I haven’t been writing much. I haven’t been reading for pleasure much. Still I’m swimming in the written word. I’ve been labouring under piles of corrections for months. It’s the deal I’ve made with management this spring to have time to heal. My personal dose of Job this winter and spring has been long-COVID. I haven’t lost my cattle, but I’ve lost my health.
At 5:30am I start on student papers. If I ever get through this workload, I will convert the 5:30 timeslot into writing fiction. In midsummer, that early hour is a special one. The sun is up, and the birds are singing. I stand at the front door breathing in the fresh morning air, finding a pleasant way to wake myself up.
I sit at my desk, joining Sisyphus with Job, undertaking every day to roll the boulder of syntax and logic up the steepest hill in Holland, which is the tortured concept of business education. The routine is wearisome, and I don’t mean only the work routine, sitting in front of the computer hours per day, correcting dozens of the same assignments. I mean also the routines of human error. The students, bless them, seem to conspire to make the same mistakes as each other and the same mistakes time and again.
Somehow, my love of language survives. During my desperately short breaks from work and family, I play on Duolingo. I scribble passages for stories in the little notebook that fits in the palm of my hand. I look up poetry on my phone’s browser. A recent poetry project was to dive into Pope’s Iliad. I didn’t have the time to get far, but the poem is an inspiring enterprise. The story is timeless. The language is gorgeous. The old trope likening language to architecture is just right. The poem is Hawksmoor or Wren. Better.
Wednesday, June 29, 2022
Sunday, June 26, 2022
Travelogue 1047 – June 26
A Drizzle of Job
It’s been a bit Book of Job around the house, with ill health and ill fortune falling like a steady rain. Well, let’s call it a drizzle, and admit that ‘Book of Job’ is hyperbolic. But we’ve been tested.
One of our trials was the chicken pox. The pox took one girl down, and then, in a proud show of force, waited until the first girl was just healed to take down the other one. So this ordeal went on for a full month, and for a full month one of the girls was home while her parents tried to focus on their work.
Chicken pox in memory and in the public imagination is something almost adorable, a gentle children’s rite of passage, during which they get pimply and itchy, during which they stay home and watch TV in their pyjamas. The reality is more like a horror show. Little Ren had pox in her mouth and throat. She had pox in her nose and under her eyelid. Baby Jos had pox under her skin and on the bottoms of her feet. They were crying in pain during the worst of it and couldn’t sleep. Their parents were in shock. This parent was never very good around illness. Now he was monitoring pox that were leaking pus and pulling back eyelids to check his girl’s red, leaky eyes.
All things must pass, and these do. They have scars, but those will pass. We sink into the couch, and we stare vacantly at the TV screen, while bodies slowly heal.