What I Did - and Didn't Do on My Summer Vacation

.

Having spent my entire life in the academic community the idea of “summer vacation” has remained more salient for me than for most adults.  Folks in the business community often hold this fantasy notion that those of us in education have the summer “off.”  Would that were so.  In reality - as I used to tell my junior colleagues - the quality of your Fall semester is determined by the time you put in preparing over the summer.  I never actually took a summer off. I taught summer school every year. It was an economic necessity, and in recent years, the students needed the summer school courses to meet their graduation target. But still in my life there was always this feeling of summer off even if the work load didn’t change.   

This summer was different. Since I am in “phased retirement” I don’t see students again until January. So for the first time since I was a student myself back in the mid-1970s, I actually had a summer off. I had big plans. Well, I actually had two plans. I was going to draw more. This was a particular challenge because, truth be told, I can’t draw. Oh, I can create sometimes pleasing images and enjoy doing so. What I mean when I say I can draw is I can look at something and create a recognizable recreation of the thing before me on paper or canvas.  So I was going try to take some steps toward that goal. My second big plan was to make significant progress on getting this blog into a manuscript form. The idea is to keep the original posts, no matter how embarrassing they might be in retrospect, but to clean up typos, etc.

So I packed up my necessary tools and tech and we took off to our home away from home up in Burr Ridge, IL, where Merle Smith, puts up with the chaos we bring along with a grace and generosity I hope one day to be able to emulate.  

Well as Bobby Burns put it, “The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft a-gley.” or, “If something can go wrong it will go wrong.” As you know from previous posts - I did not plan to get pneumonia and visit the hospital. But I did. That pretty well put the kibosh on the editing plans. There is something about wide-spectrum antibiotics and editing prose that just does not go together.  I did however, largely pre-pneumonia get some work done on the drawing so I thought I would share that with you. So:

The Drawing I Did on My Summer Vacation

First,  I had to decide it was I wanted to draw. Fortunately, there was this really lovely statute out side our bedroom door. At first I thought it was a copy of James Earle Fraser's, The End of the Trail. But a closer look reveals that it isn’t; no native American, no spear. But the influence is obvious. 

Still I liked it, so I decided I would draw that. Now the thing that always screwed me up with drawing was the idea of being exact, details, details, details.  So I decided that I wouldn’t “draw” the statue. Instead I would sketch it.  You know free your inner DaVinci, move the pencil quickly. Talk to the pencil - “No, don’t go there!” Erase, erase, brush brush away the crumbs.

Oh, by the way, I went Michaels and bought their cheapest 11x14 plastic frame and drew a grid of 1 inch squares on it, marked the center with a red dot.  Every once in awhile I would hold it up and center the dot on the small piece of masking tape I had used to mark the center of the statue. That let me keep the sketch in proportion. 

So I sketched and sketched and came up with this:

OK, not terrible, but I didn’t like the head, so I went over and looked straight down on the head from the top.  I didn’t like the tail either. So. Erase, erase, erase, brush, brush. Sketch, sketch. And, voila:

I still knew that this was never going to turn into a “realistic drawing” so I took my eraser and my brush and my black ultra thin Sharpie and turned the sketch into the cartoon type drawing that I had used in my coloring book “Color Me Chilled Out” [Still available in some stores and from the author - moi!] That created the next step:

Then I took my cool new even thinner black marker purchased at Blick’s Art supplies in Wheaton, IL where I think I have cousins, and began to add the geometric details that I would later color:

And then I began to color. Always having been a fan of Gustav Klimt, I added some metallic markers to my palette. They look neat in the sun. And I got to this point:

And then I got sick. I actually was feeling better the last couple of days before we left and did a bit on the more on the drawing, I look forward to getting back to it.

Editing the Wall? Hmm. Do you realize that the year 2006 alone is more than 500 pages long? Let me think a bit more on that!

.

All My Life

.

It is something all teachers eventually encounter. You are telling a student that you don’t write an academic essay in the first person. Or that you need to provide references for those “Obama Was Born in Nigeria, Trump is an ISIS Agent, Hillary Ran a Child Porn Ring Out of a Pizza Parlor in New Jersey, Putin is a Robot” stories. The standard response can spring from any number of classroom situations, but eventually this surfaces: “But I’ve done it this way all my life.”

They are truly unaware of the irony, that “all their life” from a “big picture, student in the real world perspective” is maybe 6 or 7 years. But you don’t hassle them about that, you just point out that there rules and conventions in academic writing that allow us to be sure that we are all speaking the same “language.”

It is a completely different dynamic when each person at the dinner table is looking back at an “all my life” of 50, 60, 70, even 80 or more years. Again the response can be motivated by any number of discussions, from the proper way to mix the salad dressing, to intricate issues of public policy, through the “do’s and don’ts” of child rearing. It is nonetheless the same response delivered with the same certainty as that of the college sophomore: I have done it this way all my life.

“All my life” is an incredibly powerful piece of evidence for each of us. It is the natural outgrowth of the notion that “experience is the best teacher.” The problem is that for both the college sophomore and life’s seniors “all my life” is utterly unique, as is the “truth” it seems to reflect. 

The problem, of course, is that my “truth” gained over the experiences of “all my life” is potentially “true” only for me. For example, somewhere back in my life I apparently had a bad experience with vinegar. Hence, I have not liked vinegar “all my life.” This “truth” expanded, perhaps purely rhetorically, to all things “vinegarish,” like “vinaigrette.” When it came to salad dressing, I was a Ranch or Caesar man. Had been “all my life.” Imagine my amazement when sitting in the Bacchanalia Italian Restaurant the other night here in Chicago, I filched a forkful of salad from my wife’s plate:

“Wow. That’s really good. What kind of dressing is that?”

“It’s really great isn’t it? It’s the house vinaigrette.”

An obvious lie. I don’t like vinaigrette. I haven’t liked it “all my life.”

So what lingering notions did I pack into my doggy bag along with my left over lasagna? (That is just a figure of speech. Vito, the big black dog, ain’t gettin’ none of this lasagna.) A few come to mind:

Experience is a wonderful teacher. It’s the whole “nothing teaches you not to touch a hot stove better than touching a hot stove” idea. But it is not always a totally reliable teacher. Somewhere back in my life, experience had taught me that I did not vinegar. As I said, I then expanded that to all things that sounded like vinegar. Hence, I came to pre-judge all things in that culinary-rhetorical category. Pull out the hyphen and we are right there cheek to jowl with prejudice.

That little exercise shows us that while the experiences of “all our life” can keep us from burning our fingers on the stove, it can also lure us down the slippery slope of becoming mindless vinegar haters.

So, how do we guard against being deceived by the seemingly solid evidence that we have gathered and lived by “all my life?” You will not be surprised by the notion that I look to the tenets of Distilled Harmony for guidance.

First, delightfully, “all my life” is still unfolding. This means that none of my experiential assumptions should have morphed into certainty. And that, of course, is the mistake made by both the college sophomore and life’s seniors; the notion that the repeated implications of life’s experiences have led to certainty. My pre-judgements accurate. All vinegar is bad. I possess truth.

On the other side of the ledger we encounter that the first and dominant tenet of Distilled Harmony is “foster harmony.”  Insisting on the veracity of the prejudices you have clung to “all my life” is the antithesis of fostering harmony. This does not mean that you necessarily acquiesce to the “all my life” verities of others, but it does require us to at least consider the notion that our own “almost certainties” still have room for amendments.

The challenge then is to persuade those involved in the dialogue - be they students or guests around the dining room table - to move along through the other tenets of Distilled Harmony: Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity, and Oppose Harm.

Give it a try. It sometimes works. Trust me on this. I have been doing it for several years of the last couple decades of all of my life. 

.

Body Talk

.

Maybe 4:30, maybe 2:30. Definitely AM.  Thunderstorm rolled through about an hour ago. Light around the windows. Could be the rosy-fingered dawn, the moon, or a streetlight.  Anyhow, .  .  .   

Body: Yo, Roberto! You awake? 

Me: Go away. 

Body: Come on guy, rise and shine! 

Me: Go away. 

Body: Time to get cracking.  It’s you and me, buddy. One for both or whatever.

Me: Do you know how much I hate you? 

Body:  Is that any way to talk, after all I’ve done for you?

Me: All you have done for me!? 

Body: Well, you’ve lost ten pounds right? How long have you been trying to do that?

Me: This is not exactly the diet I had in mind! 

Body: And you're feeling better right? 

Me: Of course, I’m feeling better. That’s what is supposed to happen when you do time in the hospital. You just lay there with wide-spectrum antibiotics dripping into your arm. I was just bored and groggy. No big victory for you.

Body: Picky, picky. But, hey!  Remember the sixties? California? Good times then, dude! 

Me: I don’t mean to seem ungrateful - but that was more than half a century ago! 

Body: True, but we still some great times not that long ago. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge!

Me: How about we step off memory lane for a moment and focus on the last decade? Multiple myeloma, back surgery, two stem cell transplants, and now this dollop of pneumonia?  And speaking of the pneumonia, what was with those dreams?! I mean people I never knew and places I have never seen before! 

Body: Yeah, well, technically, dreams are not part of my portfolio. 

Me: What? 

Body: Your dreams are actually designed and implemented by a multi-member existential panel whose membership is somewhat fluid . . . 

Me: WHAT!? 

Body: Oops. I really shouldn’t say any more . . . Probably said too much all ready. 

Me: No, wait. Tell me more about this dream panel. 

Body: Listen, you should probably rest. I’m tired, and if I’m tired - hey, hey, you’re tired. Am I right, or am I right? I’ll stop back later. 

Me: No, hold on a second, what do you mean you’ve said to much already? 

Body: Really tired man, we’ll talk more when you’re feeling better .  .  . 

Me: No, no, no, no, let’s talk now. A dream panel with flexible membership? What the heck does that mean?

Body: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz 

Me: I really do hate you right now! 

Body: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz