come with being me at this point in my life. But even so, it is a hard lesson to learn that your body will betray you if it has to, and if you're not used to your body betraying you, it comes as a surprise and reality check. It makes you realize that though you in a very real way are your body, it is also something separate from you. You inhabit it, but you don't entirely control it. Now I'm much more respectful of this reality: what I want to do and what my body will do can be two very different things.

In the long run, this is all to the good. We learn from betrayal. But nobody wants to be betrayed.

The Weight Room

I spent the evening in the weight room at my local Y, where I swim and now lift weights regularly. One of the trainers there has started me on a new weight program, as the one I started with was beginning to bore me and I needed some variety (read: incentive) to continue to go in. There is a level that weight training is boring, but I have found that this is part of its appeal. There is something very satisfying about the somewhat primitive act of lifting heavy things and putting them down again in order to make some kind of change. Weight training is generally brainless, and that's what I like about it. The rest of my life is, to use the same terms, "brainful," and having an hour out of the day that is devoted to something I don't have to think about very much is a surprising pleasure.

I suspect that many people would be surprised to discover that I am now a regular in the weight room. A scrawny bookworm in a high school that worshiped at the altar of Football, I'm as surprised as they are. I've hit that point in lifting weights where I like to go in: I like seeing the regulars, I like the sound of the dull clank of metal as it's picked up and put down, and I like the equally dull soreness that my muscles have the day after I lift that tell me what I did something really physical. Truly, it's not an unpleasant soreness; it's more a slight ache that tells me that my body is capable of more than I expected. In all fairness, I do wish that the Y would put on the Metropolitan Opera broadcast on Saturday afternoons over the P.A. system -- the idea of doing Bulgarian deadlifts to the tune of Cosi Fan Tutte is delicious in its incongruity -- but I'm not making bets that this will happen any time soon.

But the larger issue, weight room soundtracks aside, is that it's working. I am easily stronger than when I started a year ago, though my body hasn't itself changed a great deal. I have been told that this is normal. All of those magazines that tout how your body will change dramatically in six weeks with training are selling false promises, unless you spend a lot of time in the wieght room. A lot of time, certainly more than I have or want to. What realisitc weight training does promise is more strength and, if it becomes a lifelong habit, as it seems to be, change that is incremental. Some changes in my body are obvious, if only because I see my body every day when I shower and shave. My arms have more definition, my chest -- well, it hasn't grown much, but the veins underneath the skin are now visible in a way that they never were before, and I have a somewhat pumped look after coming out of the weight room. It is temporary, but it's there. In the next few weeks, I'll be ramping up my new program a bit, so I expect some more changes. I would like them faster, but as I'll be doing this for the rest of my life, I can wait.

In the meantime, it has been fun seeing exactly what I'm capable of. Some weight lifting gains have been dramatic. I now do chest flies with 30-pound dumbbells, and I started with only half that weight. I lift 50-pounders for shoulder rows, I leg press 225 pounds (up from a starting point of 150). I expect that these are modest weights by serious training standards, but they're not for me at this point. It is one of the pleasures of weight training that you actually do get stronger all the time, and there is evidence of this in that you can keep trying to lift slightly heavier weights, only to find that you actually can handle them. Not necessarily with ease at first, but enough to see that you will be able to down the road. Weights are good thing to do if your basic life philosophy is moderation because it only works if your progression is designed to be very consciously moderate. But there is progress.

I started weights because I wanted to be stronger, but I also must admit that vanity, pure and simple, is fueling my time in the weight room. I swim very regularly and have for decades, and I'm noticing that middle age spread is setting in because I'm in the middle age where it does. I've always wanted bigger arms and a bigger chest, and I wouldn't mind bigger legs too. I have very mixed feelings about this. For many gay men (not to mention straight men, increasingly), physical beauty as defined as the perfect body has been a curse, making men dismiss others based on their lack of pecs or lats or delts and nothing about what really matters. This is an old story for many women, and I don't want to minimize that; but it's really sad that men have chosen to get sucked into this vicious emphasis on looks over everything else, like: oh, I don't know. Integrity. Personality. Compassion.

What makes me feel worse is the fact that to a certain level, I have done just the same thing. I will be the first to admit strength training is a health issue, but if I were truly honest, I would also have to admit that I like, really like the fact that it will make me look better. Not beautiful, exactly, as I never had the kind of looks that would put me in that rarified company. (Thank God, I say in retrospect.) Weight training is in part based on vanity. I 'm not going to pretend it isn't, and I will have to cheerfully accept the hypocrisy that I preach. I abhor gay male physical body culture while I simultaneosly buy into it, three or four times a week.

But perhaps there is a nuanced middle ground here. I hope so. I tell myself that I am not a fanatic about body building, though I am taking on some exercises that are designed to work specific parts of my body that I frankly want bigger. I am weight training, and it is in fact good for you. Doctors say so. In fact, my doctor says so. I can rationalize it all I like, but the fact remains that I chose weight training because 1) it makes you stronger, and 2) it shapes your body more to the ideal of the body beautiful that we've inherited from the Greeks.

Is there something wrong with this? The photographer Tom Bianchi has published a book of male nudes, one of his many books of this sort. It's titled In Defense of Beauty, and in it he offers his suggestion that we have always reponded to beauty in this way, and we should defend it on grounds of the pleasure it gives us. OK, sure, and I have to say that the men in this and all of his books are stunningly beautiful. (And I enjoy looking at them. There, I said it.) But there is a problem with this argument, at least as he frames it: all these men have absolutely worked and worked hard to create the chiseled bodies that are gorgeous in this book, and they have the faces to match. They are consistently stunning. But some of this stunning beauty is controllable (the body building) and a lot of it isn't (the faces). The fact is, if we define beauty in one specific way in any given time period, we are in fact privileging some people who have that beauty over those who don't, often on bases that nobody has any control over. It's worth remembering that even building one's body isn't entirely a matter of one's own will or even hard work. For example, I will never develop the kind of arms that one of the older guys I see in the gym has. I wish I could; he looks terrific. But I don't have the genetics for it, and that's that. I can build and develop whatever I have, and that will also be that. But would that fall under Bianchi's definition of beauty? Would he defend me?

I would like to feel reasonably sure that he would. He seems like a very nice man, and a talented photographer. But I also feel reasonably sure that I will never appear in one of his books, even if I could. And that's why I have a complex relationship wtih my weight training. This is simply another of saying what all of us already know: we have complicated relatinships with our bodies, these vessels of flesh, bone, and blood that contain us, that embody us (literally), but that we are at some level separate from.

A Child's Garden of Seeds, Various

Hope springs eternal, and with luck so will our garden this summer. Alicia and I sat down over breakfast at my house and, perhaps under the influence of lots of caffeine, placed a rather large order for seeds from the Fedco catalog. Alicia works for Fedco in the winter, so we get the seeds at a sizeable discount., but even if she didn't, it'd be worth it. Growing your own food is basically cheaper than buying it. I've been saving paperboard egg cartons for planting seedlings, and we're hoping for a dryer summer this year than we had last year. As I said, hope springs eternal. Here's what we're planning to plant:

Green beans: Provider. Organic and Fedco's best-seller for 30 years. Our beasn did very poorly last year, so we'd like another shot at proving that we can grow them.

Sweet peas: Sugar Snap. The name would suggest that they're unusually sweet. A grower from last year declares, "Truly like candy--but far better." Also organic and a huge seller, though a little fussy. We had little luck with peas last year; the soil didn't drain well.

Cucumbers: two varieties. Little Leaf, which isa little blocky cuke, good for eating and pickling; and Lemon, an odd variety that has fruits shaped like, well, lemons. This latter is an antique variety, first introduced in 1894. Very sweet, and, so Fedco claims, never bitter. We'll see.

Summer squash: three varieties. First, Raven, a best-selling zucchini. (This is a vegetable I never thought would even have a best-seller.) Second, Early Yellow Summer Crookneck, which pretty much describes it. I'm not a huge fan of summer squash, but Alicia is, and she's promised me a trip to her organic farmer friends' place in Starks, Maine, where I can gorge myself on winter squashes; hsi butternut squashes are terrific. Still, I will gladly grow anything. Third, Benning's Green TInt, a little patty pan squash with a, you guessed it, green tint. I have never eaten a patty pan squash, but I do think that they're darn cute.

Pumpkins: Winter Luxury, which are a breathtakingly beautiful orange and good eating as well. I will be making pumpkin mush with maple syrup for winter breakfasts this coming January -- a very old New England treat.

Carrots: Scarlet Nantes is a good basic carrot, but Yaya is trifle exotic. We couldn't decide between the two, so we ordered both.

Beets: Alicia's little boy Jonah loves beets. I have never developed a taste for them, so Jonah has decided that I'm going to and insisted that we get some. We ordered Early Wonder Tall Top, which come up early and provide very nice beet greens. Maybe I'll develop a taste for them. I do like the greens.

Parsnips: I love parsnips, easily the most underrated vegetable out there. We ordered Harris Model. Like carrots, except sweeter and even better.

Skirrets: I've never even had a skirret, but I keep seeing the name pop up in my medieval cookbooks, so I know that they're old. Alicia didn't even know what they were, which is unusual for a farm girl. Not knowing much about them, she is taking them on as a personal challenge. There is but one variety in the Fedco catalog, titled simply Skirret.

Turnips: Oasis. This is a Japanese variety, where they are popular. I'm fonder of turnips than I used to be, and winter root veggies do very, very well in Maine's cool soils.

Leeks: Last year's leeks were wonderful. We have the exotically named Bleu de Solaize coming; they overwinter well, so if we do that, they'll be even more delicious in the spring of 2010.

Onions: Dakota Tears will no doubt make you cry -- the catalog says that they are very "oniony" -- but isn't that the point? A big producer, which is good, because for all that we had last year, it just wasn't enough.

Spinach: Bordeaux. This baby grows fast, so if you like early baby spinach salads, come on over. We also ordered Space, a peculiarly named variety that overwinters well if it's mild. In Maine? Uh, sure.

Lettuces: There are so many varieties, how do you choose? You order the mix of organic seed like we did. We have no idea what we'll get, but there will at least half a dozen varieties. We ordered a greens mix, too, so we'll eating salads until we burst come July.

Arugula: Ice-Bred Arugula Organic. Mainers grow this stuff in cold frames so they can eat it with Christmas dinner, and this variety winters well this way. Not as if it's going to last in my house that long, but one can always hope.

Chard: Bright Lights. Apparently this chard has an enormous range of colors in the ribs and veins of its leaves, and a dark green leaf. Fedco's most popular chard by a long shot. It's apparently very, very pretty.

Mustard greens: Mizspoona Salad Selects Gene Pool. I don't know what all that means, but it's organic and it's wonderful braised. So let me go get my wok.

Bok choy: I've always wanted to try to grow this, so we're going to. We ordered Shuko, a Japanese variety. As I said, let me go get my wok. I expect that a Chinese cookbook is in my future.

Broccoli: My only gripe about last year's broccoli crop was that there wasn't nearly enough of it. We ordered a mix again so we can harvest it all summer long. Broccoli is nice in that if you pick it once, you get more.

Cabbages: Mammoth Red Rock is another old variety, introduced in 1889. And it was introduced in Bangor, Maine, so it must grow well here. We decided against planting cauliflower, as it's sort of fussy and doesn't give you the bang for the buck that cabbage and broccoli do. It also takes up lots of space, not that that's a huge issue with the size of the plot we had last year at Sparrow Farm in Pittston.

Kale: I love kale braised or in a stir-fry. We ordered Beedy's Camden, which also overwinters very well with the right wnowfall.

Eggplant: I've recently taken a liking to eggplant, a vegetable I didn't grow up with. So we ordered Pingtung Long, a Chinese variety that's long, skinny, and not as bulky as the five-pound monsters you see in the supermarket.

Sweet peppers: We got two kinds. Peacework is an organic early red bell pepper developed at Peacework Farm in California, and Bulgarian Carrot Chile is a brilliant orange, fiery hot pepper. I will be making some salsa this summer.

Tomatoes: As far as I'm concerned, tomatoes are the whole point of gardening. I simply gorge on them in August. So we got a bunch of kinds: Be My Baby, a very sweet cherry tomato that was one of last year's hits; Orange Banana, a paste tomato that's shaped like a banana and was also a huge hit last year; and an heirloom mix, so we'll get all sorts of tomatoes. We did this last year, and it was worth it. I have no idea what I was picking and eating, but when it tastes like it did, who cares?

Basil: Sweet and Thai. Both were fabulous last year, and we took crates of it home.

Cilantro: Caribe. This is a workhorse of a plant.

Fennel: Again, last year's was wonderful. We ordered Zifa Fino, as it's really hardy, but last year's just grew and grew, not seeming to care what the weather was like.

Sage: White Sage. This is what First Nation folk used to make smudge sticks. It's also good to plant if you want to attract bees.

Thyme: We ordered German Thyme. Also good to plant to attract bees.

Calendula: You can use this to make tinctures, and that's waht Alicia wants to do. Frankly, I'm not even sure I know what this plant is. But what the heck.

Nasturtium: We ordered a Tall Climbing Mix. These are just pretty on their own or in a salad. I made it clear that I wasn't interested in planting flowers that I couldn't eat.

Sunflowers: We ordered the Sampler Mix again because last year's were so nice.

We will add to this list as the season gets closer. For example, we haven't even begun to think about potatoes, but they are very late to plant. There are also more herbs that I would like to have; dill comes to mind. Even so, if I had nothing but the basil I had last year, I'd be pretty happy. I regret that Maine is quite cool in the summer, as I'd love to plant hot-weather plants like lavender. Likewise, we haven't bothered with truly hot-weather vegetables that I loved growing up in the Midwest -- corn and melons. They can grow here, but it's a lot of work and no little amount of luck. Besides, Michigan spoiled me. Whatever I could grow here, it will never compare to a muskmelon out of Michigan garden in early August.

In any event, the Garden, Year Two has begun in earnest.

The Class System

So far I'm having an unusually good term with my four classes. English 102, Introduction to Literature, is always a fun class; English 101, College Writing, often isn't because students don't necessarily want to be there, but this term it's going modestly well; and Englihs 456, History of the English Language, is more fun than a barrel of fricatives. (That's a linguistic term, for those of you not in the know.)

I'm rather surprised by all of this, because I did not think that a history of the language course would be popular. But it is. It's full, actually, which is highly unusual in an upper-level English course, and I couldn't be happier.I had my doubts, though, that a course devoted to basic linguistics, Old English morphology, and the Great Vowel Shift would appeal to people. It seems to be in ways that the students never even thought about. If anything, they are realizing how massively political language is. If you doubt me, think about all those "English only" laws floating around various less enlightened state legislatures. These are the sorts of things that we talk about in addition to the use of fricatives.

The fact that my term is going so well got me to thinking about what makes a class "click." Certainly there are the obvious points: engaging subject matter, enthusiastic teacher, good class design. I think I have all of those, except perhaps in English 101. It's hard to make a class excited about writing and grammar when they have told you how little they want to be there, as they did in my first-day diagnostic writing survey. But these obvious elements are a given. I can sell Old English grammatical stuff because I think it's pretty interesting in itself, and it's easy to show students why it's still relevant. In cae you were wondering why we still have irregular verbs, for example, there's a reason, and it goes all the way back to the seventh century. (It's basically an Old English holdover.) But it seems to me that it is the intangibles that make a class work, and that's something that the instructor doesn't have a lot of control over.

Case in point: my two sections of English 102. I teach this class every term, so I have my schtick down to a science, though I change the reading list very regularly so that I don't go on auto-pilot. It's instructive to see how different my two sections are. They both meet at 10:00 am on different days of the week, so I can't chalk up the differences to the time of day, which is a big factor in determining a class's energy level. All I can say is I have more fun in one class than in the other. It's not an issue of better students. There are very bright students in both section. But one section requires me to pull teeth to get students to read the poems out loud, whereas the other section not only has a regular roster of readers, it now has a roster of students who are bringing donuts to class to pass around. I'm not arguing -- after all, I get donuts out of this -- but I am trying to figure out why one class bonded like this and the other oen didn't.

Likewise, my 101 class meets at 1:00 pm to 3:45 pm, whihc is a deadly time to teach or lerean; energy levels tend to be very low. Much of the work is not particularly enthralling. Grammar, for example, is a foundation of my class, as I've found that this is a skill that many students don't have as fully as they need to, and it's hard to make grammar exciting. I've encouraged students, in writing their own examples of the basic grammar rules, to have some fun with it. One can demonstrate subject-verb agreement with something as basic as "John has a date with Mary," but why not write something go-to-hell like "John's date with counter-intelligence agent Natasha ended abruptly when she was inadvertently sent into outer space on an old Soviet satellite"? Slooooowly, they are coming around to thinking that writing is a skill that doesn't have to bore you; in fact, good writing won't bore you. Nevertheless, it is a long three hours, and I do a lot of song-and-dance to sell my wares.

My 456 course, on the other hand, is a three-hour free-for-all where we talk about the English language: its peculiarities, its political agendas, its relationship to everything else in the world. It hlpes that I have students in the class for whom English is not a first language, so that we can do interesting comparative work. I have an enormous fondness for the subject matter, and they developed it quickly. The hours just fly by.

Part of the reason that some classes click and others don't is, of course, the random set of students who end up in them. It's amazing and depressing how much energy one slug of a student can suck out the rest of the class. Conversely, one bright light bulb of a student can take over a class and change its dynamics entirely. But I think that there's more to it than that alone. My 101 students certainly see the relevance of knowing how to write, even if they're not all that enthused about achieving that relevance, and my 456 students have completely gotten that their course, though theoretically about language history, is really a parade of linguistic politics in all sorts of ways that really does affect them in all sorts of ways. My 102 students may never read a poem for the rest of their lives (perish the thought), but they do understand that learning to read poems is excellent training for learning to read anything: films, business annual reports, you name it. In fact, I put this right into the syllabus so that if they didn't know it, they will on the first day of class.

In other words, making the course relevant on the students' terms is key. This is a problem in English studies, where many courses get scheduled and taught because somebody loves, say, Romantic poets, and works on the assumption that everybody will love them if only enough proper enthusiasm is shown for Wordsworth. I think this is a deadly assumption. For example, I've met any number of scholars who are serious literary theorists and who assume that their students will loooooove theory because they do. When I've seen their syllabi for such courses, I envision a very drowsy snoozefest. Whatever we teach, we have to show students why it matters to their lives in the here and now, as opposed to the traditional "You need to know Shakespeare's romances because if you don't, you're not educated" attitude that permeates so many English departments.

That said, students have to do their work on their end too. I have one student in my 101 class who is clearly viewing her degree as a step up the economic ladder. I don't blame her one bit -- many of our students do just that, for very good reasons -- but I do feel that in her quest to get her degree in the most efficient way possible, she's really missing the entire point of her education. When I suggested on the first day of class that we meet off campus for our last class at a local coffehouse for a Wednesday night reading and poetry slam, she insisted that this would not be possible for her, as she worked every night of the week and that an evening schedule change would be utterly non-negotiable. This may well be true, but I have to wonder. After all, I wasn't proposing a change for the following class; I was proposing a change a full five months out. I get the sense that for her, the degree is one thing and one thing only, vocational training, and that freshman comp is just part of the training that one has to do in order to move on and get the next job. She will finish the class, surely, and probably produce some competent writing, but I am not sure that she will get an education as opposed to a degree.

The balance seems to be that students have to want to learn and teachers have to teach subjects that are worth learning. We have a real struggle in my institution in that many students don't want to learn. They want to get a degree in a marketable field so that they can move up the economic ladder. Education for its own sake doesn't really enter into the picture, and that's why my work is so tough. I have thechal challenge of showing them why subjects that aren't going to get them a promotion in a business firm are still worth learning, and even more important, how learning them in fact will get one a promotion in a business firm. Just not in an immediately obvious way.