The Canadas
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Summer 1998 News Updated August 6, 2002 |
At Work and At PlaySeveral people have asked me what I plan to do this summer, often inquiring whether I will teach summer school. As a matter of fact, I am teaching a section of Composition 2 at Richmond Community College, where the University of North Carolina at Pembroke operates a satellite program, but I have plenty to do outside the classroom. For one thing, I have several writing projects, including an article on the origin and development of the short story in the American South up to 1900 for a book called A Companion to Southern Literature. I'm trying to draw on the experience of researching and writing this article as I help my composition students write their research papers. I also have been busy planning for the fall, when I will teach two courses--Freshman Seminar and Issues in Contemporary American English--for the first time, as well as two other courses--Major American Authors and Composition II--that I already have taught. I have had a particularly good time preparing the syllabus and lesson plans for Freshman Seminar, which is designed to help students read, study, take notes, and generally succeed in college. Having seen many students who do not reach their potentials because they lack study skills, I look forward to helping my students be their best. Finally, summer has been a great opportunity to spend more time with Lisa and Esprit. Like me, Esprit is an early riser--very early, in fact--and we spend a lot of time together in the morning playing, reading poetry, and listening to music. In the afternoon, I usually take her for a walk and sometimes go for a run on my own. Finally, when Essie has turned in, Lisa and I have a little time alone to eat a couple of slices of one of her rhubarb pies, watch a rerun of The X-Files, or just talk. We also have gotten out of the house several times. A few days ago, the three of us took a picnic dinner to After Five, an outdoor event where scores of people in Laurinburg come together to listen to music, visit, and relax. Esprit, who loves to get out, had an especially good time. |
Father's Day
June:
Since January 18, every day has been Father's Day for me. I relish my little
daughter and this new life of mine, even if sometimes I can't believe it's
true. Apparently, Esprit thinks every day is Father's Day, too, because she has
been extraordinarily generous, continually showering me with her gifts of
smiles, pats, and, every once in a while, a chuckle. For the real Father's Day,
however, she went the extra mile and teamed up with her mom to make me this
beautiful card.
Esprit's Midwest Debut
July:
One of the great joys of having a new daughter is sharing her with our
families. While some of her relatives, including both sets of grandparents,
already had seen Esprit at her baptism here in North Carolina in April, most
had to wait until we made our annual summer trip back to the Midwest. During
that trip, which lasted for the almost entire month of July, Essie saw her
grandparents and godparents again and met for the first time 21 aunts and uncles,
23 cousins, one great-grandfather, and an assortment of great-aunts,
great-uncles, and second-cousins.
In Indianapolis, my parents relished the opportunity to spend two weeks with their only grandchild. For her part, Essie must have felt as if she had wandered into an amusement park. She went for horsey rides on my dad's knee, played with the few thousand toys my mom showered on her, posed for pictures, went for walks, and, when she was thoroughly exhausted, slept blissfully on Granny's and Grampy's chests and shoulders. In Fort Wayne, Lisa's parents sang to her and walked with her, and Lisa's mom made her cloth "doughnut," in which she could sit and play with her toys or just sit back and relax. Thanks to the hospitality of some of her aunts and uncles, Essie also had the chance to spend some quality time with many of her cousins. While Lisa, Essie, and I stayed with Chris and Carolyn Henry, Essie played with their children--Lindsey, Allison, and Sam--and, during a brunch at the home of Mart and Vicki Henry, their children--Heather, Becky, Jamie, and Jake--entertained her.
Finally,
the three of us visited Lisa's brother Erik and his wife, Mary Kay, in
Naperville, Illinois, where she met her cousins Andrew, Haley, and Ryan. The
time Es spent with Haley was one of the most memorable parts of our entire
trip--at least for me. Haley, who is 5, immediately fell in love with Essie and
for the next 24 hours rarely left her side. In addition to introducing her to a
variety of toys and pushing her stroller, Haley showed an uncanny ability to
read Essie's mind. Whenever Essie began to fuss, Haley was quick to diagnose
the problem; with a sly smile, she would say, "I think she wants me to
hold her," and then hoist up Essie's body--which is nearly the size of her
own--into her arms. Essie enjoyed the experience as much as Haley, and
I--sitting by and watching them relish each other--had the most fun of all.
Indiana
July 3-31, 1998: Ever since moving to North Carolina in 1992, we have returned to our home state of Indiana at least once a year, spending time with our families, visiting our favorite old haunts, and exploring some new places. This year, we discovered a new reason to come home: free, responsible, and fantastically eager babysitters. Since Essie was born in January, her grandparents in Fort Wayne and Indianapolis had spent only a few days with her, and her parents had spent every day with her. We all seized the opportunity to trade places from time to time. On the evening of the Fourth of July, for example, Lisa's parents watched Essie while Lisa and I went to Fort Wayne's Memorial Stadium, where we enjoyed fireworks, an air show featuring barnstormers and parachutists, and a wonderful Fort Wayne Philharmonic concert of American music by Aaron Copland, John Philip Sousa, George M. Cohan, Irving Berlin, James Weldon Johnson, and others. Having spent the last several weeks in 95- and 100-degree heat in North Carolina, we also enjoyed the weather, which actually turned chilly after the sun went down. Best of all, Lisa and I relaxed and enjoyed each other's company.
Later, my parents did the babysitting while
Lisa and I spent an afternoon at one of our favorite places on earth:
Bloomington, Indiana. Anyone--with the exception of
those poor, confused souls who wind up attending Purdue--could easily fall in
love with IU, where students from every state and 133 foreign countries come to
study in music, psychology, biology, finance, theater and drama, and 50 other
programs ranked among the 10 or 20 best in the nation. They study and relax on
a beautiful, wooded 1800-acre campus and attend sporting events such as the
famous Little 500 bicycle race. They eat, shop, read, watch movies, hear music,
or just sit and think in the gorgeous Indiana Memorial Union, the largest
college union in the world. For us, IU is even more special. Between 1985 and
1989, we were those students--two of them, anyway--and we did all of those
things and more. We attended classes in Woodburn Hall, where gigantic murals
adorn the walls in one of the lecture halls. We watched student plays,
including a musical in which one of our friends appeared. I worked for the
Indiana Daily Student, one of the best student newspapers in the country, and
we both studied English with some distinguished scholars. As resident
assistants at Read residence hall, we met scores of students and made many
friends. In 1987, we celebrated with hundreds of other students at Showalter
Fountain after IU won the NCAA basketball tournament. Best of all, we met and
fell in love. When we returned to Bloomington for the first time in five years,
we fell in love with it and with each other all over again. We had lunch at our
favorite Bloomington restaurant, the Uptown Cafe, and strolled down Kirkwood
Avenue, where we used to shop. We visited the Arboretum, where I wrote a poem
for Lisa, and the Union, where we went on one of our first dates. While
revisiting Read, we mentioned to a student we encountered there that we had met
at IU, and he immediately asked me for advice on his love life. I told Lisa
later that he probably looked at her and thought, "Man, this guy knows how
to find a beautiful woman!"
We had other adventures, as well. In Indianapolis, my mom and I visited the Eiteljorg Museum, which is known for its extensive collection of Western and Native American art. As a fan of Frederic Remington's Western sculptures and paintings, I enjoyed seeing his sculpture The Cheyenne (1901) and his painting Baffled Chiefs Leaving the Fort (1897). We also saw works by Charles M. Russell, Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, and other Americans who made a reputation as artists of Western landscapes and peoples, largely by selling their works to Eastern magazines such as Scribner's Monthly. I especially liked Bierstadt's picturesque Indian Encampment at Sunset (1872) and Alfred Jacob Hubler's Trapper's Bride (1847), which reminded me of Vardis Fisher novel I read last year. Perhaps the most unusual and interesting item on display, however, is a 1919 letter that Russell wrote to a friend; amidst the words on the pages, Russell sketched and painted two tiny Western scenes of horses and men, each intricately drawn. After leaving the Western Art Gallery, we visited several galleries featuring Native American art and craft items, including beautiful beadwork, soapstone carvings, an Aleut cape made of sea lion intestine, and a cleverly designed chess set featuring American soldiers on one side and Native Americans on the other.
Also in Indianapolis, my parents joined Lisa,
Essie, and me at a Revolutionary War re-enactment. Lisa and I had seen a Civil
War re-enactment in Charleston, but this was our first chance to see a
demonstration of the American Revolution, which interests me even more than the
Civil War. We interviewed a surgeon in the Continental camp, where we learned
about bleeding and various medicines, and chatted for a long time with a
colonial soldier, who happened to be one of my dad's co-workers in his real
life. He showed us several items that Revolutionary soldiers carried, such as a
musket and bayonet, and told us a fascinating story about George Rogers Clark's
military exploits in Indiana. Finally, there was the mock battle itself, a
re-enactment of a battle fought on Long Island. I knew that the warfare of the
eighteenth century was quite different from that of today, but I still learned
something from watching this demonstration, in which elaborately--and
warmly--dressed soldiers on each side boldly advanced on each other in lines,
then stopped and fired their muskets, usually without even trying to find
cover. When they needed to retreat, they simply turned their backs and walked
back in the direction they came, and the opposing army did not fire at them. At
one point, some of the British troops had managed to sneak up behind the
colonial soldiers, forcing them to fight in both directions. The colonists
simply fired at the troops on one side, then turned 180 degrees and fired at
the troops on the other side. When they were fighting in one direction, they apparently
didn't have to worry about being shot from the other direction. The smoke and
boom of the muskets and cannons added to the realism. While a few anomalies--an
Indian with a tan line, an overheard comment from a colonial soldier that he
didn't drive five hours to die in the first five minutes, and a peculiar
command from the British leader, "Casulaties, up!"--forced us to work
a little harder to suspend our disbelief, we found the whole experience a lot
of fun.
In Fort Wayne, I visited the Lincoln Museum to see a temporary exhibit on the Lincoln Highway, the nation's first transcontinental highway. A fascinating collection of maps, photographs, videotapes, and other items, the exhibit interested me even more than I thought it would, particularly because it was so full of surprises. I learned, for example, that the Lincoln Highway was not so much a construction project as a public relations campaign. In 1912, representatives from the car industry, tire companies, and other businesses that stood to gain from automobile travel formed the Lincoln Highway Association. Realizing that Americans would be more likely to buy and use cars if they had better roads on which to drive them, members of the association sponsored a survey that identified already-exisiting roads that could link New York to San Francisco. Some of these "roads" were mere gravel or even dirt trails, including paths that had once been part of Pony Express routes and the Oregon Trail. Nevertheless, the association promoted these connected roads--which passed through Philadelphia, Fort Wayne, Omaha, and dozens of other cities and towns--as the "Lincoln Highway." With the hope of encouraging local government entities to improve these roads, some of which turned into muddy morasses after rain or snow, the association also built mile-long stretches of concrete roadways as models. Inspired by the "new" highway--which was promoted through pennants, signs, cigar boxes, even a Lincoln Highway board game manufactured by Parker Brothers--many Americans set out in cars to explore their country. Because of the unreliability of their cars and the roads, however, a trip by automobile was more of an adventure than it is today. A contemporary manual encouraged auto travelers to pack extra headlights, a gallon of motor oil, tire chains, even a shovel to cope with muddy roadways. Until motels began to appear, many travelers on the Lincoln Highway camped along the way. Indeed, the exhibit explained that early auto travelers saw themselves as pioneers akin to those who had set out on the Oregon Trail some 70 years earlier.
On our way back home to North Carolina, we stopped in Madison, Indiana, and visited Hanover College, a liberal arts school of about 1,000 students. In the few hours we spent on it, the Hanover campus quickly became one of our favorites among the dozens we have seen. In fact, I told Lisa that it looks like the type of campus I would design if I could. After following a winding, tree-lined approach that must have stretched for more than half a mile, we came upon a gorgeous mixture of tall trees, grassy areas, and Georgian-style buildings with red-brick walls and white trim. The architects and designers obviously had made a deliberate effort to bring a classy look to everything they did. Even the three-year-old gymnasium featured huge palladian windows and a bright, open foyer, in addition to its utilitarian basketball courts and weight rooms. Standing in front of the college president's house, we enjoyed a majestic view of the Ohio River, which runs along the south edge of the campus. If not for the smoke stacks of a nearby power plant, the spectacular panorama would have rivaled the view from George Washington's Mount Vernon. When we finished visiting the campus, we spent a couple of hours at nearby Clifty Falls State Park, where we had lunch and enjoyed more great views of the river, as well as impressive Clifty Falls, a waterfall on an Ohio tributary.
In addition to all of these excursions, we had a great time just spending time with our families and seeing them interact with our new daughter.
Guests of the Guests
July:
Back when Lisa and I attended Indiana University, we made a very special friend
in Jack Guest, who lived on my floor in Read Residence Hall. A few years later,
we made a new friend in Stephanie Sanderson, whom Jack began dating after Lisa
and I graduated. Since that time, we have traveled to Ocracoke, North Carolina,
with Jack and Stephanie and, a few years ago, attended their wedding in
Bloomington, Indiana, on the IU campus. On our trip to the Midwest to visit our
families this summer, we traveled to their home in Chicago to join Jack and
Steph again for another special occasion: the birth of their first child, Tyler
Hamilton Guest, who had arrived only a few days earlier. For their part, Jack
and Stephanie got their first look at our first child, Esprit. Having been
through the same wonderful, but exhausting experience only six months earlier,
we enjoyed seeing this new family and were especially pleased to see them doing
so well.
Sewanee, Tennessee
August 1, 1998: On our way home to North Carolina from Indiana, we took a little detour to visit Sewanee, home of the University of the South. Our curiosity about the school had been piqued when we read that students there dress up for class and professors teach in their academic regalia. We had heard all about Southern gentility and even experienced a bit of it since living in North Carolina, but we had never known it to manifest itself in college, where students are supposed to show up to class in T-shirts and tennis shoes. When we got to Sewannee, however, we entered a quintessentially genteel academic atmosphere. We wandered through a huge Gothic church, up narrow stairwells, past cloistered courtyards, even into what appeared to be a mead hall, complete with carved wooden walls and suits of armor standing by the fireplace. Even the residence halls, generally the pariahs of campus architecture, were elegant; one of them featured a beautiful courtyard with wrought iron and what appeared to be clay tile. The grounds are impressive, as well. Nestled high in the Smoky Mountains, it is densely wooded and features a spectacular view of the valley below. The 1,000 or so students who go here should feel fortunate to be part of such an extraordinary place of study and scholarship.