In the sun

These days we're settling into an early summer routine that is well portrayed by Magellan, who loves to bask in the sun (good Puerto Rican cat that she is) any chance she gets to be outside.

Now that both mami and papi are here, and that I'm finally done with the teaching and the meetings (well, except for one more meeting this week), and Commencement obligations, and there's only 11 more final papers to grade, time is moving a lot slower around here and I'm deeply grateful for that.

I have pledged never to have a repeat performance of this most awful of semesters when, I roughly calculate, I read thousands of pages of student papers so that I had hundreds of papers to grade almost every week. It's true that my students, almost all of them, became much better writers by the end of the semester, mostly thanks to that effort. But at what cost to my own time and energy and felicity? That's the question that I cannot ignore in the future.

While I am committed to being the best teacher I can be, and I just can't drop the ball in that court, I do have to remember to balance my commitment to helping my students become better writers and readers with my own need and desire to write and read for my own purposes, and to have a personal life that is more important than my work. I have to realize that I owe myself to myself, first and foremost. The students eventually move on but my life remains with me. That balance between my vocation for teaching and my love of living is the one I will be striving to reach this year, and I will be seeking new pedagogical strategies to apply the next time I walk into the classroom.

That is, I am going to slow down and smell the roses on the way (or, in this case, the lovely peonies in my backyard).



Most of all, I don't ever want to place my blessing of a husband in a constant "wait until I'm done with grading" mode. It should be the other way around. My job should be the one placed on hold so that I can tend, and love, and appreciate the one person who's stuck with me through thickest and thinnest, though bounty and dearth, and who, even as we speak, is nearly heroic in all the support that he is willing to give me and my family in these difficult and so sad times.

And he's also a great source of fun and laughter, as he proved yesterday when he arrived from the city, after purchasing a pair of speakers to connect to his old stereo so he can have music in the garage. He found the speakers for $20 in Craig's List but when he showed up to pick them up from the seller, the speakers were too big to put inside his motorcycle transport bag. To get the speakers here, he had to tape them with masking tape to his motorcycle, as the photo below shows. As he says jokingly, quoting his good friend SF: "You can take the boy out of West Virginia, but you can't take the West Virginia out of the boy."

Personally, I think it's very smart, worked well, and showed his ingenuity and ability not just to think on his feet but on two wheels, too.