Liberal arts

While YouTube surfing (realistically, this is what I spend a large part of my evenings doing if I’m not baking, cleaning, running after my animals or poking at my wood fire) I stumbled across this trailer for a movie:

Liberal Arts

It fits neatly into that genre of commentary indie films, hysterical but touching, lighthearted but emotionally sensitive. It hit me close to home just watching the two minutes and forty seconds: not that I’m going to run off with a student in one of my classes, but that dual sense of alienation in a college town and kinship felt with students struck me. I’ve discussed this subject multiple times throughout this blog, but this trailer just happened to put it into a neat and tidy and entertaining little package.

Same ideas: majoring in a subject that doesn’t set you up for a career. Wanting to fit in with the students without being a student, or being mistaken for one. Feeling like an adult, or not, while realizing that no one else does either, because no one knows what that means. And, of course, the closing dialogue:

“One of things I loved about being here was the feeling that anything was possible, that anything could happen. And then you do get out, and life happens.”
“So what you’re saying is I should prepare myself for suckiness?”
“No. A liberal arts education solves all of your problems.”

I was thinking deep thoughts while stirring milk for hot cocoa–never mind the fact that I’m slowly cooking myself in the heat of the woodstove (it will be cold later but it’s still warm now–suffer in the present so the future is better)–that the insecurities we think we have and the insecurities that others observe about us very likely never coincide. Where we think we are brave, confident, funny and happy, we may appear to others needy, frightened, lost or hungry. The best we can do is continue living life, with or without a strong liberal arts education.

Thank goodness I learned to read.

Funny how a melody…Part II

I can’t get enough of this song “Springsteen” by Eric Church, one of the great new country songs that doesn’t necessarily sound over-the-top country. The first time I touched on this song was thinking of the trip to Raleigh and back. It needs a second look, I think, so here we go, again.

I was singing to you, you were singing to me
I was so alive, never been more free
Fired up my daddy’s lighter and we sang oh, oh, oh
Stayed there ’til they forced us out
Took the long way to your house
I can still hear the sound of you saying “don’t go”

I drove down 244 back towards Alfred yesterday in a sudden burst of sunshine, radio turned up loud over the sound of the wind rushing through the open windows, sunglasses on and singing along, my new rental lease on the passenger seat next to me held down by a dog leash to keep it from flying into the spring breeze. I’m finally moving out, moving on, trying something different and looking forward to the crazy little cabin I’m heading into. Rebecca stopped in today with me and proclaimed it “a great vacation house.” She’s got a good point; I have no idea what this place will be like in the winter. I know it was a little bit of an impulse to rent this house, but I’m ready to make some impulsive decisions and see where they take me (don’t worry, I’m not going to be shaving my head or going home with strangers or streaking or anything else that I imagine comes on impulse.) I’m looking forward to spending the summer sitting on the porch of this house teaching myself to play the guitar that I inherited from my younger brother who never quite learned how either, watching my dog play in the grass. Are there fireflies this far north? I hope so. I’ve never been in New York for June or July. It’s been years since I’ve even been on the East Coast for a summer.

When I think about you, I think about seventeen
I think about my old jeep, I think about the stars in the sky
Funny how a melody sounds like a memory
Like a soundtrack to a July Saturday night
Springsteen

Baby, is it spring or is it summer?
The guitar sound or the beat of that drummer
You hear sometimes late at night on your radio.
Even though you’re a million miles away,
When you hear “Born in the USA,”
will you relive those glory days from so long ago?

I drove through the village to drop off my lease and rent check in the mail–not necessarily on my way home, but I also wanted to case out the local bar and make sure it was open for the season and still serving the best pizza in the entire world. (It is. Sad fact in a college town that most of the truly excellent places are closed from May through August.) There are cars everywhere–pulled off the side of the road, doors wide open, four-ways blinking, piled with boxes and bags and the detritus of four years learning how to be a person. I watched six guys as somber as pallbearers slowly slowly taking an enormous couch down the stairs of the apartment I rented last year, headed for a pickup pulled halfway onto the sidewalk.

There are people on all of the lawns, dressed in various shades of purple and gold, partying it up and celebrating Senior Week. Unlike Hot Dog Day, however, with its nonstop feel of crazy, these parties seem to have a sense of finality to them. The beer pong players on Mill Street seemed to measure their shots a little more carefully. The porches aren’t crammed with people spilling over the railings and spilling their drinks and spilling out of their clothing, but pleasantly full of young people sitting on steps or walls or chairs, laughing and enjoying each others’ company for what maybe will be the last time. The music isn’t cranked up quite so loud; no one is screaming down the street to anyone else. People are enjoying the warmth of springtime and the company of friends, simply.

On Saturday or Sunday when the entire rest of the village is trying to pack up and move out I’ll be doing the same thing, trying to get my larger pieces of furniture from this house to the cabin. As if people had a hard enough time figuring out if I was a student or not. One chapter closes, another begins.

Funny how a melody sounds like a memory
Like a soundtrack to a July Saturday night
Springsteen

We rode the draft horse team today, settling the bet I had made on the equestrian center’s Facebook page that Kaitlyn and I would climb aboard if we got 200 likes in a night. We got 213. So today, after Kaitlyn took the boys for one final drive down the road to the lake, we helmeted ourselves and headed to the indoor arena to give it a try. As far as we know, they’ve never been ridden before. Kaitlyn and I looked at each other for a moment, shrugged, and I bravely led Rocky up to the mounting block. After leaning my weight over him and feeling little concern, I simply hopped up and there I was, seventeen hands above the ground, bareback on a Belgian, holding a pair of clip reins attached to his driving bridle.

Everyone else poured into the arena to see Kaitlyn and I circling around the arena, calling Gee! and Haw! to our steeds, trotting around and making grandiose plans to start them under saddle and make them useful riding horses. For a moment I was back at the ranch, when we all argued to ride the ponies, the drafts, the most basic beginner horse, just for the novelty of saying we had. I team-sorted on Brave, for heaven’s sake, to be followed the next week by Gannet the war-horse/Belgian/Quarter horse/potato. We fought to get the honor of bringing in the herd bareback on Vinda the Icelandic. We argued to get to pony things around because it was cool. I’m riding Rocky because I wanted to, because it’s different, it’s unusual, he’d never had a human on his back before. He carried me well.

So we finally settled the bet. We did what we had always joked about doing. Now it’s finished.

 

A place in the world

There are an infinite amount of places I want to revisit: Ocala, or really a lot of Florida; the mountains around Asheville, North Carolina; Amarillo, Texas; of course, of course, Wyoming, over and over again. This summer I will be visiting a number of places I’ve never been before: Bozeman, Montana; Oklahoma City; Grand Cayman. I’m sure I’ll add them to the places I want to see again.

After driving through the “countryside” of Florida from Ocala back to Tampa and staring at miles and miles of lush green horse and cattle farms, I speculated about that culture of equestrians that travels to the Sunshine State every winter to train. While I love the snow of western New York, the views from the interstate were idyllic. Relaxing at the hotel in Tampa was even better: palm trees grew out of enormous planters on the veranda outside our rooms and I spent a few minutes lying on a chair in my jeans and ostrich boots, listening to the sound of traffic and speculating that I had qualified my team for Nationals. Realistically, Tampa, though romantic for a night, is not really where I want to live. Neither is Ocala, really.

North Carolina? Yeah, I could see that. I love that area (so did the producers of the Hunger Games, apparently.) Amarillo? Maybe. I feel like I should get a lot better at roping if I were going to move to Texas. Wyoming?

Well, funny story. I know that everyone who works at the Bitterroot who commented on a very-much-earlier post about not going back out this year suspected that this would happen, but I kind of regret not going this year. What I regret most is the group of friends ready-made to step into, the view of mountains wherever you look.

But I’m not alone here–I have some friends. I waved hello to a student as I walked across campus on Friday evening flanked by my dog and two faculty members, and realized that I had a few acquaintances–maybe more than that. Maybe I’m finally starting to make some friends on the rest of the Alfred staff. We had just completed a hike, and even though it was raining, I was happy and satisfied. All around me were the rolling foothills, starting to bud out here and there into spring. No snowcapped craggy peaks, perhaps, but refreshing to the eyes regardless. I had just romped in the woods with some friends in a hailstorm. Things weren’t so different from Wyoming after all, were they?

Recently given the opportunity to live on my own (a fancy and political way of saying my boyfriend and I broke up) I made a deal with my coworker to rent one of his family’s apartments, just outside of the village: still within walking distance, but abutting my coworker’s acres and acres of hay fields and offering lots of opportunity for my Border collie and me to go rambling. While I enjoyed living within the village for the few years that I did, I relish the opportunity to enjoy a period of “country” life while not being too far away.

And then my “new friend” Mark told me he knew a family looking to rent an apartment outside of Belmont, a town about twenty minutes or half an hour away. I would be far out in the country, living at my own beck and call, with access to a hundred acres of woods to wander in. No more worries about neighbors or overhearing drunk parties down the street. At last, I would be on my own.

I speculated on this as I walked home through the cheerfully-busy village, cars coming and going as people alternately left Alfred for the weekend or came into the village to take advantage of the restaurants and bars. As I passed by the newly-restored Kappa house, the church bells began to chime the hour, and that sound alone called me home. Alfred is my home now. For now. I can’t leave it, at least not for awhile–living on the edge of the village will suit me fine. This is where I belong. Everywhere else is only a visit.

Micro Monday

Becca, Jenn (a grad student boarder who helps us fudge the line between student and teacher) and I are standing around the horse-drawn manure spreader, an interesting (if you are into that sort of thing, like I am, and I suspect Jenn and Becca less so) and antique piece of equipment, banging at the singletrees with a variety of less-than-useful tools.  We need the singletrees off the spreader in order to give Dan, the assistant farrier who is stepping in to teach my driving class on Friday while I am in sunny Florida, the equipment he needs to do some horse-drawn logging (aka dropping saplings on my students, with horses.)

We chat, gossip, laugh and continue to uselessly flail at the equipment with tools. We get little accomplished but we have a great time. While we are giggling, Sage runs wide circles around us, flat-out, having the time of her life. It’s sunny out and we have nothing better to do.

Being old

“Can you fix this for me?” one of my varsity riders called to me from across the warm-up pen. She gestured vaguely to her stirrup.

“What’s the magic word?” I teased, striding through the organized chaos of the arena as fifteen horses circled like vultures.

“Please,” she giggled back. (I love this student, she always–ALWAYS–thinks I am hilarious. Either that or she’s very good at laughing at me while making me feel good about myself.)

“Darn kids,” I pretended to grumble as I reattached her stirrup collar. “So rude these days.”

“Right, ’cause you’re so old,” laughed another student, mounted nearby and overhearing the exchange.

“I have gray hairs ’cause of you guys!” I protested with a laugh of my own. It was true. I had one which developed shortly after taking the job as assistant western coach, and, not believing the old wives’ tale, plucked it. I now have three. The tales are true.

By the numbers, I am not old. I am twenty-three. I don’t feel old, or look old (I hope.) I occasionally act old (I blame this on the Alfred Knitting Studio) but such moments can be forgiven, I think. Every now and then, however, something happens to make me feel like a gray-haired old lady. I know this post is going to be greatly amusing to some people, such as mother and all of my mother’s friends who also read this–I am not calling you old, just pointing to the truth that you are, in fact, a little bit older than I am and are probably going to think this whole thing is hilarious.

Location: the Wegmans meat cooler. I am examining the selections of stew beef like any other self-respecting old lady when I hear giggling right behind me. I turn around to see two of my Western I students with a shopping cart loaded with organic products, clearly surprised to see me there. We exchange greetings and they continue to giggle.

“I am a real person, you know.”

“It’s just like…when you see professors in a store…you forget they’re people!”

Lovely. Okay, so maybe this is not an example of my students thinking I’m old, just my students thinking I am some sort of extension of the equestrian center, a function rather than faculty.

As I write this, my cat (obligatory for being an old lady!) snoozes away behind me. I am drinking a glass of wine. I just got done eating a cheese plate (totally required if I want to be a snobby wino) I am burning a candle. I’m keeping a blog. If these aren’t warning signs of impending old age, I don’t know what is.

But–I found myself looking at dark clouds in the distance today as I waited for Sage to stop eating a leaf and instead focusing on going potty. I remembered in that moment a night two years ago when I lived at Ford Street in the campus apartments, a dark night in late April or early May, just a few weeks before commencement. Thunderstorms were dotting the radar of the area–typically storms came into the valley from over Alfred State, raged over both schools and the village, and moved on. This evening, from what we could see of the sky, storms were all over–most of them missing us, but passing by close enough to see the lightning and hear the thunder.

Inspired, my friend Mhari (an odd but charming little girl from Wales) and I scurried across the flat roof of the Leadership Center, ducked under the guardrail and then climbed/crawled up the steep roof to the very top, the front edge of the building dropping sharply away beneath us. We sat there, our bare legs dangling over the edge, bathed in the orange glow of the sidewalk lights below, illuminated from above and around every few seconds with a dull flash of lightning in the clouds. We sat and watched the clouds move, whispering and giggling to each other with the nerve of our daring, smelling with each breath the scent of rain that did not fall. In retrospect, this was one of the handful of times I broke a rule while an undergrad.

Do I wish now that I had broken more rules, been more daring, gotten in trouble? Not exactly; I don’t like having regrets (no one does.) Now, though, living as a teacher in a college town comes with its own set of unwritten rules–I cannot be in certain bars at certain times. I cannot have students over at my house (within reason…this one I have been pushing.) I cannot date students (don’t tell, but obviously I broke that one last year…Peter was a year behind me in undergraduate) I’m sure that I am no longer supposed to be climbing onto the roof of the Leadership Center to watch thunderstorms roll in.

I often wonder in the WILD committee meetings exactly what my new peers think of me–not in the insecure and hopeful way that I hope they think I am doing a good job, but a curiosity, wondering if they think of me as their contemporary or as some new interloper–either a fresh face or a student upstart who just happened to get lucky. I don’t let my musings get in the way of being productive with them, though I still find it funny that I am the head of a subcommittee allowing me to delegate work to the Dean of Students; nor do I let my hang-up on age difference stop me from small talk and banter before and after (and during, if we’re going to be fair) meetings. Nancy continues to host Pictionary nights (though she is my boss and twenty-plus years my senior) in which we hang out with Tammy, the mother of one of our senior IEA riders, and drink lots of wine and be silly. Sometimes she invites Cathie, the incredibly sharp, witty, sassy and intimidating head of the Wellness Center. These gatherings have become the normal monthly Friday crew. It’s fun. I feel privileged to know these people, to be on a good footing with my boss that we can hang out and be silly and then continue a professional relationship. What else would I be doing on a Friday? I don’t feel quite like I could be doing what other twenty-three-year-olds are doing, but sometimes it would be nice to know I could go out to the bar and get a drink and not worry about what my students would think if they walked in (see Alone in Academia.)

I don’t think that I missed out on some epic part of being a college student. Sometimes, though, I wish I was allowed to act a little more my age. I’m not that old after all. I’m not much older than my students. In expectation, however, I am in that vague category known as “adult,” and in Alfred, that means not breaking the rules. I will watch the clouds roll by, but I will watch them from the ground, not high up in the air, feet waving in a restless breeze, a friend at my side, the two of us laughing, effortless, untouchable.