1948

For most of my life, I thought that I was born in a boring in-between time; three years after the end of World War II, two years before the uneventful nineteen fifties.  Just since I began to teach that Mod Civ course, I have realized how significant 1948 was… not just for being the year I was born ( as if the world revolved around me)

I was just preparing to teach Shirley Jackson’s endlessly disturbing story “The Lottery”  for perhaps the tenth time. 
She wrote a passage later, called “The Morning of June 28, 1948” about the reaction to her story when it was first published in the New Yorker. I was distracted by the thought that I was just two months old when that story was first published.  That led me to my 1948 meditation:

The State of Israel was formally created in 1948

The Marshall Plan was created and implemented in 1948

The UN created the World Health Organization in 1948, and The United Nations General Assembly adopts the Universal Declaration on Human Rights

Gandhi was murdered in January of 1948

In Germany, The United States and Great Britain began a massive airlift of food, water, and medicine on June 26th to the citizens of West Berlin following the Soviet Blockade.

The Communists seized power in Czechoslovakia.

In the US Presidential Election , Harry S. Truman (Democratic) Defeats Thomas E. Dewey (Republican) and Strom Thurmond (States' Rights Democratic) and Henry A. Wallace (Progressive/Labor)

 

T.S.Eliot won the Nobel Prize for Literature that year.

Lawrence Olivier won the Oscar for “Hamlet” and “Hamlet” won for Best Picture.

 

Cortisone was introduced as an arthritis treatment.

Alan Paton published his novel Cry the Beloved Country.

Al Gore and Prince Charles were also born that year. So was Henning Mankell, a favorite murder mystery writer.

The Summer Olympics was held in London!

 

Preparing for the Freshmen

The members of the Class of 2016 arrive tomorrow. I'll be meeting with the 17 of them that will be my students on Monday and Tuesday for some orientation work, and then, for class on Thursday, from 12:30-1:45.

I've met most of them already, on two Saturdays in June, but that was too quick to get much of an impression of them. 

Our Core Curriculum has been extensively revised, so I'll be teaching them for one semester instead of two, which grieves me.  I'll also be teaching completely different texts, which excites me.  Teaching the same ones for thirteen years, I am ready for a change. 

First , we will be discussing three essays/excerpts they were supposed to have read over the summer:
"Naturalist" by E.O.Wilson

the conversion passage from Augustine's Confessions

an excerpt from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

These are included in the anthology we are using:  Being Human: Core Readings in the Humanities, which was compiled and published by the President's Council on Bioethics in 2003.

Then, we'll read and discuss another essay: "Curiosity and Smartphones" by Douglas V. Henry.

I'll talk more about these, how they introduce the course, and how the discussions went, next week.

The long text we will read after these essays will be Aldous Huxley's  Brave New World. I re-read it this summer, and was more horrified by it than I ever was when I read it at sixteen ( or thereabouts).
I wonder how they will take it. 

Recently I've been reading the book the class will cover in late November: Wendell berry's novel Hannah Coulter. It couldn't be more different from Brave New World.

More about that later, too.

Update on the Cornell Hawks

School starts for me tomorrow with an afternoon of faculty meetings. These meetings precede the arrival of the freshmen on Sunday, followed by Freshman Orientation, followed by the first day of classes.
I will probably not be posting regularly once school gets into full swing... but then, who knows?

Anyway, I've decided to post some photos of the three "Chicks" from the nest at Cornell. They are all fledged and hopefully hunting well. These are fairly recent shots:
C1, taken June 24:

C2, July 3:

C3 - don't know the date:

They are truly breathtaking creatures. And just this past week, the nestcam ( which is still up and running) captured the parents, Big Red and Ezra, on a return trip to the nest. The video filmed them rummaging around for about nine minutes; looked like some bonding and some remote preparations for a nest there again in 2013:

Vows for Sister Liz

In my  community, the Daughters of Charity of St.Vincent de Paul, sisters never make what in religious congregations is known as "final vows" or "solemn profession."  All of us make what canon law calls "simple vows" and we make them for one year at a time, from year to year, all our lives.We do this each year on March 25. We make them silently, during Mass.

 For the first five or so years in the Daughters, a sister doesn't make vows at all. So the first time she does this is a special occasion, and she pronounces them out loud.  We had one of these holy moments today at Sunday Mass. Sister Elizabeth Ann Sjoberg, age 30, pronounced her vows to the Lord. She did this in the pew with the sisters of her local community surrounding her, and her parents and friends looking on:

Really, it is Midsummer

Doesn't feel like it, since school starts in about ten days.  But if the first day of summer is June 21, and the first day of autumn in September 21...yes.  I tend to label the long vacation from school as summer, though this year it started in mid-May.

Anyway, after my road trip, I came back to a somewhat weedy but alive garden, thanks to Dan, the grounds manager, who kept it watered when rain didn't do the job:

He also planted some lovely perennials around the statue of St.Louise de Marillac:

Right outside the door, however, in addition to two volunteers:  a Milkweed ( host to Monarchs) and a Cleome, flourishes a mountain of weeds. I've begun to pull them up, but more needs to be done:

Road Trip Report

NB: My camera's battery ran out, so ,with the exception of the people photos, all the photos came from Google images.

On July18,  one of the other sisters and I drove out to Indianapolis Indiana -- 11 hours across Pennsylvania , Ohio, and Indiana --

 to a Daughters of Charity meeting which was held at the Marriott in downtown Indianapolis:

Stayed in this place  --- so unlike anything I am used to --- from Wednesday until Sunday. Attended great meetings and liturgies, and saw many friends from all over our Province:

Left Indianapolis at noon on Sunday, July 22, driving by myself from here on. Drove to Erie Pennsylvania --- about 7 hours--- until I was too tired to drive any further--- and stayed overnight in a Comfort Inn by the side of Interstate 90. Started out on Monday, driving I 90 along Lake Erie:

Drove I 90 across New York State to Syracuse, to Christ the King Retreat House, where I spent the next eight days in a silent retreat with about 20 of my sisters. It's a lovely spot.:

On Wednesday, August 1, I left Syracuse and continued across New York State( a four hour drive) to Adirodack NY, a village in the huge Adirondack Park . I've learned that this Adirondack wilderness is protected land ---3 million acres of it:

I stayed with my friends in their house in this beautiful country, not far from Schroon Lake , one of the hundreds of lakes in the region:

While I was there, I began to read a book about one writer and his hike from his home in Vermont to his former home in the Adirondacks. It's a beautifully written and illuminating book about the region at the present time:

Then, on Friday, August 3, I drove from there, along the scenic Rt.8 and Rt.9N, and crossed the new Crown Point Bridge across Lake Champlain in to Vermont:

I continued on this two hour drive into Middlebury Vermont, where I stayed with my cousins and visited with them and their daughter and grandchildren:

Then, on Sunday, August 5, I drove four hours south along Rt.7 through some more beautiful scenery, shouldered by the Green Mountains of Vermont

to Albany, New York, where I stayed overnight with our sisters. Monday morning, I headed back south via Rt.787, 87, 287 in New Jersey, to Rt.78 across Pennsylvania:

Seven hours later, I was home in Emmitsburg: 

In Southern Maryland

Yesterday I drove almost four hours to the other end of the state to St.Mary's College of Southern Maryland. I'm attending their first annual Chesapeake Writers' Workshop.  About forty writers are here, in four groups of ten:  two groups for fiction, one for creative nonfiction, and one for poetry.
Haven't had the first poetry workshop session yet, but so far it has been fun.  The campus is very beautiful --- surrounded by water, with campus buildings that remind me of Williamsburg. It's birdwatching heaven as well. 

Photo from Google:

On the perception of time

That's a mysterious and abstract title for what is probably a common realization.


Back in the summer of 2010, when I was visiting my mom  in the nursing home, I was looking at this 8X10 framed photo on her dresser:

This was taken in 1941, of my mother and her five brothers.  I know it was 1941 because my Uncle Al is in uniform. I would love to know the location and story of the house in the background.
What struck me was that I always thought of 1941 as ancient times, very far in the past. It hit me that day that 1941 was only seven years before I was born!  And that 2003, when this photo was taken,

of me, at the "Mountward Bound"

retreat for the incoming freshmen ( I worked in Campus Ministry then), was much more distant in time from my birth -  fifty-five years!

I lived in what, to my students, are the dark ages, the ancient times. Yet they seem to me to be not so far away.

I guess I especially have been thinking about this since last Sunday, when I visited one of my high school teachers -  one of my favorites . We hadn't seen each other since about 1972, or maybe even before that.  He is only ten years older than I am,  but at age fourteen, age twenty-four seemed so old.

I looked into his face ( still handsome) and saw the face of that twenty-four year old.  This must be the way my former students see me --- the students I taught when I was twenty-eight and they were eighteen.  Several of them have been visiting me in recent years.

Maybe this miserable heat has been cooking my brain  But the passage of time just fascinates me.

I remember that old Rolling Stones song  "Ti ---me  is on my side, yes it is"  Not any more.

Heat Advisory

The heat and humidity have arrived in Maryland.

I began to remember the first fourteen or so years of my life before airconditioning became widespread.  People flocked to movie theaters on days like this.  I also remember going to the Thrift Drug Store in the West Goshen Shopping Center to hang around in the aisles in the air conditioning.
It's hard to believe that my first waitressing job, at the Guernsey Cow restaurant in Exton Pa was in a restaurant with no airconditioning.

In the summers between 1956 and 1962, when I was home from school, my mother, who was a private duty nurse working from 7-3PM, took off for the summer, and she and I would spend our days at the pool at Lenape Park.  We would get home about 4, in time for her to get supper ready for when Dad came home from work at 6PM --- and he worked outside in the heat at his Exxon ( then Esso) station.  Our house was not airconditioned; if it was really hot, she and I would like on the tile floor in the living room on towels in front of a large electric fan.

My parents were not big beach-goers. We did go at least three times during my childhood, though.
This photo was taken on the beach at Ocean City New Jersey in the summer of 1954:

Jump to 1979 through 1984, when I was a young Daughter of Charity, living in Petersburg Virginia. One of the sisters said she thought Petersburg was built over hell. The heat and humidity were unrelenting, and were enhanced by the sulphurous fumes from the Allied Chemical plant and the tobacco processing plant.  The convent chapel, community room, and refectory were airconditioned, but the rest of the cinderblock building and the schools were not.  I remember going over to my classroom in late August and September at 5AM to open the windows and turn on the fans, to try to bring some of the cooler morning air in.  My long-sleeved navy blue habit would be sticking to me most of the days.

Actually, when I think of it, most of the high school classrooms in which I taught for twenty-five years were not airconditioned.  I was younger and thinner then, but I just lived with the expectation of discomfort.  Most people have done so for most of the history of the world.

Back to the Garden, part two

On this lovely sunny summer Sunday, I weeded and mulched out there. Then, when the sun moved, or, rather, when the garden moved into the sun, I went back out to take some photos of the glory:

Bee Balm

Larkspur

 Glads-  two of the many

 

Sunflowers and Crocosima

Tomato plants coming along

Hostas