ever-fixed mark

Watching the convention coverage reminded me of one random brush with near-celebrity I’ve had in my life: In grad school, I took a seminar on Faulkner in which Jill Biden was a fellow student.

I wish there were something more to the story, but that’s about it. I believe she used her maiden name during the class, and then for some reason, the professor told us that she was Biden’s wife on the last day. This was before Anita Hill, before the plagiarism scandal, before the aneurysm; Biden was known but not yet notorious.

That seminar was memorable for me, though, because we had to present our papers orally–a little prep for the thesis defense toward which we were ostensibly headed–and it was the first time in my life that I actually enjoyed speaking in public. I was socially awkward and insecure in the extreme, but something about my paper topic lit my imagination, and I found myself eager to deliver it to the class. It was the first time I ever lectured rather than reading a prepared paper, and I really enjoyed the sensation of holding people’s interest with my words. That was the day I decided to become a teacher.

(Some day I’ll have to write a blog post about the day I decided to give up being a teacher. It involved a vice principal who told me I couldn’t fail a kid who had plagiarized a paper. And maybe he was right; we have a vice-presidential nominee who is a well-known plagiarist. And another who is a former beauty queen!)

After I left teaching, I continued to speak in public as part of my job. I am not a very polished speaker. I have an unpleasant, crackly voice and no rhetorical flourishes to speak of. Still, I get a lot of positive feedback on my presentations, and if I were to give advice to anyone nervous about public speaking, I would say that you’ll be a raging success if you do these two things: 1. Speak LOUDLY and 2. Have something interesting to say.

The first is easily, if rarely, done. (Amplification is irrelevant; when you speak loudly, miked or not, you sound interested in your topic, and if you sound interested, your audience will be more interested.) The second is considerably harder. Most presentations I hear are either too general or too specific for the audience. And even if you have the right level of detail, you have to arrange those details to create a narrative arc for your listeners. To do this, you have to edit ruthlessly. Personally, I tend to be too pedantic; I feel a responsibility to share every detail, when my listeners only care about the highlights.

In this country, we don’t emphasize oratory in our educational system, which is probably why as a nation we respond to it so readily. Think about it: it’s relatively rare to hear someone like Obama who can string two coherent thoughts together in public. He’s taken some flack for it, and I heard he even toned down his acceptance speech to mitigate concerns that he’s all style and no substance. But I’m looking forward to having a president who is a statesman. I think it would be terrific if we had something akin to the British tradition of having the Members of Parliament question the Prime Minister right there on the house floor, so he’s forced to give impromptu speeches on a regular basis.

That sharp intake of air you heard a few months back was the sound of all the working parents of kids in Aitch’s preschool simultaneously realizing that, come fall, we would have to pick up our kindergarteners at 3:30 p.m. on the dot, instead of “any time before 5:30,” our current arrangement. (Frankly, I don’t know how parents who commute even manage to pick up their kids at 5:30. On days when I’m in the city and Husband can’t do the pick-up, I have to leave before 3:45 to be reasonably sure of making it, and even then I have three friends on speed-dial in case of traffic.)

At the kindergarten information session this winter, parents had only one question for the principal: “What are the details of the after-school program?” It wasn’t all worked out yet, the principal told us, but information would be forthcoming.

At the parent orientation session in the spring, there was only one question: “After-school program?” “Details to follow!”

At the kid orientation session, the same question was asked and answered: “The after-school people will be here next week for the kindergarten screening; ask them then!”

At the kindergarten screening, there was no information available. “We’ll let you know as soon as we hear something.”

Two weeks ago, I heard a rumor on the playground that the after-school program was going forward, but it was going to be held at the elementary school, so all the kindergarteners would be bused to it. I called the YWCA, which runs the after-school program, to get the details. I left several voicemails and finally got a call back.

“So,” I asked, “if you are busing my kindergartener from one school to another for the after-school program, who would be in charge of holding and administering his Epipen in case of an allergic reaction?”

“Well, I guess that would depend on which bus company is transporting the kids,” she said. (Keep in mind this is a mere two weeks before the start of school.) “We haven’t worked that out yet. If we’re contracting with a company to do it ourselves, then I don’t know what we would do. It’s never come up. If we are using the school district’s buses, then I guess we would use their policy.”

“Which is…?”

“I don’t know.”

I did a bit of digging (I’ll spare you the blow-by-blow of unreturned phone calls and unknowledgeable administrators) and managed to piece together the bits of something that might form a policy if anyone ever thought to gather them together as such; of course, no one has, because this is the first time in the history of Port City schools that any parent has expressed concern to anyone about their food-allergic child riding a school bus. Here it is:

• There are no adults on the bus other than the bus driver.
• Bus drivers are trained to recognize the signs of an allergic reaction in children…
• And I’m sure they can do this effectively while driving the bus safely; however …
• Bus drivers are not required to administer Epipens in the event of an incident; they just have to pull over and call 911. So…
• The school district recommends that I “develop a relationship” with the bus driver, presumably because he or she will be more likely to damn the liability and inject my kid if we’re friendly. However…
• It is illegal for the school to inform a bus driver that my child has a health issue. So…
• If the bus driver with whom I’ve cultivated this close relationship gets has a bad lobster roll at the Park Lunch one day, requiring a substitute for the afternoon run, the driver will have no idea there’s an issue, and I’ll have no idea that there’s a different driver. But…
• The school nurse reckons I can enlist the help of a mature older child to monitor Aitch for reactions. So, it’s all good.

So, imagine you’re my neighbor. “Hi, this is Denise, from down the street? I need a favor…can your seven-year-old sit with my son every day on the school bus and check him periodically for anaphylactic shock? Also, I’ll need to teach her how to administer epinephrine via an auto-injector. No, it’s very safe, even if she injects herself by accident. My husband did it and he lived to tell the tale. No, I promise I won’t sue her for malpractice if something goes wrong. Of course, I’ll need a backup if she’s going to be absent. How mature is your six-year-old?”

Husband and I made a last-minute decision to get away sans enfants for two days, and because we are booking so late in peak vacation season (coinciding with the only good weather we’ve had all summer), we’ve had a hard time finding lodging that meets our requirements. Basically, we want something that’s less pricey than a luxury inn, but not as folksy as a bed-and-breakfast.

An old friend of mine from the Peace Corps, I’m told, has opened a bed and breakfast not too far away, and another mutual Peace Corps friend suggested that I book a room under my married name and show up to surprise her. Back in the day, my relationship with the innkeeper was intermittently fractious — I can’t remember why — and that scenario suggests to me that episode of “The Office” where Pam and Jim stay on Dwight’s beet farm, which he’s converted to a B&B. It actually sounded kind of quirky and fun, not to mention rife with dramatic possibilities, but the B&B in question is not on a lake, and I intend to take advantage of the nice weather in my kayak.

The trouble with most inns in New England is that they’re not different enough from what we’re leaving behind. I mean, if I wanted to sleep in a drafty Victorian with rickety furniture and funky wallpaper, I could just stay home — and here, Dog is allowed. Now that I think about it, wouldn’t it be awesome if we opened a B&B here? We have three unused bedrooms that could be outfitted at minimal expense, and a dining room that is never used that could hold three couples for breakfast. As long as our guests were down with our “slacker hospitality” ethic, we could probably bring in a little cash.

It sounds like the premise for one of those hugely successful, double-titled, memoirish non-fiction books you can’t believe someone published and wish you had written: “A Year of Bed-and-Breakfast: How I Opened My Heart by Opening My Home as a B&B,” or some such. It would be divided into twelve chapters, one for each month, each containing a story about one of the wonderfully wacky guests and a seasonal recipe for a breakfast food.

Doesn’t that sound like the most perfect amalgamation of A Year in Provence, Eat, Pray, Love, and Julie and Julia? I’m going to write a proposal right now.

Husband and I hate yard work so much that we took pains to buy one of the only houses in town without a lawn. Even so, there is still a troublesome border sprouting weeds along three sides of the house. Once a year, my mother pulls all the weeds and puts mulch down, but they always grow back. She must be doing it wrong.

This year, a rather purposeful-looking plant sprouted right next to the back door. “Weed or not?” I wondered, and then one day it threw up a large, pretty yellow flower. My parents cleaned out the border to give it some room to grow, put down more mulch, and then put up some edging so we would stop treading on it. Other plants of the same type took root and fluorished, but we still had no idea what it was.

One day our babysitter was dropping off the boys and exclaimed, “You’re growing pumpkins? How did you get them to take? Mine have never turned out so well.”

Pumpkins?!

Rewind to Halloween, when like most of our neighbors we (nominally) decorated our doorstops with pumpkins. Unlike most of our neighbors, though, we pretty much let the pumpkins sit out and rot until it snowed and we didn’t have to think about them anymore. The seeds must have dropped into the soil, and then Nature took its course.

There are some benefits to sloth.

Last week at work, I unexpectedly won two tickets to the Bruce Springsteen concert. I haven’t been moved to buy tickets to see Springsteen since 1988, when I saw him as part of the line-up in the Amnesty International “Human Rights Now” tour in Philly. But I like Bruce — who doesn’t? — and maybe it was the “unexpected” part, or the “free” part, but I was unaccountably excited to see the show. He did not disappoint.

The Boss holds a special place in the lore of the small liberal-arts college where I did my undergrad. In 1974, before he made it big, he played our dining hall. Lord knows what he thought of the handful of preppy clones from the Land that F.M. Radio Forgot who turned out to see him. Bruce’s subsequent fame, of course, ensured that they never forgot him and guaranteed them a sure-fire cocktail-party story for years to come.

That was before my time. My college cohort also has a concert story, but one that lives in infamy. When I was a junior, the concert committee booked Stevie Ray Vaughan to play the spring festival, but they had to cancel him when the student body purchased only eight tickets. (I wasn’t one of them; I had neither the musical chops nor the $40 to spare.) Thus, we missed the opportunity to see one of the greatest rock guitarists before his death.

I had three goals for the big ten-mile race this year:

Let’s see how I did, shall we?

We started off slowly enough, thanks to the crowd. I had vowed to try to stay with my friends for at least a few miles, with a stretch goal of running at their 10-minute mile pace for the whole thing. So when they picked up the pace, so did I. I was feeling a bit winded already by the half-mile mark, when I told them I wanted to run on the right side of the street for a bit so I could wave to the kids as we passed my house. I moved to the right: no kids. I moved to the left: no friends. I picked up the pace even more, hoping to catch up with them, but they were nowhere to be found in the crowd. At the one-mile point I marked the split time with my watch and goggled when I saw 9:17:59 — much, much faster than I wanted to be.

I slowed down a bit but felt pressured by all the runners passing me. I knew from experience that by mile 7 many of them would be walking, while I would still be running, but I still didn’t feel like I could slow down to a comfortable pace. For mile 2, my pace was 9:30; mile 3, 10:11. I felt the worst between mile markers 3 and 4, just like last year, and finally decided I was going to have to slow way down or I wouldn’t be able to finish. I was hot and thirsty and rubber-legged and felt just generally weak and awful. I was cheered here and there by the appearance of my friend C., the one who said to me in April 2007, “We’re doing the 10-mile race this year,” who had run the race with me last year but damaged her ankle so badly during the race she hadn’t been able to run since. She was dashing around on her bike intercepting the runners here and there, shouting encouragement. I ran mile 4 at 11:09 and started to feel more of a rhythm. I finished mile 5 at 11:50 and panicked a bit — too slow! — but by then I was rounding the corner to The Hill and my only concern was getting up without stopping.

Hills have never bothered me; I grew up running hills, and I always treat them as something to get over as quickly as possible. I felt physically awful going up that hill, but I didn’t feel intimidated. When I got to the top, this sense of relief washed over me, but at the same time I felt like quitting. I wasn’t having fun. Running alone was not exhilarating; it seemed pointless. By now I had learned, through C., that one of my running buddies was about five minutes ahead of me, and the other about five minutes behind. At this point I thought seriously about running back to meet my friend. I turned around to see if I could spot her winding around the course, but my body recoiled at the thought of retracing a step.

My splits were getting slower and slower, but I still felt like I was working hard. My left foot and leg started cramping, something that had never happened to me in 25 years of running. Suddenly, I remembered that I had given up bananas that week in an effort to cut some calories. Now, I’ve eaten a banana almost every day for most of my life, and it wasn’t until that moment that I realized that the potassium was the only thing preventing my muscles from knotting up into big painful charleyhorses. Idiot!

I had reached the cool, shady part of the course where last year I had gotten a second wind. It was about this point that C. caught up with me again. She could see that I was hurting, and she rode alongside me for the remaining four miles, keeping up a steady stream of conversation and organizing all the people she recognized along the race route to cheer for me, personally, by name. Might I have finished without her? Maybe. Would I have had any fun without her? Definitely not. She totally got me through it, and I was grateful that I got a chance to “run” it with her again.

I finished in 1:50 and change, an eleven-minute pace. When I got home and looked up the results, I saw that this year I was not dead last in the Middle Aged Fat Lady division; I was 88th out of 91. Whoo-hoo! Also, I beat one of the deputies that C. and I smoked during the Frigid Fiver two years ago, and this year I had the pleasure of beating the county sheriff as well.

I may be a Middle Aged Fat Lady, but I can still outrun the Law.