I'm Here

I have a minute or two, at last, so, yes, here I am after many weeks.

During the semester it's all madness and sleep deprivation. Now my semester is just about over, although I have to give a final and collect research papers on Monday, and I can take a breath, share a few thoughts.

Hmm, what to share?

Last night a friend of mine, an academic, dropped into the conversation a reference to writing as what "feeds her soul." (I thought of putting brackets around the "her," to show that I am quoting her indirectly, but instead I will pretend that I am Jane Austen or Maria Edgeworth and use free indirect discourse.) Anyway, my friend's comment made me think, what is it that feeds my soul (besides yoga)? I think for me also, writing falls into that category, but I haven't found a way to keep up with the scholarly writing since the dissertation, and I'm not writing in any other formal or consistent way, except, sometimes, here. Not that the blog entries are so formal, but they are more formal, more polished, than what I might jot down, for example, in a journal. More thought goes into the construction of them. And I have mostly sought to write about the things I have to celebrate in my life, not the other things, or if I write about those other things, I try to do so obliquely or briefly and not in a self-indulgent or whiny way. So, what I am trying to say is that I like keeping the blog for several reasons: it keeps me writing (sort of), it keeps me positive, and it provides a record of what has been going on that is connected to how I feel and also separate from it. And then, of course, there is the sense of being part of a community of readers and writers, however evanescent or intangible.

Here's something that crossed my mind as I was writing, above, that I like to write about things to celebrate:

Wednesday, my last night of teaching for the semester, I went out with two colleagues who had also just taught their last class. We went to a bar not far from school, a real old-time New York joint that is a restaurant too, with good hamburgers and tough-looking, no-nonsense-taking, world-weary, aging but still glamorous waitresses. We sat in a little table in the bar area, tucked into the corner near the front of the restaurant, windows on two sides of us, ordered beer and burgers, and traded war stories from the semester: our favorite students and the ones who made us uncomfortable, how we dealt with the latter, the things we discovered about our teaching selves. As we left, I had that same feeling I've described before, how wonderful it is to be out in New York in the spring, the conversations all around us as people left the restaurants and bars, the air warm and soft, it's nighttime but it feels like day, only more fun, more glamorous.

I took the subway home, latish, to Brooklyn, with my one colleague who also lives in Brooklyn. It was almost midnight but the subway was crowded, which is a good thing, a reassuring thing, when it's nighttime. As we crossed over the Manhattan Bridge into Brooklyn, my colleague handed me a xerox of Walt Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," which he had taught that night.

I read, silently,


FLOOD-TIDE below me! I watch you face to face;

Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I see you also face to face.


Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes! how curious you are to me!

On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose;

And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.


I looked up at my colleague after I read that last line. "It's about us!" I said. "Here we are: 'you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence.'

My colleague smiled, and I read the rest of the poem to myself as the East River sped away below us, as we approached Whitman's "proud hills of Brooklyn."

"It's so great," I said, when I was done. "It's . . . comforting."

"Yes," my colleague said. We talked a little then about how it went in class with the poem, how his students seemed moved by it, and yes, did really believe that the poet was watching them, was with them somehow ("Who knows but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?")--that, as the poem says, "It avails not, neither time or place—distance avails not."

Just then, our own time and place called us back in the voice of the train announcer: the train was only going as far as stop-that-neither-of-us-lives-close-to. We could take the Q train shuttle if we wanted continuing service. "The Q train shuttle?" my friend asked. "What's that?"

"I don't know," I answered. "It's a made-up thing."

As we got ready, resignedly, to get off the train at the wrong stop, my friend said, "I think I should just leave this on the subway." He placed the xerox of the poem on the corner seat, folding it so it was propped up slightly, waiting for the next reader, the next among the multitudes that cross from shore to shore.