Rather than with the voracious tick that buried itself into my skin today

I celebrate the first day of spring with these inspiring folks.

Three Wonderful Posts Made by Other People in One Day

I
Humans of New York posted this today.

Thirty years is mighty impressive.

I have been trying to post every day in this blog for almost six years. It is hard. But harder still if I miss a day.

II
A Facebook friend posted sage advice today found here. I am especially fond of these three of Amitava Kumar's principles:

1. Write every day. This is a cliche, of course, but your will write more when you tell yourself that no day must pass without writing.
2. Have a modest goal. Aim to write 150 words each day.
3. Walk for ten minutes.

III

After I re-posted this article on Facebook, a former student (in 8th, 10th, and 12th grades) wrote, "I still have my journals from your class." (Twenty-three years and counting. I hope she has her words forever.)

Close Punctuation

I
A new term learned today from Mary Norris' "Confessions of a Comma Queen" in the February 23, 2015 issue of The New Yorker:

The New Yorker practices a "close" style of punctuation. Or, as E. B. White once put it, "Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim." (Norris, 2015, para. 32)

Commas separate or mark off sentence parts with precision and tact and art.

II
Precision isn't something we experience with Tennessee weather.

In the transitions from season to season, the parts -- temperature, humidity, precipitation, sun -- jumble together like words in a rambling sentence, which defies logic or clarity.

To wit: a high of 66 today and a predicted low of 26. Fog, rain, ice pellets. Sunshine on Friday with a high of 38 and low of 22. Then back up to 52 on Sunday.

III
In language, I like a close style, but in seasonal shifts I prefer messiness and unpredictability, so much closer to life as it is lived rather than life as it is made in words.

IV
Besides, the crocus don't mind, so why should I?

If Only I, a Reformed Bug Smusher (for the most part), Were This Clever

On Smushing Bugs by Tim Kreider
The New York Times, 17 November 2014

When my kitchen became infested with ants this summer, as it does every year, I put out ant traps, which, in another annual rite, did exactly nothing. So I did what I always end up doing — inefficiently smushing the ants one by one. Sometimes I’ll massacre dozens at a time in a fit of pique after catching them glutting themselves in my sugar bowl, but then, seeing a single ant moping around on the counter looking sort of forlorn and hangdog, I’ll hesitate. He looks like maybe he’s not having such a great day already. Getting smushed is the last thing this guy needs.

Dispensing death and clemency capriciously — killing on petulant impulse, granting pardons at whim — gives me an Olympian view of how men must live and die in battle or disasters: one just unlucky, in the wrong place at the wrong moment, while the guy next to him is miraculously spared for no reason at all. As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods.

Ants, as individuals, do not seem like very complicated animals to me (I’m sure E. O. Wilson would correct me), but every time I smush one I am aware I am extinguishing for all eternity one being’s single chance to be alive. It’s hard to believe Descartes convinced even himself that animals were automata; watching an ant scramble frantically to escape my annihilating thumb, he certainly looks every bit as conscious of his own mortality as I am.Dispensing death and clemency capriciously — killing on petulant impulse, granting pardons at whim — gives me an Olympian view of how men must live and die in battle or disasters: one just unlucky, in the wrong place at the wrong moment, while the guy next to him is miraculously spared for no reason at all. As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods.

Living in a cabin in the country in the summer, I end up having to kill a lot of things. In this, as in so much else, my 16-year-old self would be disappointed in me. At that age I thought maybe Jainism was the religion for me. All I really knew about the Jains was that they carried little brooms with them everywhere to sweep insects out of their paths, lest they accidentally step on a single bug. As a kid who used to spend most of his time at pools rescuing flailing beetles from drowning, this appealed to me.

I note that Jainism originated in India, a country to which stinkbugs are not indigenous. The stinkbug, an invasive species, has taken over the Mid-Atlantic region, including my house, in the last few years as swiftly as the Martians conquered England. It was from stinkbugs that I learned that any animal in sufficient numbers, no matter how harmless, can be horrific. An effective stinkbug trap can be constructed out of a two-liter soda bottle and an L.E.D., but I find it more thorough and meditative to eradicate them through piecework, using the nozzle attachment of my vacuum cleaner. They make a very satisfying thhhhhP! sound when you suck them up. They then get to live out the rest of their lives in the oubliette of the vacuum bag. So my compassion is not quite Buddha-like in its embrace.

Mice are a stickier moral problem. Mice are mammals, and, it has to be admitted when you look at them in the light of day, cute — little bright-eyed wriggly creatures. You can see why they make such endearing cartoon characters. In an ideal world I would be content to coexist with mice. But my Gandhi-esque live-and-let-live attitude hardens into a more Fleming-McCartneyesque one when I go to enjoy my first cup of coffee of the day and find a tiny, hardened black turd in my mug. It is then that I set about carefully daubing the trigger of a mousetrap with peanut butter. So begins a wearisome cycle of vengeance and remorse.

A traditional mousetrap is designed to function like a guillotine, killing instantly and painlessly, but human technology is imperfect. Having to dispose of the limp corpse of a mouse first thing in the morning is a depressing chore with which to begin the day, but God forbid you should find the mouse alive, bleeding, maimed and crying on your kitchen counter. Now what? Mercy-smush the mouse with a rock? Put it outside and hope it’ll recover? It will die of sepsis under your porch. Whatever you do, you are going to feel like John Wayne Gacy for days. These days I use clever balance-activated traps that harmlessly capture the mouse. Whenever I catch one I carry the trap out to the car, place it on the passenger seat, and drive the mouse up the road to let it out near the house of my neighbor Gene, who likes animals.

I feel guilty about this killing to varying degrees, ranging from not one bit (mosquitoes, horseflies) to sorta (ants, stinkbugs) to gut-clenching remorse (the mice, the mice). The cartoonist Ruben Bolling once drew a handy chart explaining the ethical hierarchy of living things, from close relatives to plants, rating each in categories from Should You Help It? to Can You Eat It?. Some of these biases are based on help versus harm — cats and dogs are our pals and protectors, snakes and mosquitoes can kill us — but some are irrational prejudice. It is my official policy never to kill spiders, even though occasionally a large hairy one drops out of the rafters right onto the back of my hand and I must walk swiftly to the door holding my hand as far away from me as it will get mentally reciting Fear is the mind-killer, fear is the mind-killer. My rationale is: Spiders eat insects, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It’s a little like arming the mujahedeen, but as far as I’m concerned mosquitoes and stinkbugs are the Soviet Union, and there’s a war on. Also, anyone who’s read “Huck Finn” knows that killing spiders is bad luck.

It’s impossible even to live and move through this world without killing something. Not long ago I stepped out in my lawn and felt something squish under my heel. Inside my slipper I found the body of a daddy longlegs, an animal of which I am rather fond, its attached legs still twitching. Just driving the 10 minutes to the library and back, I wince as I smush butterflies when I fail to brake in time to whip them into the slipstream, or, worse, the occasional lightning bug, whose splattered magical guts leave a fluorescing greenish-gold smear of stars across my windshield that I then have to watch go heartbreakingly dark. Once I struck an indigo bunting who’d been sitting in the road — I didn’t see him in time and he couldn’t fly out of the way of my grille. I stopped and got out and stood watching him dying in the grass, slowly spreading his wings, iridescent under the sun. I helplessly kill dozens, if not hundreds, of animals daily with my big, dumb, blundering existence.I feel guilty about this killing to varying degrees, ranging from not one bit (mosquitoes, horseflies) to sorta (ants, stinkbugs) to gut-clenching remorse (the mice, the mice). The cartoonist Ruben Bolling once drew a handy chart explaining the ethical hierarchy of living things, from close relatives to plants, rating each in categories from Should You Help It? to Can You Eat It?. Some of these biases are based on help versus harm — cats and dogs are our pals and protectors, snakes and mosquitoes can kill us — but some are irrational prejudice. It is my official policy never to kill spiders, even though occasionally a large hairy one drops out of the rafters right onto the back of my hand and I must walk swiftly to the door holding my hand as far away from me as it will get mentally reciting Fear is the mind-killer, fear is the mind-killer. My rationale is: Spiders eat insects, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It’s a little like arming the mujahedeen, but as far as I’m concerned mosquitoes and stinkbugs are the Soviet Union, and there’s a war on. Also, anyone who’s read “Huck Finn” knows that killing spiders is bad luck.

It’s fastidious and silly in this culture, kind of sissyish, to confess to feeling bad about smushing bugs. As far as most of us are concerned, bugs are household dirt that moves. I recently read an article about the survivors of an earthquake in the Tibetan city of Yushu that killed 3,000 people saving thousands of near-microscopic crustaceans from the mud, as an act of devotion. This may seem to Westerners like a trivial ritual, a waste of time, but it is, at least, more real than posting condolences on Facebook or applying a custom R.I.P. decal to your car’s rear window. A bug may be a small, unimportant thing, but maybe killing or saving one isn’t. Every time I smush a bug I can feel myself smushing something else, too — an impulse toward mercy, a little throb of remorse. Maybe it would feel better to decide that killing even a bug matters. Does devaluing tiny insignificant lives have some effect whereby we become more callous about larger, more important ones, like a karmic broken-window theory? People running for cover on the ground must look antlike from a bomber or a drone. As flies to wanton boys.

This summer I drove a bag of garbage that was attracting fruit flies (kill en masse without qualm) down to the Dumpster at the end of my dirt road. I went to lift up the heavy lid of the Dumpster, and what did I find in there but two miserable-looking raccoons huddled together in the corner, hiding their faces from the light. They couldn’t have been in there for too long, or they would’ve roasted to death in the summer heat wave. At least they weren’t going hungry — the floor of the Dumpster was covered in denuded corncobs, squashed watermelon rinds and other amuse-bouches of filth. Still, they must’ve had a bad night of it in there; they looked scrawny and matted and sad.

What I had here was a Situation. I put down my bag of garbage and turned off the car. I trotted off to a shed where I found just what was needed — a piece of lumber about six feet long. Raccoons may not grasp the concept of favors or gratitude but they instantly grasped the concept of the ramp — I hadn’t even lowered it to the Dumpster’s floor before one of them reached up and grabbed it with his paws. (They’re extremely clever, dexterous animals — I do not doubt they will be the next species to set paw on the moon if we successfully exterminate ourselves.) I set the board down and backed off fast. They both clambered up it, crawled across the Dumpster’s rim, plopped to the ground and slunk off into the woods whence they’d come — to rehydrate, debrief or generally recollect their dignity. See? I thought. I am a good person. I am helping.This summer I drove a bag of garbage that was attracting fruit flies (kill en masse without qualm) down to the Dumpster at the end of my dirt road. I went to lift up the heavy lid of the Dumpster, and what did I find in there but two miserable-looking raccoons huddled together in the corner, hiding their faces from the light. They couldn’t have been in there for too long, or they would’ve roasted to death in the summer heat wave. At least they weren’t going hungry — the floor of the Dumpster was covered in denuded corncobs, squashed watermelon rinds and other amuse-bouches of filth. Still, they must’ve had a bad night of it in there; they looked scrawny and matted and sad.

When I told this story to my neighbor Gene, who puts bowls of meat out for the local vultures, he told me he lets those same raccoons out of the Dumpster once a week or so. So O.K., maybe they’re not all that smart after all. And maybe I am not a hero in the raccoon community. But whenever I think of all the harm I’ve done in this world, through cruelty or carelessness, or just by the unavoidable crime of being in it, I try to remember how I felt standing there, watching them go.

Odonate rescue, one of many

One Aria to Sing

From a not very good book I finished today (others liked it, but not I so much), this rang true: "The past is so tenacious. . . . Everyone has one aria to sing over their life, . . ." (The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer).

So many times, I've taught students who've written about the same longing or sorrow or trauma or idea, revisiting and revising one thread from eighth through twelfth grades, sometimes well into college.

Tennessee Williams and Annie Dillard wrote their individual tales over and over again, in new form, picking at the same scab.

I, too, have done the same, never quite resolving or working out whatever the memory or feeling meant, might mean, could mean.

Tonight, as I ate summer fruit from a handmade bowl, whose family of North Carolina potters I first encountered at 17 -- the juices bursting, tingling, mixing tartness with syrupy sweetness, I thought of the place where I wish I were: at camp reunion with old friends, among my oldest, lying on the canoe dock, looking at stars, singing our mutual opera again.

In the Here and Now

In today's New York Times, Perry Garfinkel describes opening a writing workshop with this direction:

At the top of a page, write the words ‘Here and now I am’ followed by an ellipsis. In the next five minutes write as many sentences as you can, each sentence beginning with ‘Here and now I am.’ The rules: no questions, no stopping, no thinking, no worries about logic or syntax and no cheating off your neighbor.

If you go blank, draw from your senses — what you see, smell, taste, hear, feel.

Here goes:

Here and now I am writing my 2,120th post for My Daily Snap, a ritual that lifts me like a swing, higher and higher, head back, laughing. 

Here and now I remember swinging as a child, and I love blogging like that, an infectious addiction, even though my feet hurt. 

Here and now, my feet hurt as they have since morning when, over my head a green heron ack-ack-acking across the pond, I slid part-way into the black loam, water soaking my socks, my camera aimed at another new species -- the Southern Spreadwing. 

Here and now, I smile, knowing that a famous person, Dennis Paulson, author of a major field guide to Odonates in America, verified my photo on Facebook. 

Here and now, I heard the heron's acking as applause, but it's the rush of wings, the gust of air brushing my cheek as a Slaty Skimmer races by, that makes my skin pucker. 

Here and now I feel dehydrated, not literally, but metaphorically: spent, I suppose. 

Here and now, still tired from looking for bugs, in wet shoes and socks, two cameras slung across my chest and back, I know I'll do it again tomorrow. 

Here and now, when I write have nothing to say of consequence other than noting the way the Southern Spreadwing turned a moment toward me as I reached in for a photograph or the way the second lizard, the one on the Lake Dimmick sign, waited and waited and waited as I approached, as if it knew I am no predator. 

Here and now, I have nothing to write, I think, but then when I sit at the computer and place my fingers on the keyboard, something happens and text appears. 

In the here and now of photowalking and writing I am part of the elements, and I feel whole.

Verbal Legerdemain

Writing is hard. I should know. I have tried to teach it for most of my adult life, knowing all the while that it can't be taught. Or that I, at least, can't teach it.

But attending can be taught, and if one attends to the world and to words, sometimes magic happens.

Richard Rodriguez is a magician: his words appear as fast as any rabbit from a hat, and they delight and surprise.

On a day without walking (weather and work), some of his words from Darling will serve.

Of Elvis Presley, this: "The platter spun at 45 rpm. The aural helix opened like a can of white-meat Apollo: an engorged voice; a slurred diction; a humpy, syrupy croon."

Of Liberace, this: "Liberace addresses us as the Big Bad Wolf might address an infant or a canary or a little lamb lost -- a petting voice, not unkind. Necessarily, he supplies all the answers to his petit catechism. It is exactly the cadence and the Socratic method of Mister Rogers. He tugs the tonnage of his train along the lip of the stage."

At the beginning of the "Sisters of Mercy," this: "I would never in a million years have thought of lobbing a 'darling' Franz Schurmann's way, though Franz and I had lunch almost every week for twenty years. Now I wish I had, for Franz would have sluiced the noun through the brines of several tongues, finally cracking its nacreous shell."

And finally this about cloistered orders: "Often the founders of such congregations came from upper-middle-class families, but most of the women who swelled the ranks of missionary orders had left peat-fumed, sour-stomached, skinny-cat childhoods behind."

Better than any walk or any set of photographs today, these words leave me both sated and hungry for more.

Reading and Writing

The Greats and I love books and their neighborhood library, where we went on an expedition. One returned four books, one five. One checked out three books, the other three.

The youngest settled onto a bench in the children's section and said, "I want to stay here and read."

The other said, "No, not today," so off we went.

One stayed home, and the other came with me for a treat at the local coffee shop. After chai tea and a milk frosty (from which I had to eat the whipped cream because the Great said, "It's gross"), she took me upstairs where I had not been.

At the top of the steps, she said, "Isn't it cool?" The man settled in an armchair looked up from his paper and smiled, but the two students cramming for exams did not.

"Shh," I said, "this is the quiet spot."

We agreed it would be a cool place to read.

On the way home, I asked, "What's the best part of third grade?"

"Cursive," she said, and she was serious.

When we got home, she proved it.

These are things we love: books (all three of us), reading (all three of us), writing (two of us), and the people who write the books we love (all three us).

Drafting Frenzy

A friend recently said, "You always get so worked up over your Christmas books, Robley."

Well, maybe.

But the thing is that my process of writing requires a l-o-n-g time for thinking before I even start my "zero draft," the mess from which I hope to make something worth giving. Then, suddenly, I feel a shift and everything pours out like the all-day rain falling here today. Add to this the book designing and making, and yes sometimes I work myself into a swivet (the good kind -- the I-am-doing-something-interesting-that-I've-never-done-before-swirl-of-creation swivet.)

Finally, I had to learn a new online program to make the book. Only after I had created three solid working drafts did I even figure out how to unlink text blocks.

After many proofreading/editing sessions (mine and two friends') I gave the command to print this afternoon. This is it!

it's blurred because it's still a secret

Bring on Christmas and the Greats!

What if money were no object?

"What would you do?" asks Alan Watts.

I would give my most prized and sentimental possessions to my family and most of the rest of my possessions to those who could use or want them.

I would buy a little plot of land near my family, in woods, near mountains and water. On it, I would build a tiny house with an adjoining tiny studio just like this one.

I would use a fast computer with all the right photography and publishing programs. I would use more flexible equipment, including different cameras for different purposes. I would share my tiny house with a cat or cats to keep me company. I would use my library card at a good library with Kindle books. I would live near a college campus where I could attend lectures and plays, concerts and classes. I would travel to places I already love and love the new ones I would visit. I would wear comfortable clothes all the time, and every night at home I would float in a big bathtub under stars.

I would read, and walk, and write, and complete my poetry MFA and take photography classes and workshops, and make pictures, and compose and construct handmade books.

I would spend time with people I love and with people who create things because they must.

I would drink tea and make scones.

I would wake without fear and fall asleep without anxiety.

And I would be happy.

Writing Well Matters

I've taught composition for a bit more than thirty years. Every day, I read and respond to student papers, and every day I wait for one to awaken me with a committed, original voice, reminding me why writing matters.

Today, I opened an envelope and found these thank-you notes from my 7-year-old great-nephew and his 5-year-old sister.

Lesson re-learned.

Recursion

My artist friend Jack called this afternoon.  "Robley, you sent Arlyn and me a message a few days ago.  Something about recursion?"

I had responded to another friend's Facebook post, which included an image reading RECURSION WARNING.  I wrote, "Without recursion, writing is dictation."

It seems that Jack and Arlyn had been puzzled.  He had looked up the word, finding meanings specific to mathematics, physics, computer science, logic, but nothing related to composition theory.

"Jack," I said, "writing isn't a hierarchical step-by-step process; it's a recursive one."  I then went on to tell him what he already knows without knowing the fancy academic language.

"Oh," he said, "I understand creation and revision."

"Yes.  That's it.  Just think of the root of the word: recur.  The writer goes forward and back, and forward and back, as does the artist."

And so do I, walking with my camera.  I return to specific places again and again -- like Lake Cheston and Abbo's Alley, shooting the same spots again and again, because I cannot have enough of them and because I can never make the just right photograph any more than I can make the just right essay.

Just like when I still acted and much preferred rehearsal to performance: the practice and the never getting it right equal magic.

Funny that a simple Facebook post can turn, and turn, and turn, in so many directions.  Funny -- and enjoyable.

A Grateful Mother

At Parents' Day, a student's mother introduced herself to me. I don't teach her daughter, and I haven't taught her daughter. I will probably never teach her daughter. But the woman gave me a gift as great as the one her daughter gave her.

Last year, her daughter created an illustrated book, one of several writing projects in ninth-grade English, of which I was in charge. My friend Ron, who taught her daughter's section, shepherded the student as she composed a beautiful book about her grandmother's dementia. The mother wanted me to show her the book. She couldn't ask Ron because he isn't teaching this year.I showed her the book, and she cried. We then had a long conversation about why writing matters, during which she said, "Sometimes, I don't think you English teachers know just how important you can be." And then she thanked me. I accepted on Ron's behalf.

I do know writing matters, but being reminded, again, especially on Parents' Day, is a welcome gift.

Teacher and Student

For a long time (almost 19 years), I taught at a girls' prep school in New Orleans. Just outside my classroom in the old science wing (my classroom had earlier been the "new" library) was a breezeway winding down past a history/English classroom and the music room. Along that breezeway were old wooden benches on which my students and I sat when conferring about their writing.

Among the treasured things I took with me when I left that school was this photograph, which my friend Cathy, a former development director, gave me. It has been sitting in my office at my new school and reminds me of the girls, all now young women, I taught at McGehee's over three different decades.One of those young women, Meredith (listening intently in the photograph above), and I have recently been chatting through Facebook. She now teaches at her alma mater and also coaches volleyball. When I taught her in 8th and 10th grades, she lacked confidence in her reading, writing, and voice. During her senior English class with me, however, poetry gave her a voice. Indeed, she wrote such a beautiful personal essay that she used it as a college essay. Later, her peers chose it for publication in the school's literary magazine. In one of our last FB wall-to-walls, she wrote that she was the highest achieving student in her freshman composition course.

I always loved Meredith, and I know she knows it, too.