Spring Miscellany

One thing about Spring: it’s busy. I have to make choices I normally wouldn’t have to, because everything’s so demanding. Get out there and plant stuff! Clear out the weeds! Pull the wild grapes out of the bur oak! And do your normal stuff—clean house, cook, read, prep for classes. What’s an old gal to do?

I did manage to spend the better part of Friday and Saturday working on the sodden plot for the potager, and I got some yellow squash and a tomato in. I’m not sure how either will do, because I’m not sure about the amount of sun, but I’ll put in a couple more tomatoes in test plots elsewhere, and some beans. The rest will pretty much be herbs, all of which are still sitting on the table out back, waiting to be transplanted.

Two observations: color in my garden works on a complimentary schedule. It happens elsewhere, too, such as when the bluebonnets and the Indian paintbrush bloom together. In my yard the yellows and purples come out in tandem: Carolina Jessamine, mullein, yellow oxalis (or sorrel, I think), dandelions together with grape hyacinth, ajuga, henbit, and some little purply lily-like things that come and go so quickly (and there are so few of them) that I never remember to look them up or get a picture. In Chicago I could always count on the violets to be first up (the season starts much later up there), but then the pattern would be similar.

The other thing I noticed this weekend is that accidental gardens promote accidents. Before the heavy rains of last week, my husband had started tilling (with a “garden weasel”) the plot I’m using for the new herb garden. He was stopped by the deluge, which turns out to be a good thing, because (in the meantime) I picked up a copy of the latest Mother Earth News, with a nifty article about low-maintenance gardens. Lee Reich offers eleven tips for starting a new garden, and the very first one is “Minimize soil disturbance; always try to preserve the natural layering of the soil.” Hot dog! A really good reason not to till up the whole area—just what needs disturbing to allow planting. The rest can be covered with mulch to make pathways. Another idea was to plant the food garden as close as possible to the house. Well, now I'll be able to step out of the back door and practically fall into my dinner.

I then proceeded to use two of the corners from the old “summerhouse” to support the yellow squash and tomato plants I’d bought from Whole Foods last week. I put the one for the squash in the corner of the potager, and the other outside of it, open to the late afternoon sun (I hope; the pecans haven’t leafed out yet, so it’s hard to tell). There goes the plan for a veg garden outside the concrete sidewalk area. I can’t seem to get away from wanting to sit there in comfy lawn chairs, instead of tearing it up to plant things in neat little rows. Pots of herbs surround that support, which (again, I hope) will sport a nice big patio tomato plant as time goes on. Photos will be posted as soon as everything settles in.

So the new plan is to visit a couple of nurseries this week and pick out stuff on a whim. And then to plant it where it “wants” to get planted. We’ll see. Beginning-of-quarter planning interferes, but if Spring Fever proceeds apace (and if the weather holds), I’ll be getting up earlier and gardening before I go down to Dallas to teach.

One more thing: I’m developing some “rules” for aging (modeled on the “rules” for technological development with which I regale my students). The first of Uhlmeyer’s Rules For Becoming an Old Bat is “Old people shouldn’t get sunburned.”

Idiot that I am, I forgot to use sunscreen on my shins. I usually cover up pretty well otherwise, with a long-sleeved shirt, hat, socks, shoes, and gloves. But I had on pedal pushers (Capri pants, I suppose, is the more up-to-date term), and my shins got too much sun. Now, Rafael Nadal (how's that for a cheap plug for the U. S. Open?) wears these pants to play tennis in (“pirate pants” my tennis-coach husband calls them), and he looks pretty good. But old folks don’t tan like that. As a result, I have splotchy red shins between my white sock line and the equally white line where my pants stopped. Next time, longer pants.

Finally, in my never-ending search for blog fodder, I picked up a couple of books during Border’s educator appreciation weekend (25% off almost everything). Book-shopping is another reason I didn’t get as much done in the garden as I wanted. Anyway, look forward to ruminations involving Kurt Vonnegut’s Armageddon In Retrospect (a collection of unpublished stuff, gathered by his son Mark), Lee Siegal’s Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob, Jeffrey D. Sach’s Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s global warming trilogy.

It’s going to be an interesting Spring.

Photos: Yellow Carolina Jessamine and purple wisteria; the bare potager.

Passing Strange, and Wonderful

Desdemona’s lovely speech in act 1 of Othello, in which she describes how she fell for the guy in the first place, recounts the enormous power of storytelling. Great stories make us love people, and help us love ourselves. My version of the passage is stolen from the title of Yi-Fu Tuan’s book on aesthetics, nature, and culture (for which he paraphrases Desdemona's lines) and he’s a bard of a different kind: one of the best philosophers still alive. But I use it for a different reason: to mark the deaths of two remarkable storytellers, each of whom has profoundly affected my reading life, and (in many ways) the way I think about the world. The trouble with getting old oneself, of course, is that those older than you are, who have inspired or otherwise nurtured you, start dying off and reminding you over and over again of your own mortality. Still, one would hardly want to have done without them—one’s own personal heroes, inspirations, role models.

The first of these is Arthur C. Clarke, almost every book of whose I’ve read one or more times in my life. He epitomized the scientist-science fiction writers I admire most—those who can use what they know about how the universe works to posit truths about those who populate it. Although he lived to be ninety years old and wrote more than most people could in several lifetimes, I will miss him sorely. My memorial offering: two good obituaries (one from the New York Times, and one from Space.com) and Clarke himself via YouTube, from an interview last December.

The second is Robert Fagles, emeritus professor of Classics at Princeton, translator extraordinaire, channeler of Homer and (more recently) Virgil, and someone who could read Greek iambic hexameter aloud with the voice of an angel. His versions of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid should be on the required lists of all English-speaking schools in the world. Through them children would learn about honor, loyalty, and the frailties of humankind, and about both the glory and the folly of conflict. Having worked on my own translation of the Odyssey (in order to keep up my Greek chops) for the last twenty five years, I can attest to the difficulty of rendering Homer’s transcendent language into equivalently powerful English, but Fagles did it with both of Homer’s works. He translated plays by Sophocles and Aeschylus into resonant commentaries on the nature of tragedy. And then he blessed us, only two years ago, with the best translation of the Aeneid I’ve ever read (and I’ve read many). The last time my husband and I drove from Texas to California, we listened to Fagles's translation of the Odyssey, read by Ian McKellan, and it transformed the landscape of the trip. Robert Fagles died last week at only 74. Here’s a nice obit in the New York Times, and a wonderful audio recording of a talk on Homer at Princeton.

Both of these men helped color my view of utopia: Clarke with his apparently irrepressible belief in the positive outcome of human exploration, especially into space, and Fagels with his eloquent translation of Homer's Odyssey, and particularly the story of the Phaeacians. My heartfelt thanks to them both, for their many and enduring gifts.

Photos: Arthur C. Clarke by Mamyjomarash, Wikipedia Commons. Robert Fagles by Denise Applewhite, Princeton University.

Time, Again

Two days ago, my firstborn child turned 32; two days from now would have been my grandmother’s “eleventy-first” birthday (she was born in 1897 and died in 2001)—and although there won’t be wizard-designed fireworks and a big cake and party, I will probably celebrate by lifting a glass in her name (even though she herself was not a tippler). My son’s a year younger than Frodo was when Bilbo turned 111, and the dates aren’t exact, but I thought the parallel (for a couple of Tolkien fans) was close enough to mention—and he’ll undoubtedly have lifted a pint or two of the Gaffer’s best brew in honor of himself. The passage of time is, consequently, much on my mind, especially since spring has sprung and growth is becoming increasingly visible and tangible.

As if the mere season weren’t enough, however, one of my favorite comic strips, Rick Kirkman’s and Jerry Scott’s Baby Blues is on a “Days are long/years are short” kick, every day reminding me how quickly children grow up. I’ve loved this strip for years because the mom has breastfed all three of her kids, and the nursing jokes alone are worth their weight in . . . well, you get the idea. As the strip’s kids grow, they frequently remind me of the trials and tribulations of raising siblings who don’t get on all that well, which often slips my mind now that they live half a continent apart from each other and are great chums. The distance probably helps.

At any rate, unfinished business from my last post is still lurking, especially since it was originally inspired by an article in last Sunday’s Dallas Morning News: Carolyn Johnson’s piece on “The Joy of Boredom,” which I never got around to mentioning last time. As I’ve undoubtedly mentioned before, I’m fond of telling my students (when they tell me something I’ve asked them to read is “boring”) that boredom reflects a lack of imagination. I go on to boast, in my best preacherly tone, that I have never been bored in my life. It’s probably a lie, because I’m sure I’ve been faced with an interminable lecture or two, complete with bullet points, that I actually found boring. But at least I can’t ever remember being bored, and even when told to read something I wouldn’t otherwise have tackled, I always seemed to find some value in it (if only the knowledge that God wouldn’t assign me to the fires of hell for having disobeyed Sister Francisca). Nonetheless, my own students are difficult to convince, and sometimes I wish I were more like a Dominican. The fear of God was a prime motivator in my day, but the most evangelically-oriented of my students don’t seem to be cowed by visions of hell, not even when they’re illuminating Canto V of Dante’s Inferno.

Johnson’s point is that boredom is not only inevitable, but “a primordial soup for some of life’s most quintessentially human moments”:

Jostled by a stranger’s cart in the express checkout line, thoughts of a loved one might come to mind. A long drive home after a frustrating day could force ruminations. A pang of homesickness at the start of a plane ride might put a journey in perspective.

She goes on to note that technology has come to the aid of the bored, offering them myriad ways to fill up those moments of ‘microboredom’ (she’s quoting Motorola here), putting folks out of potential misery by making sure they’re engaged (whether or not in anything worthwhile) at all times.

To me, time is the important element in this assessment: the frenetic filling-up of time that seems to preoccupy modern culture more and more, so that people feel compelled to be “doing” something in addition to what they’re already doing. (Who the hell really needs to tap out a text message while driving the bloody SUV through a school zone, anyway?)

Now, I will admit to having answered my cute little iPhone exactly three times while driving on the freeway. But even just picking it up and figuring out how to answer it (I’m not exactly adept with the thing yet) was distracting enough to make me slow down and become very deliberate about my actions, and to be very happy to hang up. But most of the time I try to call home and answer any missed calls before I get on the road, so that my drive time can be spent (there’s that pesky little time is money metaphor again) sorting through the day and—oh, yes: attending to the driving of the car.

Boredom, it would seem, is tied these days to how we think of time, and the “spending” of it. Our most common cliché reflects our attitude: it flies when we’re having fun, even though the Latin (from which it probably derives) implies regret. Tempus fugit (time flees) suggests that it escapes, gets away from us. It does seem to be the case that the older we get the more conscious we are of time’s passing, and the less anxious we are for it to get away from us. The experience of time is always relative—it often dilates when we’re engaged intensely in some activity, and contracts when we’re enjoying ourselves—but our consciousness about time might also increase as we proceed, kicking and screaming, toward its “end.”

I tend to rail at my students for using the phrase “since the beginning of time” because it’s meaningless (when exactly did time begin, anyway?), and its opposite is equally silly: “until the end of time” (that’s how long I’ll love you, say the songs). Human beings are babies in the chronology of the world, but we think we’re incredibly wise (whether it’s through religious belief or scientific knowledge). And we treat time cavalierly, wasting it, spending it, losing it, gaining it, playing with our clocks and yet pretending that it’s something terribly important and unknowable. We might do better to adopt a less linear view, as many other cultures have done, or notice more carefully the “events” on our natural calendars. A cyclical, recursive notion of time might forestall boredom entirely, allowing us to incorporate reflection as part of our daily lives, and not having to snatch at it only when we have nothing better to do, or when we have “time on our hands.” The link, by the way, leads to a lovely short film about Mt. Athos, in Greece, at Easter time.

According to the Maya, we’ve only got a few years left, anyway, since their current Long Count ends on my birthday in 2012. Wouldn’t you know—just when I’m due to retire and have more time to myself.

Photo: My father holding my eight week-old son, in the chair my grandfather bought for my parents when I was born.