Frankenstein Sundae: 8

Title page from 1818 edition,
published anonymously

Volume I begins with a series of letters from Robert Walton, an explorer, to his married sister. He explains his plans for polar expedition. In his fourth letter, now in the far north, Walton tells his sister about a “being” of “gigantic stature” that he glimpsed out on the ice—and then recounts the later rescue of a wretched man, whom Walton subsequently takes aboard his ice-bound ship and befriends. The wretched man is Victor Frankenstein. Greatly weakened by his ordeal in the icy wilderness, Victor tells his long story to Walton, who, later, each night in his own quarters, writes down (for us!) what he has heard.

Victor tells about his boyhood in Geneva, Switzerland. He has two younger brothers—Ernest and William. Also living with their prosperous family is his first cousin Elizabeth Lavenza. Joining the household later is Justine Moritz, an orphan girl, who becomes a servant. And we also meet Henry Clerval, Victor’s longtime friend. Victor becomes interested in science—and, specifically, in the science of life—and begins conducting primitive experiments. When Victor is seventeen, he goes to the university at Ingolstadt, Germany, where he studies chemistry. And he makes a discovery: the chemical origin of life.

In Chapter IV comes one of the most famous moments in literary history: Victor brings his creature to life. But he is horrified by what he has created. Assembled from parts of cadavers, the creature is eight feet tall. Victor leaves his rooms in a feverish disgust. His friend Clerval, who has come to Ingolstadt to visit, takes Victor in and nurses him to health. When Victor later returns to his own residence, he sees the creature has disappeared.

Time passes—more than a year and a half. And then Victor gets a horrifying letter from home: His little brother William has been murdered. A distraught Victor heads for home, and in a storm sees his creature, but before he can pursue it, it swiftly scales a mountain and disappears. When Victor arrives home, he sees that cousin Elizabeth has become a lovely young woman—and discovers, to his horror, that the authorities have charged Justine, the maid, with William’s murder. She’s innocent, of course; we know who’s done the deed. But Justine—terrified and counseled by a priest—confesses, and Volume I ends with the imminent execution of Justine.

Volume II begins with more of Victor’s depression. His father urges all to go to nearby Chamonix, a lovely alpine valley and community featuring what was (in pre-global warming days) one of Europe’s most formidable glaciers. Exploring the glacier alone one day, Victor sees his creature again, who this time approaches Victor and begs him to listen to his story. Victor consents, and the creature’s tale consumes the rest of Volume II. The creature, by the way, is extraordinarily articulate. “I ought to be thy Adam,” he says; “but I am rather the fallen angel …. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.”

The creature recalls how he found ill-fitting clothing in Victor’s place and fled into the countryside, where he found a large cloak. People ran from him, drove him away. He found a hovel attached to a cottage where he concealed himself and began aiding the poor resident family (without their knowledge). Helping the situation: The old man living there was blind. Spying on these people, the creature learned languages; he learned to read (and manages all of Paradise Lost); he learned about social classes and conventions. He resolved to join the family, thinking he could first endear himself to the blind man, but when he did so, the others returned unexpectedly, were horrified, and drove him away. In a rage he burned their cottage, then decided to find Victor in Geneva. But he came across William first, who screamed; the creature, attempting to silence him, choked the little boy to death, then planted evidence on sleeping Justine to frame her. The creature tells Victor now—out on the glacier—that he wants Victor to make a mate for him. Then he will be happy and will fly the society of people. Victor reluctantly agrees.

Volume III commences in Geneva, some weeks later, and Victor has still not begun to fulfill his promise. There is talk of a marriage to his cousin Elizabeth. He agrees, happily, but knows he must first go back and create a mate for the creature. He travels with his friend Clerval into England, then, alone to the Orkney Islands (off the northern coast of Scotland). There, he begins the creation of the mate but soon has doubts: He fears they will produce a “race of devils … who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror.” And so he tears his creation to pieces.

Outside, watching, out of Victor’s sight and knowledge, his original creature, is now fully enraged with what he’s witnessed. He confronts and curses Victor, warning him: “I will be with you on your wedding-night.”  Back in England, authorities show Victor the body of Clerval, murdered by the creature. Victor’s father comes to England to journey with his grieving son back to Geneva.

The night of the wedding, Victor prowls around outside, just to make sure. He hears a scream inside. He rushes in, finds his bride lying dead, the creature grinning at the window. He rushes back to tell his father, who promptly suffers a stroke and dies a few days later. Victor vows to pursue, find, and destroy his creature. And so begins the long chase that culminates with the scene on the ice that began the book.

            In another series of letters we learn that Victor is dying. When he does so, the creature enters the ship’s cabin and talks with Robert Walton. “Am I to be thought the only criminal,” he asks, “when all human kind sinned against me?” He vows to flee civilization and destroy himself in a fire. The last we see of him he is on an ice-floe. “He was soon borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and distance”—these, the final words of the novel.

Sirens and Storms

We live right across the street from the old Hudson Town Hall. On the roof is the town's storm siren.  In the picture you can see it on the roof. We generally don't have much trouble hearing it: When it's operating, you see, we can't hear another thing until it runs out of steam or terror or whatever animates it.

Last evening--with many tornado warnings in the area--it went off. And Joyce and I padded down to the basement, where the spiders and other residents were alarmed to see us. This is their home, not ours! We waited awhile (the siren ceased), then headed back upstairs, figuring it was better to be whirled off with Dorothy and Toto than to be in that dank basement another moment

I grew up in Oklahoma (1944-1952, 1953-1956) and the Texas Panhandle (1952-53)--Tornado Alley--where I spent a lot of springtime worrying about tornadoes. We had drills at school, which were remarkably similar to the atomic bomb drills (crouch under your desk). Even at age 8 I knew these drills were pointless, but at least we were doing something, which, generally, is better than nothing.

I never saw a tornado in Tornado Alley. I did see some pretty terrifying skies, which would boil red and green (hard to believe, but true). And tornadoes were always smacking folks in communities around us. But somehow we escaped.

In 1985, when I was teaching at Harmon Middle School in Aurora, Ohio, we were setting up for our annual 8th Grade Farewell-to-Harmon Show, about an hour before the 7:30 curtain. I heard noise, went to the back door, looked up and saw a fearsome cloud passing over the school. Shortly afterwards a large tornado (F5) touched down in nearby Newton Falls and did terrific damage--though no one was killed. And our show went on.

Newton Falls High School
after the May 31, 1985, tornado

(YouTube Video about Newton Falls tornado.)

That was as close as I've ever come ...

Last night (Monday) I watched the TV news and was struck by the coverage--four solid hours on the Cleveland stations. Lots of Doppler radar and weather people improvising. No twisters had actually touched down; no damage was reported (at least during the time I watched)--just lots of wind and rain and lightning. And sirens. But the stations kept telling people in various communities to go to their basements or "safe places"--and to wear bicycle helmets, if possible.

I know that the chances of a twister dancing down your specific street are slight--virtually nil, really. Still, when that siren goes off--right across the street!--and the sky is too dark to see much? Well, it's time to go visit the spiders, clutch your loved ones, and, later, to thank your lucky stars.

Frankenstein Sundae: 7

Villa Diodati; Geneva, Switzerland
1816--summer home of Lord Byron--
where Mary Godwin (later, Mary Shelley)
first told the story of Frankenstein

III: The Plot of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Readers who know the story of the original novel and its composition should skip this chapter and advance to the next section. For others, this quick summary will add both information and context to all that follows.

Mary Shelley began the original story in 1816 when she was nineteen years old, still named Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, though she was estranged from her father and had not spoken to him since her elopement with Bysshe Shelley two years earlier. Unmarried, she was living openly with Shelley and had delivered two of his children—an unnamed daughter died two months after her birth on 22 February 1815; son William was born 24 January 1816. Mary had gone to Switzerland in the summer of 1816 with Bysshe and her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, and little William, only five months old, in pursuit of Lord Byron, who had impregnated Claire (he was as yet unaware of this) and was living in Villa Diodati, a villa that still stands on Lake Geneva, a bit northeast, up the lakeshore from the city of Geneva.

The Shelley party rented a house near Byron’s and quickly became friends with their celebrity neighbor. The weather was stormy that summer, principally due to the eruption in April 1815 of Mt. Tambora in Indonesia, among the most powerful eruptions in history. Thousands died. The vast cloud of ash and gas circling the earth affected weather and crops around the world. American farmers saw spring crops ruined by ice and frost and snow—into June.

In Geneva, spectacular thunderstorms over the lake and mountains dazzled residents and visitors. But the weather forced folks inside, much more than they would have preferred on this, a supposed summer’s holiday. And it was on one of these dreary days that Byron proposed that each of them write a ghost story. And Mary—after a few frustrating and unproductive days—came up with the idea for Frankenstein, about a man creating life. Originally, she’d intended it to be only a short story, but Bysshe encouraged her to transform it into a novel, which she did, with his light editorial help and buoyant enthusiasm, publishing it anonymously near New Year’s 1818.

There were two subsequent revisions. In 1823, Mary’s father (they’d been reconciled for a while) arranged for a new edition of the novel to appear because of the excitement about a new dramatization of the story; he—an experienced novelist—made some changes in the story, changes that Mary recognized as improvements. And in 1831, revising the novel for a new edition, Mary kept her father’s alterations and added a number of her own, as well. Many critics believe her 1831 version is inferior to the earlier ones. The summary below is based on the 1818 edition, which was published in three volumes, standard practice for full-length novels in her day.

Mother's Day--2014

Mom's high school yearbook
photo (senior year), 1936,
Richmond, Va.

A couple of years ago I did a post about my mom on Mother's Day, and I think it's worth re-posting. She is 94 now, and her world continues to shrink. She was a vigorous, intellectual woman; when she was in her 70s, living in Oregon, she would hike the mountain and coastal trails with her friends. She read every spare moment. She worked in her garden, cooked, did community service--a wonderful woman, all the way 'round.

Now, she's living in Lenox, Mass., in an assisted living unit (barely) and is in a wheelchair. She has lost the ability to use her computer (she was the first in our family to have one); she sometimes forgets how to answer and/or hang up the phone. She can turn her TV on and off--but is not too sure about changing channels. It's hard for her to generate conversation (though she responds well to things that others say--example: the other day, on the phone, I told her that Joyce was teaching a class now; Mom said, "I'm sure she's doing wonderfully well." And I said: "She always does--except when choosing a husband." Mom laughed, said, "No one's perfect."). She can no longer read much; she pages through magazines, the local newspaper.

When I originally posted this--just two years ago--she was still able to get about with a walker and was living in the "independent living" area of the stages-of-care place where she is.

But she still loves to laugh with her sons, daughters-in-law, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. 

She was/is a wonderful woman--though during my high school years (as this piece records) I was an idiot and didn't recognize how fortunate I was ...

Monday, May 14, 2012

Why Does My Mother Still Speak to Me?

When I was in high school, I once went to a Tribe double-header with friend Johnny Kelker.  When we got home, I found out it was Mother's Day.

When I was in high school, I once tossed a couch pillow at my brother Dave.  I misfired.  It hit an antique lamp with a Tiffany shade that showed prairies and mountains.  The lamp had belonged to my mother's uncle Bill.  The lamp toppled to the floor, the glass shade breaking into a score of pieces.

When I was in high school, I decided my mother didn't understand me.  So I quit speaking to her, tried to avoid being in the room with her.

When I was in high school, I had my mom's car out on a date.  I decided it was a good night to "park" up on cemetery road in Hiram.  It was January.  The drifts were chest high.  I got about 200 feet before the car stopped and would not budge.  My girlfriend and I had to walk back to her house (about a mile, in bitter cold); then I had to walk home, wake up my parents, and tell them what I'd done.  They called a tow truck.  It got stuck before it could reach the car.  Which stayed out on the road all night.  Next day, a township snowplow got to it, pulled it out.

When I was in high school, my mother (a high school English teacher in Garrettsville) had her school newspaper staff over on a Saturday morning to work on editing some stories.  When I passed through the dining room (where they were working), she asked me if I'd go get the thesaurus.  I said I didn't know that that was.  And headed on out the door.

When I was in high school ...

I was an asshole.

I eventually matured, in some ways--I got older, anyway.  That's something, right?

I've spent a lot of years--decades, really--trying to atone for those long-ago misdeeds.  My mother certainly deserved none of it.  She is quite a woman.

Her father was a minister, seminary professor, author; her mother was among the finest women I've ever known--a farm girl from Austintown, Ohio, who had more talents than I can even name.  My mom's brother became a minister and seminary professor and author.

Mom married my dad in 1939; she had just turned twenty.  When Dad went off to World War II, she had a young son, Dickie (1941), and I was on the way (1944).  Fortunately, she could live with her parents there in Enid, and they were an enormous help with two little ones.  Dad came home from the war--another son arrived in 1947.  So now there were three little boys running around, each very different from the other.

Meanwhile, my mom had finished her bachelor's degree at Vanderbilt (before sons arrived to ruin all--for a while).  And she began teaching part-time at Enid's Emerson Junior High School--but not until all the boys were in school.

When we moved to Hiram in the summer of 1956, she taught full time at Garfield High School in Garrettsville, got a master's at Kent, a Ph.D. at Pitt.  Published articles and books.  Managed my father--who, to his credit, encouraged her tirelessly--dealt with three sons, two of whom (the older two) became increasingly assholeian in adolescence.

In 1966, the year I graduated from college, the year Dave graduated from high school, my parents both took jobs at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, and began enjoying the happiest, most productive years of their lives.

Was it a coincidence that the three boys were gone?

When they retired, they built a little place out in Cannon Beach, Oregon, where they lived happily until medical problems began their attack on my father.  They moved to Massachusetts, to be closer to my two brothers.  And my mother took care of Dad--for years with very, very little help--as he made the decline from cane to walker to wheelchair.  It wasn't until the very end, when he was absolutely helpless, that he moved to a nursing facility.  His mental acuity had also softened; his last few years he talked about food, the weather, his car, football.  That was it.  My mother listened to his same expressions and stories, over and over and over again.

My mother was always physically active.  When they were in Oregon, she and her friends regularly hiked the trails along the coast.

She hates being the way she is now, at 92.  She can walk only very slowly.  With a cane.  Getting out of a chair, across the room, is a wrenching effort.  Making her bed can take an hour.  But she will not go to assisted living.  Will not go gentle into that good night.

And so I remember forgotten Mother's Days and slighted birthdays and insults and rudeness and cruelty and neglect with the most piercing regret and an unrelenting self-loathing.  Who was that person I was?

When I was in high school, I had a wonderful mother.  And I am soaringly grateful that I have had the opportunity to tell her so for the ensuing fifty years.

Postscript: When my mother was teaching at Drake University, she taught herself Greek and began leading groups of public school teachers to Greece in the summers. So phenomenally energetic and ambitious she was ... I know that I absorbed from her so many lessons about what it takes to be a teacher. But, of course, I credited mostly myself for a while ... isn't that what we so often do? Credit ourselves for our virtues, blame our parents for our vices?

Message Mom wrote to me
in my baby book, 1944.

Mom with newborn me and brother Richard,
late 1944

Mother's Day 2013

Reading Smollett

A couple of days ago I finished the book you see pictured here--Tobias Smollett's The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751). Smollett (1721-1771) was born and lived in Scotland, and I can't really remember why I started reading his books.

Tobias Smollett

Maybe because I'd just finished reading all of Thackeray? And I needed another Old Guy to read? (I'd already "done" Dickens and Trollope.) Probably. I've just gotten in the habit of having an Old Guy novel on my nightstand--and it's always the first book I read a bit of each night. (As I've written here before, I usually have a half-dozen or so books on my nightstand; I try to read a chapter or so in each one each night--don't always manage to do so, but I'm pretty good.) Some of the chapters were amazingly long. One of them ("Memoirs of a Lady of Quality," LXXXVIII) consumes over 100 pages, and there's another 40-pager near the end.

Pickle is 781 pages long. I began it on June 27, 2013, and finished on May 7, 2014--that's not exactly speed reading, I know, but Smollett hardly invites such an activity. His sentences are long--as are his paragraphs, many of which are a half-page long or longer (small print, too!). Fast reading causes me to miss things in such a book, so I don't try to do it.

a fairly typical page or two of Smollett

Pickle tells the story of its eponymous "hero," who's not really much of a hero--not at first. He's a spoiled young man with a temper who gets in trouble at school--and later on. He loves practical jokes (some border on cruelty), sex (ah, youth!), and spending money (which gets him in lots of trouble). He's also incredibly gullible and others cheat him out of his money, and he ends up broke and in the Fleet, where he finally learns a little humility and humanity.

Then ... a ship comes in (literally); some convenient people die (leaving him well set again); a long-ago lover returns. All's well that ends well, as someone once said.

Smollett has a sharp wit and eye. I like this little comment not far from the end when a woman he knows learns of his financial fall ...

Notwithstanding this interruption, she still retained a friendship and regard for his character, and felt all the affliction of a humane heart, at the news of his misfortunes and deplorable distemper. She had seen him courted and cultivated in the sunshine of his prosperity; but she knew, from sad experience, how all those insect-followers shrink away in the winter of distress. Her compassion represented him as a poor unhappy lunatic, destitute of all the necessaries of life, dragging about the ruins of human nature, and exhibiting the spectacle of blasted youth to the scorn and abhorrence of his fellow-creatures. Aching with these charitable considerations, she found means to learn in what part of the town he lodged and, laying aside all superfluous ceremony, went in a hackney-chair to his door ... (673).

I love that phrase "insect-followers"; some things never change.

Smollett didn't live very long and wrote other things beside novels. I've started reading his next novel--The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753) and then will have only The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) remaining. Then, I guess, I'll have to find another Old Guy to read.

Frankenstein Sundae: 6

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Not long after I retired from Aurora in January 1997, I began keeping a journal. I’d done this sporadically throughout the years— though never too assiduously (a failure I deeply regret)—and I started slowly, almost hesitantly, on 8 February. At first, I used just the calendar feature of WordPerfect, and every day I would jot in the space allowable some things I’d done that day. No reflection, no elaboration—basically, a list of activities. Soon, though, I’d shifted to a regular document format, a practice I’ve continued.

But then I read about Mary Shelley’s father—William Godwin—who kept a diary throughout his adult life. I read that he always left his diary open, on his desk, adding events as they happened throughout the day. That seemed like a good idea. And I’ve been doing the cyber-equivalent since the late 1990s, keeping my journal file open on my computer, adding to it all day long.

My first Mary Shelley entry is 10 February 1997, less than a month after I retired. That day, I noted, Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality, 1989, the first of the many—okay, all—Shelley biographies I would read. And, because this was the first, every page taught me something I had not known. I underlined her text heavily. I see on that February calendar that I was simultaneously reading other Shelley-related texts, among them the journal of Dr. John Polidori, Byron’s personal physician, who was with the group during the Frankenstein summer in Geneva, 1816. Polidori—only twenty at the time—joined the famous ghost story-writing competition and later, after Byron fired him (thinking young Polidori was too uppity—which he was), he published the first vampire novel in English, The Vampyre (1819—are you grateful, oh you fans of Bram Stoker, Anne Rice, Stephenie Meyer, and True Blood?), and another tale of the supernatural, Ernestus Berchtold; or, The Modern Oedipus (also 1819). Miserable Polidori, 25, took his own life—by poison—in August 1821—“Poor Polidori is gone!” said Byron when he heard the news.

I was reading Emily W. Sunstein’s biography,

After I finished Sunstein’s biography (as well as her A Different Face: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft, 1975), I wrote her a fan letter on 14 May 1997. I was ebullient about my new pursuit, and were I not too old to blush, I would do so now as I revisit my opening paragraph in the Sunstein letter:

I have just recently read your biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft and of Mary Shelley and just wish you to know how very much I admire your work. Your research is meticulous, your narration clear, your judgments cool, precise, and verifiable. You have helped readers understand these two remarkable figures by doing your best to display the events of their lives without projecting them through the distorting lenses of personal philosophy or political bias.

I went on, strewing more such flowers on my florid path—then ended with this:

Thank you again for your terrific scholarship; it has cleared the trail for others, and I hope, as I begin down that trail (I just finished Valperga and The Last Man [other novels by Mary Shelley]), that I can bring to the subject some of your skill and devotion to detail.

Two weeks later—on 31 May—a reply from Emily Sunstein. She thanked me for my interest, told me about some recent research she’d been doing, some things she’d found out about Mary, and ended: Thanks again for your particularly gratifying letter, and warm wishes for your continued success. Oh, was I happy!  A Shelley scholar had written to me!  Had appreciated my words!

Like a schoolboy who’s just learned that—yes!—that little red-haired girl does like him, I swiftly replied, and we exchanged a few more letters before our correspondence dwindled, then died. In my last letter to her (on 25 May 1999) I responded to her comment that she hadn’t been feeling well. She’d said she had a chronic illness and had ended her letter with a word about her current project, a book about siblings: hoping the present remission will continue long enough for me to finish.

Today, 17 August 2011, writing this, curious, I decide to check on her. Google quickly escorts me to the New York Times. To her obituary. Emily W. Sunstein died at age 82, on 27 April 2007, of autoimmune vasculitis, an inflammation of the blood vessels, says the Times. (Link to her obituary.) There is nothing in the obituary about her siblings book. Nor does Amazon list anything other than her Shelley and Wollstonecraft titles. I look in my journal: On 27 April 2007, the day of that obituary, I was finishing Anna Karenina and—swear to God—that very day had read of Anna’s death.

Once I finished Sunstein’s books—and once I siphoned the fuel from her bibliography—I roared off in my own Shelleymobile down the freeway of my research … which, I soon learned, was no speedway at all, but a maze, a labyrinth featuring many exits, service plazas, rest areas, detours, dead ends, and dangers. And even a few inviting off ramps that led to nowhere. I explored them all.

Teacher Appreciation Week Redux

This has been Teacher Appreciation Week. I was going to write a post about it--then remembered that I did one last year. I read it over--didn't see much I'd add--so here it is again, only slightly modified ... with some additional thoughts at the end. In red!

Teacher Appreciation Week is nearly over.  It's a week with a long, long history, all the way back to the 1980s.  No one appreciated teachers before then.  Or since, really.

Oh, sure, there are those special teachers in our lives, the ones we'll never forget.  I have a handful--from elementary through graduate school, people who made an enormous difference in my life, who, in one way or another, believed in me, helped me believe in myself.  How can you ever "appreciate" something like that?  An apple?  A gift card to Starbucks?  No, all you can really do is hope you get around to telling those people before it's too late.  I missed on a few, realizing only after the person's death that I'd never really thanked him or her.  It's a terrible feeling, knowing you can never thank someone.

Of course, I also had teachers who were special in a negative way, people I will not forget because they were cruel or grotesquely incompetent.  We've all had some of those.  And there were also many who didn't really affect me at all, one way or another.  We were in a room together for a while.  We got along all right.  We forgot each other pretty quickly thereafter.

From the very beginning of my public school teaching career (1966-1978, 1982-1997) I experienced students and parents who were very appreciative.  The parents told me so; some even wrote notes (which I still have).  I was fortunate enough to encounter some folks who saw I was trying to do good things--even when I failed to accomplish them.  And I have to say that throughout that time I had very few students who persistently gave me a hard time.  But there were some.  Of course there were some.  Just as I'm sure there were some who despised me and my classes.  No one is right for everyone.  Didn't you have that experience as a student?  Liking a teacher your friends didn't?  Hating a teacher they loved?

I also had--throughout my career--parents who gave me a hard time.  Who complained about grades.  Or something I said.  Or something I had the kids read--or write about.  At some parent conferences I saw red, angry faces, heard hurtful words.  (Remember the moment from The Taming of the Shrew when Kate's father warns Petruchio, "But be thou arm'd for some unhappy words"?  An understatement for a teacher's conference.)  In 1982, the year I returned to Aurora after a four-year absence, the school board approved my return by an overwhelming vote of 3-2.  I was fortunate to have three-fifths of the Board appreciate me!

In later years when kids started doing evaluations of their teachers, I would always have a few who zinged me for this or that.  Fair enough.  And often deserved.  After a while, though, I quit reading them (the good, the bad, the ugly).  I was always much harder on myself than my students were.  I always knew what I could have done better, knew where I'd screwed up, knew which kids I'd failed to reach--and why.  It made for some long, regretful summers.  Some vows to do better the next year.

And then the next year came, and I made some different mistakes, screwed up in some novel ways.  Another regretful summer.  More vows.  And on and on until I retired (for the final time!) in June 2011.  I had great fun with my last classes--but there are some things I would do differently, if I could.  There were some things I said I wish I hadn't, some things I didn't say I wish I had, some gestures made and unmade ... You know ...

I wouldn't want to be a public school teacher right now--not in this era of education = test-preparation.  I look back at all the great teachers I had, and I know that the influences they had on me--and on my classmates--would have been greatly diminished if test scores had been a principal concern for them. 

The teachers I appreciated--and continue to appreciate as I type these words--were the ones who taught me to care about something, who showed me how to do something, who got me to love something I never thought I would, who recognized my abilities and made me feel good about them, who showed me how exciting an intellectual life can be--a life of reading, thinking, writing, traveling.  Who showed me the wonders of this world--and then taught me there were far, far more of them out there, waiting for me.  And all I had to do was to get myself ready.

Some Thoughts Afterwards: I actually have been quite overwhelmed--in these days of Facebook and email and Lord-know-what-else--by the expressions of appreciation I've received from former students--and colleagues. Just this week I got the kindest (snail-mail) note from a colleague from years ago who just wanted to say some nice things. Nice things are nice to hear, aren't they? Especially from nice people. (My high school English teacher, Mr. Brunelle, hated the word nice and did not allow it in our compositions. Nice.)

Anyway, I detected a bit of a dismal tone in some of this post, and I don't really feel that way ... all the time. I am always moved by the kind (nice?) words of former students--especially as the years roll along, and all our lives just ... tangle with complication.