It's Sunday night, and I've graded a grand total of one paper out of many more that needed attention this weekend. But that's okay, because in the last 48 hours, I planned my lessons for the week, read 300 pages out of a 400-page novel, and cleaned my shower. Oh yes, and I drove to D's parents' house for their second annual Oktoberfest.
The lederhosen shown above are actually D's from his toddler days. His parents moved to Austria to teach right after they were married, so they knew where to get the genuine article when he arrived several years later (they had returned to the U.S. by then). Apparently, there is a picture of D in costume with a little Alpine hat on his little blond(!) head -- hard to imagine since his curls are now the color of espresso. Next time I go to his parents' place, I'll have to dig that photo up to add here.
The party itself was Saturday evening. There were, of course, sausages galore (see below), including one seasoned with curry that I'd never had before. D's mother also made some beautiful breads (also below) and desserts, one of which was called a Marmor Gugelhupf. Sounds exotic, but it's actually a simple marbled Bundt cake. New languages (German being one of them for me) always make things so much more fun ...
I had a good time meeting people (mostly D's dad's friends from work). The town where I spent a decade before college is relatively small and has a long local memory. Some of the guests there had children at my former high school -- we talked about the experiences I had in common with their kids as students, even after so many years. It's nice that there's continuity. I always feel a little sad when I go back to visit because of that overwhelming sense of time having moved on. Even though the town feels more or less the same, it's changed just enough to remind me that I'm no longer a part of it. Feeling connected to it through the people who are part of it now is comforting.
Tomorrow has much in store -- my department is holding an informational meeting on theses, which the students in my program are very glad about. The process for selecting a thesis committee isn't exactly transparent (even after you've read through the guidelines in the program handbook), so a little Q&A time will be helpful. I've already asked a professor to be my thesis director, thank goodness, so I won't have to worry about the mad rush to secure advisors that might very likely occur after this meeting. I do need to start thinking about my prospectus and secondary readers, though. Part of me is very reluctant to go forth on the topic I think I'm going to write about, but another part of me wants to do it very badly. I'm committed to it, either way.
I came across something helpful last week in a memoir by Mark Doty, which I'm reading for a class. "Why tell a story like this?" he writes as he talks about an unpleasant memory his mother tells him on her deathbed.
A writer I know says, Say it clearly and you make it beautiful, no matter what. Sometimes I think that's true; difficult experience can be redeemed by the powers of language, and words can help us to see what is graceful or human where loveliness and humanity seem to fail.
But other days I believe it's the other way round: say it beautifully, or at least precisely ... and you will make it clear. ... The older I get, the more I distrust redemption; it isn't in the power of language to repair the damages. ...
What we remember, wrote the poet who was my first teacher of the art, can be changed. What we forget we are always. ... We live the stories we tell; the stories we don't tell live us. What you don't allow yourself to know controls and determines; whatever's held to the light "can be changed" -- not the facts, of course, but how we understand them, how we live with them. Everyone will be filled by grief, distorted by sorrow .... What matters is what we learn to make of what happens to us.
And we learn to make, I think, by telling. Held to the light of common scrutiny, nothing's ever quite as unique as our shame and sorrow would have us think. But if you don't say it, you're alone with it, and the singularity of your story seems immense, intractable.
~ Mark Doty, Firebird
I won't go into any details about my topic here, but this singularity that Doty describes is what I want to be free from, being alone with "it." Amazing how he captures that idea so clearly -- hence my choice just to quote him at length instead of trying to put it in my own words. Will I be able to stand the light of common scrutiny, as he says, once the story's out there? Or will I regret it and wish I'd kept silent?
Maybe this week's reading will have answers.
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