From the Writing Marathon

Stop #1: The Conservatory

So that’s how a banana grows?  The first bunch really took me by surprise, but the second, larger one looked more like what I’m used to, sitting green on the produce counter.  Only it still looks upside down.  Seeing the bananas on the tree is only slightly less revelatory to me than when I learned last month that asparagus grows in single stalks right out of the dirt, like a bunch of dead guy’s fingers.

I don’t necessarily like agrarian metaphors for education—though they are markedly less offensive than ones out of medicine or business—but I can’t help comparing what I’m thinking right now, seeing what that bunch of bananas looks like in process—to what it’s been like over the past 10 years learning how little humans acquire language and learn to represent their speech and thoughts through writing.

As a grown-up who taught almost-grown-ups for so long, that developmental mystery and miracle was hidden to me.  It’s so much easier to appreciate the work adolescent writers do when you have even some understanding of what they went through to get there.

And I much prefer to think of kids as that bunch of bananas, growing together even if upside down, than as those lonely asparaguses.

Stop #2: The Idea Garden, but still inspired by the Conservatory

I have not thought of hens and chicks (properly called sempre vivum) for over thirty years.  The only other place I can remember seeing or hearing about them was in my grandma’s yard, growing in a few pots in front of her house on Cleveland Ave. in Rochelle, Illinois.

The back yard adjoined the far end of a golf course, though at that age all I knew of golf was the occasional ball that made its way near the chain link fence.  Much more memorable was the ancient Carmen’s shingled doghouse, which I would climb atop like Snoopy and Woodstock did.  Side note:  I would find Carmen’s sun-baked poop and think it came out hard and white.  Just like her.

Across the front yard was Connoly Park, which featured a gate mounted to a pole, made to swing around on.  I also remember banks of snow piled high, reaching up past her large front window.  I’m pretty sure I’m really just remembering a photograph.

And visiting in my new brown winter coat, with a hood and football patch, being pleased that she said I looked like a teddy bear.  I had no idea what a heart attack was, but I knew that’s why we were there, on such short notice and so late at night.

Stop #3: Caffe Paradiso

Cafe culture is bizarre to me, kind of appealing, the idea of habitually sitting and talking and reading and writing.  Sounding a little like the Summer Institute now that I put it into words.

But I feel culturally conditioned to think there’s something wrong with this.  Shouldn’t everyone be somewhere, somewhere else, like working?

I’m horrible at relaxing.  The idea of a few unstructured days without any tasks due or deadlines looming kind of terrorizes me.  This, I realize, is a me problem.  I do better when I’m with my son; I can throw a football or swim for an hour.  But there I still feel like I’m getting something done, being with him and “doing parenting.”

Am I being too honest about this neurosis?

My favorite vacations are to cities, where the pace picks up and there’s more to do.  A week at a beach and I have no idea what to do.  The beachiest I get is a day at Coney Island, with its Russian immigrant  retiree sunbathers and beaches that are at least as much broken glass as they are sand … and a thirty minute ride on the Q train back to the city.

2013 Writing Marathon

Stop One: Krannert Art Museum Mogalakewena

Counterpoints / Moshekwa Langa: Mogalakwena. On exhibition at Krannert Art Museum.

Is clutter art?  Minus the Barbies and the balls of strewn yarn, this room could be my living room.  Piles of books with post-its sticking out of them, tennis and soccer balls, lamps without shades, and toy plastic animals.  It’s too close to home.

I know I’m never going to stop having lots of stuff, too much stuff.  And I know that there is room in my house not being used wisely at all.  But I’m also not one of those people who gets struck very often by the urge to organize, or to feel especially fulfilled when things are tidy.  (It won’t last long; I know this.)

Seeing the mess made public, though, does bring up enough latent shame to make me feel like I should do something about my piles of piles as soon as I get home.  Even if it’s just giving my mess a title.

Stop Two: Business Instructional Facility

The atrium at the inventively named Business Instructional Facility.

As I stand looking out over the railing into the cavernous glass-encolsed space, an old urge strikes me.  It would be so amazing to jump from this ledge, to fling myself into space and start swinging from the tantalizingly hung lights.  I say urge, but it’s mostly video game induced fantasy.  Haven’t you gotten really close to an edge, though, and felt more than a little interested, compelled, to try the big what if?  No suicidal tendencies here, just a temporary short in the reptilian self-preservation system.  And haven’t you felt something similar in an incredibly awkward or boring public speaking setting?  There’s that nearly uncontrollable desire to shout something ridiculous in a funny voice.

Stop Three: Courtyard between Architecture Bldg and DKH

In a few limited places on campus, if I zoom in  just right and find a way to ignore everything beyond the narrow scope (looking really closely at a slate roof, a brick chimney, and a white window frame did it this time), I can be reminded of a summer I spent in England on the campus of Cambridge.

A forbidding hedge around a neighboring building was my original cue.  But the sprigs poking up from it and the ill-tended grass beyond it broke the spell, and quickly.

A sunken doorway with cracked and peeling paint, flanked on either side by now green copper lanterns works, too.  Until you hear the splash (and smell of chlorine) of the shopping mall brick fountain.  No need for artificial waterworks when your dorm is steps from the banks of the river Cam.

St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge.

Stop Four: Along Sixth St., approaching Murphy’s

Having lived in Champaign-Urbana since 1994, now more than half my life, I have a certain affinity for this place.  Especially campus, which is a world so unlike what I had known before.  When I look on a building that’s been built since I’ve been here, I think about how this space changes over time.  And I wonder especially about what it would have been like to be here when campus was actively encroaching on and integrating residential space.  I like the fact that nestled between institutional brick megabuildings, there are these former homes.  Though their siding is now vinyl, no more wood, and a brown metal sign announces their purpose from the yard, you know at one point these streets were lined not just with classrooms and offices, but with families and their homes.