A (delayed) Table of Contents for June
The date is July 9, 2023. I’m tired. We drove back from Tennessee yesterday. Tennessee was a week of hiking on trails too far for little legs to travel. I carried our younger daughter on my shoulders quite a bit. It felt good to be away from a desk and a computer, but I still felt stooped. It also felt good. The girls hiked farther than they thought they could.
Before we left for Tennessee, we had been watching the last installment of The Hobbit trilogy. My favorite shot in that movie is when after the Battle of the Five Armies Bilbo and Gandalf sit in the center of the frame without saying a word between them. Bilbo shifts his posture a little. Gandalf fidgets and puffs with his pipe. My daughters relate quite a bit to Bilbo. I know this because they have both said, “I want to be Bilbo.” I feel a little bit like Bilbo at times. I feel a little bit like Gandalf in others. I can never tell how much Gandalf does or doesn’t know. He acts quite a bit on intuition and instinct. He’s wise and perceptive, but he’s lucky as hell too. I mostly relate to Gandalf’s luck. I’ve been pretty lucky in my life.
Just about a year ago at this time, I was in the hospital. The nurse at the school where I worked recommended an ambulance be called for me. I want go into all the details, but if you’ve read much of anything I’ve written and posted since then, then you know I’m no longer a teacher. I walked away, and unlike Gandalf, I really did so without much of a plan. Luckily, I did have a job lined up. I had a job lined up largely because I knew someone who vouched strongly on my behalf.
When I left teaching, I worried I’d perhaps stop reading and writing. That seemed scary because reading and writing kind of define a lot of my personality traits. The whole reason I started posting with any regularity on Medium again this past January was to make sure I kept up with the habits I had always vouched for in my classroom as being a way to solidify the self against all the uncertainty and unknowing in the world. The reading and writing doesn’t provide certainty by any means. I always told students that too. But reading does allow a person to think through the murk, to seek haven in the passage. I think running has taught me that as well, and running has most definitely shown me the value in consistency. (A love for running well was also a major motivating factor in my leaving teaching — I wanted more time for more miles.)
I really wish I was posting this a week ago for some reason. Maybe it’s because I’m listening to Jason Isbell in a house half lit, and my older daughter keeps coming down the stairs with another reason not to fall asleep. In a year’s time, maybe she’ll rest easy. Then again, her arrival at the habit is an honest one.
Early in June Rejection Letters published “A Jury Summons from the Green Knight.” The piece is something of a Hermit Crab and a bit of a poem as well. Big thanks to MM Kaufman!
“An Update on the 184 DVDs in My Netflix Queue” (June 30)
“Correspondence from when I taught a Cormac McCarthy excerpt that upset a parent” (June 16)
“I want to be a real country singer: Revisiting Joshua Hedley’s Mr. Jukebox”(June 14)
“Table of Contents for May” (June 4)
“Airport Beers with the one and only Kamilah Lawson” (June 2)
As always, thanks for reading. Think I’d much rather return to those Tennessee trails tomorrow than drive back to work.
