Some Short Creative Nonfiction from RBU

In Appalachia's blank winter skies and endless rain at the end of this November, I find myself longing for stars and family.  This is a piece I wrote for Real Bloggers United some months ago and find myself revisiting, so I thought I'd share it.

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Starlight Requiem

God is an intelligible Sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

-- Alan of Lille

*      *      *

This is my Father's world, 
And to my listening ears, 
All nature sings, and round me rings 
the music of the Spheres...

“What’s wrong?”  My then-boyfriend asked me when I stopped singing.  I turned to face him with a frown. 

“The ‘music of the spheres?’” I said over the noise of the worship service.  “That’s so anachronistic.   It’s an image from a geocentric universe.”

“But it’s really just a metaphor,” he offered helpfully.  I shook my head. 

“But that’s exactly the kind of thing that gets me funny looks at college when I tell people I’m a Christian now,” I protested.  Some of the other parishioners started eyeing me doubtfully, so I shrugged it off and joined in at the refrain. 

Back when I was twenty years old, I could have sworn things like that mattered.  I grew up in Montana as the youngest child of amateur geologists who worshiped a faceless but benevolent God in the vast church of Nature, and the dome of that supposed crystalline sphere formed our cathedral.  My mother’s God, the grand scientist driving Nature, wasn’t exactly an absent watchmaker—but He was punctual and a little distant, and He was careful to keep that watch brightly polished and wound tight.   As a neophyte Christian with one foot still planted inside that starry cathedral, I was reluctant to denigrate Him, or so I thought, with such an outmoded view of the universe.  The stars were most definitely not fused into some crystalline globe, I adamantly declared, and no music filled the skies with a sympathetic ring from their revolution—and it secretly embarrassed me to hear such a thing proclaimed in the church I attended, seemingly to confirm all the stereotypes my old friends held about my new faith.   

And yet, when I was a child living in a house of science, my childhood cathedral was dominated by the turning of the spheres and I never knew it.  You see, star watching guides don’t talk about the motion of the earth around the sun—they talk about the night sky and sun revolving eternally around the horizon line, with Polaris its hub and the constellations churning about in their various declinations.  The stock-still earth served as my kneeling-bench as I gazed up, up, into the rood-loft of the night and learned the names of the stars in the Northern Cross in almost the same way that a medieval priest might have taught his flock the names of the Patriarchs whose lives were painted on the walls.  In my head, I knew that the earth turned around the sun; but in the deep recesses of my imagination, God’s stars and His sun turned inexorably around the earth. 

Now that I am several years further down the road in my stargazing (and in my Christian faith), I’ve come to realize that I needed both views of the stars in order to help me cope with the vastness of a world I don’t always understand.  For one, I was surprised to discover that my smug dismissal of the geocentric world is really a side-effect of my recent urbanization.  When I looked up into the Chicago sky some years ago, my earth spun off its axis, zipping around the sun, and I realized as I gazed upon so much empty, black space in the sky how deep it was, how lonely.  That heliocentric universe, lit up by the light of our own hubris, was admittedly vast and mysterious; its unknown workings fascinated me.   But even though it made me feel awe, it also left me feeling cold.   There is no good light to see a loving Creator by in that sky; His hand vast, but it is also harder to see as it turns the universe around a hub that science still can’t locate.    

In contrast, anyone who has spent time in wilderness knows how self-evident the geocentric universe is.  Back in my lonely stargazing days in Laramie, the stars burned so thick in the air that I couldn’t slot a fingernail’s width between them.  Without the light of town to block my view, the sky looked both solid and yet strangely alive with motion.  The closeness of those stars offered a comfort that the other, neverending sky never could; as they moved restlessly around my inert frame, I could also see the Hand which pushed them around their imaginary axis—and I could also imagine, at least briefly, that such a Hand just might also hold me within its grasp.  Back in those years of my greatest doubt, this was the sky I tried with such care to re-create on my dorm ceiling with tiny glow-in-the-dark stars, a string compass, and a star chart.  Even though I hung out with intellectualist astronomy students and agnostics back then, I didn’t think I wanted a universe warmed to a few degrees Kelvin.   It was that close, immediate sky that a transcendentalist friend of mine adored when he went camping for the first time in his life; as he dropped his empty flask to the earth, he drunkenly exclaimed, over and over again, “Oh my God, look at all the stars…” 

I could, in my own way, understand his reaction.  For someone who had never once had seen anything more than the Big Dipper on a city skyline, the pressing weight of the spheres against his mind now threatened to overwhelm him. I, however, had seen and known both of these sides to the universe, and spending too much time under the turning spheres after my conversion made me start to take Him for granted.  I still needed to figure out how to make these two worlds fit together under the same night sky. 

*      *      *

My grandmother, matriarch and axis of my family’s careful universe, passed away last year.  My mother was especially grieved at her passing, but the one who suffered most, and the most silently, was my sister Sparrowhawk.  She held a deep affection for my grandmother, being just as restless and free spirit as she was, and Sparrowhawk’s own failing and sometimes violent marriage gave her a sense of kinship to my grandmother which no one else shared.  In the days before Grandma’s funeral, none of us understood the weight of the grief and rage Sparrowhawk kept inside until it flared out unpredictably against us all.   

Her most frequent victim of that fulminate grief, however, was her eldest daughter.  My niece Kestrel had just turned fourteen and, just like her mother had once done, she found herself straining at the jesses for reasons she couldn’t explain, desperate to break loose, go haggard.  On the day before the funeral, my sister and Kestrel had a vicious spat over something pointless; Sparrowhawk’s hidden tinder met Kestrel’s flame, and within seconds a screaming match flared up in our tiny hotel room.  I made the mistake of interfering, and predictably, I escaped with a scorched face and singed fingers to mock my foolishness.

Later that night, after tempers died down to embers and we all sat sulking in my grandfather’s kitchen, Kestrel looked up towards me.  “Aunt J., can you help me with something?” She asked over her schoolbooks. 

“Sure, what’s up?”  I asked. 

“Can you help me count stars to figure out how bright the sky is?  I have to do a star magnitude study for my science class while I’m out of town,” she explained.  She and I slipped outside to the backyard to the comforting veil of darkness which hid our losses. 

           

Once outside, we stood for a while at the blank stillness as she tried to tally up the night sky.  “Wow, I’m getting, like, sixty stars.  That’s pretty good, isn’t it?”  Kestrel asked.  I tried hard not to smile. 

“Kestrel, hasn’t your mom ever taken you stargazing out-of-town?”  I asked, baffled.  She shook her head, and I tried hard not to growl in disapproval at my sister’s apostasy.  ‘That’s it, we’re headed out,” I grumbled, which made Kestrel smile.  “Grab a coat.”  We slipped out of the house, away from our family’s muted rage and silent grief, to visit the stars. 

In a real sense, these stars which Kestrel and I drive beneath are my grandmother’s.  I drive several miles west out of Lewistown to where the road turns toward the ghost town where my grandmother grew up, and I pull off the highway onto a suggestion of a dirt road, just a couple of bare lines cut through the wheatgrass.  The darkness slams a lid over our car, pierced only by the dome light as Kestrel gets out of the passenger seat.  We lean back against the trunk of the car; after a couple of minutes, her eyes adjust to the perfectly moonless night, and she gives a low whistle.  “God, look at all the stars,” she whispers reverently.   I smile inwardly. 

We do a short catalog of the stars in the night sky, and after some scientific discussion, Kestrel decides that she can see up to magnitude seven stars in the sky.

“Not so fast,” I tell her.  “Look to the east.”  She peers over to where a dark pink smudge creeps up the edge of the sky. 

“You can’t really see stars at that magnitude unless you get about forty miles away from town lights,” I tell her.  “That light pollution is hiding a lot more than you realize.”  The idea hits her like a revolution. 

“So, there’s even more than this?”  She gapes in awe. 

“Yeah, Kestrel.  There’s a lot more stars than even this.” 

She sits silently in thought while I teach her the names of the constellations and their courses; I tell her about the ecliptic, the declination of the night sky, running through the same celestial catechism I had learned by heart but she was never offered.  In the dark, I can almost feel her mind punching through the boundless limits of her new-found sky, escaping the confines of her youth and disappointment into the arms that turn the heavens.

A sudden realization stops her short.  “This is what Great-Grandma saw every night on the farm, wasn’t it?”  Kestrel asks me.  As I lean against the trunk of my car, parked in a field on the rim of the Judith Basin, her question turns my mind over the axis of the heavens, back to my grandmother’s adolescence: before her own grand rebellion, before my grandfather and their disastrous marriage.  I see her just as young, as wild and angry as I once was and my niece is now becoming, her thin, still form blocked in silhouette against the revolving sky; she sits on the back of her father’s tractor in a frozen landscape of hard winter wheat, watching the same sky that her great-granddaughter now ponders with an equal and restive fascination.  In the edges of my niece’s blue eyes I see reflected her great-grandmother’s, restless with anger at the vast cage that her father’s acreage makes of her freedom.  As she combs the endless skies with her eyelashes and plumbs the depths of the same shifting stars I now watch, suddenly she finds what I had lost so long ago and just so recently discovered:

“The music, in the stars.  Jackrabbit, can you hear it?” 

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PHOTO CREDIT:

1)  Night Sky (Wish you were here Andreas) by Indian.summer 1901's Flickr photostream:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/27962415@N07/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

2) Night sky in Wyoming, taken by Gary Elasser: 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/speakerx/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

Back to Laramie

[This is the first of several posts about my recent visit to Laramie, Wyoming to visit my brother and do a little informal research.  I hope you enjoy it!]

As I write this post, it is the beginning of July and I am sitting in the self-proclaimed "Home of Edgy Coffee" just a couple blocks off of campus, drinking an iced coffee with a wedge of lime in it.  Some crooner from the fifties drifts out a lazy melody over the radio.  In fact, this new branch of Coal Creek Coffee Company is about as "edgy" as a paperclip on a quarterly report, but, hey-- I guess they can call themselves whatever they want.  At least it's not Starbuck's.

How does it feel to be back in Laramie after at least six years?  Pretty darn good.  I started out for Albany County from my in-laws' house on the first and took a leisurely drive through the Shirley Basin in the early evening and crossed into the prairie just ahead of a huge set of thunderclouds brewing on the horizon.  It's as green as far as the eye can see right now, just starting to get its earliest tinges of gold as the heads on the grasses ripen and dry.  In a few weeks, if it doesn't rain much, those oceans of rippling green will turn into a golden, waving sea. 

My brother Coyote walked me around the downtown my first night here to introduce me to the new Laramie.  He's in school here now, sort of, trying to walk that delicate, fine balance between school and starvation.  Right now he's out of a job, but he's also out of school, so he can eat.  He looks more gangly than starved-- a little like Shaggy off of Scooby-Doo, with his wavy red hair he never cuts until he donates it to Locks of Love and a chin patch that should be on a saxophone player.  On the way he introduces me to a good portion of Laramie's fringe culture: a bouncer called "the hippie" and several real hippies, one of whom got in trouble with the city for living in a wigwam by the river.  As we walk he chats about his friends, most of whom don't fit in to the mainstream in one way or the other: punkers, rebels, gays and lesbians, bluegrass guitarists, hippies, artists, philosophers, troublemakers.  Coyote knows all these people because he's one of them, and their company suits him well. 

Has Laramie changed much since I lived there?  Yes and no.  Most of the downtown looks virtually identical to my high school days except that the names of the stores have changed.  The restaurant where my sister Sparrowhawk worked when I was in high school is now an Italian restaurant, and the downtown now houses two yoga centers, an honest-to-goodness sushi joint, and an oxygen bar.  (An oxygen bar?  Really?  That's just over the top.)  The major change is that the old Fox theater, which had stood as an abandoned piece of Laramie Americana for generations, was finally so dangerous that they were forced to tear it down.  Now an empty lot stands next to the Cowboy bar, its glaring, yellow sign no longer oxidizing in the Laramie heat.  Farewell, ye vintage pigeon haven.

The major changes are all east of town.  The little strip mall I'm sitting in behind War Memorial Stadium is entirely new, as are the big hotels clustered around it.  It used to house a couple of old rain barrels in an empty field.   In fact, there's a set of "Cowboy Condos" going in right next door, too-- as housing for Wyoming football fans, I suppose, which will overlook the pitiful cinder-block married housing for college students that should have been torn down when I was in college.   Out towards Cheyenne around Sherman Hills there are hundreds of gleaming, new houses all stamped out with a Technicolor cookie press.   Coyote tells me this is all just a few years old.   Little Laramie is growing up pretty fast, it seems, though I wonder from the numbers of houses whether or not the population has grown to match. 

And yet, for all this growth it doesn't really seem to be that much bigger-- nor does it seem to have a different character.  I almost had to smile when I pulled my car over a few miles north of town and a black cloud of mosquitoes made the windows go black.  Some things never change, it seems.  It's been one of the wettest summers on record, and the mosquitoes are getting so big and so nasty that I'm waiting for them to run for political office.  The Public Health office is handing out cans of Off to help the poorer residents deal with the bugs.  Laramie has never had much of a mosquito abatement program, and it looks like that hasn't changed at all.  Scratching the bites on my ankles with my pen as I type is a good reminder of the not-so-good side to the town.  

As we wandered around town last night towards the railyard, I looked up at a deep blue sky edged with purple and sighed.  "I would really love to come back here," I said.  Coyote gave me a fuzzy look.

"Seriously?"  He asked.  "To be honest, I'd give anything to get out."

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PHOTO CREDIT:

2) The old Fox theater in Laramie, from awkwardindeed's Flickr photostream. available through a Creative Commons 2.0 license.

Yeah, You Betcha Dere: the Power and Politics of Code Switching

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I want to know... whether they are deranged freaks, murderers who committed crimes in the name of the government, or whether they are forcing the Afrikaner to confront himself.  More to the point-- what do I have in common with the men I hate the most?...

I interview them one after the other in a quiet corner of the Pretoria Synod hall.  "You know, your whole body language and tone of voice change when you are with these men," says an English-speaking colleague.  "I couldn't hear what you were talking about, but there is a definite intimacy..."  I say nothing.  I did use all the codes I grew up with, and have been fighting against for a lifetime.  But now I want a good story and I want to understand them.  (117-118)

--Antjie Krog, talking about the Vlakplaas Five, in Country of my Skull 117-118)

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Choosing one set of codes over another can often involve power relations among certain classes or cultures.  Social codes can have political or personal cachet-- delineating who's in the club, who's on the outside, or who has the superior social role, for instance.  As somebody navigating through a culture whose cultural layers are also divided into linguistic layers, Antjie Krog's code switches-- and power plays-- often fall along linguistic lines.  She switches into the verbal and non-verbal intimacy of Afrikaans when talking to the Vlakplaas Five in order to gain their trust.  A certain inflection in Afrikaans over the phone is enough to provoke panic even before the death threat is pronounced.  And sound of an English accent against her Afrikaans is enough to put her at a rhetorical disadvantage in a philosophical debate.  The language you use and codes you employ-- or have employed against you-- can have a profound effect on one's social positioning. 

For an extreme example, my first teaching job in the deep South was on the coast, and one or two of my students spoke the Sea Island Creole dialect (also known as Gullah).  It's not a matter of bad grammar; Gullah has distinct western African parallels and, if  you learn the rules, it makes perfect sense.  But these kids were effectively told that their home English was not welcome at school because the grammar rules they followed were "wrong."  I only worked in an after-school tutoring program in the inner city for one afternoon because I couldn't stand listening to their otherwise well-intentioned and sweet volunteer teacher constantly scolding the kids for their "gutter"  English.  In short, the kids were forced to "talk white," as some of them put it, and they resented it.

I was torn on this.  On the one hand, my job was to teach college freshmen to express themselves in their own language.  For me, that means writing to their own community in an expressive, idiomatic Gullah.  On the other hand, I was also supposed to teach them how to write papers for college classes.  That meant teaching them the language codes of the university and forcing them to write in standard English.  I was supposed to teach them the language codes required to be a part of and an agent within the "academic" social set. So, I marked anything outside of standard English wrong-- and I felt like a heel while doing it. 

Although these are heavily politicized examples in America, almost every person has some experience with this issue of navigating through different social spheres with different language.  Many people speak completely different languages at home or work; others have a vocabulary for certain exclusive societies.  We have to switch in and out of these social circles linguistically to navigate.  Language is power. 

My own experience has been far more mundane than my students from the Sea Islands, as it's only an issue when navigating between my home culture and academia.  For instance, when I was in Montana a few years ago on my way to visit my grandparents, we stopped in a town we used to live in to visit some friends.  My parents caught up with two of their friends, the "Fosters" at an old cafe on the edge of town, a standard burger-and-steak joint with a fiberglass mustang out front.   Mrs. "Foster" has Blackfeet heritage and her husband was a retired rodeo bull rider.  They raised three plucky, strong-willed daughters whom I used to play with when I was little.  After my father cheerfully explained to Mr. "Foster" that I was still in school for my PhD, my mother joked, "In a couple more years she's going to be too educated to speak to us anymore."  Ouch.  The "Fosters" both laughed.  I looked over at my mother, set my jaw, and said in my best high line accent,

"Hey now, hold on dere-- I don' wan' no sheepskin 'f it means I can't be a normal person."

 The speed at which I unconsciously switched into this gear surprised me.  When my parents tried to suggest I was falling out of their collective society, the only way I felt I could respond was by changing my language to demonstrate otherwise.  Judging by the raised eyebrow and grin I got, I think Mrs. "Foster" (who was born twenty miles from my birthplace and whose accent is similar to mine)  got the point.   

In this case, my code-switching was mainly an issue of reinforcing my place in my community in a way my parents would understand.  But many times, this code-switching is more about power relations than belonging.  The powerful set gets to determine which codes are acceptable and which aren't allowed.  Think back to the Krog example I shared with you at top; Krog's Afrikaner accent puts her at a disadvantage with English South Africans, but it lets her move freely among the Vlaakplas Five because she's part of the group.  If you follow a different set, then you're out of power.  Although the writing is a little bit questionable, Ellen Cushman's book The Struggle and the Tools was an important first step to understanding the politics of language and code-switching from a compositional standpoint.  The community she studies is an inner-city minority community, and she follows its linguistic strategies (like code-switching) for survival against the local bureaucracy. 

But the struggle for power and language is everywhere-- not just the inner city.  Everybody wants to fit in somewhere, and everyone learns and uses the languages of certain groups to their own advantage.     Usually I unconsciously switch out of my Montana high-line accent when I'm talking to my professors, and I especially did it when Sarah Palin was running for VP back in 2008 because her so-called "Mooseburger" accent (and by extension, mine) had been branded by the literati as "ignorant."  I just couldn't stand the funny looks.

But I was surprised to catch myself babbling on angrily in my tepid Canadian wannabe accent in the middle of class shortly before the election was over.  The class discussion had wandered off-topic for a few minutes to politics, so the professor proceeded to explain how all people who voted a certain way (people like my father) were all a bunch of rifle-toting, truck-driving trailer trash with GEDs and questionable religious beliefs.  (Well, it was something along those lines.)  Even though I didn't respond back to his flaming remarks directly, I did spend the rest of class glaring a lot and sounding like a stage extra from Fargo while throwing out words like "ain't" and "ya know" and "you betcha."  Why did I do it?

It took a little while to figure it out: even though I didn't want to challenge him openly in class,  I still wanted to create distance between him and myself, between his views and my world.  So I code switched out of an academic register and in to the social class he was mocking to show where my loyalties lay.  I linguistically walked out of the academic sphere, so to speak, and slammed the door behind me.  

So, people often switch in and out of groups by switching in and out of certain registers or the ways that they talk.  People can choose to identify with or against communities with their language.  This gets really interesting, for instance, if you start digging through The Laramie Project.  Who is identifying with whom? Can we get a sense of community or alignment based on the linguistic codes each one follows?  Are the interviewers or interviewees trying to place themselves within social groups, or without? 

Maybe. I'm not really convinced that you can, but we'll look few interesting spots in the two TLP plays in the next few weeks nonetheless, just to see what we can find.  We'll keep these ideas about language, and codes, and code switching-- belonging, maneuvering, advantage and disadvantage-- to see if we can find different languages, and codes, in The Laramie Project.

Johnny Cash and my Grandmother

As I'm up here in Wyoming, I find myself thinking of my grandmother a lot.  My grandmother's "tall drink of water" wasn't my grandfather (who was, admittedly, a very "handsome fella" in his day).  It was Johnny Cash, the man who gave her rebellion a voice.  Every time Cash's name came up in conversation when I was a child, my Grandmother would get this funny little light in her eyes-- something mischievous, alive.  She didn't really speak in terms of hero worship or admiration.  She loved his music, to be sure-- but that's rarely the context I heard her mention his name.  She once defiantly announced in front of my grandfather that Cash "could park his boots under [her] bed anytime."  I remember stifling a childish giggle.  I don't remember my grandfather's reaction, however, but I bet it ended up with a fight.

I think it was a connection that went a little farther than Cash's resinous voice, gorgeous deep eyes or rebellious personality; rather, they were both shockingly beautiful, profane people needing redemption, and I think she recognized that.  In the midst of their personal turmoil and agonizing failures, they both longed for something stable and holy, something which they knew, for all their stubborn willpower and passion, they couldn't provide for themselves. 

And then there's this video.  I only ran into it recently when I heard it over the stereo at a local taco joint, and the sound of Cash's voice singing Nine Inch Nails over the hubbub stopped me in mid-bite.  It made me think of my grandmother.  I looked the whole song up on my computer a little while later, and I was just overwhelmed.   Oh my gosh, the psychological pain in this song is unbearable.

Even though I know how talented he is, I've never liked Trent Reznor; he's a good songwriter and can tap into pain (but little else) with a raw-edged clarity.  But Cash takes it and turns that anguish into something else-- it's a lament to Christ, for a seemingly wasted life. 

I don't know what my grandmother would have thought of hearing the discontented spokesman of her generation singing music from the discontented voice of mine.  Maybe it's something in the slight lisp in Cash's voice that betrays his last stroke (just like hers once did), but I think she would see something familiar in this song, something that would break her heart... 

Now there's a "Handsome Fella": Codes and Family Again

You know, after writing that last post, it's funny where I start thinking about code switching and my grandmother's codes for different kinds of masculinity-- and where those codes resurface.   I recently got back from Montana where I was helping to move my grandfather from his three bedroom  house to a retirement apartment complex in his hometown.  It's been a solid week of stress and tongue-biting as we have packed, re-packed, coddled him, begged him, and even browbeat him into doing everything he has to do for his own good, like leaving the house unlocked when the real-estate agent comes to show the house, or not swindling a relative in a car deal.  But, he's finally moved in, thank goodness-- the stress is over, and I'm happy to escape back to Wyoming for a few days before going back to Appalachia.

So, one thing we needed to do was to find and pack up all the family heirlooms and memorabilia before the estate planner came to sell the rest.  As my mother, aunt and I were digging down in the closet in the basement to get everything ready for a garage sale, we came across a box of old pictures.  Most of them were pictures from the Judith Basin of extended family now long since forgotten.  My mother and aunt looked through the pictures one at a time and tried to place faces.  "This is Mom's aunt's family, isn't it?"  Mom would ask.  "She looks like one of Edith's kids, doesn't she?"

Most were stiff, formal pictures of farmer's families and children taken in Harlowtown at the portrait studio in the next county over.  I have one of some unidentified second or third cousin from the twenties who is a dead ringer for my four year-old niece. 

One of the things we came across was this early photograph of my grandfather in his enlisted uniform, shortly before going off to the Pacific theater in World War II.   My mother laughed out loud as she pulled it from the box, and she and my aunt spent a lot of time reminiscing over it.  As they chatted about when it must have been taken and whether or not their grandmother was still alive at that point, I looked into those cold, blue eyes and face devoid of all kindness, and I felt a little queasy.  He might not swing a fist like he once did, but those eyes still burn with a cold heat that sears like frostbite.   And in every photograph I've ever seen of him as an adult, he never once genuinely smiles. 

Mom handed the picture over to me so I could have a closer look.  "Your Grandpa certainly was a handsome fella in his day, wasn't he?"  She asked.

"A real looker,"  My aunt agreed.  A handsome fella.  I suppressed a shudder at the coincidence of their words, and what those words actually meant to me.

Code Switching as I Learned It from My Grandmother

Although it's probably not typical of my generation, estate auctions made up a large part of my social education when I was growing up.  The women of my childhood were all antique collectors, and an important part of our social lives was spent at auctions at private houses and fairgrounds.  These are nothing like Sotheby's auctions where the so-called "auctioneer" is actually some Art historian with a faux continental accent and most of the bidding is by agents.  These are rowdy, fast-paced events in dusty front yards or livestock arenas, with auctioneers in cowboy hats calling off numbered lots of everything from tack and harness to bent coffee spoons a flutter-tongued syllabary of their own making.  A good estate auction is a social event where friends from around the state catch up, ranchers and wives eye their competitors, and buyers vie with one another in a cutthroat, symbolic contest of subtle gestures for the highest bid.   It takes time to learn that non-verbal language, and it's easy to be misunderstood; for that reason, my grandmother made me sit on my hands when I was on the auction floor until I was about seven years old. 

There's such a feeling of freedom once you learn to become a free operator, however, and you learn how to maneuver through codes at the auction house.  I blushed with pleasure the first time I had the winning bid on a lot when I was about eleven-- a beautiful old copy of A Child's Garden of Verses in maroon calico, which I outbid a dealer for and I still have.  And I have to admit, I also felt a little rush of superiority several years ago when my college in the Deep South auctioned off their impounded bikes and I was practically the only student there who knew the ropes.  I had to explain the codes to the young men around me as they scratched their heads, unable to follow the bids.

Why I'm interested in all this will take some time to explain; for the moment, let's just start with the basics on learning the social context of language use and where I first learned it existed. 

Derek Hopkins explains the Auctioneering trade on NPR, The Way We Work (via YouTube)

I'm headed home!

Well, I got the bad/good news just last week-- my ticket is bought and I'm going home to the Rockies in a couple of weeks.  My elderly grandfather in Montana announced to the family about a month ago that he wants to move into one of those senior citizen's communities and sell his house.  He's arranged for a two-bedroom apartment in town where he'll be surrounded by other swinging seniors and have a social life. (Heaven help 'em all.  He's such a grouchy old fussbudget.) 

So, I'm going to be the dutiful granddaughter and help my mother and aunt get him packed up and moved in.  This is going to involve a lot of packing of boxes-- and of Grandpa unpacking and repacking them again because he's O.C.D. and has to make sure all the labels on his canned goods are facing the same direction.

I expect this should go smoothly for the most part, until we get to the old brass bed my grandmother inherited many years ago from her parents and Grandpa no longer wants.  I might have to step in and referee the arm-wrestling contest between my mother and aunt to see who gets it.  ;-)

This means that me, my camera, and my audio recorder are headed back to Wyoming-- and I've decided to go back to Laramie for part of that time to do some research.  At first this seemed like the natural thing to do, given my academic inclinations and fascination with TLP, but I'm having a little bit of panic about actually talking to real live people about The Laramie Project.  I'll have to outline that in a little more detail later.

But in the meantime:  Woo-hoo!  I'm headed home, y'all!

How Geoffrey Chaucer Changed My Life

As you know, I've spilled a little bit of ink giving my own relationship between academia and my home culture the talking cure, especially because I've not had a lot of luck integrating the two in any meaningful way.  A lot of times I feel like I'm trying to walk down the top of a split-rail fence without falling into a pond on one side or concrete on the other.  In particular, it's been hard making my family understand why on earth I'm still in college twelve years after high school and training to be a medievalist of all things.  I really have a hard time trying to make my life in academia useful and relevant to theirs. 

Well, the other day I got a phone call from my brother "Coyote" during dinner.  He lives in Laramie and, after about a ten year hiatus, he's finally going back to school at the University of Wyoming. He's had a few lumps and bruises, but at this point, he's doing pretty darn well.  He and I have always had a fraught relationship, but in the last five years or so it has settled out to a pleasant formula: three parts sarcasm and one part vinegar.  But, you need to understand: my brother never calls anybody.  In fact, Coyote's name pops up in my cell phone as "The Invisible Man."  If he's calling me, it's because he wants something. 

So, I pick up the phone and tell him, "Well, hi, Coyote, what's up?" and he says, "Hey, Jackrabbit, so I'm writing this paper on Chaucer's Clerk in The Canterbury Tales, and it was due forty-five minutes ago, and I'm completely stuck and can't get this paper finished.  What do I do?!"  So, I long-distance coached him over the phone for almost an hour about his paper and helped him get his ideas straight.  As it turns out, he wasn't stuck as he thinks he was; he had some awesome observations, but he needed somebody to tell him he was on the right track and fill in a little cultural context he hadn't gotten in class yet.

Coyote and I had the longest conversation we have probably had about anything since the road trip after my grandmother died last March, and about medieval society and biblical exegesis in "The Clerk's Tale" of all things. He was genuinely interested; and I was genuinely happy to help him out. 

When we were done, he said, "Okay, little sister, I better hang up and write this thing finally.  Thanks for your help."
"No problem, Coyote," I said.  "Anytime."  There was a brief pause on the other end of the phone.
"I always knew I'd figure out something you were good for eventually," he wisecracked.  "Catch you later."   And then he hung up.  

I was absolutely flying with joy for the rest of the night.

Walking in My Own Footsteps and Finding they Don't Fit

So, after three and a half weeks back home in Wyoming with family, I boarded a plane in Casper, Wyoming to fly back to my home in Appalachia last Friday night.   The weather, unfortunately, prevented me from making the five-hour trek to Laramie through the Shirley Basin, so I never got to visit the campus again like I hoped.  That was the same cold weather snap (one night plunged to -25 degrees Farenheit) which wreaked havoc on our airplane the day of our departure, and between the cold in Casper and the storms in Atlanta, I spent about nine extra hours sitting on uncomfortable vinyl chairs in various airport terminals trying to think.  For some reason, this visit was a lot harder than on previous years; certainly the lack of my grandmother's presence was a huge factor, but something else about this visit was on my mind as well.

When our plane finally departed from DIA and rocketed its way into the sunset, I snapped a picture of the view on our way out.  This was my last sight of the American West for a long time to come: an endless patchwork swath of snow-dusted farmland, fields, and prairie stretching off into the distance, Laramie and Cheyenne somewhere north of our plane's wingtip.  As I looked out the window and craned my neck backwards for a last glimpse of the Rockies, it suddenly occurred to me what the problem was: I didn't really feel like my life fit here anymore.  In a sense, I was getting utterly homesick for a place that, in a real sense, wasn't even my home anymore.  I've lived in the South for eight and a half years now, which is six months longer than I had ever lived in Wyoming.  I've been in college now for eleven years, in an intellectual environment that has almost nothing to do with my family's lived experience.  How on earth do I reconcile these two halves of my life-- my Western self, my internal wilderness and land-centeredness, and my Humanities self, the one that lives in a middle-class land of intellection and abstraction?  How can I retrace my own footsteps every year back to the land I call home and make that journey make sense?