Updated to add: If you click through the link on IndyAnne's comment below, you can see some beautiful photos of Tante Mississippi and Uncle Quiet, and read some material from the memorial service. Thanks, Anne.
Me: Uncle Quiet is dying, Curious Girl. He is very sick, and his body can't get better anymore.
Curious Girl: That is so sad. I have to tell everyone!
********************
a few minutes later
CG: That is so sad about Uncle Quiet. (She sits down next to me and sits quietly for a few seconds.) I am going to think about something else now. It's much more happier that way.
***********************
In the car, headed to Lisneydand, CG asks, "how do you spell Uncle Quiet?" We tell her, and she starts writing it down. "Do you know what this is? It's a list of people who are dead. Who else should I put on it?" I suggest my predecessor as department chair. "But he's been dead a long time. Uncle Quiet is still getting used to it."
***********************
CG: What is Uncle Quiet doing right now?
me: He's very sick, CG, and he's dying. Tante Misssissippi is taking good care of him, and his mother is there, and Grandaddy J and Grandma L and Curly Haired Cousin and lots of people.
CG: But what is he doing right now? Is he dying right now? Did he already die?
me: I don't know, sweetie. Tante Mississippi is taking good care of him, and he knows we all love him.
CG: But what if he doesn't die?
me: Then Tante Mississippi will keep taking good care of him.
*************************
After Uncle Quiet died
CG: Tell Tante Mississippi that we still love Uncle Quiet and it's going to be OK.
***************************
CG: I'm going to make something beautiful for where he died. I will draw a picture, a flower. I know! I'll make a garden. Maybe something out of clay.
*******************************
We should get Tante Mississippi a present. Maybe a picture, maybe a picture frame like we got Mommy for her trip. I know! A picture of me! With the princesses! That would make her much more happier.
***********************
on a postcard from Lisneydand
Hi Tante Mississippi and Curly Haired Cousin,
We're sorry Uncle Quiet died.
I miss you.
We're at a friend's house.
We didn't see any airplanes at Lisneydand. (Curly Haired Cousin loves airplanes)
I love you, Curious Girl
***************************
driving from the airport, heading for Tante Mississippi's house
CG: When are we going to be there?
me: Not too long. We get off at the next exit, the same exit we use to get to our house. Tante Mississippi and Uncle Quiet's house is on the way home from the airport to our house.
CG: Not Uncle Quiet anymore.
me: That's right, but it's going to take some time to get used to that.
CG: Especially for Curly Haired Cousin
*************************************
CG: Is Tante Mississippi still sad?
me: Yes, she's still sad.
CG: She might be a little sad forever.
me: she might, in a way, but she will also be happy again. We can all smile when we remember Uncle Quiet even though we miss him.
CG: but she might be a little sad forever. That's OK.
*************************************
CG: Is Uncle Quiet in our family?
me: yes.
CG: Is Tante Mississippi in our family?
me: yes
CG: Is Uncle Quiet still an uncle?
me: yes, honey
CG: but a dead one now.
me: right.
CG: you can be an uncle and be dead?
me: like Cool Uncle.
CG: at least I got to meet him. Did I meet Cool Uncle?
me: no, honey, he died right when you were coming into our family.
CG: and Mormor (Politica's mother). I never got to meet her. That's not fair. But I met Uncle Quiet a lot of times.
*************************************
I think Uncle Quiet has friends already underground. Is he underground already? I think he has friends there.
*************************************
Can he still remember us?
***********************************************
I tell Curious Girl that we can remember Uncle Quiet, that we will write things down for Tante Mississippi and Curly Haired Cousin, that Uncle Quiet is part of us because we remember him and tell stories about him. I tell her that we loved him, he loved us, and we all knew we loved each other. I tell her that sometimes, people get so very sick, very, very sick, that their bodies can't get better even though they try and their doctors try. I let her talk, I listen, I take her to Tante Mississippi's often. I really don't know how she's going to make sense of all of it, but for now, this is the best I can come up with. I'm using the lessons from all our adoption talk: I don't keep secrets, I answer the questions she has, I encourage her to talk about it all. Anyone else have any good ideas about helping small children navigate a loss like this?
26 February 2008
24 February 2008
Fish on TV and Ice Cream for Breakfast
I'm loving Bardiac these days--well, I've loved Bardiac for a long time, but her recent posts on life in Japan fascinate me because I love the ins and outs of just living somewhere else. Reading about learning to decipher the pictographs on toilets or kitchen appliances, learning about how snack food is packaged somewhere else, learning about negotiating the daily-ness of life somewhere else has always fascinated me. I enjoy the gorgeous photos that the NY Times Sunday Travel section now ends with, but I miss the first-person essays that used to appear in that space. I love personal travel stories about negotiating regular activities in another place.
When we visited Budapest several years ago, we found a TV station whose camera was, 24/7, trained on a fish tank. Always the same fish tank. I watched it a little every day. What a delightfully weird piece of public programming. Fish tanks reduce stress in real life--who knows what watching one on TV will do. I sure enjoyed it in our Danube and Parliament-view hotel room.
Curious Girl and I just got back from a weekend of visiting friends and (for me) a conference. I'm happy to be home (even if the dishwasher didn't magically empty itself while I was gone). It was a great little visit, with friends who have two kids, one a little older than CG, the other a little younger. We'd never stayed at their house before, but we fit right in, and CG was pretty excited to discover some new toys (like an indoor basketball hoop and the wondrous playmobil). We stayed up until almost 11 one night--something that is a rare event around here, where bedtime can start at 6:30 as the week goes on and CG gets increasingly tired. We ate breakfast a while after waking, instead of right away. We had ice cream for breakfast one day (because the friends we visited are also people who've worked at getting kids to gain weight--what a joy to have friends who can swap calorie tips rather than wondering, "but won't that be creating bad habits later in life?"). The kids invented a few new games,heavily influenced by CG's home classics "Pet Shop" and "Office" crossed with our friends' favorite pretends. They played basketball even when people were sitting on the couch, a big treat given our lack of hoops and general lack of enthusiasm for indoor ball throwing. We sang one of our home Shabbat melodies (which led to a lot of questions about why our melody wasn't the same as our friends' usual melody).
It's easy to get off-routine when traveling. As long as Curious Girl knows where Politica or I will be, and as long as she knows she doesn't have to put herself to sleep, she's usually a pretty happy camper. She's a partying girl--despite the fact that she's ready for bed quite early on most nights, she invariably rises to the occasion and happily stays up late as long as there's good company. In the afternoon following our very late night, she had a weird little fit, a product of fatigue and perhaps hunger. But that passed (with a bit of mood management on my part), and she was back to her party-hearty self, happy to stay up not-quite-so-late-but-still-pretty-late that night. And I loved it.
I'm happy to give CG some later nights with other kids to play with, some lazy mornings and even some grumpy afternoons as a consequence. It's fun to try on being someone who stays up a little late, someone who does Shabbat a little different, someone who eats a little later or organizes the day a little different. Some things from this visit will probably stick around. Ice cream for breakfast? Why not? (CG modeled eating pizza for breakfast while we were there, something I don't think our friends will be imitating anytime soon, but one never knows....) Other things, I'm happy to leave on the road. CG was happy to fall asleep around 7:30 tonight after a batch. We're getting back into our usual routines, and that feels good. But I like knowing that our usual routines could be different, that we can be people who sleep later, eat differently, use our time a little differently. There are a lot of ways to move through the world, and I like to try moving differently every now and again.
So ice cream or pizza for breakfast: try it. It's good to know things don't always need to be the same old way we love them to be. We might love the new ways, too, even just for a weekend.
When we visited Budapest several years ago, we found a TV station whose camera was, 24/7, trained on a fish tank. Always the same fish tank. I watched it a little every day. What a delightfully weird piece of public programming. Fish tanks reduce stress in real life--who knows what watching one on TV will do. I sure enjoyed it in our Danube and Parliament-view hotel room.
Curious Girl and I just got back from a weekend of visiting friends and (for me) a conference. I'm happy to be home (even if the dishwasher didn't magically empty itself while I was gone). It was a great little visit, with friends who have two kids, one a little older than CG, the other a little younger. We'd never stayed at their house before, but we fit right in, and CG was pretty excited to discover some new toys (like an indoor basketball hoop and the wondrous playmobil). We stayed up until almost 11 one night--something that is a rare event around here, where bedtime can start at 6:30 as the week goes on and CG gets increasingly tired. We ate breakfast a while after waking, instead of right away. We had ice cream for breakfast one day (because the friends we visited are also people who've worked at getting kids to gain weight--what a joy to have friends who can swap calorie tips rather than wondering, "but won't that be creating bad habits later in life?"). The kids invented a few new games,heavily influenced by CG's home classics "Pet Shop" and "Office" crossed with our friends' favorite pretends. They played basketball even when people were sitting on the couch, a big treat given our lack of hoops and general lack of enthusiasm for indoor ball throwing. We sang one of our home Shabbat melodies (which led to a lot of questions about why our melody wasn't the same as our friends' usual melody).
It's easy to get off-routine when traveling. As long as Curious Girl knows where Politica or I will be, and as long as she knows she doesn't have to put herself to sleep, she's usually a pretty happy camper. She's a partying girl--despite the fact that she's ready for bed quite early on most nights, she invariably rises to the occasion and happily stays up late as long as there's good company. In the afternoon following our very late night, she had a weird little fit, a product of fatigue and perhaps hunger. But that passed (with a bit of mood management on my part), and she was back to her party-hearty self, happy to stay up not-quite-so-late-but-still-pretty-late that night. And I loved it.
I'm happy to give CG some later nights with other kids to play with, some lazy mornings and even some grumpy afternoons as a consequence. It's fun to try on being someone who stays up a little late, someone who does Shabbat a little different, someone who eats a little later or organizes the day a little different. Some things from this visit will probably stick around. Ice cream for breakfast? Why not? (CG modeled eating pizza for breakfast while we were there, something I don't think our friends will be imitating anytime soon, but one never knows....) Other things, I'm happy to leave on the road. CG was happy to fall asleep around 7:30 tonight after a batch. We're getting back into our usual routines, and that feels good. But I like knowing that our usual routines could be different, that we can be people who sleep later, eat differently, use our time a little differently. There are a lot of ways to move through the world, and I like to try moving differently every now and again.
So ice cream or pizza for breakfast: try it. It's good to know things don't always need to be the same old way we love them to be. We might love the new ways, too, even just for a weekend.
19 February 2008
A Nod to Bob
A note to googlers: this post isn't about the Bob Dylan tribute album, but if you're wondering whether it's any good: yes, it is.
It may be just about time to break out a poem I have posted before, in honor of some of your kids who've learned to read
"The First Book," by Rita Dove:
Open it.
Go ahead, it won't bite.
Well...maybe a little.
More a nip, like. A tingle.
It's pleasurable, really.
You see, it keeps on opening.
You may fall in.
Sure, it's hard to get started;
remember learing to use
knife and fork? Dig in:
You'll never read the bottom.
It's not like it's the end of the world--
just the world as you think
you know it.
Curious Girl's first book: Mat, in the Bob first level series. I think Moreena got the Bob books just right: they are hardly compelling literature, but the art and the typeface balance beautifully, and the books are easy enough for a kid who is just starting to read to do it on her own. We saw a boxed set at a used bookshop today, and CG said, "Oh, those are baby books." I said no, they were for kids just learning to read, and she asked for them. I said OK (I am a bookstore pushover, after all), and in the car, she started reading the first book on her own. Then the second, and eventually got up to the 6th in the series. Not without some frustration, and not without sometimes forgetting how to sound things out or forgetting what a word means.
But boy was she pleased with herself. Tonight, for the first time, she read me a bedtime story (and read Politica one via Skype, and then I read her one). More fluency will come, and she'll soon be able to read harder words, longer stories. But still, tonight she read a whole little book to me. May it be the first of many, with the literary quality only climbing up.
It may be just about time to break out a poem I have posted before, in honor of some of your kids who've learned to read
"The First Book," by Rita Dove:
Open it.
Go ahead, it won't bite.
Well...maybe a little.
More a nip, like. A tingle.
It's pleasurable, really.
You see, it keeps on opening.
You may fall in.
Sure, it's hard to get started;
remember learing to use
knife and fork? Dig in:
You'll never read the bottom.
It's not like it's the end of the world--
just the world as you think
you know it.
Curious Girl's first book: Mat, in the Bob first level series. I think Moreena got the Bob books just right: they are hardly compelling literature, but the art and the typeface balance beautifully, and the books are easy enough for a kid who is just starting to read to do it on her own. We saw a boxed set at a used bookshop today, and CG said, "Oh, those are baby books." I said no, they were for kids just learning to read, and she asked for them. I said OK (I am a bookstore pushover, after all), and in the car, she started reading the first book on her own. Then the second, and eventually got up to the 6th in the series. Not without some frustration, and not without sometimes forgetting how to sound things out or forgetting what a word means.
But boy was she pleased with herself. Tonight, for the first time, she read me a bedtime story (and read Politica one via Skype, and then I read her one). More fluency will come, and she'll soon be able to read harder words, longer stories. But still, tonight she read a whole little book to me. May it be the first of many, with the literary quality only climbing up.
18 February 2008
What Politica is Missing (besides us, of course)
- 62 performance reviews
- countless pieces of paper scattered on the floor as an illustration of how mad Curious Girl got today. Look how mad I am, Mama! she screeched.
- 9 days away from the office (well, I did go in to change my "I'm away for the week" sign to the "I have limited office hours this week" sign. Does that count?)
- 7 flight segments for me and Curious Girl within a month
- 3 loaves of bread (one to Mississippi Friend, one to Historian Friend, one for us)
- 2 days of no! school! for Curious Girl (great for her teachers, not so great for us working parents)
- 2 major tantrums in! one! day!
- 1 wiggly tooth (so we may find out soon whether the Tooth Fairy really does leave baby sisters, as CG maintains she does. I remain skeptically amused.)
12 February 2008
Hopes, Dreams
Here's one story about today:
We're in the H@ppiest Pl@ce on E@rth right now, happily exhausted from a day spent largely princessing about. Curious Girl's way of approaching any new situation is to decide in advance an activity to focus on (princesses) and then to repeat activities to get herself used to things. So today, while other families were busy trying to cram as many activities into the day as they could, we went on the same few rides multiple times, and spent several hours in the princess area, listening to stories, standing on a ridiculously long line to meet the princesses (but what joy at the end of the line!), and watching various royal ceremonies. The princesses do a great job of storytelling and interacting with little guests, and the emphasis in all the patter is on some basic royal lessons: follow your dreams, tell the truth, use good manners, and have hope. If you do all that, you can face whatever comes. And, of course, you'll find true love and live Happily Ever After. But the big emphasis is on dreams and hope.
Curious Girl is eating it up. She wore her Cinderella dress to the park today, and she got her hair done all princessy fancy, with glitter and little flowers and a bun. She was tickled by the way everyone called her princess (even some other children), and happily pretended her way through the day. The twirling tea cups may be rated a very tame ride by all the guidebooks, but I got a thrill watching my fancy Cinderella daughter exclaiming, "yeah, baby!" as the tea cups spun.
She's beautiful, and she loves being in a place where there are princesses around every corner (if you don't leave the princessy part of the park, that is. Our brief foray into a neighboring park was met with G00fy fear. Go figure. Minnie Mouse, not scary. But G00fy, scary).
I can't tell how much she is actually attending to the stories the princesses tell. She knows the basic outlines of all the princess stories, of course, but as her version of them all is a big princess girl power confab in the castle where all the princes are invariably unavailable (having served their purpose to create a big wedding party at which it is possible to dance with one's mothers, and sometimes to help make a baby), I don't know how much she attends to the messages about hopes, dreams, love.
Here's another story about today: Quiet Friend just passed away. We're surrounded by these messages of hopes, dreams, love conquering all, acutely aware of the ways in Quiet Friend would be happy and healthy today were if possible for hopes, dreams, and love to cure him. He died peacefully, Mississippi Friend tells us, but he died after coming through years of cancers that just wore his body down. His mother never left after his last hospitalization, so the room we helped restore went to good use, even if it never housed the people caring for him after the bone marrow transplant we all had hoped for.
Quiet Friend was a good, good person. Not easy to get to know, but well worth knowing. Smart and classy, he had a self-confidence that carried him through the world. He was great at Taboo--as Mississippi Friend once said, that's how Quiet Friend talked in regular conversations. He had an amazing vocabulary and just loved words. His brain tumor took a lot away, though. Not language so much as motivation. His work history turned spotty after he got sick. For months on end he'd be too sick to work. But the work he did do was wonderful, even when he was too tired after doing all that work to do much at home (which made living with his illness hard for Mississippi Friend). But what strength of will it took to get that work done. Quiet Friend was a force in the world, a force finally worn away by too much illness. But I will remember him, quiet, sharing a picnic with all of us, being on the beach in Florida on a vacation we took together, before Sofia, when Mississippi Friend and Quiet Friend's son (now 7) was an infant, cooking most of the food for Curious Girl's naming celebration, coming out to our holiday party even when his chemo exhausted him. So many memories run through my head tonight.
I'm glad he's no longer in pain, no longer struggling. But I miss him, and Politica and I are both broken-hearted to be so far from Mississippi Friend tonight.
Hope couldn't make him better. I can't decide whether I'm angry at the lights of the resort flickering out my window, or comforted by them. I know I am comforted by Curious Girl's response--surely a subject for another post. I told her a few days ago that Uncle Quiet was dying, and she's been thinking hard about all this. When Politica called Mississippi Friend tonight, CG said, "tell her we still love him, and it will be all right." CG's empathy is a gift.
We do still love him. And Mississippi Friend, whose grief I can only begin to imagine. Life surely isn't fair tonight, not even in the H@ppiest Pl@ce on E@rth.
We're in the H@ppiest Pl@ce on E@rth right now, happily exhausted from a day spent largely princessing about. Curious Girl's way of approaching any new situation is to decide in advance an activity to focus on (princesses) and then to repeat activities to get herself used to things. So today, while other families were busy trying to cram as many activities into the day as they could, we went on the same few rides multiple times, and spent several hours in the princess area, listening to stories, standing on a ridiculously long line to meet the princesses (but what joy at the end of the line!), and watching various royal ceremonies. The princesses do a great job of storytelling and interacting with little guests, and the emphasis in all the patter is on some basic royal lessons: follow your dreams, tell the truth, use good manners, and have hope. If you do all that, you can face whatever comes. And, of course, you'll find true love and live Happily Ever After. But the big emphasis is on dreams and hope.
Curious Girl is eating it up. She wore her Cinderella dress to the park today, and she got her hair done all princessy fancy, with glitter and little flowers and a bun. She was tickled by the way everyone called her princess (even some other children), and happily pretended her way through the day. The twirling tea cups may be rated a very tame ride by all the guidebooks, but I got a thrill watching my fancy Cinderella daughter exclaiming, "yeah, baby!" as the tea cups spun.
She's beautiful, and she loves being in a place where there are princesses around every corner (if you don't leave the princessy part of the park, that is. Our brief foray into a neighboring park was met with G00fy fear. Go figure. Minnie Mouse, not scary. But G00fy, scary).
I can't tell how much she is actually attending to the stories the princesses tell. She knows the basic outlines of all the princess stories, of course, but as her version of them all is a big princess girl power confab in the castle where all the princes are invariably unavailable (having served their purpose to create a big wedding party at which it is possible to dance with one's mothers, and sometimes to help make a baby), I don't know how much she attends to the messages about hopes, dreams, love.
Here's another story about today: Quiet Friend just passed away. We're surrounded by these messages of hopes, dreams, love conquering all, acutely aware of the ways in Quiet Friend would be happy and healthy today were if possible for hopes, dreams, and love to cure him. He died peacefully, Mississippi Friend tells us, but he died after coming through years of cancers that just wore his body down. His mother never left after his last hospitalization, so the room we helped restore went to good use, even if it never housed the people caring for him after the bone marrow transplant we all had hoped for.
Quiet Friend was a good, good person. Not easy to get to know, but well worth knowing. Smart and classy, he had a self-confidence that carried him through the world. He was great at Taboo--as Mississippi Friend once said, that's how Quiet Friend talked in regular conversations. He had an amazing vocabulary and just loved words. His brain tumor took a lot away, though. Not language so much as motivation. His work history turned spotty after he got sick. For months on end he'd be too sick to work. But the work he did do was wonderful, even when he was too tired after doing all that work to do much at home (which made living with his illness hard for Mississippi Friend). But what strength of will it took to get that work done. Quiet Friend was a force in the world, a force finally worn away by too much illness. But I will remember him, quiet, sharing a picnic with all of us, being on the beach in Florida on a vacation we took together, before Sofia, when Mississippi Friend and Quiet Friend's son (now 7) was an infant, cooking most of the food for Curious Girl's naming celebration, coming out to our holiday party even when his chemo exhausted him. So many memories run through my head tonight.
I'm glad he's no longer in pain, no longer struggling. But I miss him, and Politica and I are both broken-hearted to be so far from Mississippi Friend tonight.
Hope couldn't make him better. I can't decide whether I'm angry at the lights of the resort flickering out my window, or comforted by them. I know I am comforted by Curious Girl's response--surely a subject for another post. I told her a few days ago that Uncle Quiet was dying, and she's been thinking hard about all this. When Politica called Mississippi Friend tonight, CG said, "tell her we still love him, and it will be all right." CG's empathy is a gift.
We do still love him. And Mississippi Friend, whose grief I can only begin to imagine. Life surely isn't fair tonight, not even in the H@ppiest Pl@ce on E@rth.
03 February 2008
More Things You Missed in Sunday School
We interrupt the Super Goal to bring you the latest in creative retellings of Biblical material.
The scene: the stair landing, with Curious Girl coming down from upstairs. I had sent her to get the animal or doll she wanted to sleep with while I went downstairs to get the new book she'd gotten as a yay! baby! gift at the Super Goal/Welcome Baby party we'd been to earlier. I'm coming back up, and she's just arrived on the landing.
CG: Look, Mama! I've got her! Baby Miriam! (she strokes her Baby Miriam doll, which is a doll that came with a Moses basket, except that we call it a Miriam basket, since it holds her Baby Miriam).
Me: Hi, Baby Miriam!
CG, gesturing with her hands: Mama, this can be the water, and the basket it in it, and I find her! She smooths the water and puts the basket in the water. Oh, look, a baby! It's crying. Baby, it's OK. I'll take care of you. And she picks up the basket and takes the baby upstairs. Baby Miriam, it's OK. You're going to be a baby forever, and I'll take care of you.
The scene: the stair landing, with Curious Girl coming down from upstairs. I had sent her to get the animal or doll she wanted to sleep with while I went downstairs to get the new book she'd gotten as a yay! baby! gift at the Super Goal/Welcome Baby party we'd been to earlier. I'm coming back up, and she's just arrived on the landing.
CG: Look, Mama! I've got her! Baby Miriam! (she strokes her Baby Miriam doll, which is a doll that came with a Moses basket, except that we call it a Miriam basket, since it holds her Baby Miriam).
Me: Hi, Baby Miriam!
CG, gesturing with her hands: Mama, this can be the water, and the basket it in it, and I find her! She smooths the water and puts the basket in the water. Oh, look, a baby! It's crying. Baby, it's OK. I'll take care of you. And she picks up the basket and takes the baby upstairs. Baby Miriam, it's OK. You're going to be a baby forever, and I'll take care of you.
01 February 2008
Germany
So here's what I haven't been blogging about for the past few months: we're moving. New jobs, new house, new part of the country. A couple of my colleagues read this sometimes, so I didn't want to spill the beans here before things went public at work.
We're moving.
I'm still trying to get my head around this, despite the fact that I've known since June that things were likely going to shape up this way. June is a funny time for an academic interview, but for a variety of reasons I can't explain on a (presumably) pseudonymous blog, we ended up with some off-cycle interviews, and amazingly, have managed, again, to end up with a pair of tenure-line job offers. A pair of tenured job offers, in fact.
So, we're moving, and I'm a lame-duck department chair, which is an interesting role. Last year at this time, I was going through my first round of performance reviews with my large (60+) department, and it felt like the first in a long series. I approached the reviews with the sense that I was going to be the chair who'd shepherd the assistant professors through tenure, who'd (hopefully) coach a few associate professors through their second promotion. Now, we all know I"m leaving, so that throws my role into some confusion.
I get reviewed by the other full professors in the department. One of them asked me last week, Why do we review you? If you view performance reviews as supervision, it doesn't make sense. But if you view performance reviews as a way of gauging how individual work helps add up to the department's collective work, it does make sense. This is the most cat-herding part of the year, because some people welcome the performance review, some are constitutionally opposed to them, and some just don't give a fig either way. So I write my reviews partly with an eye on the colleague's attitude toward it all, partly with an eye on their career trajectory. I'll still meet with everyone to talk about their reviews--after all, their career paths don't stop for a year just because the department chair is changing.
*******************************
Why Germany in the title of the post? I need to think of a pseudonym for New Hometown, but for today, it's Germany. We visited Germany--the real Germany--last summer, and one of the cities we saw in Germany has a name that, if you are a small child and transpose sounds and then change a few sounds and rhyme them, sounds a little like New Hometown. It took me several months to figure this out, as it explains Curious Girl's questions like "Do they speak English in New Hometown?" "What if I go to school and I can't understand the people?"
********************************
We're downsizing. It's likely we'll end up in a smaller house than the one we have now, and I figure that's only a problem if you try to have stuff that exceeds the function of the smaller house. So I'm sorting through things. I just found library bookmarks from my hometown library that I probably got in 7th grade. I cleaned out a jewelry box and found the gold honors medal I got for graduating 8th grade. Actually, I didn't get it at my 8th grade graduation. I had the top grades in my class, as I recall, and thus qualified for a $300 scholarship for high school. But because I had won a scholarship from another source, the school didn't give me the $300 scholarship. They gave it to the next kid down. I didn't mind that so much, but I did mind that I left graduation without so much as a card or certificate or little medal that went with the award. I stewed about that for months, and finally my parents said, "Well, write to the principal." So I did, and she came to the house after dinner one night, apologized, and gave me this little medal. I didn't throw out the medal, but I think I might. I can't figure out a good decision rule about memorabilia. I don't want to erase my past, but I'm not sure the 8th grade medals need to come to Germany. (That said, another thing I have to decide about is the box of little medals and pins that my favorite uncle--now deceased--did save from his high school and college. I'm not sure what to do about those.)
But I was rather pleased to unearth my "Books, like friends, should be well-chosen" bookmark. I loved my hometown library.
Wish me decluttering strength, please.
We're moving.
I'm still trying to get my head around this, despite the fact that I've known since June that things were likely going to shape up this way. June is a funny time for an academic interview, but for a variety of reasons I can't explain on a (presumably) pseudonymous blog, we ended up with some off-cycle interviews, and amazingly, have managed, again, to end up with a pair of tenure-line job offers. A pair of tenured job offers, in fact.
So, we're moving, and I'm a lame-duck department chair, which is an interesting role. Last year at this time, I was going through my first round of performance reviews with my large (60+) department, and it felt like the first in a long series. I approached the reviews with the sense that I was going to be the chair who'd shepherd the assistant professors through tenure, who'd (hopefully) coach a few associate professors through their second promotion. Now, we all know I"m leaving, so that throws my role into some confusion.
I get reviewed by the other full professors in the department. One of them asked me last week, Why do we review you? If you view performance reviews as supervision, it doesn't make sense. But if you view performance reviews as a way of gauging how individual work helps add up to the department's collective work, it does make sense. This is the most cat-herding part of the year, because some people welcome the performance review, some are constitutionally opposed to them, and some just don't give a fig either way. So I write my reviews partly with an eye on the colleague's attitude toward it all, partly with an eye on their career trajectory. I'll still meet with everyone to talk about their reviews--after all, their career paths don't stop for a year just because the department chair is changing.
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Why Germany in the title of the post? I need to think of a pseudonym for New Hometown, but for today, it's Germany. We visited Germany--the real Germany--last summer, and one of the cities we saw in Germany has a name that, if you are a small child and transpose sounds and then change a few sounds and rhyme them, sounds a little like New Hometown. It took me several months to figure this out, as it explains Curious Girl's questions like "Do they speak English in New Hometown?" "What if I go to school and I can't understand the people?"
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We're downsizing. It's likely we'll end up in a smaller house than the one we have now, and I figure that's only a problem if you try to have stuff that exceeds the function of the smaller house. So I'm sorting through things. I just found library bookmarks from my hometown library that I probably got in 7th grade. I cleaned out a jewelry box and found the gold honors medal I got for graduating 8th grade. Actually, I didn't get it at my 8th grade graduation. I had the top grades in my class, as I recall, and thus qualified for a $300 scholarship for high school. But because I had won a scholarship from another source, the school didn't give me the $300 scholarship. They gave it to the next kid down. I didn't mind that so much, but I did mind that I left graduation without so much as a card or certificate or little medal that went with the award. I stewed about that for months, and finally my parents said, "Well, write to the principal." So I did, and she came to the house after dinner one night, apologized, and gave me this little medal. I didn't throw out the medal, but I think I might. I can't figure out a good decision rule about memorabilia. I don't want to erase my past, but I'm not sure the 8th grade medals need to come to Germany. (That said, another thing I have to decide about is the box of little medals and pins that my favorite uncle--now deceased--did save from his high school and college. I'm not sure what to do about those.)
But I was rather pleased to unearth my "Books, like friends, should be well-chosen" bookmark. I loved my hometown library.
Wish me decluttering strength, please.
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