Some black humor on the day

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 had to be put to sleep yesterday morning. Dad passed away early this morning. I think he'd be amused to know that his prognostication turned out to be wrong. In the end, it was a photo finish.

Dear T. F.

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 isn't voluntary can be even more difficult, challenging, and stressful.

But of course there's some good with the bad, in all sorts of ways, and we try to take the comfort from that that we can. There's been a lot of family togetherness, and many family reminiscences have been bouncing around in the air, and I thought I'd post one I found especially sweet, Rose's note to the tooth fairy (oh-so-familiarly addressed as "T. F."), from a time maybe only a few years before her dad's first round of cancer. Although it's hard to keep in mind, it's also hard not to be thankful that he's had what seems like a thirty-five year reprieve, including a happily busy retirement of around twenty years.

But let's focus, rather, on Rose's note, which I find thoroughly amusing, sweet, and charming, although I know that she thinks it makes her sound pushy and demanding ("PLEASE GIVE ME 25c!"). But to me it reads like a perfect little poem:

I lost my tooth while brushing it;
It went right down the drain.
And when I thought about it,
It gave me such a pain.
Please give me 25c.

In an old diary that Rosemary has from about the same period, she has an entry that reads something like this, "I had a bad day; I spilled a lot of things." And even now, spilling things is still a sign of a bad day for Rosemary, and I marvel to recall how much she must share with the little girl who wrote these things. And I also try to help her keep from spilling things as much as I can, although I'm not always successful. Who could be? And anyway, sometimes things spill all on their own, despite anything we can do.

And while I've never really fancied myself a poet, and it may just be the stress of recent events, I can't help but thinking, somehow, that many poems might be usefully ended with the simple honesty and directness of Rose's note to the tooth fairy: "Please give me 25c." Offhand, at least, I can't think of a single poem that it might not improve. I don't know if the tooth fairy came through with the quarter or not, but Rose's parents have kept the note for almost forty years: and this week, that seems like an otherworldly gift of far greater value.

The Greatest Generation

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 years of combat in northern Italy, he'd become fluent in Italian, having befriended a local family with whom he still exchanges Christmas cards. After V-E Day, he and some of his army buddies who also had leave traveled to Rome to see the sites, inadvertently alarming his mother back home when she didn't hear from him for several weeks after the surrender.

Like many vets, he came home and immediately went to college on the G. I. Bill, and the stories he tells about his undergraduate days at West Virginia University are among my very favorites. He lived in the old Episcopal parish house, Trinity Hall. The building had actually been condemned, but was allowed to remain open for a few more years due to the housing shortage when the student population swelled with returning troops eager to get on with their lives.

The Trinity Hall group was a motley bunch--most were first-generation college students, sons of miners and laborers from a huge variety of ethnic backgrounds. Smart, ambitious, and happy the war was over, they studied hard and played harder, each trying to outdo the other with practical jokes.

(My personal favorite has to do with one resident who was notorious for coming home drunk and waking everyone else up. Fed up, the other guys moved all of his furniture out to the front lawn after he left the house one night, recreating the guy's room down to running an extension cord out to plug in the guy's table lamp. The drunk had the last laugh, though: when he came home, he simply climbed into the bed right there on the lawn and turned out the light.)

My father has often said that the men of that generation were anxious to put the war behind them, to get back to the plans they'd had beforehand. And it's true, he never talked much about his war experiences when I was growing up. Apparently, I asked him once (I don't remember this) whether he'd ever seen a dead person.

He didn't answer me then. But in the last fifteen years or so, he's been talking a lot more about those years of his life, both during the war and after. And he's been to several reunions of both his Army Division and of the Trinity Hall guys, who managed to track each other down recently.

In fact, the photo below was taken at his Division's last reunion in 2007, when they met in Washington, D. C. and were joined by members of the current Division. One of the current officers had seen the V-E Day photo above previously, and had brought along a copy of Stars and Stripes he'd found so that Dad could recreate the pose.

And he and my mother were down here in Morgantown the first week of October for another get-together with some of the Trinity Hall folks. Dad grumbled that they'd run out of things to say to each other, and that he didn't think they needed to keep meeting. But he still clearly enjoyed himself, and enjoyed recounting more stories of his days at WVU.

On the Friday night of their visit, Tom and Dad and I sat around visiting for awhile after mom went to bed. Suddenly, the fingers on Dad's left hand started trembling; a few seconds later, his whole hand was wagging back and forth, and then his left arm.

We all studiously tried to ignore it (that's the Hathaway way, I'm afraid), but in less than a minute Dad jumped up and said he was going to bed, too. I felt awful: was this something that I didn't know about, but that he'd been dealing with for awhile?

When it happened again the next night, I discovered that, in fact, the previous night's episode had been the first. And, in fact, he jumped up because he was so freaked out by it: "It's WEIRD!" he exclaimed.

Long story short: after a bunch of tests, he's been diagnosed with metastatic brain cancer, and had surgery last Thursday to remove the tumor.

Once a warrior, always a warrior: as soon as he woke up, Dad was cracking jokes and expressing his impatience with his slow recovery. He wanted to report to me immediately that his anesthesiologist was a graduate of WVU's med school. I learned from my mother yesterday that Dad discovered that one of the doctors who comes in to check on him is also fluent in Italian, so they've been chatting away in Italiano.

In many ways, his memories of his war and college years seem to be the ones that are sustaining him through all of this. We've heard a lot about those days on our visits to the hospital.

Funny how the things you try to get away from, put behind you, are the very ones that stick with you. And now, as in 1945, he just wants to get on with his life.

Rufus' story

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 things I've missed since, mainly low humidity and good Mexican food. Boise delivered both, and then some.

The day before the conference officially began, I went on a day-long tour that took us to a Boise synagogue built in 1895 whose grounds are now host to a community garden used mostly by Somali Bantu emigres. Later we met and saw the beautiful work of two talented women who make stirrups, saddles, and rawhide riding accessories. After a great lunch of chile rellenos at Lalo's in Caldwell, ID, we made our final stop at a horse-training facility run by a crusty old guy who grew up, of all places, in Huntington, West Virginia.

(I'm embarrassed to say that I didn't make a note of and can't recall the trainer's name, but you'll see him in the video at the end.)

En route to the horse-training center, Deana Attebery, the master saddlemaker/rawhide braider (pictured above), got on the tour bus's PA system to explain that she herself was a student at the barn we were going to visit, and that the trainer would be riding a horse that used to belong to her son.

During her earlier demonstration, Deana had mentioned that her son, whom she'd been teaching to make saddles, had died several years ago, though she didn't explain how. During lunch, we sat together, and though she mentioned "the horse incident" a couple of times, I didn't press her for details.

Over the PA, she told us the harrowing tale. Her son, who was in his 20s and a lifelong rider, had been thrown from his horse, Rufus, and--as Deana said--"they both ended up in the river." The horse survived; her son didn't.


However, the horse only survived in body; Rufus was distraught and crazy-angry after the accident, a totally different horse than he'd been beforehand. No one could ride him; he bucked constantly when he was in his stall, and he was aggressive with Deana and her family.

I can only imagine how agonizing this must have been for Deana: Rufus was the only witness to her son's death, the only one who could explain what had spooked him and caused him to throw his passenger. The incident clearly haunted Rufus as much as it haunted Deana, but they couldn't talk about it. And they couldn't work through it. Eventually, Deana gave him to the horse trainer we were headed to see.

As Deana explained, under the trainer's care, Rufus was completely transformed. He went from being a manic, uncontrollable basket case to being the trainer's primary horse, the one he uses to train other reining horses. This is western-style riding we're talking about, so if you know rodeo, you'll understand what the trainer meant when he said that Rufus would make a good pickup horse--one that wouldn't be afraid to sidle up to a bucking bronc and have its rider jump on his back. That takes an exceptionally calm and "supple" horse, to use the trainer's term.

Check out Rufus now. That's an amazing horse. He could probably give us humans some training, too: how to overcome trauma, let go of guilt, and get a new lease on life.

Trick, or treat?

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

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--we could use a few more things on the walls--but (frankly) I don't feel like I know anything about art. But this monocle-wearing guy is so delighted with his toast, and the colors are so bright and happy, that we knew right away that it would make us happy to see it hanging on our wall every day, and it only cost a couple days' salary-equivalent. It almost feels like the money can buy us a little happiness--or at least a happy feeling now and then.

I was especially happy to buy this painting because we already had two other examples of commercial art that we bought while we were in Colorado, two slightly earlier automobile advertising paintings, in awful 1970s avocado mattes that I haven't gotten around to replacing, because a decent frame will cost more than the paintings themselves.

I've always loved the Maxfield Parrish-esque look of the Buick painting, but the 1920 Eight-Cylinder King painting shows a group of women, including the driver, conquering the Rocky Mountains in their stylish frocks and bonnets. "Most Powerful Car in the World."

Just our luck, I guess, that all three paintings have wide, horizontal compositions, about three feet long in each case, which makes them a bit difficult to hang on the wall. But three makes a collection, I guess, and good things come in threes. And maybe these aren't real art, since they so clearly do come under the heading of commercial illustration. But they are real to us.

Dream hopping

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 taken me a surprisingly long time to realize that this is actually a dream, because every time it happens, I feel like the dream is actually real. So each time it happens again, I just feel like I'm experiencing a very familiar series of real events, in which hopping is just how I get around.

(Oh, and by the way, I hop around because my other leg is cramped up, or twisted up like a withered limb, and sometimes the bad leg actually hurts: it's these things that make me think that what's 'really' happening is just that my leg hurts in a non-dream way.)

But anyway, I just think in my dream “Oh, yeah, hopping: that's just how I do it,” and it seems real.

And anyway, sometimes when I'm not paying any attention to whatever the hell is happening in my waking life, I remember these dreams like real memories, and I think, in a kind of half-conscious way, “Wow, today I can get around fine without all that hopping. That really is a pain when it happens.” Then I stop myself, and I remind myself that I can't recall a single time in my waking life where I really did get around by hopping because my other leg was a withered limb. At least I don't think I can remember any—and I always feel a little uncertain, because the dreams seem so much like memories.

And even more: my hopping has some special dream properties: I can take some really long hops, where, really, I just float across the ground for eight feet, ten feet, twelve feet, maybe twenty or more, and then I can just kind of put my foot back on the ground and take another smooth, low long-jump hop. And I have the feeling that if I just didn't put my foot back down, I'd keep gliding along. I always hear that flying dreams are among the most common dreams, and maybe this is my kind of flying dream: low, slow, close to the ground, and requiring regular effort to keep moving along: it's probably the kind of flying dream I'd have, after all.

In some of the fantasy novels I've been known to read, dreams give one access to a kind of real alternate world, where unicorns get devoured by wolves and things like that. In my fantasy dream world, I get around by hop-floating. And in that world, it's totally normal. Somehow, I don't think there's a best selling fantasy novel in there. Too bad.

But for today, I guess I'm just as happy I'm not in a hopping dream, and I'm vaguely comforted that the next time I am, it will seem familiar, comfortable, and right.

Juris(im)prudence

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!--until I saw the return address: the Colorado Department of Corrections.

It was from a former student of mine--one of my favorite students from the university I used to teach at, actually--with whom I'd kept in touch for over a decade. I'll call him M.

M. had been in the very first folklore class I taught at my previous job, and was one of those people who develops an instant passion for the subject. At that point, he was a naive enough undergrad to ask me quite seriously as we were about to start on the folklore collection project whether one needed a license to do fieldwork. He was so earnest I couldn't even laugh. But it endeared him to me forever.

Over the years and long after he graduated, we kept up a steady e-mail correspondence. M. is one of those people who seems to get every joke, urban legend, and chain letter sent to him, and he faithfully forwarded them on to me, since--ironically--I'm not one of those people. We'd often write back and forth about the context in which he'd heard a joke, or the differences between one variant of a legend and another.

About four years ago, M. decided to go back to school to get his master's degree in education and get certificated to teach high-school English. I wrote him a gushing recommendation letter, and our correspondence widened to include discussions about English education. Always tech-savvy, M. was interested in the remarkable facility students had for code-switching back and forth between text language and standard English, and we had lots of interesting discussions about ways that might be incorporated into the classroom.

We lost touch for a year or two around the end of my time in Colorado and my move to West Virginia. Then a year or so ago a student here e-mailed me a legend that reminded me of one M. had sent me years ago, but with an interesting twist. I dug out M.'s e-mail address and forwarded it to him. I figured by this time, he'd have settled into a full-time teaching job somewhere, so I asked him how things were going and said that I had no doubt he was doing well, since he had so much promise as a teacher.

The message I got back left me stunned. The previous spring, a student on the cross-country team he coached accused him of sexual assault. He'd been summarily fired and brought up on criminal charges. It didn't look good, he told me.

I had no doubt then, and no doubt now, that M. did not commit the crime he was accused of. I know him well, and it is just out of the question. I wrote a letter to the judge in his case to vouch for M.'s charaacter, and to plead for leniency.

Over the last few months, I've heard from M. occasionally, and he steadfastly skirted the issue of how things were going. I know he was trying to protect others from his misery, but I felt anxious for him.

So. The letter today was from him. In it, he explained that his lawyer told him he'd be better off making a plea agreement than going to trial. Instead of granting leniency, the judge handed down the maximum sentence: 12 years in prison. Though he's eligible to be in a minimum-security facility, overcrowding in those places got him sent to a medium-security institution over three hours from Denver, so he has very few visitors. He's hoping his case will be reconsidered. He told me he plans to study prison lore as a way to stay focused.

I wanted to throw up when I finished reading. But I had to go in to work in the advising office, where a mopey-looking student told me he was sad because his favorite NFL team lost yesterday. I wanted to slap him upside the head. At least he could walk out the door into the blue brightness of a beautiful October afternoon. At least he'd been rejected from WVU's teacher-education program, so he'll never have to worry about his life being derailed, and his freedoms taken away, for something he didn't do.

Since the letter was addressed to Tom, too, I left it on the table. When I got home, Tom greeted me with the same look of shock and horror I'm sure was on my face after I read M.'s letter. We talked about how scary it is that everything can be taken away from you so suddenly, how quickly life can devolve into a total nightmare, and a lot of other things that will all sound too banal if I try to put them into words.

But I'll tell you: I feel sobered and cynical in a way I never thought possible--and I'm here on the outside.

First Thoughts about the Hoard

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.

[For those who make it this far into this entry, but who still haven't heard of the Staffordshire Hoard, please check out this site, where the pictures are beautiful and brand new. The hoard was discovered in July 2009 and announced last week; it is the single largest discovering of Anglo-Saxon gold treasure of the modern era, with about eleven pounds of gold alone.]

Staffordshire hoard excavation from Dan Pett on Vimeo.

Nick Howe, of course, knew as well as anyone how problematic the date of Beowulf has been for Anglo-Saxon scholars, and how important: it was from Nick that I first heard the argument that the controversies over dating and historicizing the poem are perhaps our most productive strategy for making meaning from it. And as is well, known, Beowulf is a poem whose narrator seems fairly obsessed with golden treasure: the descriptions of treasure in the poem are frequnet, lovingly detailed, and thorough. What the Staffordshire Hoard tells us, if nothing else, is that hoards of (primarily) golden treasure were, in fact, possible in at least one seventh-century Anglo-Saxon kingdom, and one at least partially accommodated to Christian monotheism, and at least in this case associated with war.

Elizabeth Tyler's wonderful discussion of treasure words in Old English poetry makes part of my point here beautifully: in her discussion of The Battle of Maldon (about a battle fought in 991), Tyler notes that Maldon uses a highly conventional vocabulary of treasure, in which references to gold far outweigh references to silver. Significantly, exactly the opposite situation obtained in reality at the time: when the Danes were bought off in 991 and succeeding years, the payoff was in silver, and the coinage of the time is exclusively silver, with little gold in evidence anywhere.

If Beowulf is as late as its manuscript, of course, then it too simply uses a conventional vocabulary for treasure, in which gold is far more prominent than silver, except when the two are linked in formulas like “silver and gold.” But it's the details of the Staffordshire Hoard that then stand out: the gold literally outweighs the silver, by a four-to-one ration. Further, the assemblage of materials seems clearly to have been made in the context of war: the prominence (and sheer number) of sword-fittings makes any other context seem unlikely. And sure enough, we see warriors stripped of their gear in the poem. Likewise, when Beowulf's troop arrives at Heorot, their spears are foregrounded, but when Weohstan kills Onela's nephew Eanmund, he takes the sword to Onela and is given it as a reward—the uncle rewarding the slayer of his nephew because of a family feud. Hrothgar's hilt, of course, is the sign of Grendel's mother's death (far more so than the head of Grendel), and we see in the Staffordshire hoard some 80 gold pommel mounts, stripped, it seems, from sword hilts.

And there are hoards in Beowulf: the dragon guards a hoard, and when Beowulf kills it, he believes that the hoard will be a treasure to buy his people's future safety: a doomed hope, as it turns out, but a clear claim is made about what a hoard might be thought to do. The dragon hoard, of course, has been laid in the ground by the “last survivor” the final living member of a now-long-gone tribe, the hoard a kind of national treasury, useless to an individual. Likewise, the hoard of the dragon slain by Sigemund provides an opportunity for a discussion of good and bad kingship: hoards are to be used by lords who are gold-friends to their thanes—a source of wealth to be shared.

When all we had of Anglo-Saxon treasure hoards was the Sutton Hoo burial (and other burials), we could look at Sutton Hoo as deeply continental in contents and significance and ultimately too poor to reflect the poem's gold obsession. But the Staffordshire material—some 1500 items, even if most of them are small—seems Saxon to the bone, and it's big, big, big. When Sutton Hoo is the only treasure on the horizon, we can look at the poem's depictions of gold, swords, and hoards as a highly fictionalized depiction of a golden age, a long-ago time in which gold was thick on the ground and heros could find monsters worthy of a battle. But the Staffordshire materials seem to open up a completely different perspective: as late as the seventh century real Anglo-Saxon kings (or as near to it as can be determined from stuff dug up in a field) really did or could collect remarkable hoards of gold, and presumably they usually spent them as wise gold-friends would. That is, the social economy depicted in the poem may be far more like a real, historical Anglo-Saxon social economy than has ever been realized.

When I teach Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I always point out the the historical King Arthur must have lived some eight or nine centuries before the poem, and that the poet freely anachronizes, dressing his characters in the armor, clothing, foodways, and social mores of the fourteenth century. What the Staffordshire Hoard may well suggest is that Beowulf might engage in an exactly parallel strategy: depicting a hero from centuries earlier, but dressed in gold, armor, and attitudes from very near the poet's present. It's a line of argument that Sutton Hoo does not make possible, I think: but the Staffordshire Hoard may well make it possible—the poem may get a surprisingly strong new argument for an early date: I'll go with the eighth century, putting the Hoard, perhaps, in the poet's grandfather's memory. Because what seems clear is that the conventional language of treasure may have been mobilized by the Maldon poet, but the practices (and the sheer wealth) that led to the Staffordshire Hoard seem so closely paralleled in Beowulf that it's hard to imagine that so many details are merely literary convention. The Beowulf poet's well known attention to gold may be its most remarkable point of historical accuracy. But the accuracy is not in how the fifth-century Beowulf and Hrothgar saw the world, but in how the seventh-century—and perhaps the eighth as well—saw and thought about war, treasure, and gold.

Perhaps in a year, or two, or twenty, I'll see more clearly than I do now if or how the Staffordshire Hoard changes our understanding of the poem. But right now, caught up in the excitement of the newness of discovery, it looks to me like Beowulf will never be the same. Because now we know just what an Anglo-Saxon could hoard (as opposed to bury in a grave, or lose, or throw away), and it's surprisingly like what the poem tells us. Who could have believed that the hoarding, of all things, was where the poem was telling us the truth?

That class

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 I'm doing, and wonder when someone is going to call me out on it.

That feeling isn't helped this semester by having a class that's That Class. Those of you who teach know the kind I mean: the soul-sucking, lethargic, amoeba-like organism that starts as a gelatinous mass and gradually calcifies until it is utterly impenetrable. At first, I thought they were just quiet. Confused, maybe. In need of some more examples. But no: none of those things seem to be the problem.

It makes for a long 75 minutes, especially in a class (introduction to folklore) where I rely heavily on them contributing personal experiences and examples to illustrate some of the more abstract concepts and to help them begin coming up with topics for their fieldwork projects.

In those moments, 20 years of experience doesn't do me the slightest bit of good; I still feel like a panicky grad student who's run out of material halfway through class.

I suppose, though, that the benefit of experience is that I know (but have a hard time believing) that to a large degree, it's not about me. It's about a combination of bad place (room with chairs bolted to the floor), bad time (mid-afternoon), and bad karma. I taught the same course last semester, using the same texts, and the students had lots to say, asked lots of great questions, and generated that amazing kind of reciprocal energy exchange that makes a class work.

Still, it's discouraging. I ran into a colleague at the rec center this morning who's in a similar predicament with one of his classes. We agreed that just one section of That Class has the potential to unmoor you.

I read this recent editorial by Maureen Dowd with interest, since That Class has been getting me so down. The problem, as Dowd sees it? That women "tend to attach to other people more strongly, beat themselves up more when they lose attachments, take things more personally at work."

Well, yeah. I've been working on those issues for years. Longer than I've been teaching probably.

Easier said than done, especially when you feel like you've humiliated yourself in front of a class, doing just about everything but swinging from a trapeze to get some kind of response. And believe me, I haven't ruled that option out.

In case you missed the story about the zombie-alert sign earlier this year, above, click here.