Romantoes

Bottling day

2012-01-21T16:23:00.000-05:00

You might recall that Tom and I recently embarked on a home-brewing experiment, thanks to the holiday gift of a starter kit he got from my mom and sister. Well, today was bottling day. This required boiling a little more than half a cup of sugar in some water, putting that in the bottling bucket, and then siphoning the fermented beer into the bottling bucket. Remarkably, when we took the lid

Helicopter attack, part 2

2012-01-09T18:46:00.000-05:00

Regular readers might recall a post from about a year and a half ago about an encounter that I had with a helicopter dad who came in to the advising office with his daughter, and the family drama that ensued. Flash forward to today. First day of spring semester, and I'm in my usual two-hour Monday afternoon shift doing advising. It's very quiet--too quiet--for the first day, which probably

Happy brew year!

2012-01-01T20:07:00.000-05:00

Or maybe that should be "Happy new beer"? Tom's toyed with the idea of making his own beer for a long time, and thanks to my sister and my mom, he got a home-brewing kit for Christmas. So, today was our first brewing day! Fortunately, the kit came with everything--and I mean everything--you might need to get started, including a well-produced DVD with step-by-step instructions. After watching

What a long, strange trip it's been

2011-12-20T20:55:00.000-05:00

In tenure-file hell (thanks to Cath Gouge for the photo!) A few days ago, Romantoes marked its four-year anniversary. Our inaugural post focused on the end of our first semester here at West Virginia University, after Tom and I both ditched tenured jobs in Colorado to move back east. Yesterday, I turned in my tenure crate. Yes, crate. Don't let appearances fool you--that's not just any

At the Seneca Center

2011-12-02T19:58:00.001-05:00

Today was the last day of school before "dead week," when we're not supposed to assign any real work, and when I came home from collecting papers in two classes today, Rose suggested we go out to the local antique mall in the Seneca Center, the former glasshouse down along the river. It's a small antique mall--I think it may have only three or four dealers, and we figured we could easily get in

Puttering

2011-11-20T20:06:00.000-05:00

This morning, we jumped in the car with every intention of going to Pittsburgh. Since my cell phone needed to be recharged, I plugged the splitter into the cigarette lighter, and tried to connect both the car recharger and the Sirius satellite radio. The radio promptly died. This happened when I tried the same trick just a few weeks ago, so I knew that we'd blown the fuse for the radio and

Griswold Corn Sticks

2011-11-17T19:47:00.002-05:00

We love our vintage Griswold Corn Stick Pan.Today, as we walked home from work, snow was in the air, and not too long after we got home, it was sticking to the ground, for the first time this fall. Winter is here. So we decided that we'd have chili for dinner and that we should make some

Boo.

2011-10-30T18:34:00.001-04:00

"Boo" to the month of October, that is, which has been stressful and busy in ways both expected and unexpected. One of those months that you'd want to end quickly except for all the stuff you have to get done before the 31st, and your anxiety about what lies ahead. Still, we took some time to make holiday marshmallows, in our continuing tradition. Bring on November!

Who's counting?

2011-09-21T10:32:00.000-04:00

"I'm 18, and I don't know what I want" (far right) Me, for one. And human beings generally, since we're "gifted" with the twin powers to speak and to count. (Sometimes being a "time-binding" animal is just a curse.) While we're on the subject of anniversaries, I thought I'd write about a couple of recent events that have put me in a tallying mood. First, my friend Jane posted that she'd

Slow but steady...keeps the neighbors from calling code enforcement

2011-09-18T16:16:00.000-04:00

--not that I think there was any danger of that. But as usual, some of the summer projects that seemed like they'd take no time at all ended up getting abandoned when the semester started. The major project that got set aside was getting the ivy out of the beds in front of the house and replacing it with something more interesting. The really daunting part was over: Tom spent many sweaty

Teaching 9/11

2011-09-09T17:12:00.002-04:00

Today I was down at the local high school for which I'm the faculty liaison to observe three of our student teachers. About five minutes into the first class, around 9:35 or so, the PA came on and a student's voice said, "At 9:37 a.m. on September 11, 2001, a plane crashed into the Pentagon in Washington, D. C. At the same time, hijackers had taken over Flight 93 and turned around to head for

At the Antiques Roadshow in Pittsburgh

2011-08-27T11:59:00.006-04:00

When we heard that PBS' Antiques Roadshow would be taping a series of episodes in Pittsburgh this summer, we knew we had to enter the lottery for tickets. Who knew it was so hard to get them? Tom and I entered, as did my mom, sister, and brother. On the day the lottery winners were announced, I checked the website and discovered I didn't get them. Via e-mail, my sister and brother confirmed

The bats of August

2011-08-18T21:02:00.000-04:00

It began as a slight fluttering at the edges of my consciousness. At 3 a.m., I was in a deep sleep and the sound filtered in vaguely at best. The blinds rattling in the breeze? A mourning dove settling on the windowsill? Then the pieces fell together and I sat bolt upright in bed. "BAT!" The sound alone was enough for me to jump up and head for the door. En route, all I saw was a shadow

Book Writing

2011-08-16T19:01:00.010-04:00

All summer long, I've had this bit of proverbial wisdom swirling around in my head: "It's better to break the spine of a man than of a book." Thanks to Google, I'm guessing that I heard Dan Simmons say it at some point when I went to one of his many readings in Colorado, as Google, surprisingly, does not turn it up as a proverb at all. But anyway, as I've been toiling away at writing my own

This one time, at band camp...

2011-08-09T07:25:00.002-04:00

The Bexley High School Marching Band, Fall 1979 I opened the door to the screen porch one morning last week and one thought struck me: band camp. At 6:30 a.m., it was already 74 degrees and humid, and I could hear crickets chirping contentedly. It was the crickets, really, that put me over the edge: I'd forgotten that they were about the only other creatures up and making music so early

Life is just a bowl (or, more precisely, an 11-quart stockpot) of cherries

2011-07-22T16:24:00.001-04:00

When we lived in Colorado, some neighbors of ours (who were also good friends) had a sour-cherry tree in their backyard that Tom coveted. One year, we happened to be catsitting for them while they were out of town, and the cherries were just about to be fully ripe. "Pick as many as you want," they said, "because by the time we get home, it'll be too late." Tom has fond memories of canning

Summer doldrums

2011-07-09T19:37:00.002-04:00

Post-4th-of-July is when I always seem to hit a summer slump. This year is no exception. Paradoxically, I feel guilty both about not doing more work and about not having more fun. Consequently, slump time is also list-making time: I scribbled these yesterday, in a fit of depression/ennui. As you can see, the list of work-related things is longer than either of the other two, and is

The Pittsburgh (area) jazz scene circa 1948

2011-07-01T08:35:00.001-04:00

I had no idea that my dad had been the music editor of WVU's humor magazine, Moonshine, until my mom unearthed a file folder with several issues in it. In my last post, I wrote about the demise of WDUQ's jazz programming. Here's a little taste of what Pittsburgh's jazz scene was like back in the day, courtesy of this column from February 1948 (click on the picture to see a larger version):

The day the music died

2011-06-30T08:12:00.002-04:00

For me, personally, that would be today, the final day of jazz programming on Pittsburgh public radio station WDUQ. Earlier this year, Dusquene University sold the station to Essential Public Media out of Boulder, Colorado. Presumably (or so listeners were told during several pledge drives), this was because the university could no longer foot the bill. Members, myself included, pledged

What do books do?

2011-06-20T22:24:00.002-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial by Meghan Cox Gurdon, who argued that young-adult literature has become a bastion of "depravity," "brutality," and "ugliness": "Pathologies that went undescribed in print 40 years ago, that were still only sparingly outlined a generation ago, are now spelled out in stomach-clenching detail. Profanity that would get a song or

Correspondence

2011-06-14T20:51:00.007-04:00

Toddling our way back from Columbus yesterday, Rosemary and I stopped in Zanesville to scout out one of the antique malls there, where they have a lot of nice examples of Ohio pottery: Weller, Roseville, Owens, and even some Rookwood. All priced pretty much beyond what we are ready to pay, however. My big purchase of the day was, instead, a giant pile of used postal cards, around 150 of them,

Memorial Day 2011

2011-05-30T12:42:00.020-04:00

According to the San Francisco Museum's website, the Pepsi-Cola Center for Service Men and Women opened on March 5, 1943. The center offered telephones for troops to call family members, stationery for writing letters, and wire recorders to make voice recordings to mail home. It also served hamburgers, hot dogs, and--of course--free Pepsi. My dad arrived there on November 27, 1943, after a long

Six Things in a Blog

2011-05-27T14:10:00.003-04:00

So-- Rosemary woke up this morning with the Andrews Sisters' "Six Jerks in a Jeep" running through her head, leading her to both sing it all over the house and to post a YouTube version as her facebook status. I'll resist the temptation to re-post it here to save all you readers out there from having the sort of experience we had this afternoon at lunch. It all started out with a whole series

Kalamazoo Update

2011-05-16T15:50:00.004-04:00

Just got back from the big medieval conference in Kalamazoo: as usual, I went to the dance, but I did not dance.The dance at Kalamazoo remains an institution, though the beer is no longer free, and one must show one's conference registration badge to get in the door: they actually have people guarding the entrances. One rarely if ever needs to show the badge to attend a panel, go to the book

My mountain mamas

2011-05-08T08:03:00.002-04:00

In case you didn't know it, West Virginia is the home of Mother's Day. (So you can direct any complaints to Anna Jarvis, Grafton, WV 26354...or better yet, to the Hallmark corporation.) On this Mother's Day, however, I want to pay tribute to a couple of other West Virginia mothers: my grandmother, Wilma Maude (Crow) Toothman, and my mother, Joyce Alley (Toothman) Hathaway. OK, so they're

Teacher Appreciation Day 2011

2011-05-03T19:43:00.004-04:00

Colson Hall, home of the WVU English Department True confession: when I first started working with English-education majors years ago, I openly scoffed at those who said they wanted to be teachers because they just loved kids so much! (Although not as much as I scoffed at those who said they wanted to be teachers so they could be home when their kids got back from school, or because they

Easter treats

2011-04-23T19:07:00.001-04:00

Somehow, we seem to have gotten into a holiday marshmallow making habit. This time, my sister and I decided to make homemade Peeps. We colored the marshmallow mixture yellow, and after it set up, we cut these out with a lovely old tin cookie cutter in the shape of a chick. As you can see, some turned out better than others (which ended up looking more like teacups). The trick seems to be to

Smoke

2011-04-12T16:56:00.005-04:00

A few days ago, I walked out of one of the buildings I was teaching in, passing right through the unofficial smokers' zone a few steps from the door. To my surprise, one of the smokers was sitting there on a bench, puffing away on a pipe, and I felt--as I often do when I smell pipe smoke--a powerful burst of nostalgia. For years when I was growing up, my dad smoked a pipe, most often using

Her price is far above rubies

2011-03-20T16:55:00.008-04:00

Lavish salaries and benefit packages, work days that end at 2:30, summers off...man, those teachers sure are living the good life, at least according to some conservative pundits. But this is not a blog about them. Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, in September of 1971, a beautiful fairy princess walked into a first-grade classroom in Bexley, Ohio. She spent a full year working her

Pepperoni Rolls

2011-03-13T20:24:00.011-04:00

Pepperoni rolls are a local foodway here in northern West Virginia (and they come with a long origin narrative about having started out as food for guys working the mines).Rose has had pepperoni rolls on the brain since talking about them in her folklore class recently. So when we saw some pre-packaged ones up on Shopping Mountain today, we thought about buying them to have during the Buckeyes

The "stylish blogger" I sort of knew, wish I'd known, and hope to grow up to be

2011-03-03T21:35:00.003-05:00

Beth over at the Daily Devil recently posted about the death of the writer of webdeb90, a woman in hospice care in Columbus, Ohio who decided, at age 90, to start a blog. I followed Beth's link to her site and was delighted to get an "adult content" warning before I was allowed to read the blog itself. At first, my amusement was at a 90-year-old posting adult content. But on perusing her

So much for the Commonwealth

2011-02-25T22:39:00.003-05:00

So, there I was, teaching Thomas More's Utopia today in my BritLit Survey--probably the longest work of the semester and a pretty tough sell to college students, unfortunately. But it's really a fascinating book in a lot of ways.But anyhow, there I am wrapping up class, asking them all to think about how More claims that there can be no justice as long as there is private property, and how

Who, us--"Stylish"?

2011-02-20T15:33:00.002-05:00

That was my reaction when I discovered this morning that my friend Beth nominated Romantoes for the "Stylish Blogger Award." As she notes, it's a chain-letter type of award: you get nominated, you nominate others, they nominate others, and so on and so on and so on... As Beth says, "Appreciation is best shared out loud," so I'll thank her for the nod, and pass the award on to those whose work

More Valentine's Day ephemera

2011-02-14T05:00:00.019-05:00

A roundup of the new old Valentines we've added to our collection recently: Can't tell the exact vintage of these, but I'm guessing 1930s? This back of this one is dated February 14, 1942. How many Valentines are you likely to find these days with verbs like "compel" and "dispense"? This (and the two at the top) have moveable parts--here, when you move the tab on the right up, the "Do

You'll definitely surprise that special someone with these Valentine's Day treats...

2011-02-12T11:10:00.000-05:00

Thinking about making a cake for your sweetie for Valentine's Day? Here's a new product (well, new circa 1949) that might make that task simpler: Recently, the fearless chef over at Retro Recipe Attempts tried to make cupcakes in actual coffee cups from a vintage recipe, with questionable results...so I suppose Swan's Down Instant Cake Mix was a big improvement over baking from scratch for

TMI

2011-02-04T13:20:00.000-05:00

I'm used to virtual strangers telling me their sad tales. I just have "one of those faces," for good or ill, that makes people (especially crazy, lonely, or troubled people) feel safe. Most of the time I try to think of this as a good thing, particularly in the classroom. But for some reason this semester I've been hearing way too much, and in way more detail than I need, from some of my

Why we haven't blogged in a month (in pictures)

2011-01-29T19:08:00.000-05:00

Bathroom remodeling. Expert help from professional carpenter father-in-law. Birthday and new year celebrations. Adorable chubby houseguest (and his parents, big sister, and dog.) Frenchified cooking: bread and onion soup. Baking District 12 cookies for young-adult reading group discussion of Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games. More bathroom

Christmas 1941

2010-12-26T16:15:00.013-05:00

When we think of December 1941 these days, we automatically think of the Pearl Harbor attack on the seventh, and the declaration of war. To hear my parents talk about it, though, at the time most people in the U. S. had never heard of Pearl Harbor, and Hawaii seemed a long way away. My Dad was a senior in high school at the time, and after he graduated the following June, he'd be drafted

Things fall apart

2010-12-19T19:34:00.000-05:00

After my last post about the Kindle and my wariness of e-texts, I have to follow up by saying that I more than understand the need to digitize older books. Case in point, this relic of my childhood, The Cookie Book, which I got through the Scholastic Book Club at school when I was probably seven or eight (the publication date is 1973). This was clearly not a book that was made to last: printed

Looking a gift horse in the mouth

2010-12-15T18:11:00.000-05:00

I know you're not supposed to. But... A couple months ago I was gifted with a Kindle for my work with an educational group on campus. Ironically, not long before I got it, I'd had a conversation with my mom about e-readers, and when she asked if I thought I'd ever want one, I said no. You'd never have guessed that had been my answer if you'd heard my squeals of girlish glee when I opened the

Cartoon meme followup

2010-12-09T21:05:00.002-05:00

So, in the last post I described the cartoon-character meme that swept Facebook last weekend, and mentioned that the alleged "purpose" of using a cartoon image as one's profile picture was to raise awareness about child abuse. Specifically, the standard phrasing of the call to change one's profile picture, which people posted as their status after they changed their picture, went something like

Penelope Pitstop revisited

2010-12-07T18:53:00.001-05:00

This past weekend, Facebook was overtaken by a meme asking members to change their profile pictures to an image from their favorite childhood cartoon. This was allegedly in an effort to spread awareness about child abuse--the kind of oddly illogical justification that always sets my folklore antenna a-wigglin'. Regardless of the alleged purpose, it was fun to see what cartoons people chose...

Only in Morgantown, Part 1

2010-11-24T15:46:00.002-05:00

It seems like every state has its "outlier outpost," the place about which everyone says, "Only in [fill in name of town here]." In Colorado, this was always Boulder. Everyone who didn't live in Boulder would hear of something happening there--and it could be anything from a bid to legalize pot to protesters trying to protect prairie dogs--and would shake their heads and say "Only in

Dinner Service for Two--No Maid

2010-11-13T11:38:00.010-05:00

West Virginia may now be known across the world as a coal producing state, stereotyped as a place of poverty and hillbillies, but one of this region's most important exports to the rest of the country was once--believe it or not--middle class aspirations.In the nineteen twenties and thirties, this whole area (West Virginia, western Pennsylvania, southeastern Ohio) was the national hub for

Dia de los Muertos

2010-10-31T17:55:00.000-04:00

Ever since living in Colorado, I've been fascinated by Dia de los Muertos, which seems like a much healthier way to ritualize death at this time of year than the usual Halloween celebration. This is the first year, though, that I've been motivated to actually put together an altar. Given my dad's death last November, and the fact that next Saturday we'll be going to Grantsville, WV, for a

It gets better

2010-10-09T11:30:00.004-04:00

Me and Jay in a window of our high school, 1982. In the wake of the recent spate of suicides by gay teens and young adults who'd been bullied, harassed, and tormented because of their sexual identities, advice-columnist Dan Savage has started a YouTube project called "It Gets Better." The project's goal is to help LGBT teens know that however bad things are at the moment, that isn't going to

When History Begins

2010-09-30T19:00:00.004-04:00

So I was cruising around the local antique mall a couple of weeks ago, and I couldn't help but notice the "oldies" music that was playing: "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," "Get a Job," and others of that sort. Engaged in conversation by one of the regular workers there, I noted how quickly I thought I'd find the music selection irritating, but then (perhaps putting my foot a bit in my mouth), I

You dropped a bomb on me

2010-09-24T17:16:00.002-04:00

I recently posted here about the eye inflammation I've been experiencing in conjunction with my Behcet's Syndrome. As I mentioned, I'd been seeing a very kind, if wacky Groucho-Marx lookalike opthamologist for treatment. Well, on a followup visit in late August, he discovered the inflammation was back, and admitted to being stymied. He suggested I go see another opthamologist at the Eye

Clunkers, junkers, and beaters--oh my.

2010-09-08T17:07:00.002-04:00

Last weekend Tom and I traveled to his parents' house near Newark, Ohio, to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary. In honor of the occasion, Tom's dad wanted to drive his restored 1953 Studebaker to the Granville Inn, where the celebratory dinner was being held, since it was the car that he drove to his wedding in 1960. Or, at least, parts of it are the same car. He also has a 1955

The telephone is ringing--is that my mother on the phone?*

2010-09-01T19:46:00.001-04:00

This morning I had another one of those moments that makes me feel middle aged...and glad of it. I took the PRT (Personal Rapid Transit) over to the Evansdale campus for a meeting. For those unfamiliar with the PRT, it's a sort of monorail system with unmanned cars that shuttle to and from five different stations around Morgantown. They hold about 12 people total, and are usually populated by

Suffering fools? Gladly!

2010-08-30T20:09:00.002-04:00

There's a family story among the Hathaways about my Dad's grandfather, a physician who also owned and ran a pharmacy in Grantsville, West Virginia. As a kid, my dad used to hang out there after school sometimes, and one day some old timer came into the store and started yammering on about psoriasis. "It comes from the bones, y'know!" he insisted, suggesting that the disease somehow leaked out

Two and a half jokes.

2010-08-19T15:26:00.005-04:00

So I was standing in line at the Morgantown post office today (where you always have to stand in line, because that's the way it is). Anyway, while I was waiting, one of the postal clerks behind the desk is having a chat with the old geezer standing in front of him. Suddenly, the clerk gets this gleam in his eye. "Did you hear that FedEx and UPS are going to merge?" he asked. "No, I didn't,"

Solitude

2010-08-15T19:31:00.000-04:00

I'm stealing this meme from YA author, friend, and fellow blogger Erin McCahan: My Week in 7 Words: Pool Read Write Write Write Wine Sleep--repeat until SFD* of article is completed. Success! 7,000-some words of academic writing, another 4,500 of personal writing (which were easier to churn out than the academic stuff...hmmm). Either way, lots of words for one week, so, short post. More

Tile and Error

2010-08-07T21:06:00.003-04:00

After three years in the house, we finally decided to do something about the upstairs bath, which had been remodeled on the cheap by a previous owner, and was a weird mashup of 50s-era tile and 80s fixtures. We had a pretty complete plan: install new lighting, a new vanity, and new low-flow toilet; pull the old tile off the walls and put up put up bead-board wainscoting; pull two strata of

I was rooting for the Big Bad Wolf

2010-08-03T21:28:00.001-04:00

In a previous post, I mentioned how much I loathed Jackson Pearce's Sisters Red, a contemporary retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, featuring two sisters who become werewolf hunters after their grandmother is attacked and killed by one. I suggested I might blog about it eventually, but I couldn't really say it any better than the Book Smugglers did in their recent review. I wanted to like this

The eyes have it

2010-07-25T11:12:00.000-04:00

About six or seven years ago, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune syndrome called Behcet's disease. I'll spare you the gory details, but it was pretty debilitating the first few times it flared up, and prompted a couple of comments I hope never to hear again at the doctor's office: "Holy cow, I've never seen anything like that!" followed by "Do we have a camera around here?" (Thankfully, they

Dad's geraniums

2010-07-22T11:12:00.000-04:00

Not only did they survive my benign neglect all winter--they were consigned to the third-floor bathroom, the only place in the house that gets full sun--they actually bloomed all winter, despite the nasty weather. And now, they're bustin' out all over outside the screen porch, providing some extra screening from the sidewalk, and nonstop color. And the cats love to peer out of the gaps between

Simple gifts

2010-07-16T09:19:00.001-04:00

While we're on the topic of fairy tales... Yesterday I received three "magical" gifts (in the sense that they were unexpected, delightful, and just in the nick of time). First, a casual question on FaceBook about inexpensive retreats got a response from a high-school friend who owns a condo in Seven Springs, an hour or two northeast of Morgantown, who offered it to me for a few days in August

A new look, and an interactive feature!

2010-07-11T21:47:00.001-04:00

You're right: the dramatic title of this post doesn't match the tedious reality. But as you may have noticed, this half of the Romantoes writing team has been AWOL for awhile, so I needed something to motivate me to get back into the swing of things. Plus, I was tired of the dark look of the old template, and the annoying sans-serif font. We'll see how long it takes for me to tire of the "

Flat Pizza from Rubino's

2010-07-09T20:20:00.008-04:00

When you call up Rubino's Pizza (in Bexley, Ohio) to order, a guy standing at the counter karate chops one end of the handset on a 1970s vintage beige-colored phone just hard enough to make it pop up into his hand. He's done it tens of thousands of times, probably. You'll tell him your order, and he'll tell you "Fifteen minutes" (sometimes twenty, if they're busy), and then he'll slam the

Football Season

2010-06-20T18:11:00.003-04:00

I can trace my real fascination with the World Cup to our trip to Europe in the Summer of 2002. We were in Paris, just barely getting by on our rusty French, when Senegal beat France in what has sometimes been called the greatest upset in football. Then we moved on to England, where I was scheduled for a week in the Parker Library in Cambridge. Because Rose and I have been in Cambridge more

Gems from the archive

2010-06-10T20:28:00.000-04:00

This summer, I'm hanging out in the West Virginia and Regional History Collection, aka the university archives, researching the folklore materials that were collected under the auspices of the state branch of the Federal Writers Project in the late 1930s/early 1940s. An offhand comment about spending my summer in the "musty old archives" on Facebook prompted my friend Susan, an archivist, to

Memorializing Memorial Day

2010-06-01T10:09:00.003-04:00

My mother, sister, nephew, brother, and sister-in-law were all here in Morgantown for the last few days. Being Memorial Day weekend--and a hot, sunny one at that--it included traditional elements like bike riding, bratwurst, ice cream, and outdoor beer drinking. But perhaps the most traditional thing we did was to visit a family cemetery yesterday morning. All of us Hathaway kids have very

Paint Peeling

2010-05-29T11:12:00.009-04:00

My first car was a 1947 Plymouth Business Coupe, exactly twice as old as I was when I first started driving it. My dad, at the time, was in his middle forties, and it seemed to me that he knew everything that needed to be known about fixing up an old car. His 1953 Studebaker was a fixture in my childhood, parked in the big old barn on our farm, and I probably wanted to drive an old car partly

More on Monongah

2010-05-22T17:40:00.007-04:00

Awhile back I wrote about Dear, Pretty Fairmont, the next major town south of Morgantown, and promised that eventually I'd return to the issue of my family's connection to coal, always a troublesome topic in West Virginia. In that post, I described the Heinz History Museum's exhibit about the 1907 Monongah mine disaster that Tom and I had seen in Pittsburgh in March, just the week before the

Lost & found video

2010-05-16T09:10:00.000-04:00

My brother Mark recently digitized a reel of 16mm film that my Mom had found. It was in bad shape--had eroded and discolored over the years, and was very fragile.But when he got it somewhat cleaned up, it turned out to be a film that my Dad had made the summer he and Mom started dating, in 1950. According to Mom, Dad was taking some kind of an "education A/V" course, and had to shoot and edit a

Teacher Appreciation Week

2010-05-06T08:50:00.019-04:00

The national PTA has designated May 2-8 as Teacher Appreciation Week, and with each passing year I come to appreciate teachers more and more. My classes are largely composed of preservice teachers, and part of my job is to serve as the university's liaison to a local high school. So I see how much teachers these days are expected to juggle, and I am regularly humbled by how much work they do,

Don't Grunt

2010-05-04T15:29:00.006-04:00

Here's another couple of old postcards from our always-growing collection, both from 1906, and both postally used: this kind of century-old wisdom always seems best, don't you think? It has both a kind of early-twentieth-century folksiness and all the dignity of great age to give it a kind of gravitas, I suppose.These were both originally copyrighted by M. T. Sheahan, from Boston, Mass; each

Football heroes of 1910

2010-04-24T16:55:00.015-04:00

I'm pretty sure this is the only record of anyone, on any branch of my family tree, ever having had any kind of athletic prowess.The guy third from the right on the front row, sitting on the ground and looking off to the side (as if he's gearing up for his next opponent) is my mother's father, Harry Toothman.This is a picture postcard that was pasted into a scrapbook about his life that my

Sixty-five years ago today

2010-04-18T00:00:00.003-04:00

On April 18th, 1945, my Dad was interviewed by Armed Forces radio in the Po Valley of Italy, about his job with the 91st Infantry Division. After the war, he requested a copy of the recording, which arrived on a shellac 78 rpm disc...and which, long-time readers won't be surprised to hear, my dad kept all his life.This is the original interview, to which he added a short introduction some time

Coal

2010-04-06T16:49:00.004-04:00

The terrible news out of Montcoal, WV, this week about the mine explosion there has me thinking--again--about my relationship with the coal industry. Not that I have one, in the sense of an economic or even a philosophical investment, but you can't live in West Virginia without establishing some kind of relationship with Big Coal. I discovered this very quickly after moving here in 2007. To be

Easter ephemera

2010-04-03T16:18:00.000-04:00

Hard to believe it's Easter weekend with high temperatures in the mid-eighties. After February, though, I'm not going to complain about our apparent transition directly from winter to summer. So, happy "spring," all. Next week we'll be back to the fifty-degree drizzle that seems much more traditionally springlike around here, so I'll take the warm weather while I can. In the meantime, to

"Dear, pretty Fairmont"

2010-03-27T20:48:00.000-04:00

On Friday, I drove down to Fairmont, WV, about 20 miles south of Morgantown, to attend the Mountain State Storytelling Institute. Fairmont is a really lovely little town: clearly quite prosperous at the turn of the last century, it's full of beautiful old Victorian buildings and the high school I serve as the university's liaison to, Fairmont Senior. It's also the birthplace of Father's Day

Neologisms: Not just for the lazy

2010-03-21T19:01:00.003-04:00

They say twins often develop a private language; the same must be true for couples who have been together long enough. The two of us have been together for the better part of two decades, now, and we've developed our own kind of private shorthand. If you ever wanted to sound like part of the Romantoes team, here's a few of our choicest inventions.1. Snouffer. Technically, this is the name of

One-shot reads

2010-02-26T19:30:00.002-05:00

This morning when I looked out the window to see that it was snowing, again, and promised to do so all day, I just about lost it. We'd finally gotten all the ice off the sidewalks earlier in the week, and I was starting to hear birds singing in the morning, and it's not dark out when I leave work anymore...and then another winter blast. My primary urge upon seeing the snow blowing sideways was

Carry On, Small Human

2010-02-20T10:52:00.003-05:00

Once in a while when I'm teaching, something comes out of my mouth that I actually like. Most of the time, of course, I feel like a juggler, trying to take my own ideas about a work, along with ideas or questions thrown out by students, and trying, at the end of a fifty-minute workout, to get them all in the air at once, hopefully in some sort of pleasing pattern. And sometimes all I can say is

Marshmageddon

2010-02-14T08:48:00.003-05:00

Years ago, I tried to make homemade marshmallows, and it was a fiasco. I have no idea what went wrong, but the final product was inedible. We regarded it as such an epic failure that once, during a game of Taboo with friends, the word "marshmallows" came up, and Tom's clue to me was "Those things you tried to make that were such a disaster." Needless to say, we won that round. When my sister

Retraction

2010-02-11T09:15:00.002-05:00

Suddenly, this doesn't seem like a joke anymore, but rather like one of the most brilliant inventions ever. Though frankly, the most brilliant thing ever is these puppies. Seriously, if you live somewhere where it snows a lot, and you don't have a pair of these, buy some. White Park, Sunday 7 February 2010

File under "Better late than never"

2010-02-07T14:12:00.001-05:00

In my last post, I mentioned the negatives my dad had been meaning to scan for so many years. He was an amateur photographer all his life, but really honed his interest during high school, when his mother (who also loved photography) allowed him to use the lone bathroom in their house as a dark room, doing the processing in the tub. (This did not go over well with dad's older sister, Virginia.

I let a song go out of my heart

2010-02-05T12:12:00.010-05:00

As the song goes, "Little things mean a lot." And they can also add up to a big meltdown. Earlier this week, there was a story on the WVU homepage about "Hot Rod Hundley," a legendary basketball player here in the 1950s, whose number was being retired. My dad had often told stories about Hot Rod's antics, and when I saw the story, I immediately thought, "Oh, I've gotta send this link to Dad!"

Wherein Rosemary tears up her PhD and hires on at McDonald's

2010-01-30T08:57:00.002-05:00

Part of my job at WVU is to work with our English-education majors, both in the classes I teach--especially the young-adult literature class--and out in the local schools where they're doing their observations and student teaching. I love this aspect of my work, and in fact applied for the job here three years ago specifically to do more of this sort of thing, which I'd started doing at UNC when

Wow--people actually read blogs!

2010-01-20T20:43:00.006-05:00

I had an interesting voice mail on my work phone yesterday, from a guy in Charleston, who said he needed to talk to me about some of the things I'd been finding out at yard sales and so on. It took me a little by surprise, and it wasn't until he mentioned some old WVU dance cards that I realized he was talking about an old blog here on Romantoes.Apparently, one of the dance bands mentioned there

Auction Action

2010-01-16T19:49:00.006-05:00

When we lived in Colorado, we didn't have cable tv, and were at the mercy of whatever the airwaves brought us (which was sometimes pretty interesting, in a weird way, like the news from Cheyenne). But we could get two different PBS stations from Denver, which was a first for me. One way the two stations distinguished themselves from each other was by trying to have different on-air fund-raising

The fast and the furious

2010-01-14T19:49:00.009-05:00

I gave up making big New Year's resolutions years ago. You know, the traditional "lose 20 pounds, learn to say no, procrastinate less, be a faultless human being" kinds of goals. Instead, if I make any resolutions at all (which I usually don't), they're very small. It started several years back when I jokingly resolved that in the coming year, I would throw out any pen that didn't work.

Another MLA Story

2009-12-29T21:23:00.004-05:00

I think the very first blog I posted here was my story about "Shoe-Love" from the Modern Language Association (MLA) annual conference in Chicago a couple of years ago. This year, when I went to the MLA, I wasn't expecting to have any blog-worthy experiences, but that just goes to show what I know.Anyway, the MLA is a typical (even stereotypical) literature conference, but one where I kind of

Peace on earth, goodwill to all, blah blah blah

2009-12-23T12:25:00.000-05:00

It's no secret that the last few months have been something of a train wreck here at Camp Romantoes. So it felt like a real blessing that today--a day when the tearing of metal and the grinding of gears seems finally to have quieted--dawned bright and clear and sunny.I put on the Yaktrax I got and never had a chance to use last winter and made my usual trek over to White Park. In the two years

Digging out

2009-12-21T19:56:00.013-05:00

We didn't get hammered here as badly as folks further south and east did, but we still had a good eight inches of snow between Friday night and Saturday. Since Tom and I were both buried under final papers and exams, we didn't even leave the house until today.You might recall that Tom has a penchant for odd snow-removal devices. Well, today he decided that a snow shovel was the best thing to

Swinging Taps

2009-12-13T19:06:00.006-05:00

I quote a lot of British poetry when I'm teaching the Brit Lit survey, and perhaps no lines get quoted more often than these lines from the beginning of Shakespeare's Sonnet 55: "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments/ Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme." The irony, of course, is that the fragile paper on which the poem is written seems to have little chance of outlasting the marble and

Some black humor on the day

2009-11-28T10:53:00.002-05:00

About fourteen years ago, after my parents' old cat Gretel died, my mom adopted a little calico kitten that she named Daisy. My dad grumbled about it, saying, "That cat's going to outlive me."As the years went on, the two of them became fast friends--no small feat, given that Daisy was a bit of a psycho, and wouldn't really let anyone pet her.Daisy developed renal failure early this week, and

Dear T. F.

2009-11-27T14:46:00.005-05:00

Here we are enduring a somewhat stressful holiday week at Rose's old homestead. I won't go into all the details now, partly because it's not really my story to tell. But as I told my own folks during this past week: when we moved to Morgantown, it was difficult, challenging, and stressful--because change is all of those things. But now we're being reminded that change that isn't planned and

The Greatest Generation

2009-11-11T10:35:00.008-05:00

This is one of my favorite photos of my dad. Taken on V-E Day, in his barracks, he looks impossibly young. He was twenty, and I'm sure he fancied himself a man of the world. When he left his county-seat hometown of Grantsville, West Virginia, he hadn't seen much of the world, though he'd listened to it on the radio in the old henhouse that he'd wired up to live in during high school.After two

Rufus' story

2009-11-02T20:35:00.001-05:00

One nice thing about small academic conferences is that they can meet in more out-of-the-way places...and the American Folklore Society has met, in the past, in wonderful small cities like Lafayette, Louisiana and Eugene, Oregon--and this year, in Boise, Idaho. It's been over two years since I was west of...well, Chicago, since moving away from Colorado in the summer of 2007. There are many

Trick, or treat?

2009-10-28T08:13:00.005-04:00

In an effort to hand out something seasonal, in addition to candy (knowing that kids would mutiny if they didn't get candy, too), we bought this bag of silly plastic rings at our local Big Lots. Spiders, pumpkins, bats...But wait--what kind of rings are these?Hmmm.

"My! What Toast": Art that Makes us Happy

2009-10-21T18:06:00.009-04:00

We sometimes shop the local antique malls and flea markets, where I am usually looking for one sort of thing and Rosemary is looking for something completely different. But once in a while we find something we both fall in love with, like this Kew-Bee Bread painting, with a guy who looks like the Monopoly millionaire.My! What Toast! Sometimes I think that we should buy original art more often-

Dream hopping

2009-10-08T15:35:00.003-04:00

As I think I've written here before, I don't think that I usually remember my dreams. But I've had to realize over the last few years, I think, that I have a recurring dream in which my primary mode of locomotion is hopping on one foot.Undoubtedly, my other leg is asleep or something, and my dream is just my mind processing some sort of physical sleep phenomenon. But it's fascinating: it has

Juris(im)prudence

2009-10-05T18:51:00.012-04:00

I was working at the dining-room table this morning when the doorbell rang; it was the mail carrier, who needed me to sign for a package. He handed me the rest of the mail and I flipped casually through it--the usual bills, junk mail, magazine-subscription renewal forms, and then...one thin white envelope, addressed by hand.I had a fleeting moment of sheer pleasure--a real hand-written letter!--

First Thoughts about the Hoard

2009-09-28T17:27:00.009-04:00

Last evening, as I was sharing digital images of the Staffordshire Hoard with Rosemary, she said “It's too bad Nick didn't live to see this.” I agreed, and as I've thought about the hoard further today, I agree all the more. In this brief and informal essay, I hope to explore some of what the hoard may end up meaning for our understanding of the Anglo-Saxon past and of Beowulf in particular. [

That class

2009-09-23T20:21:00.010-04:00

It recently occurred to me that this month, I'm marking 20 years of college-level teaching, if you start counting in fall 1989, when I began work on my M.A. at Ohio State and teaching freshman comp. And I've been in a tenure-track or tenured job for a decade this fall.I can't even begin to tell you how freaky I find all of that, since much of the time I still feel like I don't have a clue what

More from Washington

2009-09-08T14:12:00.008-04:00

In a recent post, Rose shared some of the vintage cookbooks she found at the Washington Antiques Fair the other weekend; we found quite a lot of interesting stuff there, I'm afraid, and I thought I'd share a bit more of it here, just because I feel like it. And because of the whole weirdness of serendipity and collecting: part of what makes collecting old stuff worthwhile.So besides the vintage

When swine flew

2009-09-04T07:31:00.006-04:00

--that would've been my response if you'd asked me how often Tom has canceled classes and stayed home when he's been sick. He's one of those cranky, stubborn sick people who stoically go to work, then come home, lie on the couch, and moan. (Needless to say, I'm the same way.)But now that WVU has two confirmed cases of H1N1 and the President of the United States has not just given people