The Great and Terrible Ruby

My brother texted me last night that Ruby--my maternal grandmother, formally named June but nicknamed Ruby, for critical distance's sake--was sick and in the hospital again.  Her heart and lungs have been in bad shape for a while and she's been lugging around an oxygen tank.  This slowed her down some, but not much, and last time I was with her (when I was in Idaho for my other grandmother Muggs' funeral) she was still entertaining and terrorizing most everywhere she went.

At about 3 in the morning, my brother woke up wide awake, and shortly after received a call that Ruby's heart had stopped and that she was on a breathing machine.  She's alive now but still on the machine.  She has a DNR, so if her heart stops again, well, that's it.

Here we are again, in that liminal space between life and death.  A few weeks ago, I thought it was Pru's last day, and she's sitting on my bed now, winking at me in her wise way, and if it weren't for the grotesque tumor on her leg, I would not know she is sick.  But the vet tells us she could slide downhill tomorrow and, well, that's it.

Before hearing again from my brother this morning about the heart and the breathing tubes, I had finally decided to pick up the book about Muggs' family, the Browns, in The King's Pines of Idaho.

The author, Grace Edgington Jordan, published the book in 1961.  She writes about my great-grandparents and McCall,

Built at the south end of the larger of the two Payette Lakes, McCall would eventually have become a resort, at least in summer, without any Browns about.  The lake water is a fine sapphire, the air is high and clean, and the hills are spiked with cool evergreen timber.  But without the payroll of Carl Brown's lumber mill, operating many years, McCall would never have become much of a business place.  And without the cooperation, the willing hands and the brains of the Browns and those the Brown children married, the village would not have attained such things as its efficient community hospital and modern high school.  Aided and encouraged by the caring of the Browns, McCall has become a uniquely satisfactory place to live, self-dependent, spirited, and beautiful because it is natural and unaffected.

My chronicling has not been easy.  The Brown left hand doesn't even want to know what the right hand is doing.  If you confront a Brown concerning money or effort that he has given to some good local cause, he may finally admit that Yes, maybe he did do this or that.  And then he begins to play down whatever he did.  To get any of his goodness or charity on paper requires ingenuity and drudgery.

I admit to a little pride over this history, but there is more than that, too, as I read this book in 2011, after losing or about to lose most of my grandparents.  I think about how closely my family's fortunes have been tied to resource exploitation--the Brown's lumber mill and Boise Cascade's exploitation of public lands in the West fairly intimately connected.  My father's attempts to connect to the wealth of oil and gas, and the fact that I received a scholarship from the Western Petroleum Marketers' Association as a college kid, my face on the cover of their annual report.  And that McCall, mostly, has become mostly a resort for the very wealthy.  Most of us could not afford to live there, and even vacationing there is pricey now.

Also, that phrase, "the Brown left hand doesn't even want to know what the right hand is doing."  Jordan makes it sound as if that is all about humility.  And partly, it is.  The Browns and Davies are definitely humble about their accomplishments--pride is strongly discouraged.  But they are also intensely private and even exclusionary, whether they mean to be or not.  They're friendly and personable, definitely, but I don't know if they are embracing and connected beyond their nuclear families.  They seem to marry people who desire those connections, which may be the thing that holds them together at all.

In my own life, this has manifested as my not always feeling connected.  I have a tendency to hold friends and family at arm's distance, even though that is certainly not what I feel in my heart.  I see this with my dad, too.  From my vantage point, he was not much involved with the Browns/Davies, even though he was definitely proud of being one.  This meant I wasn't involved with them either.  I did not see him much, and since he did not see them much, I did not know them hardly at all.

Except, ironically, through Ruby, who made sure I had a copy of The King's Pines of Idaho.  Ruby, who made sure I knew I was related to the Browns.  Ruby, who drove me to McCall every summer and made sure we found a boat to take us by the Davies place so that I could know my other grandparents.

She was a huge pain about it--don't get me wrong.  She believed the Browns/Davies to be some kind of Idaho royalty, which is why she wanted me to know them.  She never forgave my mom for messing up her marriage and marrying someone who was not Idaho royalty, and she made their lives quite miserable at times.  I was also frequently embarrassed by Ruby when we visited the Davies--they seemed so normal, and followed the rules of politeness and distance, and she never did.  She never recognized boundaries and it caused no end of trouble and embarrassment.

But her transgressions at least meant I knew that part of my family, while their recognition of boundaries would have meant I never knew them.

Such a study in extremes.

Anyway, this is what I'm thinking about.  These liminal, boundary-crossing spaces in my head and in my heart and for my grandmother this morning.

Ping Pong Playa

One of the hardest things about coming to Mines to teach was leading discussion.  At Scripps College, an all women's liberal arts school, I could get away with handing students an interesting text and saying, pithily, "What do you think?" and off they would go.  They were hungry to chew on ideas and to have discussions with one another and it was just in the air at that university--and maybe at most liberal arts universities--to give the text a go.  And, shoot, I thought I was a brilliant instructor.  Basically, they were making me look good just by being fabulous themselves.

Mines is an engineering university, though.  Some of my fellow scholars estimate that, by the time they graduate, students will have completed around 5,000 "problem sets"--they're given problems and asked to "plug and chug" on them.  Constraints are almost always determined and there is nearly always a "right" answer.  Furthermore, their technical classes are largely oriented around lectures, in which they feel they are given "the answers."

So then I show up here at Mines, 27 years old, cocky, thinking I'm a good teacher.  I'm hip, I wear a jean jacket, I crack wise.  I put my stuff down; I give them a good text; I sip my coffee; I ask them what they think.

Blank stares.

Silence.

Me, panic.

75 minutes to fill.  I got nothing.

Eight years later, I almost never go into a classroom counting on open discussion about a text.  I carefully prepare "agendas" for each of my classes (these are for me, to remind myself what I have planned).  I craft discussion questions, devise pair-share activities, assign "quick-writes," make powerpoints, have video clips, sing, dance, cajole, facilitate, soothe, provoke.

It's exhausting.  But it usually works.  And it's sort of required.  Most of my fellow instructors do some version of all of this.  A lot of it is just good teaching.

But it can also look a lot like ping-pong.

A student pings a comment to me, I reformulate it, comment on it, repackage it, and...pong...throw it back out.  Another student picks it up and pings back to me and I pong.  I am the center of that discussion, the fulcrum, the ponger.  The ping pong makes things move and I meet objectives and things stay lively.  It's not always perfect--many of my coworkers are much better and more liked and more effective teachers than I am.  But it works better than the dead, ill silence, and I think students end up learning in my classes.  Which, after all, is the point.

Still, it makes me the focus, doesn't it?  And my students don't ever get the opportunity to really talk to one another, seminar style.  Which was my fave part of school.

Other than the keggers.

But that's for a different post.

So, today, I bailed on all my fancy, controlling pedagogical tricks and went into class asking them why they couldn't just ping pong with each other while I watched.  They said they preferred for me to give them the answers.  I said that, for today, I wouldn't.  I sipped my tea and stood back.

And you know what?  They ping ponged each other.  They made very smart points.  They participated.  They discussed with one another.  And it was good.

For about 40 minutes.  And then some began to dominate the conversation and we ran out of steam.  I took over and wrote things on the board and ponged and I think it ended okay.

Still, it felt like a victory.  Or at least an interesting experiment.

Could I have done that on the first day of class?  No way.  Could I have done it in my other class, where there is an undercurrent of angst and, dare I say, a seething anger about the grades they got on their last assignment?  Maybe not.

But I'll be experimenting with ye olde ping ponging again soon.

Pong to you.

On the Conference

I'm back from attending a conference in Monterey, which was just all kinds of fun and exhausting.  I go to this communication conference every year and the people are so smart and fun and I end up having conversations well into the night with them, and listening to interesting papers, and drinking way too much.  I don't take my vitamins or floss or go to bed at reasonable times.  I'm messy.  I eat at odd hours.  I do exercise but only as much as I need to in order to get up and get going again.

In short, I'm everything at this conference I'm usually not here.  Here, things are orderly and calm and the stress is always just nipping at my heels but I keep it at bay with all these practices--the journaling, the regular hours of sleep, the exercise, the calendar, the meditation.  At the conference, the stress is exhilarating, peaking as you give your talk then dying down as others peak and then you go out and have beers and talk about how nervous you all were even though you're all friends.  The clock and the calendar only matter insofar as you need to know when and where to show up to speak or to listen; time is fluid otherwise.  I take a plane to a new city and sometimes I don't know where I am (I thought I was in San Francisco, for example, until someone pointed out I couldn't catch the BART to my hotel in Monterey) or how I'm supposed to get to my hotel but I always get there.  I don't know where my next meal will come from or if I will meet someone new.  I come home wanting to write new papers and teach differently in my classes and not be so uptight.

The conference is the academic's workation.  I miss my kids, I miss my E., and I also delight in feeling young and free before I come home to security, responsibility, service, duty, peace.  The conference is my drug.  I don't want to live there but I sure like playing there twice a year.

Red Letter Day

Addie's school was closed today, because it seems to close every other Friday or Monday, and I had promised Nolie that when Addie get to stay home, she'll get to stay home, too, and so the three of us had the day together.  And here is what we did:

First, we went skiing, just the three of us, with no ski school.  First time ever.  Just going for it.  We only went for a half-day, and we didn't do a ton of runs, but the three of us made it up the lift, and down the hill, with no disasters and lots of fun.

Then, we came home and, after a loooong bath and some pizza--a rarity around here now--relaxed and cuddled up on the couch.  Addie read on the orange couch, and Nolie and I cuddled up on the red couch.  I had the new Sundance catalog and Nolie had Frog and Toad Are Friends.

I thought she was just going to look at the pictures and then bug me to read to her.

But no.  Blamo, the kid started reading the book.

Just like that.  She's been sounding out some words here and there, but not really reading fluently.  Then, Frog and Toad.  Pretty much with fluency.  And it's not that easy of a book.  I mean, it's not Dick and Jane.  I would never had believed it if I hadn't seen it.  How does this happen?

So, Nolie, at 4 1/2 years and two weeks, you began to read.

And now, we're watching Miyazaki's Ponyo.  If you haven't seen it, make plans to, right away (it's streaming on Netflix, if you have that).

Because it's awesome, as all Miyazakis are, and because it will give you the clearest picture of how Nolie is right now, much clearer than anything I could say.  Magical little fish baby:  that's Nolie.

And that, my friends, is what a perfect day looks like.

Why I'll Never Be An Adult

Ah, well, this made me laugh on a difficult day.  And it's good to know (judging from the comments) that all of us feel this way now and then.

Roller Coaster Day

Pru was scheduled to have her surgery this morning.  I did not have positive thoughts about it over the weekend, but by yesterday I had settled into the possibility that they would be able to remove her tumor all the way and get "clean edges" and she'd be okay.

Then the surgeon called E. and said while prepping her for surgery he had noticed a bunch more tumors.  E. and I had already agreed that if the cancer was really advanced we would not let her get very sick and suffer, we'd let Pru go, so we agreed to meet this afternoon to say our goodbyes.  Weeping, weeping, weeping.

But then the surgeon talked us into putting her on steroids for a week to see if the tumors responded and to give us time to say goodbye.  And this, too, seems reasonable, and so now she is home with us, nursing her wounds, and we will love on and appreciate her for this last week and maybe some time after that, but maybe not.  And we'll let her go.

Then Addie's school called to say that Nolie could go to kindergarten there next year.  Joy and hallelujah.

This weird life is full of odd blessings.

Davies Clan, Posterity

My cuz Heidi, who is a photographer, scanned a bunch of family photos in for my Gram's funeral.  I hadn't seen most of these, so I want to post some of them here, just so my girls see them when they look through the toddlerspit books someday, and so I don't forget.

That's my dad on the left there, with grandma and Grandpa next to him, and two of my Aunts, Debbie and Diane, below.  Crew cuts were and are popular with the men in my family.  Those who had hair, anyway.

Flash forward a few decades.  Muggs on the left, me holding some baby there (clearly my penchant for odd bangs and little babies goes back a long way), then my brother Jade, and my Uncle Terry's chin hair is in there too.

Muggs and my Dad.  She looks suspiciously over-happy in this photograph.  As does he, for that matter. Gives me pause.

Okay, weird to include this in family photos.  But this is the fox that visited my grandpa every day, especially in the year before he died.  He loved feeding this guy.  I have a fond memory of him getting very excited about the fox, even when he was quite sick.  This is oddly the most emotional photo for me in the bunch.  Hi, fox.

Muggs, with one of the six babies.  SIX!

Typical Davies shenanigans.  Don't even know what to say.  Babies are trophies, of course, but come on.

Also not quite sure what to say about this one.  I really did think of my grandmother as being quite staid. But perhaps these photos tell a different story.

Entire Davies clan, assembled some time in my twenties.

Um.  YES.  All I can say is that my wicked design skills must be genetic.

Also YES!  And definitely revising my previous assumptions about Grandma Muggs.

Ditto.  Gorgeous.

And my Dad, looking about 13 at his wedding to my Mom.

Thanks for strolling with me.