September 2003 Archives

LBJs

*The blackout ended, for us, in Hour 95, just after 6:00 p.m. on Monday. We celebrated by throwing out everything in the fridge except three beers, some hard-boiled eggs, an unopened bottle of ketchup, an unopened bottle of salad dressing, and six bags of coffee beans. In the course of our excavations, we discovered some Chinese food from the late Tang dynasty and sent it across the bridge of heaven.

*On Sunday we tried to go hiking at White Oak Canyon, but when we arrived at the trailhead we were informed by a ranger that the National Park Service had closed the Shenandoah N.P. completely due to high water and fallen trees. We rescued a few baby snapping turtles from the middle of the road and drove to Charlottesville for some Putt-Putt and Mexican food. I found a replacement copy of Fountains of Wayne's Welcome Interstate Managers and have been letting the first three songs pound through my head ever since. (They're "Mexican Wine," "Bright Future in Sales," and "Stacy's Mom," if you were wondering.)

*Last night I finally got back to the gym. I've been fairly good about staying on the Atkins diet since July, and when I weighed in pre-Isabel, I was still 19 pounds under my starting weight. After being on the road for about three weeks, I could easily have gained back more than two pounds, so I was happy to discover the damage had been minimal. Unfortunately, the diet had been easy compared to finding time for exercise, and I'd gone weeks with nothing more than the occasional walk after dinner, so it felt good to get back to the weights. One eerie note: when I arrived at the gym, no one was there--but the mix CD I'd made for the weight room last year was already playing Talking Heads' "What a Day That Was."

*My fantasy football teams are both undefeated in their respective leagues, but I've got a real test in this week's FLOGG matchup, so I may not be able to make that claim next week. It's been a challenge trying to predict whether Brett Favre or Drew Bledsoe will have the disastrous game each week, but so far I've made the right call. Here's hoping for a big game from Stephen Davis after his bye week, though.

*Dixon heard Rhapsody in Blue for the first time last week and immediately fell in love with it. We found a used copy at the CD store and gave it to him; he's already trying to pick it out on the piano--good luck, kid--and is hoping his teacher will find him a copy of the sheet music. I'm impressed by his ambition. And I can't wait to hear him play it someday.

*Today is Kelly's birthday. I gave her the traditional gift--comic books--and will be taking her out to dinner tonight. Don't expect any further reports.

5:20 PM

Sixty-five hours and counting.

Not that long, in the grand scheme of things. Not even a full three days yet, and I've had to put up with quite a few things that lasted longer than three days--flu bugs, final exams, that sort of thing. But yes, I'd have to say that at this point the novelty has indeed worn off.

I'm referring to our power outage. All in all, our little community got through the arrival of Hurricane Isabel pretty well, but of course we couldn't know in advance how it would go, which made the whole experience a wee bit more stressful. And my being on dorm duty on Thursday made it a much larger bit stressful. Woodberry gets power from three different sources, and at 3:50 p.m. on Thursday the 18th of September, we lost connection with two of them. There was only a light rain and no sustained wind at the time, but the sudden flickerings in the fine arts center definitely hinted at trouble to come. I dug a flashlight out of the sound booth in case the Black Box Theater was suddenly cast into darkness--the single smartest move I made all weekend, as it turned out.

The theater's emergency lights remained on, and we successfully finished our blocking for the day, but that evening, just after dinner ended at 6:45, the remaining power finally went out. Students were restricted to their dorms, leaving me as one of two duty men in charge of the entire sophomore class and another few dozen juniors and seniors. I spent much of the next four hours wandering the halls with my flashlight, assuring tenth-graders that yes, we would in fact be having classes the next day (as far as I knew) and that they should make whatever efforts they could make to be prepared for them. Some guys even listened to me. I ran several errands that took me outside, where the wind was now roaring from the northeast and the rain was hitting at a pronounced angle. One southward trip to anothe dorm left my back more or less dry on the way there, but when I returned, I totally saturated the front of my entire body.

I sat in on a couple of impromptu jam sessions, borrowing a student's guitar here and there to play Dylan's "Tangled Up in Blue," Mike Cross's "Elma Turl," and "Food Chain" from King Mackerel and the Blues Are Running. The flashlight proved especially crucial when I became the de facto window inspector. Despite two specific orders to drop what they were doing and close their storm windows, it was soon apparent that our students didn't actually know what a storm window was. At around 8:30, I began the process of inspecting each room on the top floor and realized that while all the main windows were closed, about fifty to sixty percent of the storm windows were wide open, with water flying straight through the screens and pooling in the sills. Complaining loudly (and dragging in all the students I could find), I set to closing off the flood before the rooms below us filled completely. Needless to say, by the time I was dismissed from duty that evening, I was beat--beat enough not to care that my house was dark and my bed full of more children and dogs than usual.

The next morning my internal alarm clock jolted me awake at 7:00 and I got ready for my 8:00 class. Our dining hall, using emergency generators, had prepared us--hallelujah!--a hot breakfast, which led me to call for a round of applause. Had there been coffee, I would have called for a standing O, but alas, it was not to be. It instead fell to my colleague Fred to drive into Orange, where power was still on, and surprise us by bringing back to-go cups for the faculty. Fred's going to get some nice Christmas presents this year.

All in all, we came out fairly well. Power came back to the main campus Saturday night at 9:50--almost precisely 54 hours after the first partial blackout. The campus lost only a handful of trees, most of them already carved up and hauled away. Though the river is high, we had no real flooding, except for our next-door neighbors' toilet overflowing and soaking their carpet. The Rapidan crested at about 18 feet; flood stage is 14, but the record is 30 feet, which it reached in 1995 during the millennial flood that washed away our bridge. By comparison, this was nothing.

What do I want now? Not much. Just power. Light to read by. Hot water. Refrigeration. Because our house is still dark. I'm writing this from my classroom, where I'm firmly in the 21st Century--I can see to work, reach across the globe, or listen to a Norah Jones cover of a Hank Williams song. But when I leave here in a moment, I'm heading back more than a hundred years, to a place where wax and oil provide the only light, where word travels only as fast as I do, where the only music comes from our fingers and our voices.

It's a nice place to visit. But I wouldn't want to live there.

2:17 PM

I wore my black shirt to work today. It seemed like the proper thing to do.

I've mourned more than a few passings in this journal, and as I get older, I'm sure I'll have no reason to stop. But I can't bring myself to mourn for Johnny Cash. If ever a man seemed to have made peace with himself, it was Johnny. His voice was not one I heard often during my childhood--only the occasional strains of "If I Were a Carpenter" or "A Boy Named Sue" on the radio--but as I grew older, I discovered that there was a power in that weary, rumbling baritone, and I learned to listen with a great appreciation to the songs he wrote before I was born.

In recent years his career underwent something of a renaissance, largely on the strength of a remarkable series of albums he released on Rick Rubin's American Recordings label. Accompanied by a cast of young and not-so-young all-stars--Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Fiona Apple, Nick Cave, Merle Haggard, Billy Preston, Marty Stuart, Norman Blake, Sheryl Crow--Johnny laid down a series of songs that traveled all over the musical map. Some he'd written himself years ago, and some he'd written only in the new century. He took on standards from his youth ("That Lucky Old Sun," "Nobody") and songs that became standards during his lifetime ("Bridge Over Troubled Water," "In My Life," "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry").

But what awed me was the bold personal stamp he put on songs Nashville would never touch. Johnny's cover of Nine Inch Nail's "Hurt" has deservedly attracted much attention, but it's far from a stunt--it's a breathtaking performance. In his hands, U2's "One" hums with authority, and Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus" changes from pomo irony into the sincere evangelism of a believer. Nick Cave's condemned-man lament, "The Mercy Seat," may as well have been a Johnny Cash song when he wrote it, and Johnny accepts the gift with becoming grace. Songs by Sting, by Tom Petty, by Neil Diamond, for pete's sake, are claimed as Johnny's own in a set of simple, straightforward, but rich arrangements that circle his voice like the band around his finger.

When June Carter Cash died a few months ago, a friend of mine in Nashville predicted that Johnny wouldn't long outlive her. I've been expecting to hear the news of his death ever since, and I've taken the time to try and appreciate what he wrote and sang, knowing that the Cash catalogue was likely complete. And I think Johnny may have known as well, though he completed it before June's death. The final song on his final album, American IV: The Man Comes Around, is not a Cash song, nor does it have the melancholy tone so many of his recordings have. Instead, it presents a gentle optimism born long ago; it's a song I remember hearing my English friends sing at my own send-off from Manchester nearly twenty years ago, and I still have reason to believe its lyrics are true. I know Johnny believed them, and when he sang them, he somehow made them true for everyone:

We'll meet again,
Don't know where,
Don't know when,
But I know we'll meet again
Some sunny day

1:15 AM

UPCOMING APPEARANCES: None!

It's about that time.

Time to shift into PARK and put the car in the driveway for a while. Time to quit worrying about what I've done with my itinerary, or whether the cell phone is charged, or which route to take to get to the next stop. Time to eat dinner with my family. Time to look at the familiar birds of Virginia, not the strange birds of other states. Time to stop punching the "seek" button on the radio in a desperate attempt to get something that's not a six-song block of Rush or the latest quavery Whitney-wanna-be or someone using Liberal as an expletive. Time to cut back on caffeinated sugar-free fizzy water. Time to quit depending on the cruise control button. Time to set my alarm for the same time every morning. Time to talk about someone's book other than my own.

Time to teach.

I've been in schools practically my whole life. I entered the classroom for first grade in 1969 and didn't come out for more than a summer at a time until 1985. The next year was so bewildering that I rushed right back to school in 1987 and stayed there, first as student and then as teacher. It's very strange to go six months without a class.

I've had a great six months. During the spring and summer, I saw people, places, and things that I'll never forget. My career prospects have been enhanced, my writing goals have been brought closer and closer, my palate has been delighted by sensations it's never known before, and my life list has grown by dozens of species. I've been absorbing experiences for half a year now, and I feel as though I'm pushing back from a mighty repast; now it's time to unbuckle my belt and quit swallowing for a while. Maybe I'll sit on the sofa and catch some football...

But no, I know what I'll do. Come Wednesday, I'll be here at my desk, and one by one a few juniors will straggle in, wondering why they have to know anything about American drama. And for the next eight months, I'll tell them. The leaves will turn, the snow will fall, the mud will be tracked all over my floor, and my students will write and argue and read and mispronounce words and laugh and write some more. And I'll teach.

It's about that time.

10:06 PM