The Professor

The Professor

In the style of Natalie Ginzburg’s “He and I”

He has taught history at the same college ever since I have known him. He loves history. He loves to teach it and hopes that his students will come to love it, too.

History, for him, encompasses past, present, and future. Knowing history is knowing ourselves.

He is energetic in the classroom. Once, I heard, he impersonated an ape.

He looks very much like a professor. He hardly ever wears jeans, especially not to class. He wears dressy cotton pants of varying neutral tones, button-up shirts, and cardigan sweaters. His favorite cardigan sweater that he wears around his house has a hole in the elbow. For special occasions he will pull a tie and dress coat out of his closet. He has a graying beard and black, thick-lensed, round-framed glasses, which make him look very academic.

He is tidy and orderly. His office is organized but crammed with bookcases, his walls with framed pictures. He keeps his lunch, usually carrots and spinach, in a mini-fridge. Yes, he sometimes eats only raw vegetables for lunch. The room smells perpetually of tea and cinnamon sugar toast.

It seems as if he knows a lot about everything. He is always reading something. As any good professor, he loves to learn. Once we watched a documentary on TV about scientists who found an ancient but well-preserved Roman ship on the bottom of the Mediterranean. We were both entranced, especially when they talked about the preserved garum, the fermented fish sauce.

He spends many hours sitting at his desk at home, grading undergraduate papers. He is a tough grader. Or so I have heard. I have never had a class with him but am told he is a very hard grader and makes you work for a good grade. I have no difficulty believing this, knowing him to be a man of high standards. He expects good work not only from students but from himself, so he gives of himself continuously. I have seen this side. He grades carefully, forms lasting relationships with students, attends conferences, and always wonders what he can do to be a better professor and Christian.

He has applied for administrative positions in the past. He would make a good administrator, I think, but he makes such a good professor, too. I’m a little glad that he didn’t get those positions because that means he is still in the classroom teaching about something he loves.

He is thoughtful, reserved, and somewhat introverted. He is comfortable in silence but will talk to you in length if you have asked a question. I remember when he drove me home during the middle of a summer camp so I could attend the funeral of a friend who had died in a four-wheeling accident. The car ride was three hours long, and I cried for many of the miles. Sometimes he talked, sometimes he didn’t, but was always the comforter. When he did speak, it was to talk about grief, God, or death or to tell a story from his own experience. He said crying was good.

He is quirky. I have seen him dance to a Lady Gaga song at his daughter’s wedding during the father/daughter dance. He couldn’t move his hips, but he tried his best. Everyone at the reception laughed. I probably won’t make him do that at my wedding.

He usually prefers older music than Lady Gaga. He likes Renaissance music and Bach. When he cleans up the kitchen after dinner, which is his contribution to the dinner process, he tunes the radio to the classical station or NPR. He likes radio shows, too, like Prairie Home Companion.

However, his entertainment tastes are quite wide for a man in his fifties. In the evening he likes to watch the popular crime shows. He likes old things—books, movies, music. He likes drama and used to act some. I found a picture once from his college days. He was dressed up in spandex and a wig as the fairy king Oberon from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I tell this to people sometimes to embarrass him.

He likes new things, too. We recently have watched Babe together, the Disney movie about the pig. Once, when I was at the very beginning of watching Beauty and the Beast, he came into the room to fetch something. I asked if he’d like to watch the movie with me. In a strained voice that let me knew he was tearing up, he told me no. He said it was about redemption and left the room. That was the first time I cried while watching the opening scene of Beauty and the Beast.

He tears up over many things—hymns at church, movies, talking about his children. I have never seen a sob, but I see his eyes water often. He is easily moved by what he loves or by where he finds grace. I tear up, too, over these sorts of things.

He has a goofy laugh. I once told him a joke that has now become his favorite. Why did the blonde get fired from the M&M’s factory?  When I tell it to him now, I can barely get past the first few words before he’s lost it in his tenor laugh. Because she threw away all the Ws.

He used to have a bad temper. I remember once he threw a large phone book across the living room, ripping it at the spine. As a young girl, I was terrified. I don’t even remember why he was angry. But he’s older now and doesn’t lose his temper very often. Sometimes he gets frustrated if the house is a mess or if the dog is annoying.

But he loves the dog, too. He talks to the dog in a voice people often use to talk to babies. He always let me get whatever pet I wanted if I was willing to care for it diligently. So I’ve had a rabbit, parakeets, hamsters, and mice. He used to grumble about the number of animals in the house because he let my siblings get their own little pets, too. Add the four young children, and you’ve practically got a zoo.

He mows the lawn every Saturday morning during the summer, wearing shorts that come just above the knee and t-shirts two sizes too large that hang on him like tents and socks that come half way up his calves and ear plugs and a large-brimmed hunter green safari hat. If I need to go outside and ask him a question I have to wave my arms and yell or practically walk right in front of his path. He’ll stop the mower, yank out the ear plugs, and look annoyed that I’ve interrupted his ritual. I guess most of those questions could wait.

He walks the seven blocks to work at the college most mornings. He wakes up at odd hours in the morning because of the insomnia and sits at the kitchen table reading a book and eating his favorite snack, tea and peanut butter toast. Then he might go back to sleep for an hour.

He wakes up very easily and usually is very surprised at first, asking with a start who is there. When I was younger and if I became scared in the night and wanted to go into my parents’ room, I made it my quest to sneak into their room without waking him. I succeeded a few times and slept on the floor by my mother’s side.

He used to play a game with his children when they were very young called bonker. It was a made up game. Whenever we ran out of a roll of paper towels, he would take the cardboard tube and sneak around the house bonking us on the head. We would run away squealing only to get surprised again with a thunk. We used to have tickle fights, too.

Sometimes when he and mommy used to argue and fight, my older sister and I would go up to the attic and cry because we thought surely our parents were getting a divorce. They don’t fight very much anymore. He doesn’t lose his temper as easily, and she is more accepting of everything. Now they have been married over thirty years, and I don’t worry about a divorce. There was never, in fact, a need to worry about divorce.

I can’t remember an argument between us. Perhaps it is because I have too much respect for him to argue with him. Perhaps it is because I never disagree with him. I have found him annoying on occasion, but I don’t even remember the reasons.

I hope he is proud of me; I think he is. He has told me before that he is proud.

He does things like study virtue and vice. I bought him once a collection of daily readings by J.R.R. Tolkien. He uses it often. This year for Christmas I got him a hand-crocheted set of Star Trek dolls. These days I like to get him sentimental things.

Sometimes I look back on my childhood and wonder where my father was at all my middle school basketball games and my high school track meets. He wasn’t there cheering me on. He was working. Sometimes I look back on my desire for “daddy pal time” and wonder if was deeper than just a call to hang out with dad. He spent many hours in his study, grading papers, or at the office. But he says he is proud of me. Teaching takes much time.

I think about the dance lessons, the music lessons, the horseback riding lessons, the art lessons, the big house where I had my own room, the well-stocked pantry, my many pets, my good grades, my independence, and I know that it’s okay that he only ever saw me compete at a track meet but once or twice.

He is a professor. A good professor, caring, thoughtful, deliberate. But he is my father, caring, thoughtful, deliberate, goofy, sentimental, loving. He will always be both, but he will first be my “Dado.”

Fuentes and Cultural Identity

Carlos Fuentes covers a lot of ground in this essay. Admittedly, I wasn’t sure what he was talking about most of the time because he refers to so many events and people of which I’ve never heard. “How I Started to Write” was difficult to follow; I kept getting lost in Fuentes’ wordiness, and yet when I did understand what he was saying, I pulled out my pencil and made a little “this is important” mark in the margins. For example, I loved Fuentes’ point about culture existing in contact with other cultures. “My upbringing,” he writes, “taught me that cultures are not isolated, and perish when deprived of contact with what is different and challenging. Reading, writing, teaching, learning, are all activities aimed at introducing civilizations to each other. No culture, I believed unconsciously ever since then, and quite consciously today, retains its identity in isolation; identity is attained in contact, in contrast, in breakthrough” (439).

As far as I’ve perceived, this belief goes against what most other “cultural purists” think. I think of Hitler’s eugenics agenda during WWII. He wanted to preserve a culture he thought was superior by destroying members of another culture, the Jewish culture (at least this is what I’m remembering from history class). Perhaps he didn’t believe that German culture could survive if it was in a relationship with Jewish culture (who really knows what he was thinking). Fuentes debunks the notion that cultural identity exists in its most pure state when isolated. In fact, culture can’t even exist in isolation. Instead, cultures maintain integrity when they interact with each other, grow with and apart from each other, come in conflict with each other. As individual humans depend on each other for the creation of self, cultural identity depends on relationship with other cultures, not on isolation.

Response to Ginzburg's "He and I"

I didn’t know what to expect when I began reading this essay and was surprised at its tone and style, which Lopate calls “deceptively plain” (422). I thought perhaps the first few paragraphs would serve as sort of a stylistic introduction, but the essay continued on in its straightforward, simple manner with little varied sentence structure. But Ginzburg is still able to show the character of the relationship between herself and her second husband, Gabriele Baldini (422).

Or does she show the character? I admit that when reading this essay I grew a little bored because of its predictability. By this I mean that Ginzburg never strays far from her “he is good at everything and I am bad at everything” thesis. Lopate calls this persistence “patience and sensitivity,” and while I do see that, I would also say that the effect is one of twisted narcissism (perhaps too strong a word). The “I” in the essay degrades herself incessantantly while simultaneously aggrandizing and belittling her husband. This evaluation probably stems from the very black-and-white writing style (He is___ but I am ___). I left the essay thinking that “he” was annoying, cruel, and even hypocritical and that she was self-absorbed and limp.

These reflections seem harsh. I did, in fact, enjoy reading the essay. It floated on in a poetic manner, and I did feel some connection to the narrator, especially at the end. I had to read the last sentence twice when she asks if the memory of her and her husband when they were young was actually them. Here Ginzburg poignantly reflects on how, not only memories, but people change, morph, or fade as we grow older.

Response to Turgenev's "The Execution of Tropmann"

In the introduction to this essay, Phillip Lopate writes, “It is interesting that Dostoevsky, who detested Turgenev, mocked the writer’s ‘squeamishness, about himself, about his own integrity and peace of mind, and that in the sight of a chopped off head!’” (306). I am not familiar with Dostoevsky’s writing, but I would have to agree with Lopate that this statement is a “willful misinterpretation of Turgenev’s scruples as narcissism” (306). While reading this essay, I did not think that Turgenev was being self-obsessed. He instead uses his personal experience of witnessing Tropmann’s execution to ask questions of human nature, such as why are humans drawn to things like public executions and are capital punishments justified.

Reading this essay, I couldn’t help but feel sympathy for Tropmann, a man condemned for brutally murdering a whole family. I was able to sympathize with him because of Turgenev’s point of view. He describes Tropmann as “an overgrown boy” who had “a natural, healthy, slightly rosy complexion” (317). After the execution, Turgenev looks around and sees that “absolutely no one looked like a man who realized that he had been present at the performance of an act of social justice: everyone tried to turn away in spirit and, as if were, shake of the responsibility for this murder” (323). A murder for a murder.

I find myself examining my own views of capital punishment. As a Christian, I am called to love my neighbor as myself. Would I kill myself if I murdered someone? Is the word “love” not even appropriate in this context? What about justice? What about mercy? What about the operation of the state? Should my desire to forgive affect my opinions of policy? Oh, it’s a messy business. My initial reaction is to extend the hand of mercy. I think I might be with Turgenev on this one.

It's a Holly, Jolly Season

Dear Santa (Saint Nicholas?),

I know this letter comes late. As a twenty-two-year old young woman, I’m past the age when most people believe in you. For some, belief lasts into the teenage years, the shattering truth coming as late as seventh grade. For others, belief never comes, the truth inseparable from reality. Others might fall between those extremes. I fall into that middle category, Santa. I’m sorry. I can’t help that I never really believed in you. I never once thought that the presents under the tree actually arrived in the middle of the night accompanied by smoking pipe and jolly belly. Perhaps once or twice when I was very young I listened in earnest for the pawing of each little hoof, but I can’t recall ever feeling the severe blow of disappointment that comes when circumstance reveals the impossibility of a childhood belief. Because I never truly believed, I was never truly disappointed. My stocking was still filled every Christmas morning, wasn’t it?

For being a nonbeliever, I blame my position. As the third child of four, with two older sisters and a younger brother, the myth of your existence never stuck. My siblings either told me blatantly or showed me with their actions that indeed, all our presents came from our parents and not you. I don’t remember exactly how I came to know you weren’t real. Perhaps it was the fact that every time I saw you in a mall you looked like a different person.

Never attempting to perpetuate your myth, my parents also influenced my disbelief. They signed my gifts, “To: Isabel, From: Mom and Dad,” never “To: Isabel, From: Santa.” Yet we honor you in a small way, reading of “The Night before Christmas” every Christmas Eve after we return from church. Our decorations include Santa nesting dolls and Santa ornaments. You don’t get a spot in the Nativity, but we like the idea of you—the gift giving, the jolly spirit, the Christmas tunes; however, we truly believe in the Christ child, not you.

*          *          *

Not Happy Holidays! Merry Christmas!

Put the “Christ” back in Christmas!

Such complaints usually come from the mouths of disgruntled American Christians.

. . . We’ve recently been living most of our days in the dark, sunlight gleaming thinly for only about nine hours a day. Since the end of the harvest, we’ve retreated indoors to repair tools and mend clothes in preparation for next spring. But soon we will feast. We will kill most of our animals and drink the beer that’s been fermenting for months in the cellars. The day will come soon when the days begin to lengthen and the nights shorten. Thinking it will attract a young man, mother wants me to play my flute during Yule this year. I don’t wish it; I would rather spend all my time sitting by the fire. . .

Ironically, Europeans began holding celebrations near the winter solstice about two thousand years before Christ was born in a manger. There was no “Christ” to put back in Christmas when Norsemen dragged evergreen boughs into their homes or Germans commemorated the god Oden. The winter solstice meant a reversal in the lengthening of nights and shortening of days; the worst of the winter was past, feasts were in order. During midwinter in many parts of Europe, people slaughtered animals that had spent the summer and autumn growing fat. A surplus of fresh meat to eat plus increasing availability of drink as wine and beer completed fermentation, meant late December was a feasting season (Before Christ, thehistoryofchristmas.com).

Many Christmas traditions, celebrated by Christians and non-Christians alike, stem from pre-Christ, pagan festivities. When the Norse observed Yule from December 21 through January, fathers and sons dragged in logs (hence the phrase, Yule log) to light and burn in recognition of the returning sun. In that season of nearly continuous dark, the hearty Norse would feast until the log went out, which could even take as long as twelve days (Before Christ, the historyofchristmas.com). When I think of a house prepared for Christmas, the fireplace invariably has a roaring fire and welcoming hearth.

Most people of the old Germanic tribes would haul in evergreen boughs during their solstice celebrations. Evergreens reminded them of all vegetation and the growing and harvesting soon to come. Some groups also believed that evergreens would ward off witches, evil spirits, ghosts, and illness. German Christians in the sixteenth century fomented the modern idea of the Christmas tree when they brought trees decorated with apples into their homes (Before Christ, thehistoryofchristmas.com).

*          *          *

I am always diverted in the different ways people choose to decorate their trees. Do you have a Christmas tree, Santa? How is it decorated? My family adheres religiously to the “hodge-podge” look—white and colored lights, ornaments we children made when we were young, balls of colored glass, sometimes strings of red and green wooden beads, childhood snapshots encased in plastic covers, twelve wooden circles depicting the twelve days of Christmas. The list could continue. One of my favorite ornaments is a large white orb with you and Mrs. Claus depicted leaning towards each other as if to smooch.

When we were younger, my mother would designate a day to decorate the house. My sisters and I would fly energetically up and down two flights of stairs holding cardboard boxes that we hadn’t seen since the year before. They all had “Christmas” scrawled in marker across one side. These boxes initiated the magic of Christmas. We would put on music, unpack the boxes, and decorate. This was a great affair; we had to follow certain rules. Grandmother’s set of white and glittery reindeer from the 1950s must always be removed carefully from its box and arranged neatly on the mantle. The glass angel candlestick holders must go on either end of the mantle. A stocking would lie on the coffee table until its owner could come hang it. Made by my Grandmother, my green stocking sports two small fabric teddy bears that dangle on ribbons from the rim. If squeezed, one of the teddy bears plays a short medley of Christmas tunes, including “Joy to the World” and “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.” I always squeeze it twice, when I first hang it and when I pull it off the hook on Christmas morning.

We squabble some, too, over certain decorations. The small, wooden pieces of the Nativity set change depending on individual preferences (No, the wise men should go this way! and the donkey should stand behind Joseph); Although we originally used a scraggly artificial tree, when I got into my teenage years we began buying real trees from Lowe’s or the Knights of Columbus. I much prefer the spicy smells of a fresh white pine or blue spruce. But for many years my brother fussed about wanting the artificial tree. For a few years, we put up both, artificial tree and real tree, one in the living room, one in the piano studio. Fortunately, he gave up that fight, and now we only use real trees.

These days, it is uncommon for all the siblings to gather at the same time to decorate the house. My eldest sister owns her own house in town. My other sister lives in another state. My brother is the only child still at home and not for long. What will happen to our poor Christmas decorations when we leave for good? My parents have had little elves to decorate for almost a quarter of a century.

*          *          *

The Romans weren’t a people to pass up a party. They had their own midwinter celebrations, too. The biggest of the holidays was Saturnalia in honor of Saturn, the god of agriculture. It began the week before the winter solstice and continued for a month, almost to the end of January. A time of hedonistic revelry, members of all classes would feast and be merry (Merry Saturnalia?). A second celebration included Juvenalia, a feast recognizing the children of Rome. A third celebration occurred on December 25 when members of the upper class celebrated the birthday of Mithra, god of the sun (Before Christ, thehistoryofchristmas.com).

Pagan traditions did not find their end with the birth of Christ. They’ve continued—Christmas trees, Yule logs, the time of year. For several hundred years after Christ’s death and resurrection, the birth of Christ was not commemorated, Easter being the main holiday. During the fourth century, however, the early church decided to place a celebration of Christ’s birth among the various pagan traditions during late December to simultaneously absorb and replace them and thus redeem them. In this way, the church hoped to further its reach across Europe and the world. Even though the date of December 25^th was nominal, it seemed as good a date as any to remember the incarnation.

*          *          *

I commend the early Church for picking this date even if the Bible never mentions one. Winter is magical. I want to cocoon myself in a quilt, talk to people, sip hot beverages. Cold weather gathers us around the fire, giving us opportunities to reminisce, befriend, or rebuild.

One of my favorite “Christmas traditions” my family celebrates is the Annual Sanders’ Christmas Gala. The party is not really a tradition; it’s only been around for about ten years. I don’t remember why, but when my sister, Clara, and I were young, we decided our family should throw a party for all of our friends (i.e. everyone we knew). We made elaborate invitations, we baked, we hauled hymnals home from church. The party was such a success, we’ve been throwing one ever since and now have the preparation down to an art. The menu stays mainly fixed, including all our favorite recipes (Scotch eggs, gingerbread, cranberry bread, fudge, tannenbaum bread etc.), and we’ve replaced the heavy hymnals with sleek, brightly colored folders of copied music. Perhaps that is the most unusual trait of our family party—the singing of Christmas carols and hymns. We never fail to sing all twelve verses of “Masters in this Hall”! Caroling, of course, is not an uncommon way to express Christmas spirit. But many private family parties might not have the luxury of having a mother who can sit down and play any hymn or carol on the piano to facilitate merriment.

The party is one of my favorite ways of celebrating Christmas. I get to bake Christmas goodies and see many people I know and love. I get to sing obscure carols like “Baloo, Lammy.” I practice some of the old pagan costumes like hauling a tree into my house to decorate but ultimately view the season as a time to remember and wonder at the incarnation.

*          *          *

Over the years, Christians have merged pagan and Christian traditions to create the holiday of Christmas (Christ’s Mass). But where does that leave you, Santa? Who are you? Saint Nicholas? Why do you live in the North Pole? And why reindeer?

You are unusual, Santa, an American icon, a “tradition” of only a few hundred years, created mainly by two New Yorkers, Clement Moore and Thomas Nast; yet, you do draw heavily on the actual Saint Nicholas, a bishop in Myra (present day Turkey) during the fourth century. Born around 270 A.D., Nicholas became Bishop of Myra at the young age of about thirty. Known for his generosity to those in need and his faith and devotion to God, Nicholas is the patron saint for numerous people and things, most notably children, ships/sailors, and the wrongfully condemned and imprisoned. Nicholas even went to the Council at Nicaea to debate the Arians and later to see Constantine about lowering taxes in Myra. He taught the Gospel simply so all could understand and pursued justice with vigor. His tomb became a pilgrimage sight for several hundred years. Although canonized about a hundred years after his death, Saint Nicholas and his generosity have been popular ever since his death. His feast day falls on December 6 (Bishop of Myra, stnicholascenter.org).

. . . Father is in a panic. He spent the last of our money on food a few days ago, and now he has no idea how he’s going to pay for our marriages. Three daughters, he wanders around the house and exclaims under his breath, three daughters! It is strange, that the father must pay to give away his daughters in marriage. I put up our washed stockings by the fire to dry overnight before we knelt, prayed for a miracle, and slept. . .

A legend surrounding Saint Nicholas explains why we still hang stockings by the fireplace. Several versions of the legend exist. Apparently, a poor man had no money to give his three daughters for their weddings. Saint Nicholas secretively dropped a bag of money through the window one night, which landed in a stocking drying by the fire. In another version, the man only had one daughter who was going to be sold into slavery because the family was so poor (Origins of Santa Claus, history.com). Either way, Saint Nicholas provided for the poor family.

So how did you transform from Saint Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, to Santa Claus, American icon? Not every group of Europeans brought customs surrounding Saint Nicholas across the Atlantic. The Puritans, for example, would have nothing to do with a Catholic saint or the pagan traditions of Christmas. They did not celebrate the birth of Christ; their focus was on Easter. But the Dutch, Spanish, and Germans brought Saint Nicholas and traditions on their boats. As the immigrants from numerous countries began to form a distinct American identity and country, traditions merged and melded. Christmas became a public holiday, a time to drink and be rowdy in the streets; however, during the nineteenth century, the New York elite wanted to domesticate the holiday and give the country a moral schooling. Christmas was a time for family and God, not public spectacles in the street (Origin of Santa, stnicholascenter.org).

Saint Nicholas's image really started to change after the American Revolution with the writing of Knickerbocker's History of New York by Washington Irving in 1809. Irving referenced a jolly St. Nicholas many times in this satirical fiction, transforming the Bishop into an "elfin Dutch burgher with a clay pipe" (Origin of Santa, stnicholascenter.org). Being a satire, perhaps Irving wished to poke fun at the Saint Nicholas character. Well, that backfired.

Enter the two men who made you what you are.

 . . . I just wrote the poem last Christmas for my children. I never wanted it to get out into the papers. What an embarrassment! I usually write commentaries on Scripture, not on a jolly elf! I just jotted it down quickly as I took the sleigh home. I suppose I should be happy that it as such a success . . .

On Christmas Eve of 1822, Clement Clark Moore wrote "A Visit from St. Nicholas," or more commonly known as "The Night before Christmas," for his six children. The poem bolstered Irving’s image of St. Nicholas as a jolly, white-bearded elf figure and became a "defining American holiday classic" (Origin of Santa, stnicholascenter.org). A dour academic, Moore didn’t want the poem published, explaining that he had simply written it for his children. But the next year, the poem found its way into an out-of-town newspaper. It was an overnight sensation (Clement Moore, thehistoryofchristmas.com).

For as long as I can remember, my father has read “The Night before Christmas” to his four children on Christmas Eve. We each had our favorite illustrated versions—the one with people characters or the one with mice characters. I thought the mouse Santa was cuter. One year, my father read both books at the same time, a book held in each hand. Turning pages was an ordeal. He would have to balance both copies in his lap, flip a page, and then swivel the book back around one-handed for our waiting eyes. I also remember my prim, proper Grandmother, who had lived for several years in New Orleans, reading me the Cajun Night before Christmas, complete with dialect and alligators.

But your exact image, Santa, had not yet crystallized. Political cartoonist Thomas Nast gave you your final form. For almost thirty years beginning in 1863, he contributed images of St. Nicholas to the magazine Harpers Weekly. He depicted you as we see you today: a red-suited, rotund, large jolly elf who lives in the North Pole and keeps a naughty and nice list (Thomas Nast, the historyofchristmas.com).

Moore and Nast gave you your final image, Santa. Did their children ever write letters to you?

But it was someone else who plastered your jolly grin onto an advertisement. In 1931, Haddon Sundblom began 35 years of designing Coca-Cola advertisements that featured Santa, whose aim was to convince consumers that Coke was a solution to "a thirst of all seasons." The use of the Santa Claus image in advertising firmly placed St. Nicholas and ultimately American Christmas in the realm of consumerism (Origin of Santa, stnicholascenter.org).

*          *          *

That’s what your work is all about, right Santa? The presents? The overwhelming pile of new toys? How do you have time to fit all those department store visits into your busy schedule? You must have a very good head elf to keep things running at the North Pole. Santa, are you a Christian like me? Do you celebrate the birth of Christ as you fly around in your sleigh? When is a child too old to receive presents from you? Why don’t you give presents to adults? Do these ideas contradict or compete in your mind, Santa?

But Santa, you don’t deliver anything, do you, because you don’t exist? Yet your presence is as real in American culture as Facebook and South Park. Even if you don’t actually have a body, live in the North Pole, and deliver presents to children, you do exist in the minds of many Americans. Not only do children believe in you when they discover presents under the tree signed “Santa,” but parents believe in you when they go out and buy those presents. They believe in the tradition of gift-giving, which often means that they participate in a society centered on consuming products. You don’t even have to be a kid to believe in Santa.

The more presents the better.

(And thank God for the incarnation.)

The truth is, Santa, I love giving people gifts. I try to be thoughtful, choosing a gift that I think fits an individual’s personality. You aren’t only the face of consumerism. You are also the face of something older—the face of Saint Nicholas—a face of generosity and faith. I like to think of you as Saint Nicholas, dropping a gift through my window, which thuds softly into the stocking drying by the fire.

With disbelief and gratitude,

Isabel

Dry Oklahoma

The description tells me that this black-and-white photograph portrays Oklahoman drought refugees camping by the roadside in August, 1936. They are looking for work in the cotton fields of California. Although there are seven in the family, we only see the mother, father, and one baby in this picture. In the foreground on the right side, the father leans his head against his right hand and his elbow against a wooden table or platform. The mother sits behind him on blankets that cover part of the platform. She fills the left side of the picture. The blonde-haired baby sitting in her lap turns his front towards his mother's protective breast, grasping her dress with one hand while still keeping his left eye on the photographer. The mother bends an arm over and around the child. A tent roof, tree, and various household items are seen in the background.While the father, being closer and larger because of the photograph's angle, is the main focus of the picture, the mother and child are equally as interesting. What makes this photograph so interesting are the facial expressions. The father looks tired. His eyes gaze off into space. His hair looks as if he runs his fingers through it constantly. The woman grimaces, looking almost as if she is on the verge of tears. Like her husband, weariness covers her face and body. They have traveled hundreds of miles from their dusty home, seeking desperately work and water.

I've known a hint of that weariness. If you live in Oklahoma, as I do, you know drought intimately. It comes as do the seasons, predictably almost every year. During the summer, the city usually calls its citizens to ration water. Even numbered houses can water lawns on Monday and Wednesday. Odd numbered houses on Tuesday and Thursday. One summer--do not water your lawns at all. That was the year the lake was several feet below its normal level. I can hardly imagine having to leave my home like the subjects in the photograph because I couldn't fulfill my most basic need, my thirst for water. Food, I can live without you for a week. Water, I won't even last a day. I saw another picture in the exhibit that showed flood refugees in Arkansas, 1937. How can it be that one state has too much water while the one right next to it has almost none at all? It we picked up 2012 Oklahomans and plopped them into 1936 Oklahoma, could they survive? We definitely couldn't water our lawns then. There would be a rush on all the stores to buy out water bottles. The President would call a national emergency. We probably wouldn't have to leave our homes, but that same dust that hit the faces of Oklahomans in 1936 would hit our faces, too.

Response to Woolf's "The Death of the Moth"

Observing the moth in “The Death of the Moth,” Virginia Woolf writes that it is often the small and overlooked things in this world that actually contain “a tiny bead of pure life” (266). The moth is [decked] with this tiny bead, which has “set it dancing and zigzagging to show us the true nature of life” (266). Yet the moth is also pitiful because having “only a moth’s part in life, and a day moth’s at that, appeared a hard fate, and his zest in enjoying his meager opportunities to the full, pathetic” (266). Woolf finds the moth both inspiring and pitiful.

By the end of this short essay, however, the moth assumes almost a heroic position. The moth becomes overturned and lies struggling on its back; yet, it manages to right itself before gracefully accepting death, when it seems to say “O yes . . . death is stronger that I am” (267). Woolf calls the moth’s righting a “superb . . . last protest” and claims that the “gigantic effort on the part of an insignificant little moth, against a power of such magnitude, to retain what no one else valued or desire to keep , moved one strangely” (267).

I was reminded of the cliché, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Life is where we see it. The best things come in small packages. Beauty comes to us through the unexpected. Who would have thought that a day moth could exhibit such a pure stream of life? Day moths “do not excited that pleasant sense of dark autumn night and icy-blossom which the commonest yellow-underwing asleep in the shadow of the curtain” does, and they are not “gay like butterflies” either (265). By all accounts, a day moth should be something totally disregarded. But we can find beauty where we least expect to find it.

Response to Borges' "Blindness"

Don’t you love when something you thought was a curse turns out to be a blessing? Maybe love isn’t the right word. But the realization that your curse is actually a gift makes life livable and bearable again. In “Blindness,” Jorge Luis Borges speaks of his blindness as a gift, which has given him “the gift of Anglo-Saxon, [his] limited knowledge of Icelandic, the joy of so many lines of poetry, of so many poems, and of having written another book” (381). The tone of this essay is enthusiastic and hopefully. Look, Borges seems to say, look at all these other people who have done wonders regardless of their blindness. His examples include Groussac, Homer, and Milton.

But the reader of this essay knows that turning blind in the prime of life is not a walk in the park. Just because Borges writes this optimistic essay does not mean he hasn’t suffered acutely. His acceptance of blindness as a gift has taken time. Although I’m not sure if Borges was a Christian or not, he demonstrates the Christian belief that goodness can come out of suffering. Not that suffering is necessary or the means to a good life but that God has the power to redeem situations, people, and afflictions. Out of the suffering of Christ comes our salvation.

I’m trying to think of examples in my life of suffering turned gift. I’ve overwhelmingly blessed so far. I can only think of trifling examples—like the humbling experience of not being named an Academic All-Stater in high school even though I knew I was just as eligible as my friend who did receive the honor. Look, the situation told me, you don’t always get everything you think you need or want. The humbling was the gift.

Response to Fitzgerald's "The Crack-Up"

I have a difficult time reacting to this essay. I wonder what it must have been like to know F. Scott Fitzgerald. I wonder the same thing about Emily Dickinson, who practically didn't leave her home for the last two decades of her life. I don’t know the specifics of Fitzgerald’s life, but in the this essay, he describes the process of “cracking up” and the inevitable withdrawing from people, society, etc. that follows such an event. Fitzgerald’s language is abstract (beautiful but abstract) and difficult to synthesize and understand. Cracking up occurs when “an exceptionally optimistic young man” has a “leak through which . . . [his] enthusiasm and [his] vitality . . . steadily and prematurely [trickle] away” (528).

Fitzgerald cracked during his late twenties/early thirties. Present day synonyms for “cracking up” might include having a mid-life crisis or a mental breakdown. Fitzgerald states at the very beginning: “Of course all life is a process of breaking down.” But what makes a crack-up distinct is its subtle “blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again” (520).

A crack in a person occurs without the person realizing it until later, perhaps ten years down the line like Fitzgerald. The crack is a leak that drains the person of his/her former values. The remaining empty plate, the empty shell, persists with some sort of altered, impaired function. Fitzgerald claims that he is only a writer now—not the optimistic young man who viewed “a new chore [as] only a nice prospect for the next day” (521). Now he is pasted together and thinks that “the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness” (531). I won't lie, Fitzgerald sounds pretty depressing to my young, somewhat optimistic ears.

Response to Mencken's "On Being an American"

I laughed out loud while reading “On Being an American.” Mencken is so ridiculous in his language. His sarcasm (if I’m reading this correctly) slaps the reader in the face. “But here,” he writes, “having perfected democracy, we lift the whole combat to a gaudy symbolism, to a disembodied transcendentalism, to metaphysics, that sweet nirvana” (507). Everything political in America, especially presidential elections, Mencken claims, is a great show, entertaining citizens with “gorgeous humors . . . extravagant imbecilities . . . [and] uproarious farce” (508). I wonder what Mencken would write now if he were still alive. What would he say about the current race between Romney and Obama? Maybe something about the show now being presented in twelve acts to the tune of millions of dollars.

Sometimes I can’t tell what Mencken really thinks about the presidential election. He seems to say satirically that politics are done much better in America because they are a great show that one would go to for a laugh. To me, that sounds like Mencken is actually dissatisfied with the American political system. But then is he just critiquing the manner in which the “100% pleurour . . . unburdened his woes” (508, 506)? Perhaps this is just an example of Mencken “mercilessly puncturing the American middle class” (505).

I both like and dislike this piece. It is amusing, yes, and generally I like satire. But I wanted more from Mencken than just sarcasm and critique. To give his own opinions, thus mimicking the person he is poking fun at, is not his point I guess. I just wanted to take away more than, “American politics are just a big show.” Maybe the complexities are deeper down, and I’m just missing them.

On Good Music

I don't know if I should do this or not, but the more I age, the more I accept the "good is relative" definition when it pertains to the arts. What you think is good art I might think is bad art, and vice verse. I don't possess the authority to tell people that the music they like is "good," much less "bad." What makes for good music? Goodness if I know. I can only answer according to my own tastes and interests.

My musical taste spans many genres. Growing up, I went through my Oldies phase and my Country phase where I would only listen to radio stations that played that music. I also grew up always listening to some form of classical music, whether intentionally listening to the radio or unintentionally overhearing my mother or sister practice the piano. I began playing French horn in sixth grade, which further expanded my listening of classical music (orchestral, wind band, chamber music, etc.). Studying classical music, its history and form, encourages even more appreciation and love. When I think of good music, I automatically think of my favorite symphonies (Saint-Saens Organ Symphony) or piano pieces (Liszt's transcription of Widmung). The expert crafting employed by classical composers amazes me and creates in me a reverence for that genre.

But I also listen to pretty much anything: today's hits, country, folk (which I especially love), world, etc. But does simply listening to music and enjoying it make it good music? I must confess that not all the music that I like to listen to is music that I necessarily think is good.Take a Katy Perry or LMFAO song--is it good? I dance to it, I sing it, I love its beat, but is it good? I want to answer "no."

There it is: I like bad music sometimes.What makes it bad? I can only answer such questions with abstraction. Good music must expand my soul in some way. It must draw my mind to a higher plane than the one on which it usually rests. It must remind me of my humanity and human creativity while showing me the grace of God. The grace need not be explicit; the music needn't be "religious." It must show me, like a beautiful sunrise or a newborn baby, that God is working in, among, through, and around us.

Response to Selzer's "The Knife"

I love Selzer’s language in “The Knife.” Vivid and concrete, I could see each body part. I hold the knife in my hand. I am the surgeon. 

Selzer kept layering the metaphors for the knife, creating a complicated picture of his vocation. I think vocation is an appropriate word, considering he confesses “that the priestliness of [his] profession has ever been impressed on “him” by the vows, “taken with all solemnity” (709). He remembers visiting the hospital where his father worked and where he began to feel drawn to such a place.

The images of the knife contradict but somehow don’t compete. They create a full picture of what it is like to be a surgeon, to wield (or almost be wielded by) the knife—an instrument of great power. The knife can be dangerous but yet is necessary for the “priest’s” work. The knife leads Selzer on a dangerous journey or down a page of poetry or through a communion-like experience.

I was greatly amused by the ant part. At first, I thought the ant might be a metaphor for a distraction, but it turned out to be a literal ant. While humorous, the section ends with meaningful implied and explicit questions like, “Is our reverence for life in question?” (712). Although he refers to a literal ant, Selzer also makes the ant a symbol for disease. “He is disease—that for whose destruction we have gathered,” he writes (712). I thought the humorous and yet serious situation of finding an ant a potent image, communicative of Selzer’s whole experience of being a surgeon.

Emblems

River: Rivers can flow both lazily or hurriedly. They can move almost without detection from the human eye or move over immediately noticeable rapids with white foam and loud rushing. I am a person who usually “goes with the flow,” who goes through life accepting either smooth flowing or bumpy rushing as they come. Sometimes I don’t ride the river but am the river, moving slowly or energetically. I’m headed somewhere, to the end of my life, to my outlet into a greater ocean.

Standing on the edge of a cliff with a parachute: I’m going to graduate in May, and I have no definite plans yet for next year. There are many possibilities, just not any answers. I’ve come to the edge of a cliff, ready and willing to BASE jump with my parachute. I’m just waiting for the signal to go, the answer back from graduate school applications (after I actually fill those out...), before I step off the stone. I could land in a million different spots but am aiming for a general area. My landing might be bumpy or painful. I might not land near the target area at all. But I’m graduating. I have to jump.

Bread: Christ is the bread of life. As a Christian, I am called to be as Christ-like as I can. So I am striving for breadhood? Yes. The yeast I sprinkle on my spiritual life sometimes produces good, light bread and sometimes produces hard, dense bread that failed to rise. My good bread, my resolve to be spiritually steadfast, molds quickly in open air, and I must bake again. And again. I am also the bread, not the baker. I am dough, waiting for God to sprinkle good yeast so that I may work for his kingdom.

Rubber band: I’m tired. I’m stretched. After being stretch and pulled by trying to hold my schedule together, I’ll come to a time of rest. My rubber band self will relax and return to her original shape. Although stretching and pulling and holding things together put stress on the rubber band, the rubber is made to do this.

Seed: Like I wait for God to sprinkle yeast, I also wait for him to scatter seed. Seeds are opportunities for relationships, growth, new ideas, a job, a child. I must be prepared ground. The Holy Spirit waters. I add fertilizer, too. Sometimes the seeds lie dormant for a long time. Sometimes they spring up almost immediately. My life is the garden.

Saving Saint Nicholas

How did Saint Nicholas become the red-suited, jolly Santa?

Born around 270 A.D., Nicholas became Bishop of Myra at the young age of about thirty. Known for his generosity to those in need and his faith and devotion to God, Nicholas is the patron saint for numerous people and things, most notably children, ships/sailors, and the wrongfully condemned and imprisoned. Nicholas even went to the Council at Nicaea and later to see Constantine about lowering that taxes in Myra. He taught the Gospel simply so all could understand and pursued justice with vigor. His tomb became a pilgrimage sight for several hundred years.

Saint Nicholas and his feast day of December 6th were not immediately known or popular in the "New World" because the first colonists, mostly Puritans, rejected the idea of sainthood. But the Spanish, Germans, and mainly the Dutch brought over traditions surrounding Saint Nicholas, such as gift giving, which French nuns had begun as early as the 1100s.

Saint Nicholas's image really started to change after the American Revolution with the formation of the New York Historical Society in 1804 by John Pintard and the writing of Knickerbocker's History of New York by Washington Irving in 1809. Irving, a member of the Society, published this satirical fiction that referenced a jolly St. Nicholas many times. Irving transformed a Bishop figure in and "elfin Dutch burgher with a clay pipe" (St. Nicholas Center). The Society hosted its first St. Nicholas anniversary dinner on December 6, 1810 and displayed the first American image of St. Nicholas, created by Alexander Anderson.

The New York elite also wanted to domesticate what had become a raucous, drunken public spectacle over the years. In 1823, Clement Clark Moore (although there is an argument that Henry Livingston first penned it) wrote and published "A Visit from St. Nicholas," or more commonly known as "The Night Before Christmas." This poem boosted the image of St. Nicholas as a jolly elf figure and became a "defining American holiday classic" (St. Nicholas Center). Other various artists, like political cartoonist Thomas Nast, contributed to the image of St. Nicholas as the red-suited, rotund, jolly elf. Not only did St. Nicholas's image change, his name did as well. Santa Claus grew out of the "natural phonetic alteration from the German Sankt Niklaus" (St. Nicholas Center).

The Church also began to celebrate Christmas as they learned that Santa and a Christmas tree greatly improved attendance. The push for Christians to embrace Christmas also came from German immigrants, Washington Irving, Clement Clark Moore, Charles Dickens, and the Oxford Movement in the Anglican church. Carol singing also became popular.

Haddon Sundblom further cemented the image of Santa Claus when, in 1931, he began 35 years of designing Coca-Cola advertisements that featured Santa, whose aim was to convince consumers that Coke was a solution to "a thirst of all seasons." The use of the Santa Claus image in advertising firmly placed St. Nicholas and ultimately Christmas in the realm of consumerism.

Santa Claus exists today as a mixed symbol. While perhaps originally suggesting generosity and kindness, he also tends to represent the over consumption that characterizes American society.

From Bishop to jolly elf, Saint Nicholas has undergone quite a journey.

Sources:
http://www.stnicholascenter.org
http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/santa/cocacola.asp

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/assessment/1997/12/santa_claus.html

Teething

I notice when people’s teeth aren’t white and straight. I can’t deny it. Smiling in America is a sign of friendliness, approachableness, and social awareness, and it is almost expected in every human interaction. We grow concerned if our companion isn’t smiling. Is he mad? Is she sad? Something must be wrong. We want to see those pearly whites!

But I am not writing to discuss the mores of smiling in American society. I am currently more interested in the physical stuffs of the smile—the teeth.

I was about seven and my left front tooth was working its way loose. Like most children, I was afraid of the pain possibly involved with having a tooth pulled; therefore, I didn’t want to brush it, and I certainly wasn’t going to let anyone touch it, especially my mother, who told me it wouldn’t hurt that much to pull. Yanking a tooth out of my gums not hurt? I refused to believe her. The incarcerated tooth kept trying to escape the prison of my mouth until finally it hung by one, thin thread of tissue. Still my lips kept sentinel.

We were driving to my mother’s parents’ house in St. Paul, Minnesota and had decided to make it a two day trip. I remember sitting in the back seat of our mini-van, awkwardly eating McDonald’s French fries to avoid the use of my front teeth. We stopped at a Best Western Hotel for the night. Once inside and settled, my mother practiced her parental authority and told me the tooth had to come out. She was probably worried about my grandmother’s reaction to the tooth. Why would my grandmother react badly? Well, because when my mother seated my wiggling, squirming body on the sink counter and swiftly pulled the tooth (which didn’t hurt at all), we discovered that the once pearly white baby tooth had rotted clean through. A small pinprick of light forced its way through the hole in the middle of the tooth, which was disturbing shades of black and green.

I was horrified. My parents had let the tooth rot in my head! I asked my mom years later why she’d let this happen. She replied that it was a mixture of laziness and good parenting. “Experience is the teacher,” she told me. Let your daughter do something gross and then let her find out how gross it really was. She’ll never ever do it again. It worked. After that, loose baby teeth didn’t stay in my mouth for long. My parents tried a similar approach on my brother, and he just ended up with dirty teeth and an abhorrence for toothpaste. Independence is a gift difficultly given to children.

My brother, Edward, is an anomaly, having always struggled with consistent dental hygiene; yet, my sisters, Mary and Clara, and I have brushed religiously. Mary remembers a song that Dad used to sing when she was little, “Brush your teeth every night.  Brush your teeth, do it right.  Don't want to get any cavities.” I wonder why he didn’t sing this to me as my loose tooth sat rotting. Probably because he knew the tooth would come out soon anyways. Perhaps he did sing me the song, and I just don’t remember. Regardless, I got the message because I’ve never had a cavity (I don’t count the rotten tooth catastrophe). I am the only child to exist thus far cavity free.  Mary experienced the negative effects of gum disease, getting her first cavity at fifteen. Clara despaired when she got her first cavity around nine or ten because this meant that she didn’t get to have her Polaroid taken for the No Cavities Club at the dentist’s office. I still have all my Polaroid pictures distinguishing me as a No Cavities Club member in a photo album.

Then came those preteen and teenage years that bring braces. My mother informed me recently that not getting braces for her children was never an option. It was just something that would happen, no question. My mother says that braces are “good for mental health,” especially for self-conscious teenagers, even if they are gotten for mostly cosmetic reasons. Having straight, white teeth makes me feel that I can smile widely and proudly.

Not getting braces wasn’t an option for my mother either. Her parents wanted braces for her and her brother, my Uncle Rob. She had many friends with braces, and she tells me that it didn’t seem uncommon to have braces in the early 1970s.

 My family’s braces legacy goes back to my mother’s mother, who had braces almost sixty-five years ago in the late 1940s. Getting braces then was pretty uncommon, and my great-grandmother had to drive Granny sixty miles to Waco, TX for her orthodontist appointments. When I asked her about her braces, she told me that they were a great gift because even though it was uncommon and somewhat expensive, her teeth were so crooked from overcrowding that her parents made the financial sacrifice to get them for her. In fact, one of her front teeth stuck straight out and showed even when her mouth was closed. Overall, she had eight teeth pulled before the braces could even begin their straightening work. My maternal grandfather, blessed with straight teeth, never got braces.

My paternal grandparents never got braces either but not because their teeth were straight. Operating under an assumption my father calls a “frontier idea,” my paternal grandfather had all his teeth pulled in his forties and was fitted for dentures. He’s spent half his life without his original teeth. Pulling teeth midway through life was standard practice in the setting where my grandfather grew up, out in west Texas. With limited opportunities for education, most people didn’t take as good a care of their teeth as is common practice today. It was probably less painful in the long run to just get the teeth pulled. My paternal grandmother, however, took better care of her teeth, only needing partial dentures.

My father got braces to fix the large gap he had in between his two front teeth, which kept other teeth from growing in properly. Growing up in a similar but more urban setting as his father, my father didn’t know many other kids with braces. In lower-middle class sections of Fort Worth, money did not usually go toward getting braces. But my father and his parents didn’t want the gap to persist, so they decided to go forward with braces. His older sister, my Aunt Kathy, did not have them.

My parents passed on certain genes that gave all four of their children crooked teeth. We expected braces as a course of life. My sisters and I all went to the same orthodontist (my brother got to go to the wife of our pastor, who owned a practice an hour’s drive away). We didn’t especially like Dr. Mann, the tall, skinny, seemingly cold orthodontist who every couple of weeks tightened our braces and sent us home in pain. He hardly said anything while he tightened and attached more metal to our mouths.

Mary and Clara have their own painful stories. Mary began visiting Dr. Mann when she was nine, who installed an appliance to widen the top of her mouth. Three years later and four teeth fewer, she got her braces, which she had for two years. Clara also had an appliance. It sat attached in her mouth for nine months, fixing her cross-bite; then came almost three years of braces.  Edward’s braces were a gift from our pastor’s wife. His experience was at least a friendlier one without Dr. Mann.

I not only had braces on my upper and lower sets of teeth, I had a tongue cage appliance (akin to a medieval torture device). I needed it because my tongue was in the way, keeping my lateral incisors (those teeth in between the front teeth and the canines) from growing down properly. So I was supposed to rest my tongue in the four prongs that extended back into my mouth in a slight upward curve from just behind my upper incisors and canines. My tongue would then be out of the way so the incisors could finish growing. I’m not sure why Dr. Mann didn’t make the prongs blunt on the ends. Instead, they were sharp and pointy, which didn’t encourage the resting of my tongue on them. Playing French horn was a horrible nightmare for a while, until I figured out how to tongue beneath the cage.

The cage came out after I swallowed one of the prongs while eating a sandwich with my grandmother in Barnes and Noble. Dr. Mann removed the cage, but I still had a year of braces. He gave me other gifts to make up for the loss of the cage, two sets of head gear (to be worn while sleeping) and rubber bands (to be worn constantly).

But viola! All the Sanders children have straight teeth. For roughly $4,000 a pop (except for Edward’s, which were gift), Dr. Mann manipulated our teeth into straightness. Although expensive, my mother told me it wasn’t a big strain because the orthodontist used a long term payment plan.

I like my straight teeth. I like the way my smile looks. I like that they look clean.

When I talked to my mother about teeth recently, she admitted something to me. Every month at our church’s community meal, she said, I can’t help but make unconscious judgments about people’s class, hygiene, education, and even intelligence based on what their teeth look like. Like my mom, I also make little judgments about people based on their teeth. Much of what I think depends on context. For example, my mother’s judgments stem from the context of the community meal, which works to feed people who are hungry and poor. If I saw a person at school who had never had braces I wouldn’t think, “Poor, uneducated, no hygiene.” I probably wouldn’t think anything at all.

 But in reality, these little judgments are, for the most part, unconscious. Part of me wants to claim that I’m very judgmental and superficial and make rash judgments about people’s crooked teeth. But I think that would be an exaggeration. I either look at people and think nothing or, more commonly, look at people and think, “beautiful.” To me, everyone is beautiful, whether or not they have crooked teeth. The person behind the teeth is more interesting to me.

Is having braces more like having laser eye surgery or plastic surgery? Are the reasons for braces health related or cosmetic? Why am I still attracted to straight-toothed smiles when I think all people are beautiful? An article on the Better Homes and Gardens website tells me that only about fifteen percent of orthodontic patients need braces because the overcrowding of their teeth causes chewing problems or pain. The other eighty-five percent just like the look of straight teeth. I’m in the eighty-five percent. When my braces came off my junior year of high school, I thought I looked older, better, more sophisticated.

Straight teeth might also become an unvoiced recommendation for some jobs. A business executive or PR manager might depend on their flashy smiles to smooth out deals, contacts, or agreements. A study on who buys the most whitening strips might be interesting. Business women and men? Students? Celebrities?

Arguably, straight teeth also fall into a category of expected appearance norms, right up there with no unibrows, facial or leg hair for women, or large, visible moles. We take our bodies and tell them that what they came up with naturally isn’t good enough. I am not referring to sickness or disease, simply the ways in which all our bodies work that we then reject on a basis of standardized beauty. It doesn’t matter that women are mammals; that leg hair has to go.

I dislike some of these norms but follow them anyways. I can’t deny that I like the feel of smooth legs and the nice lines of straight teeth. I want two eyebrows, not one. I participate and resist, existing as a paradox within my own society. I’m sure I’ll pass on crooked genes to my kids, too, and when they’re old enough, they’ll go to the orthodontist, too.

Response to Thoreau's "Walking"

I really try to like Thoreau, and some of the time I succeed. I think if Thoreau and I took a walk in the wood, we would enjoy ourselves and talk about the uplifting effects of Nature and the dangers of a mechanical society.

But I take issue with a lot of what Thoreau says in “Walking.” My honors project focuses on American Indian literature and thus most of my dislike probably stems from discovering some of the effects of ideologies propagated by white men on native culture. I can see that “dominant culture” perspective in Thoreau when he talks about the West. Thoreau writes, “We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure” (488). The “we” here is obviously Americans of European descent. The West is a place to be taken and won, industrialized and profited from. Essentially, Thoreau articulates the belief of Manifest Destiny (although as a Transcendentalist, he probably didn’t think of it in quite those terms). At least in this essay, Native Americans really have no presence. I don’t know what Thoreau thought of Indians, but I approach the work of any early “wilderness writer” with wariness.

Wilderness writers, like Emerson and Thoreau, can be confusing. The wilderness is pure; society is not. We should be more a part of that wilderness. But if we all go into the wilderness, is it a wilderness anymore? Was it ever really a wilderness to begin with? Is wilderness even real? Ironically, although Thoreau want to be “a part and parcel of Nature” (480), his ideas about wilderness ultimately create separation between humankind and nature. Everyday human society and nature are polarized. “In short,” he writes, “all good things are wild and free” (497). Does that make human society inherently evil?

Response to Annie Dillard's "Seeing"

When I write, vision is my “go to” sense. My sensory details automatically veer towards descriptions of what objects and people look like. Even my details about touch, sound, taste, and smell ultimately link back to sight somehow. I can’t escape it. So I must accept it and explore the question, what does it mean to really see? 

Sight is a most beloved sense. Like Annie Dillard, I like looking at things, especially things in nature, by attempting to silence the “useless interior babble” (705) that clouds my vision. After reading Dillard’s essay, the word “transcendence” automatically came to my mind. True seeing is a transcendent experience. You leave the confines of your mind and body and begin to “sail on solar wind” (705). Dillard’s poetic style of writing contributes to this feeling of transcendence. I get lost in some of her descriptive passages. I’m there with her, pausing motionless, watching reflections of clouds form in the creek. We leave our bodies and float above the water as spirits. What we see enters our souls in unexplainable ways.

Dillard’s last point about true seeing being a gift and a surprise gripped me. To see, we must be open to it, yes, we must be ready and willing, but we also must be patient for grace to embrace us and lift the scales from our eyes. I was reminded slightly of the Passover image: sandals on our feet, staves in our hands, ready to leave when called to do so. Somehow true sight is found but not sought. I find it because God opens my eyes.

Response to Wendell Berry's "An Entrance to the Woods"

Last semester I did an independent study devoted entirely to reading Wendell Berry’s essays and poetry. Although I didn’t read this essay as part of that study, I did read it in a literature course called Literature and Landscape. I enjoyed having the opportunity to read it again. The more I read things, the more they lodge themselves in my memory.

My respect for Wendell Berry is great, even if he expresses his opinions strongly and sometimes harshly. For example, in this essay about being in the woods he condemns the progressive, machine and technology driven American society. He retreats into the woods as a kind of moral purification. He enters despondent and pessimistic and leaves renewed and hopeful. I think this is a simplification of Berry’s argument, however. In some of his other essays that I read, he claims that machines are good up to a point. If machines enhance human work, they are helpful; if they replace human work, they are detrimental. So when I read, “the distant roar of engines, though it may seem only to be passing through this wilderness, is really bearing down upon it” (676), I interpret his words through my knowledge of his other essays. He doesn’t hate machines. He drives a car to the edge of the woods and then walks in to his campsite. He does, however, approach technology and the fast-paced life with apprehension and caution. He implicates himself in the technological culture but also resists full assimilation. He wants to remember and celebrate the renewal possible through a retreat into the natural world.

A Dreadful Event

For two weeks in the summer before my first year of high school I attended the Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute, a camp that offers two weeks of intensive study in multiple disciplines from ballet to drama to creative writing. I had auditioned for the orchestra on my French horn and was accepted. But this story is not about my experience playing the horn, although it was memorable. My first time attending the institute (I went two other summers), however, affected my life unexpectedly.

I saw her for the first time in the cafeteria. She was a painting student. I don’t now remember what she looked like or what she was wearing at the time, but I do remember one thing—her dreadlocked hair. The bumpy, frizzy, thick locks fell down her back almost to her waist. She had a few of them tied up to keep them out of her face. What beautiful hair, I thought immediately. Soon after that came the personal resolution, I want and will have dreadlocks someday. She was the first person I had ever really seen with dreadlocks. I’d definitely never seen them on a white woman before. Unaware and probably naïve, I didn’t think of the stereotypes associated with white dreadlocked females (pot smoking, free loving hippie chicks). They were simply beautiful to me.

I got home from camp and researched like mad. I read about the history of dreadlocks and how to make them and what you should put in them and what you definitely should not put in them (Elmer’s glue) and where I should buy products. I discovered a Canadian based company called knottyboy. The website was like a dreamland. They had all the information I would ever need. Even how-to-dreadlock videos! They sold natural shampoos and beeswax and conditioning spray and all manner of decorative beads. The bright orange background of the site added extra oomph and said to me, “Get dreadlocks! They are fun!” Oh I will, I told knottyboy. I will get those dreads someday. I was scared though. Dreadlocks are permanent (unless you want to spend hours combing your hair after applying knottyboy’s dreadlock remover), and they are a statement. There is no hiding them under a piece of clothing like the tattoo on my back. If I got dreadlocks, it would say something about me. The question was what? The truth was, I didn’t really care what it would say about me. I only cared that I thought them beautiful.

And then I did a silly thing after my first year of high school. I cut all my nice, long hair off in favor of a Beatles-inspired atrocity (not for the Beatles, just for me). I had, yes, a bowl cut. I don’t remember why I did it. I went temporarily mad. My long hair would have made some meaty dreads, but my resolution to get my own set of locks must have waned with time. It was instead time for funky (and not especially flattering) short hair! I’ve always preferred having long hair, although cutting all your hair off can be liberating. Your heard feels so light and you almost believe you could float away. But beware, you might end up with a bowl cut (sorry fellow females, it’s just not a good look for us 99% of the time).

No matter, hair grows (which is what I tell people when they raise their eyebrows at the news that I’ll have to shave my head to get rid of the dreads). And fortunately, my hair grows rather fast so just a year later it was long enough. I’d spent my sophomore year missing my hair and rebuilding my resolve to get dreads. The no-turning-back-point came when I pushed submit on a knottyboy order. My starter kit would arrive in a few weeks. Can’t not get them now.

I like being dramatic occasionally, so I decided to put the dreads in the day before my junior year began. I asked my sister, Clara, and best friend, Emily, to assist me. For five hours I sat in the upstairs bathroom and endured hair-yanking pain. Getting dreads is not necessarily a fun experience. The dreader must grasp a section of hair and backcomb to form a gnarly tangle. Then the dreader massages wax into the poofy tangle, rolling the dread back and forth with the palms to create as even a strand as possible. We took breaks. I even went to IHOP with a half-dreaded head (that’s how much I don’t care what people think I look like). Finally, at the end of those five hours I had little, ugly, frizzy baby dreadlocks. They stuck out at odd angles, stiff with fresh wax.

In your first year of dreaded life, you must wake up early in the morning for hair maintenance. You must palm roll daily and backcomb at the root every other day to encourage locking and tightening. I rewaxed once a week. Sundays became hair washing day, a bigger ordeal for me than usual because I had to start drying my hair for ten minutes. If you don’t dry your dreads properly, they could eventually mildew. When people already might assume that you don’t wash your hair, you don’t want the smell of mildew rising from your head. I slept with pantyhose over my head for a year so that I didn’t rub my dreads against my pillow and loosen them. Dreadlocks are a big investment. For a while. Eventually, you feel like you have enough wax in your hair so you skip a week. You grow lazy and stop backcombing the roots. Years pass and you stop doing anything to your hair all together. You wake up and go. Sure, once a week you pull out the shampoo, wash, and carefully squeeze as much water out of your sponge-like dreads as possible, but styling gel and curling irons become obsolete objects in your dresser drawers.

(to be continued at a later date...)

Teaching to the Test: Responding to George Orwell

Out of the several trigger phrases I found, I decided to write about this one because it reminded me of my own experience: “History was a series of unrelated, unintelligible but—in some way that was never explained to us—important facts with resounding phrases tired to them.” Orwell writes this sentence in the midst of a few paragraphs critiquing the drawbacks of the English boarding school’s classical education. Facts were memorized for the sole purpose of passing exams. Wait a minute that sounds a bit like the AP system in today’s schools. AP teachers construct their classes around the AP tests, instructing their students in such a way that will enable them to pass these exams at the end of the year. 

I have mixed reactions and feelings to the AP system. It can either enrich a student’s education or severely limit it, depending largely on a teacher’s approach. For example, my AP chemistry and biology teachers taught us not only what would be on the test but what would give us the fullest possible understanding of the subject. My history classes, however, were less than delightful experiences, which explains why Orwell’s quote resonated with me. Growing up with a history professor father, I had high hopes and expectations for my history classes. But what do I remember? Not even facts or dates as perhaps Orwell remembered. I remember that I couldn’t stay awake in World History. My American History teacher talked more about South Park than about the development of our country. My U.S. Government teacher enjoyed hearing his own political views expressed. My poor performances on my AP history tests (except government, which I taught to myself) probably reflected this poor teaching. My disenchantment with the subject by that point probably didn’t help either.