Office Remodel

A pipe burst down the hall from my office last week, which was a great excuse to take the whole week off. I had a couple meetings, but I canceled them. Turns out, “Sorry, I have to cancel our appointment today, a pipe burst next to my office,” is a great way to get out of just about anything. People seemed more sympathetic to that than if I had told them I was sick or dealing with a family tragedy. “A burst pipe? How awful!”

When I got to campus yesterday, it looked like a scene form E.T. There were wires and tubes coming out of doors and windows, plastic tent-like structures blocking the hallways, caution tape and barricades everywhere, and several overweight men holding clipboards and coffee mugs standing around looking at nothing in particular. A news van was parked on the sidewalk, and as I walked by a guy holding a microphone said, “You want to be on TV?” A fat kid behind me who looked like he was wearing his little sister’s UNH sweatshirt said, “Sure!”

Fortunately, my office was unaffected, except for a nice musty aroma. I’m sure in a few days my books will be curled at the edges and caked in mold. I stopped by the graduate director’s office to ask for money for my upcoming research conference. His office was one of the four that were ruined, so he set up a make-shift office on the second floor. He was slouching in a wooden chair staring out the window, arms dangling at his side, hands almost touching the floor, with several boxes of soggy books at his feet. He apologized that he hadn’t gotten around to my funding request and pointed with his thumb, still staring out the window, to the desk behind him piled high in paper. “As you can see,” he said. “I’m operating old school here.”

I told him I had heard about the flooding and that all the computers were ruined.

“I don’t care about that,” he said. He lightly kicked a box. “It’s all of this. I would love to just throw these books away, but some of them were first editions. Some were signed by my friends who are dead now.”

I sat a moment and stared at the boxes of books. I tried to think of something sympathetic to say, but all I could muster was, “So...should I resubmit the funding request?”

Goodbye, South

My junior high burned down today. My brother and I joked about it when we found out, but as the night rolls on, I’m starting to feel the loss.

I’d have to double-check this, but I think South Ogden Junior High is the only school that all of my brothers and sisters attended, and I was always living in their shadows. My science teacher asked me on the first day of class which brother or sister I was going to be like. Thankfully, I said Tracy, which turned out to be the correct answer. It took Ms. Bertleson, the crusty old history & adolescence teacher, several weeks to realize who I was. She had encouraged me to join the yearbook committee, but then one day she caught me doodling on my desk with a pen. She snatched the pen from my hand, and as she used it to fill out a detention slip, she said, “You’re Jeff's brother.”

From then on, I didn’t hide my joyful derision when she would mispronounce the word puberty. “Today,” she would say, "We’re going to learn about poo-berty.”

I only attended South for two years, which has left me a little bitter, since I never got to experience having a locker in the coveted ninth-grade hall. But, looking back, I don’t know why it was so coveted. The seventh graders had much better real-estate on the second floor—the entire second floor, in fact, including the “lounge” at the top of the stairwell, which had built-in carpeted benches along the wall. Even though the skaters and stoners took over the lounge after the first few weeks of class, it was still a source of pride to know that no other grade had anything like it.

The eighth graders resided in the nether-regions of the school: that weird strip of mismatched lockers between the cafeteria and the wood shop. It was a high-traffic area, not just for students, but for teachers and staff, since this was also where history hall and English hall converged. I was perpetually late for class due to severe traffic jams. Merging into the fray was easy enough, but then it became a mosh pit. Sometimes this was just fine, depending on who I was smooshed against. But most days, by the time I got to my locker, I was missing a shoe and feeling violated.

Ninth-grade hall, really, was just a slightly smaller version of seventh-grade hall, directly beneath it on the first floor. It had its advantages, I suppose. It was darker, since there were no windows, and there were fewer classrooms, which resulted in fewer teachers milling around. And the bathroom had full-length mirrors. I always used this bathroom, even though it often required a lengthy detour, so I could make sure my pegged acid-wash jeans and neon-green T-shirt were working for me before sauntering out, clutching my Trapper Keeper, to rub elbows with the ninth-graders. I couldn’t get over how grown-up they were. These were the big dogs. The boys had muscles and facial hair. And the girls. The girls! They were practically women. My twelve-year-old heart could barely take it: bangs two-feet high, black eye-liner, and purses—not just backpacks, but purses. And they all smelled so nice, like perfume and body spray, not like the seventh-grade girls who smelled the same as they did a few months ago in elementary school, like strawberry lip balm and jelly shoes.

But I never made it to my glory days as a ninth grader at South. I moved to Sun Valley and spent my ninth-grade year as low-man on the totem pole at the high school.

As I look at the burned-up shell of South Ogden Junior High, I wonder where all of those teachers have gone. The middle-aged ones are probably retired now. The old ones are probably dead (except, of course, for Ms. Bertleson, who—I’m sure—is in her nineties, sitting on a front porch somewhere yelling at every neighborhood kid that walks by.”You don’t fool me!” She’s saying, “I know who your father is!”). I think most of all I wonder where Mr. Lewis is. He was still young when he taught my eighth-grade English class, probably in his 30s, and I saw him occasionally at the local gym, where he worked as a weight trainer and wore leopard-print Hammer pants and a purple tank top. He had hair like Uncle Jesse from Full House, and he would stand, unashamed, in front of the full-length mirror in the bathroom of ninth-grade hall, flexing his biceps and running his fingers through his hair (I always wondered who he was trying to impress—Ms. Bertleson?). One day when he was calling role in class, a certain kid, I think his name was Eric, wasn’t there, and Mr. Lewis took advantage of the moment to make fun of Eric’s lisp, thinking it would make us laugh or make him seem cool. “Oh no,” he said. “I hope Eric’th not thick.” We all looked at each other, silently, wondering what in the world he was thinking, and his face flushed. From the back of the class, someone whispered, “That’s not right.”

What has become of you, Mr. Lewis, and where will you go now that your school is gone? Have you lost your hair? Are you on part-time disability with a bad back and a pot-belly? Do you still make fun of eighth-graders with speech impediments?

Help Wanted

I struggle to explain to people what exactly UNH pays me to do, other than sit in my office and try to look busy a few hours a week. My boss gave me a small assignment this week which has resulted in a lot of busy work: mostly things like removing staples and scanning documents--all the things that my master’s degree failed to prepare me for. In exasperation yesterday, I asked my boss if I could hire an undergraduate as an assistant to do my busy work for me so I could focus on my real job (not tipping my hand, of course, that I’m not sure what my real job is). To my surprise, he said that I could hire an assistant. Apparently there’s money in the budget for that sort of thing. I’m excited. Finding something for my assistant to do so he or she looks busy will give me something to do so that I can look busy too. I love academia.

Future Professors

Griffin asked Laura and I if Harvard was a college or a high school. When we told him it was a college, he asked if it costs a lot of money. We told him yes, and he said he's going to start saving his money, because he's going to Harvard.

Later, Griffin told me he wants to be be a paleontologist, so he needs to go to the best college possible so he can be really smart. I told him it isn't the college that makes a person smart, and that I knew a lot of smart people that went to crummy colleges and a lot of stupid people that went to great colleges (he asked which stupid people I was referring to, but I assured him he didn't know any of them).

"But if I want to be smart and go to a great college," he said, "I can still go to Harvard, right?" I told him yes--that's what his grandfather did.

Miles then declared that he wants to go to Yale to become an archeologist. I proposed that someday all of us could be professors at the same university. "Yeah," said Miles. "We can eat lunch together and talk about our cool discoveries. Well, Griffin and I can talk about our cool discoveries, and you can...what do you do again? Do you just teach? You can talk about that, I guess."

Chip off the Old Block

Griffin hasn’t quite picked up on what a nerd his daddy is. He’s always asking me about the sports I used to play. A few weeks ago he asked me where I played college football. I laughed. “Boise State,” I said. “Where else would I have played?”

But when Laura’s within earshot, I have to be a bit more honest and tell him I didn’t actually play any team sports, per se. On the way to his baseball practice, I told him the only real sport I did was track. I did my best to make it sound cool, leaving out the polyester micro-shorts or the fact that I only made the team because I had a valid student ID. Kids don’t care about those details. I told him I used to run long distance.

“And then what?” He said.

“And then nothing. We ran. Really far.”

“Oh,” he said. “Like a race. That’s cool.”

He didn’t sound convinced.

I told him how I won a high-jump competition, leaving out the part where there were no other competitors or that the bar was literally as low as it could go without actually touching the mat, and even then I kept knocking it down.

“But when you played soccer,” he said, “you were on a team with a coach?”

I told him it’s a gray area. I had a friend who used to play soccer. His mom was the coach, and sometimes we would play in his backyard and she would make us Kool-Aid, so it was kind of like I was on the team.

I bought Griffin a contraption the other day—my brother had one growing up and we called it a “pitch back.” It’s like a vertical trampoline you throw a baseball at and it bounces back to you. I felt nostalgic putting it together, thinking of our old house on Woodland Drive and my brother, Jeff, spending hours pitching the baseball at it (and myself spending hours bouncing He-Man and Star Wars figures off of it). Griffin crouched next to me and helped string the net in place, and it was one of those proud moments when I saw so much of myself in my little son.

But then Miles came outside wearing a pair of goggles, knee-high socks, and a light-saber tucked into his belt. “Cool,” he said. “This can be our spy base.” And I remembered Miles is my son, and I have no idea where Griffin came from.

Recital

Few things embarrass me more than watching people perform live, especially when music is involved. I attended the kids’ piano recital last week, and I was a nervous wreck the entire time. The first performer played a few notes and then froze. She looked at her teacher who encouraged her to continue. That’s it, I thought. I’m going to have a stroke before this thing is over. The girl started over, and I had to put my head between my knees and take deep breaths.

It isn’t just that I’m embarrassed for the performer, but I also feel like I need to apologize for how embarrassing the situation is. When the teacher announced that the next performer, a twelve-year old girl, would be singing a Taylor Swift song, I wanted to turn to the folks behind me and say, “This really isn’t my fault. I didn’t know there would be singing.” She belted her way through “Love Story” with the off-key gusto only a lovesick pre-teen can muster, and I sunk lower and lower into my seat. I felt like the whole audience was staring at me. What would compel this girl to actually sing in front of a gymnasium full of people? Did she even consider my feelings when making this decision?

She finished. People applauded. I started breathing again.

The next kid to get up was five. His first song was one note played six times. It literally went, “Bom, Bom, Bom, Bommmmm, Bommmmmm, Bommmmm.” He still found a way to botch it, but the crowd applauded furiously anyway. I think—like myself—they appreciated his brevity.

Surprisingly, though, I wasn’t embarrassed when Miles and Caleigh got up to play their duet. I knew Miles would be fine. A few weeks ago, when we loaded our out-of-tune piano onto the U-Haul, he stood there for an hour and played every song he knew as loud as he could. As neighbors walked by, he would hail them over with a dramatic arm-gesture, like a circus ringmaster beckoning folks into the big-top. I don't even know where he got the tip jar from. I offered to drive around Farmington while he played, and he was genuinely bummed to find out I was kidding. Knowing that the kid has no shame, I had no reason to feel embarrassed for him, no matter what happened. And, as it turns out, he did great. So did Caleigh.

After the twins performed, I thought I might actually make it through the rest of the recital without developing any new ulcers, but then the next student, a young teenage girl, sat down, positioned the microphone, and started singing.

Back on the Grid

I just finished my seminar papers and mailed them off to my professors, which means my semester is officially over and I can return to the land of the living.

I wrote seventy-three pages and then whittled it down to fifty-six. My fingers hurt and I'll probably have weird dreams tonight.