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| Catching up on the newsI see it has been a while since we posted anything here. I don't have a particular focus for this post this morning, so I guess it is just a catching-up blog. Last week, from Wednesday pm through Saturday am, Sheryl and I attended the Wild Food Summit at White Earth. Basically, its a camping-out experience in your tent, sharing a common dining shelter, sampling the common food cooked over the common fire by Francios and, this year, Randy.
We learned a few things about edible mushrooms, but we haven't spotted any chicken of the woods, shaggy mane, puff balls, or morels on our walks around Fargo, and the other mushrooms would take more investigation, so we haven't gone so far as to harvest and prepare any independently. We also reviewed the uses of cattails and burdock, learned about the medicinal uses of yarrow and plantain, and relearned the art of making char cloth. Upon returning home, we tinkered around with our backyard fire pit, having observed some interesting setups around the fire pit at the summit. We have also started making no-knead bread as a break from the whole wheat bread Sheryl makes religiously every week. We figured if Francios could bake it in a cast iron pot over a fire, we could do it in our oven.
This week, the weather has finally begun to feel like summer, and the days are at their longest of the year, so we have spent quite a lot of time outdoors during the long evenings, painting adirondack chiars, weeding the garden, putting in a few pavers next to the shed, and just enjoying the out of doors.
I had the English department's annual report to write this week, the one administrative task that just had to be done this week, and I was able to get that done Wednesday afternoon. Now I'm reading chapters for a book on memory that Bruce Maylath and I promised to get to the publishers by the end of summer. I hope to make pretty good progress on that project before I take two weeks off from all forms of school work.
Blaise, Nicole, Alex, and Conor are supposed to arrive here from Yakima on Sunday evening. We plan to spend the next week and a half with them here and in Kansas City and in Nebraska and finally in Colorado. We plan to meet Ember and Drew in Kansas City (for a Royal's game) and travel on in caravan fashion to Belleville to visit Sheryl's mom and Leo, and then on to Grand Island, Nebraska, where we expect to meet Phil (and maybe Abbi if she can arrange to get off) for a mini reunion with Sheryl's family. Then it will be off to the western slope of the Colorado Rockies to visit my brother Dean and his wife Margie. Blaise and his family will depart for Yakima from there and we will return to Kansas to stay with Jim and Loretta and go on to my 40th high school reunion in Holdrege on July 11. It will be a busy couple of weeks, but seeing family and taking a break from school will be good.
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| chapters, floors, weeds, lambs, and cows, among other thingsWe had a good day yesterday; at least we felt like we were able to do things important to us. I awakened early enough to read and edit a chapter for a book that Bruce Maylath and I are working on. It is a collection of papers given at the Linguistic Circle of Manitoba and North Dakota a couple years ago. They all work with memory or memorial or amnesia in some way. I have to write the introduction, so I am rereading the chapters and doing the preliminary editing. Bruce is doing the finish editing. To write the intro, I decided I needed to become familiar with the literature on memory, especially in sociological, literary, cultural, and rhetorical studies. Obviously I don't have time to master the literature, but I am getting into it now and beginning to discern the lines of coversation, the topoi, of the discussion.
Then we read the Psalms for the day together and a chapter out of Exodus. We finished Revelation a few weeks ago and decided to go back to Genesis and work our way through again.
After that we moved stuff around in the basement, got out the putty knives, and scraped the peeling paint off the floor in the new laundry area and in the kitchen area. Once the floor was prepared, we painted the laundry area with a tan colored epoxy paint that you can then throw paint chips on to camouflage flaws in the surface. That took us until about 12:30, a little longer than we wanted.
We had planned to go out to the "Day at the Farm" around 11 or 12, but we didn't get there until 1:30 or so, just a half hour before it was officially over and the farmers' market began. The event is at Noreen and Lee Thomas's farm northeast of town about 15 miles. It's a pleasure. We arrived in time to follow Steve Dahlberg around with about 15 other folk, sampling mallow leaves, stinging nettles, lambs quarter, and so on. A lamb decided he liked the company so he came along, sometimes leading the group in pursuit of Steve and occassionally suggesting by example that we try a few leaves from plants Steve had ignored. The lamb is one of Matt Carlson's lambs. He is a curious little guy, named Sprite, whom, Sheryl says, would be very difficult to send to slaughter. I guess it's a good thing we didn't meet the lamb we bought from Matt last year until it came to us cut up and frozen.
The Thomas farm is a real farm in the organic mode. In other words, its a throwback (in many ways) to the years before WW II and the farming-by-chemical era. We drive out Sunday evenings to pick up whole milk, and when we do, we drive into a farm yard where several hens are busily pecking around the yard and driveway, where a couple pigmy goats turn to eye us curiously, where the old yellow lab mix ambles our way to greet us, where Christy (the cow) greets us with a moo. Last week, no one was at the house, so we just picked up the milk and left the money. Christy was wandering around the farm yard instead of being behind a fence. It was getting near milking time, and she evidently thought Sheryl and I would do just as well as Karsten. There was a stainless steel bucket standing on the sidewalk, so she walked up to it, straddled it, and let her utters hang down right over the bucket. When we walked by with our gallon jars of milk without stopping to help Christy out, she bellowed and stamped away with evident disappointment.
It's a lesson in cooperation. The farm seems to be a place where everyone says, "We're all in this together, so I'll help you out if you help me out."
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| 38 years together I found a few old pictures of Sheryl, taken when we lived in Salina, KS, in the first house we promised to buy. I think we paid (or borrowed) about $23,000. Sheryl has always had long hair, at least ever since I've known her, except for a few short months when she tried a new look. We met at a dance at Fonner Park in Grand Island, NE, sometime in the autumn of 1969. We married one another at Rock Falls, NE (a pasture southwest of Holdrege) on June 6, 1971. We've always been close friends, as well as being in love. That friendship part is important to a marriage, we've found.
 We didn't have children for several years, not because we didn't want them--we just weren't having success. But eventually Blaise came along (January 1978) and a year and a half later Ember (September 1979). These two were great buddies, and I can still remember them eagerly clamoring to climb onto Sheryl's lap to read. Marks of the 70s in this picture? Macrome (sp?) hanging in the upper left corner, a large speaker in front of a turntable in the center of the picture. We bought the stereo from Jay and Pauline Holston. He had made the speakers.
 Here Sheryl gets down with Blaise and Ember to play. She's always been great with kids; indeed, she has taken care of other peoples' children in several places where we have lived (Salina, KS; Wenham, MA; Houghton, MI; Kearney, NE; Fargo, ND). We are looking forward to a visit from Blaise and Nicole in about three weeks, eager to see Alex and Conor, the grand children.
We've tried to do memorable things on our anniversary, but most of them blur together because they normally involve going out to eat. A few, however, stand out as distinct in my memory. Our first anniversary we spent at Mormon Island Park near Grand Island, NE, playing frisbee; our third or fourth we had a huge pile of onion rings at an empty VFW or some other such place in Dodge City, KS; we had death by double chocolate at the Downtown Bar and Grill in Peru, IL, in the early 90s; for our 25th, we got a room downtown Chicago and went to Lawry's steakhouse, a play, and the Art Institute; a couple years later, we went to the Morton Arboretum in a Chicago suburb; we bicycled along the eastern shore of the Keweenaw on Lake Superior in the late 90s and stopped for a picnic and nap on a secluded beach.
Today? We are going to watch "Land of the Lost" on the super screen at West Acres Mall and then go out to eat at Granite City (thanks to Ember and Drew for the gift certificate). I guess we can throw in our going to hear Three Dog Night at Rib Fest last night, though technically, that concert got over before our anniversary began. | | |
| anxiety about being in over one's headI don't know how to describe it, this feeling that somehow one may be in over one's head. I have often felt it when a change in life is going on. I felt it distinctly when I began work on a masters degree, again during my doctorate, again with each new job, especially if the responsibilities were greater. This feeling has something to do with the road ahead being uncertain and unfamiliar, something to do with lack of confidence in one's own ability, something to do with estimating time commitments, and something to do with anticipating other peoples' responses.
I have yet to actually encountered a situation that proved to be too much (although the U of Minnesota stint came pretty close). I attribute my getting through these experiences successfully to God, who is my strength and my fortress. I have, however, found myself mired in projects that I wish I had never committed myself to. One summer I promised to paint the window frames of the First Missionary Church in Dodge City. That commitment ruined a summer for me because the task loomed over my days all summer long until I was finally able to finish the task by squeezing out an hour here and there. Another has been a commitment to edit a book consisting of papers given at the LCMND conference a couple years ago. There has been almost no time to do the work, and it continues to haunt me to this very day. I hope to get it done in the month or two with Bruce Maylath's help. I have now also bound myself to leading a couple syllabus groups for new PhDs in the fall and to writing four papers for conferences in the coming year. These things will work out, but I wonder how.
There seems to be a tension between seeing opportunities and saying "yes, I'll do that," and being satisfied with having done enough. I keep telling myself that I am a full professor now, my salary is okay, I don't have to push so hard or bind myself to projects. And then I keep seeing opportunities or responding to invitations. I've often thought I could continue to work on my research and writing without binding myself to conferences, but I'm not sure that I can. Conference papers are a way of pulling myself into research projects.
I wonder about the value of my research and writing projects. I enjoy this kind of work, and I have a lot that I want to do, and I even think it may contribute to my field in some way. But ultimately I know that these things are unimportant. I Corinthians 13 tells us that where there is knowledge it will pass away. Three things are important: faith, hope, and charity, and the greatest of these is charity.
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| Metaphors and attitudes toward workPushing beads along parallel wires: that's the way I've taken to thinking about projects. Getting the fall schedule finalized is a matter of changing a few sections a week from Instructor: Staff to Instructor: Jones. Sending out review packets for promotion and tenure candidates is a matter of sending requests, waiting for responses, addressing and adapting letters, and sending out packets as each reviewer responds positively. Working on my project to describe the emergence of the rhetoric of science involves reading and then abstracting articles and books as they come to my attention, revising existing chapters to accommodate new material, and anticipating future chapters. Preparing for upper-division writing next year, I settle on texts, order desk copies, contact the bookstore to order for the sections, assign Ph.D. students to sections, begin marking out the course schedules. Finishing the basement project has turned out to require more calendar time than expected. I'm at the mudding the walls and sanding stage now. Soon, it will be painting the walls, then the floor, and finally contriving a ceiling. Getting the back yard in shape? I have a few post holes to dig so that we can rig up a short fence to keep Cody out of the freshly planted garden patch along the back fence. I have an adirondack chair, four plastic chairs, and one table to paint. Each of these projects, not to mention those I should be working on, lays claim to a bit of the week or the day. If I can push each bead a little bit further along the wire, some day, I tell myself, the beads will all arrive at the end of their travels, and that will be a wonderful day. At least this metaphor keeps me going. My metaphor during the semester (digging at the pile of work) was a disheartening metaphor because the pile just kept getting bigger.
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Lifetime
