Off my game.


It's not that anything went particularly wrong today; it's just that the day went, plain and simple, and now is gone. Time grows shorter and shorter, and my head would seem to be anywhere but here where I need it.

Surprisingly, the walk down the mountain was harder than the climb up: we were tired; there was no peak before us, encouraging us to keep going; the farther we descended into the valley, the warmer it got. On the way up, I had no conception of how hungry or thirsty I might be. Coming back down, it started to dawn on me.

Stone ruins--sheepfolds, houses, abbeys--dot the north Welsh landscape. We didn't visit the dramatic ones, but the small survivals were all around us.

Back down from the mountain.


When we arrived in the vicinity of the mountain, we were still planning to take a train to its top. It's not that we had actively decided we didn't want to climb it; it's that we didn't even consider climbing all the way to its top. I, for one, would have thought that scaling the whole thing would be a near-impossibility for me, given my desperate fear of falling. But then we ate a big breakfast on our first morning in Wales, and I said, perhaps we should do our walking first and our mountain train trip second, since we have all this food in us now. And then we saw the mountain and decided we'd see what we could do. There's a low road, called the Miner's Track, and a high road, called the PYG Track, and an even higher road, called the Snowdon Horseshoe. "Every summer," a guidebook told me, "countless people find themselves atop Crib Goch, on the horseshoe, scrambling over rocks with nothing on either side of them, and wish that they weren't there." When the moment came, we chose not to ascend to Crib Goch.

Sometime in the second hour of our climb, I began to realize what it was that I was doing, and then things got very exciting indeed. It's not that we ever needed to rock climb; Snowdon's paths are well delineated and maintained. But we did ascend something like 300 meters in the space of 30 minutes, near the very end--a feat for which my calves are still paying a bit of a price--and then we ascended some more, and then we were at the highest point in England and Wales, up in the high winds, above ridges and lakes and stark blown grass. And almost above fear.

If I weren't so tired, I'd give you more details this evening. As it is, they'll have to come tomorrow--but here's a sheep to keep you company.


The sheep also joins me in saying Happy Mothers' Day to all of you mothers out there. In my world, every day is mother's day: my mother is that completely awesome.

The next few days.


In just over an hour, I depart for Places Elsewhere. This time around, to tide you over until I return, I'm leaving you little surprises.

First, the week's best little surprise: the waterfowl have had babies! Here's Trinity's gosling. Trinity also has baby moorhens. King's, on the other hand, has all those ducklings, and they know how to cross bridges.

Under the bridge.


From the poling position on a punt down the Cam, one can see things not otherwise visible. "Hey," I said to my Ohioan friend as I dropped the pole into the water and pushed us along some more, "would you take a picture of that alien DJ for me?" She obliged.

An eely day.


Yesterday, before my Ohioan friend arrived in the middle of the night, before my beloved Lexingtonian caught up with me in age yet again, I traveled through this county's fields of gold to the cathedral city of Ely for its annual eel festival. I kid you not. And it was astounding, as will be suggested by this image of the giant eel featured in the parade through town.

Awake and aware.


At first I'm not sure why I'm awake, and it's annoying: I've come to on my stomach, and it's 3:37 a.m., and nothing disrupts my sleep, and I'm going to ignore it. But, after what can only be called fitful dozing, by 4:30 I'm ready to give up the game and at least indulge in some reading.

It's not until I'm making my toast that I wonder whether I've awakened because something has gone wrong somewhere. And so I'm back to thinking about what I almost posted yesterday: some days, when the baby gets herself really worked up and unconsolable in the car, her mother will call me on her mobile, put me on speakerphone, and let me talk until the baby goes wide-eyed and quiet. "Listen," she'll say to the little one squawling, "it's Auntie S!" I coo out the baby's name in my very best soporific sing-song, the kind of voice I'd use if I were talking a person next to me into sleep. And, while my beloved and intrepid friend stays quiet, piloting her car through the streets and highways of the town that will be her home for only a matter of weeks now, hoping that her daughter will forget everything but the quiet onrush of words coming from across an ocean, I tell her stories about what I've seen, and I let the stories carry me on to whatever comes next in my associative mind.

"Do you know what I saw today?" I said to her on Wednesday. "Today I saw ducklings, three little spotted ducklings, walking with their mother on the lawn at King's College, and they were little baby puffballs, even smaller than you, small girl, and they were tumbling over each other and falling down, and their father was walking away from the whole group as though he was thinking that he'd had no idea what he was getting himself into, having a family like that. And then I went to evensong, and the readings were psalms that were beautiful, and then after evensong, the sun was out but it was also raining! And that meant that there was a rainbow in the sky. Someday you'll learn all about why there are rainbows when it's sunny and rainy at the same time, but basically it's because water refracts light into its constituent colors, and someday you'll learn the mnemonic for the colors, the only mnemonic I can ever remember, which is ROYGBIV, and ROYGBIV stands for red, orange, yellow, green, blue...[indigo, her mother says quietly, and as the voice-operated part of her mobile's speakerphone kicks in, I can hear that the baby has gone quiet], and violet. I have a little prism that my father gave me when I was not much bigger than you are, and with that prism, you can refract the light whenever you want to, and if I can find it again in my boxes of treasures that are all still stashed away in my old closet in my parents' house, I'll dig it out and show it to you when you're a little bigger, and you can learn about the spectrum of visible light that way."

When it feels safe, my strong, strong friend will give me a progress report. "She's listening to you," she'll say. "She's looking toward where your voice is coming from, and she's listening." I'll talk some more, about the Trinity goslings about which I've heard but haven't yet seen, about the different trees that are flinging out green fire, about swimming in the college pool. Sometimes I talk about things that are just for her mother's benefit, but I keep my voice low and as melodious as I can make it, and I know I'm crooning my low song of comfort to the woman who placed the call as much as to the child strapped in behind her, and all the while we are realizing together though we never say it out loud that we never grow up, never ever grow all the way up, and oh what will it be like to start losing the people who strapped us in and drove us around, and oh what stories could possibly help us stop squawling inside, where we are very young and small indeed at the same time that we are fierce and proud and more capable than we might ever have expected we could be.

And the sky pinks around the west, the way I'm facing, and it is 5:17, and halfway around the world a baby should be going to sleep right about now.

Falling sky.


Nearly every day this week, our sunny skies have clouded over and opened and dropped at least one hailstorm on us, only to go sunny again within minutes. Powerful systems are passing through these parts.

* * *

On a rare day when we had no hail (and only a smattery spitting of rain in the late afternoon), a friend and I wandered out across Grantchester Meadows, taking advantage of the 8:30 sundown to have dinner in a sunlit garden. Returning, we saw the world turned upside down, a different sort of skyfall, just right for the conversation she and I had had all evening.

Solace.


I spent part of the day hoping that yesterday's horoscope was very wrong indeed, since what I remember most clearly about last night's dream is being in the front seat of an MD-80, flying too low over a city, until we plowed right into a building--and then, after a pause and a little bit of difficulty, backed up and then started going forward again. And then we flew right out the other side of the building. Which, I don't think I've told you, is what my eyes told my brain was happening on the television screen at least the first three times I saw footage of the second plane hitting the second tower on 9/11. No one anywhere was hurt. Even the plane was not hurt. Once we were out the other side, I had to go back to the task at hand--which involved photocopying something in the plane's copy room. Note that I am periodically anxious about how my time here is lessening day by day?

I spent much more of the day thinking about a friend of mine who is far away right now, dealing with one of the hardest things I can imagine dealing with. All I can do to help her is be here if she calls. That, and do my best to assemble our people (because some of you are her people, too) in a steadfast community of strength. I have been hoping all day that she and her family are as peaceful as possible and that her faith (and her own little family) will be her mainstay through everything that's happening. If you have a few extra minutes, or some extra brainspace, please think some peace and strength her (and their) way.

Set your affection on things above.


On the trees, their leaves a-twist with new fire, for instance.

For the first quarter-century of my life, my mother wore the same small gold heart-shaped locket all the time, even while she slept. When I was very little, I asked her where she'd gotten it. "Someone gave it to me long ago," she said, "when he couldn't really afford it, and that made it all the more special for me." (I found it heartwrenching when the locket--already soldered back together once--broke beyond repair.)

This afternoon's post brought me a new necklace from that wise woman of life coaching and jewelry design, Andrea Scher of Superhero Designs, who has just added a sterling silver bullseye pendant to her product line. The back of the pendant reads "superhero." That the person who sent it to me did, despite the many heavy things weighing on her, makes it all the more special to me.

Spring is messy right now--a riot of color and weather, baby ducks and goslings starting to pop up everywhere, sun and rain hitting us all at the same time. Some things are in focus, some things not. At its best, it's beautiful. At its worst, it's beautiful, too, but harder to deal with.


A somewhat promising horoscope for today:

Write down anything you can remember from your dreams tonight--they are much more vivid than usual and may offer clues to what lies ahead. They probably won't be too explicit--they rarely are!
Heh--stay tuned.

Strange of beak.


What, I ask you, is going on with the beak on the drake bringing up the rear here? These mallards (sans their usual female companion) were out wandering about this morning, despite our distance from any water besides the copious amounts that fell from the sky today. I peered under the climbing vines and the shrubs outside my patio, trying to locate their mate and the ducklings I imagine she's incubating somewhere, but all I saw were these two increasingly annoyed and suspicious drakes.

Get a closer look at his beak (not to mention his annoyance):


After a downright silly number of colloquia and lectures today, I'm afraid that's all I've got that's of wider interest than the bounds of my own skull. As always, I have higher hopes for tomorrow.

Springtime in England.


The signs: bluebells abloom everywhere; another day of brilliant sun followed by torrential rain and hailstorms; so much energy in me that when I got home from the treadmill and the pool and found a message from a friend asking whether I wanted to go for a walk, I called her right away and off we went. I pick and piece, pick and piece. I write my conceptualizations in colored markers and watch Pushing Daisies for breaks. At 9 p.m., the horizon is still lightly gilded. The sun wakes me up early every morning.

My neighbor, returned from a jaunt in the U.S., reports that his three-year-old niece spent significant portions of his visit pretending to be me, having only heard my name and that I'm his friend in Cambridge. "She was extremely happy being you," he says. "Well, I'm extremely happy being me," I reply, "so I don't find that surprising. I mean, really, I think that she chose well." "Yes," he says, "she has excellent taste."

Saturday on the phone.


My best laid plans went out the window when the phone rang yesterday afternoon: my father, calling to talk. And talk we did, for nearly four hours. What a deep blessing to be able to say out loud, "You're the best man I've ever known," and to have him reply that he hopes that sometime soon I'll meet someone who will best him for that title and be a partner for life. Intercut that kind of love with transatlantic eBay browsing and in-depth discussions of Questar telescopes and insightful conversation about work lives, and you've got a damned fine afternoon.

At the end of the call, I read him my horoscope for yesterday:

You may be moving too quickly into this relationship or career path--slow things down a bit and see what happens. If you're still fired up after some time has passed, then go right ahead at full speed!
which I took as yet more sanction of the way I spent my afternoon.

And now I am officially declaring it: Some Time has passed, and I am still Fired Up. Must be not only the project but also all this walking and swimming. Not to mention the £5 free trade cotton t-shirts I found at Marks & Spencer today.

Tomorrow, right ahead at full speed!

Psyching myself up.


In February, I set myself a challenge: could I write a freestanding article about a work I really loved, send it to some friends, revise it as best I could, and then send it out to a journal? And could I do it in two weeks? (To understand this, you have to know that my neighbor had just busted out a 37-page piece in the space of about a week, and I was feeling a little competitive, not to mention curious about my own abilities.)

The two-week part turned out to be crazy (as everyone watching must already have known). But I did research and write that article, and I did send it out, revise it, and submit it. Next Saturday, it will have been out for a month, which in academia means that I've got anywhere from two to five months to wait for news--if the journal is a responsible one. If it's not, then in about five months I'll be writing to ask what the hell is going on. (But more deferentially.)

The weird thing was that once the article was done, other potential essays on related works began to emerge. (I'm sorry to be cagey about this, again; I can tell you about the project in detail if you contact me in the real world, but I don't feel good about discussing it specifically here.) And so I've set myself something of another challenge: can I research and write a book that I think is timely, as opposed to an historical work that maybe fifteen people will ever read?

Strangely enough, as I did the background reading for what will probably be the first body chapter of this project, I found myself feeling more and more ready to write an introduction in which I'd state some theoretical principles and survey the field into which I'm inserting myself--or, to be more accurate, the field in which I've been working for years and years but in which I'm now examining a different acre.

And today I find myself having a very familiar feeling: knowing that I have all the materials together for a piece of writing I need to do, but not wanting to write it. Wanting to do anything (intellectually speaking) but write it. Plus, the weather has suddenly gotten warm enough here that I have my kitchen windows and balcony door open and have been able to don my Moosewood t-shirt and my silver Birks (without socks!). So you know I want to go outside and endanger my skin for the first time this season.

But instead, with my belly full of omelet and avocado, I! will! write! Or, at the very least, assemble this week's worth of notes and thinking (which currently includes things like a list of crucial noun concepts: identification, projection, animation, performance, translation, relation, interpretation) and get ready for a week of busting out some prose.

Maybe I'll set up another challenge: can I write a book sitting outside in the sun? Maybe by the time the sun comes west enough to wrest my balcony out of shadow, I'll have decided. But actually I know: often, I'd rather be inside, but near an open window or door, than outside. Maybe I'm secretly a threshold person. And so I suspect that I will stay here at my desk, facing out my window, with breeze and birdsong coming through, for the better part of the afternoon.

And anyhow: my Canadian friend has just come by to report that in town, amateur punters are running into each other on the Cam--so good fun awaits me as a reward for industry.

What it's like here.

On my way to the concert last night, I stopped to photograph lots of buildings head-on. When I stopped to shoot one of the half-timbered buildings of Bridge Street, I was momentarily almost disappointed to have captured a bus--but once I saw them at home, I was glad of it. I took these two photographs in the same spot, two seconds apart, in this order.



This time last year, I was already starting to think about the things I would miss about mid-Ohio while I lived here. Now I find myself starting to think about the things I will miss about Cambridge.

Having been given a fig.


Tonight I walked to my first chamber music concert of the term (the University just started up again this week), and not only was it still light out but the sun was even up for my whole walk. Now the sun sets after 8 p.m. I was especially grateful for the light when, after a walk punctuated by picture-taking, I walked up to the concert venue and discovered that the tree outside its main door would seem, unless I am much mistaken, to be a fig. I thought immediately of MG's comment on yesterday's writing: the bodhi tree was a fig. And even though this one isn't quite the right kind (not a sacred fig, that is), it still figured for me as yet another revalidation in a day full of them, due in no small part to you all.

Chance graces.


We weren't even finished with our first course at dinner tonight before one of my good friends here had, after several months' rest, taken up the question of why and how I should be working my way toward marriage right now. It's an old conversation between us; we've been having it, sometimes with quite outlandish embellishments, since at least December. It's possible that tonight was the first time that she's come out and told me that I'm just plain wrong in my perspective on my own life. It's kind of a shocking thing, to be told, by someone you like, that you're wrong. A strong sense of my self-delusion creeps into some space behind her eyes when she gets onto this subject with me; I can see her thinking that I'm fooling myself with my talk of being really, deeply, fundamentally satisfied with my life the bulk of the time.

Ever the teacher, tonight I tried again to explain to her why I'm not going to do anything compromising in order to guilt someone into wanting to be with me. What? No one's suggested this kind of thing to me...ever, really. Ever. What's always fascinating to me about these conversations, when I remember to step back and watch them happening (in a kind of out-of-body experience), is that they're really about a change in generation. For me, it's actually possible (though not in every way desirable) to imagine a life without a spouse, without a family of my own. If you've been reading me long enough, you know my take on these issues; I hope I don't flatter myself when I say that I think it's pretty nuanced and well-conceived. For her, a person's claim that s/he can have a whole life without a partner sounds like nothing more than, again, self-delusion--even though she talks (and means) a big feminist talk, and even though she is obviously, audibly proud of my strength and independence. "Don't you want someone to share your happiness with?" the person sitting next to me asked, trying to find a way to mediate between the two of us. "I have lots of people to share my happiness with," I replied. "Just because they're not my spouse doesn't mean that I'm all alone in the world."

The whole thing started taking on these strange funhouse-mirror dimensions and contours. Suddenly it was as though the first four months of this year, with all their very particular hopes and betrayals and inexplicabilities, had never happened, even though this friend and I have dissected them together in many sharp ways. She knows, for instance, that I've now decided that I'm too old to waste time with people who don't have their own shit together. I've got my shit together, and I've worked hard for that. Why should I waste my time trying to get other people's shit together? Yet somehow, over dinner, we seemed to have regressed to "he's a keeper" talk. To the talk of desperation, in other words. There was some mighty projection going on at our table all of a sudden.

And then, somehow with only a couple of seconds' worth of intervening conversation, a visitor from Japan told us that his new daughter's name is Sarah (though I suspect that the spelling is different), and that he and his wife chose her name because of its old, old Sanskrit meaning. Roughly, he told us that in Chinese (and leave it to formal dinner to ensure that one comes away with only half the specifics of any story--so that I wonder, did he say Chinese? did he say Japanese?) Sarah means that a person will never become ill, because the Buddha always sat under a tree named (in Sanskrit) Sarah when he spoke, and from there, the name developed to what it is today.

I have no real way of checking up on this story, and no real interest in checking up. What I know is that the idea of my name's having something to do with an overspreading tree under which deep teachings were made--well, that idea came just in time during tonight's dinner. I know what I'm about. I know how, as I advise my students whenever I can, to take myself seriously--as my self, my self of integrity, but also as the self that nurtures others.

I suppose that next time I should just say, "Oh, for God's sake, stop it." If I could learn how to say those six words with conviction, I suspect that a lot of the small amount of nonsense in my life would clear away.