The semester is over. My final grades are filed. A week from tomorrow I leave for California to visit the family and some friends. Though I’ve temporarily left a number of boxes of things like books and cooking utensils in Buffalo, the bulk of my belongings are now here in Chautauqua. I let myself sleep in until half-past nine this morning, the longest night’s sleep since I can remember when, and I needed it. Today feels like the first day of Christmas vacation, which for me, it is, although there is certainly work to be done and a few catering events with a friend in the Jamestown area before I leave. It doesn’t just feel like the end of the semester; it feels like the end of 2008.
Since my vacation in New York City at the end of June, I really have been moving and changing and moving again and changing again more or less non-stop. It makes me happy that said vacation was so relaxing and indulgent. Since July I’ve done the following:
1. Started working on the Spencer workshops in Chautauqua
2. Stopped working for the workshops in Chautauqua.
3. Stopped working at the restaurant in Clarence where I was hired way back in the summer.
4. Stopped working for my brother.
5. Started teaching at Niagara University.
6. Started spending 3-4 days a week down in Jamestown.
7. Split off from the Elmwood writing group.
8. Bought a car.
9. Became friends and housemates with someone I didn’t really know before.
10. Celebrated a significant personal landmark (sorry, it’s really that private).
11. And turned forty-five this past Sunday.
When I look at the list, I think, Was all that so much? Those are actually all fairly large and important changes, and I’ve logged nearly 5500 miles on that car since September 12, when I secured it. One resolution for the new year is to drive less. Way less. If I never see the Thruway again it won’t be soon enough.
Only about six weeks ago, at the end of October, a friend proposed that I consider starting a writing workshop on the grass-roots level in Chautauqua County. That was when things seemed possible that, due to the severity of the economic landscape, no longer seem possible not only for the short-term, but the middle-term. Though I had hoped to extricate myself or at the very least loosen my ties to the Spencer gradually, I ended up doing so more abruptly when I realized the situation there was becoming hopeless. I spent a couple of week exploring the idea of doing something in Chautauqua County, even going so far as to take a couple of meetings with various parties. At the same time, however, organizations and institutions in the Buffalo metro area showed continued interest in my professional services, and finally, the chair of the English department at Niagara responded that I could teach two classes there in the spring if I was interested. It took some thinking and talking to come to a decision, but I finally decided that Buffalo was continuing to provide me with opportunities (not to mention income) and that the challenges in Chautauqua would be hard and even unpredictable given the financial climate. When my friend raised the prospect of his moving to Buffalo rather than my doing something down here, I said that it had never occurred to me to ask whether such a thing interested him. So we will be looking for a house or apartment big enough to share come March, when his lease here ends. I’m pleased because this gets me back on the track I was on at the beginning of the summer, and though the path since then to now has been rocky and circuitous, it has been packed with experiences both personal and professional that I hope have left me wiser. They’ve certainly left me older!
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Friday, December 5, 2008
End of the Semester
Yesterday I taught my last classes of the semester. It was a comprehensive review prior to the final exam, and as I went down the list I’d prepared, I thought, my gosh, it’s been so long. The last time I had to worry about a fall semester final was nearly two decades ago. Now I get to be the one making the students worry. There were the usual moans and groans about the material, and everyone seems to want to know exactly what’s going to be on the exam. You want to tell them, but you want them to learn to study at the same time.
I taught The Piano Lesson by August Wilson for the drama component, which I’d chosen mostly because the play was written so recently, not because of race. But it worked out as a good counterpoint to current events in the country, and we even had a racial epithet scrawled on the pavement outside the Arts and Letters building the morning after the election. In my class we discussed (briefly) the N-word as used by the playwright and by the characters in the play. Niagara University is an extremely white, upper-class environment—I shouldn’t have been surprised, really—and though there are non-white students, there aren’t many. The school has nothing like the diversity of the schools in Buffalo proper and it should go without saying that my alma mater, Berkeley, is one of the most diverse schools in the country—so diverse that when I attended there was a kind of competition between ethnic populations to claim Most Marginalized and therefore Most Disenfranchised. (The Filipinos lead by vocal rather than other means, as I recall.) I had two African-American students in my first class, and when we discussed some of the themes and issues involved in the play, the silence and tension were the second-most palpable of the semester. (The classroom was mortuary-quiet for the lecture that covered Queer Theory.)
In my research for The Piano Lesson I was thrilled to discover that the Underground Railroad routes to Canada dropped right through the campus and down into the lower Niagara River gorge. I was able to point right out the window and say, There. There is where history happened.
I found myself suddenly plunged back into the ballet world this week. My brother’s school is doing their annual Nutcracker, and as a favor to family I offered to play one of the extras in the party scene.
Being back just for this small part reminds me that I haven’t missed being in the world that is their professional life. I worked hard to get out of one industry (hospitality) and in a rather short period of time have been welcomed into the one I’ve wanted to be in for so long, writing and teaching. Doing the work I did for them last year was something I did willingly, even gratefully, because they mean a lot to me and have done so much for me in the last couple years. As I came up the stairs into their second-floor studio, the smell of peanut-oil and rice flour wafting up from the Chinese restaurant at street level, and was inundated by the energy that is a Nutcracker rehearsal the week before it opens, I realized that I had truly made my own life here, that the business of the ballet school now means something different to me than it did a year ago.
I taught The Piano Lesson by August Wilson for the drama component, which I’d chosen mostly because the play was written so recently, not because of race. But it worked out as a good counterpoint to current events in the country, and we even had a racial epithet scrawled on the pavement outside the Arts and Letters building the morning after the election. In my class we discussed (briefly) the N-word as used by the playwright and by the characters in the play. Niagara University is an extremely white, upper-class environment—I shouldn’t have been surprised, really—and though there are non-white students, there aren’t many. The school has nothing like the diversity of the schools in Buffalo proper and it should go without saying that my alma mater, Berkeley, is one of the most diverse schools in the country—so diverse that when I attended there was a kind of competition between ethnic populations to claim Most Marginalized and therefore Most Disenfranchised. (The Filipinos lead by vocal rather than other means, as I recall.) I had two African-American students in my first class, and when we discussed some of the themes and issues involved in the play, the silence and tension were the second-most palpable of the semester. (The classroom was mortuary-quiet for the lecture that covered Queer Theory.)
In my research for The Piano Lesson I was thrilled to discover that the Underground Railroad routes to Canada dropped right through the campus and down into the lower Niagara River gorge. I was able to point right out the window and say, There. There is where history happened.
I found myself suddenly plunged back into the ballet world this week. My brother’s school is doing their annual Nutcracker, and as a favor to family I offered to play one of the extras in the party scene.
Being back just for this small part reminds me that I haven’t missed being in the world that is their professional life. I worked hard to get out of one industry (hospitality) and in a rather short period of time have been welcomed into the one I’ve wanted to be in for so long, writing and teaching. Doing the work I did for them last year was something I did willingly, even gratefully, because they mean a lot to me and have done so much for me in the last couple years. As I came up the stairs into their second-floor studio, the smell of peanut-oil and rice flour wafting up from the Chinese restaurant at street level, and was inundated by the energy that is a Nutcracker rehearsal the week before it opens, I realized that I had truly made my own life here, that the business of the ballet school now means something different to me than it did a year ago.
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