Tour: Pronounced with Two Syllables

For the past ten days, I’ve been touring around the “Deep South” with my concert choir, the University Singers. We bussed from city to city, singing for our supper at churches and high schools and staying with generous locals who had spare beds. This is the second tour I’ve been on with the U-Singers, and despite the fact that I probably should have been working on my dissertation during this time, I feel very lucky to have had the opportunity to sing instead.

And more than just sing, too. We visited eight cities, several of which I’d never seen before: Lynchburg, VA; Charlotte, NC; Abingdon, VA; Memphis; New Orleans; Birmingham; Atlanta; and Christiansburg, VA. Not that we got to do much sightseeing except for in New Orleans, but still, we always met a few locals, so I think it counts. I won’t give a day-to-day rundown of our adventures, because let’s face it: most of the time was spent either on the bus or eating (sometimes both at once), and no one who’s not in the group would care to know which nights we went flat and which nights we made all our entrances on time. But a few interesting notes never go awry, do they?

First, just a note that all of these pictures, except the first one (which was taken in Abingdon) are from New Orleans. More on that later. Now, to business. To begin, “tour” is properly pronounced with two syllables, rhyming with “sewer.” I don’t care what the dictionary says, it sounds silly when pronounced like the past tense of “tear.” This was a heated debate amongst the singers both before and during the tour. But I’m right, so that’s that.

Next, I have decided that barbeque is the southern answer to lasagna. When we went on tour two years ago to the Midwest (which, in our math, incorporated both Rochester and Buffalo), the churches where we sang gave us lasagna for dinner practically every night. It’s a classic tour staple—because, really, what better way to feed seventy-some-odd people at one go? But in the South, it’s barbeque. We had pulled pork or barbeque chicken no less than four times in eight cities, and not a mention of lasagna even once. Last tour I pitied the lactose-intolerant; this tour I pitied the vegetarians and the folks who keep kosher.

On another food-related note, it will be a VERY long time before I feel the need to eat (or even smell) fried chicken again. Usually when we stopped for lunch on the road we could find some place with a Subway at least, but there was one day in which every blessed option was fried chicken: Chick Fil-A, Popeye’s, KFC, Raising Cain. The bus smelled like a deep-fryer the rest of the day.

I also have to point out the irony that confronted us on our trip: we thought we were making a wise decision to tour the South during this nasty, cold month, considering we were wandering around in Chicago this time two years ago. But no! We were hit with snow in Abingdon, Charlotte, and Memphis (small audience that day—most people stayed in during the blizzard that was falling as we sang). It was frigid in New Orleans on our free day, and Atlanta was so buried under three inches of solid ice that all our venues (and almost all our home-stay hosts) cancelled on us. In fact, instead of being a two-day stay in which we were to sing a concert the first night and do a choral workshop at a school the next day, our Atlanta sojourn turned into four hours killing time at an OUTDOOR shopping mall, a night in a hotel, an impromptu concert at a retirement community, and then a 10-hour drive back to Charlottesville. (We stayed overnight here, then drove back to Christiansburg for our last concert the next evening.) However, that impromptu concert was actually a really lovely experience, with a large and appreciative audience and time afterward to talk with them and enjoy some very positive feedback. So, as our director said, we made some lemonade out of the weather lemon. (That’s pretty much a direct quote.)

The most amusing concert we had, at least in my opinion, was in Abingdon, where I lost my shoe coming onto the risers and had to stand half barefoot, trying not to crack up and watching everybody else stare at my orphaned shoe as they filed on, until someone had the opportunity to grab it and return it to me. At that same concert, the dimmer lights were making a constant, very loud hum. It was somewhere in between a B and a B flat, and it threw us off entirely, since several of our songs start on a B. However, our director made some lemonade there too, and since the program is mostly a cappella, he simply had us take our pitch from the lights instead of his pitch pipe! Singers out there will find this amusing; I may not have explained it well enough to make non-singers appreciate how bizarre a solution it was.

I can’t pick the best or the most moving concert, because several moments stand out in my memory from various nights throughout the trip. People would mouth the words or even stand up in their seats when we sang “Loch Lomond.” One man told somebody in the choir that our Szymko piece made him cry, and he hadn’t cried in six years. That means something. We also sang Franz Biebl’s “Ave Maria” (choral people tend to know this piece, but there’s a version on youtube if you don’t), and almost every night it moved somebody to tears—usually someone in the audience but more often than not someone in the choir as well. It’s one of the most beautiful pieces I’ve ever had the privilege to perform. But it’s never all serious; I can’t tell you how many times people told us how very much they liked “the Bieber piece.” Oh, Justin, you should aim so high.

Now, as promised, I'll wrap up by saying something about our free day in New Orleans. Every U-Singers tour has a free day; last time we explored Chicago in the snow, and this time we explored the Big Easy in barely-above-freezing temperatures, which the locals pretty much considered the end of the world. My tour buddy and I (yes, my tour buddy. Don’t you keep a tour buddy on hand?) walked around the French Quarter, had beignets and café au lait at the Café du Monde (oh, my goodness, the sheer amount of powdered sugar!), then took a walking tour of the beautiful Garden District (I’ve never seen so many famous people’s houses). Later, we braved a walk down Bourbon Street (wouldn’t want to be there on a weekend), and took in some genuine New Orleans jazz at Preservation Hall (the atmosphere was like an old speak-easy—shabby but somehow just right for that sort of music). But actually, my favorite part was the hour we spent with an old Cajun man who ran a mask shop in the French Quarter. He found out my tour buddy and I weren’t locals and was very happy to share with us his rather impressive knowledge about the history and culture of New Orleans. He even pulled up his family pictures from Mardi Gras and showed us the enclosed courtyard behind his store where a well-known local artist used to stage photo shoots. As we headed out of his shop, he left us with his one Cajun phrase: “Laissez les bons temps rouler”—let the good times roll. One of the best parts of tour is getting to meet locals who love their city and are eager to talk about it, and since we didn’t have home-stays in New Orleans, this lovely old man was a terrific answer to our wish to see the non-tourist side of the Big Easy.

So in the end, dissertation, schmissertation. How often does a trip to New Orleans go (literally) for a song?

Holidays--Oh how swiftly they fly!

Even as I kid, I always thought that there was something one-sided about the way holidays worked: for weeks and even months you build up to and anticipate the Big Day (in my family, Christmas, though for some people it’s birthdays or another celebration), then in a mere 24 hours, it comes and goes and suddenly you’re left with a lot of empty boxes and torn wrapping paper. Well, in our case, wrapping paper with the tape neatly sliced open, but still.

The whole build-up followed by an almost instantaneous tearing down of decorations and return to non-seasonal radio selections is really a modern thing. The Christmas season, liturgically and according to the celebrations throughout most of history, BEGINS on the 25th and doesn’t end until the Feast of the Epiphany a week and a half later. (How many people these days know that the twelve days of Christmas START on the 25th and go through the 5th of January?)

My family is chock full of holiday traditions, most of which take place before Christmas, and most of which involve chocolate. Starting as soon as my sister and I get home (and we’ve been fortunate enough so far always to have lengthy Christmas vacations), we start baking Christmas goodies. Then we watch all our favorite Christmas movies whilst eating those goodies. (Our viewing list includes the mandatory Miracle on 34th Street and It’s a Wonderful Life, if we can convince my sister to sit through it, but it also includes some movies others might not even consider particularly Christmassy—like both installments of Home Alone—and some movies that most of the world has forgotten—like the Muppet’s Christmas Toy and the 1987 Muppet Family Christmas. Our favorite, however, is the Muppet Christmas Carol. We like Muppets. A lot.)

We decorate our tree with every single ornament we own, which results in each branch having two or more ornaments hanging on it, and my sister always puts the first gifts under the tree. Then my cat licks all the ribbons. We go to the Vigil Mass on Christmas Eve and then drive around the local neighborhoods looking at the Christmas lights. (When we were younger, we would literally say, “Ooh, aah” when we saw a good house, but we’ll still break out the phrase even now for an especially impressive display.)

On Christmas morning we open presents, and it usually takes half the day because my sister and I insist on unwrapping neatly so the paper can be reused—and we also usually get distracted by eating more Christmas goodies; it’s the only day out of the year when we eat chocolate before noon.

Every family has its own traditions, some probably much more exciting than ours, but this year we added something new: we read Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol aloud to each other as we baked our Christmas treats (often interrupting the reading to interject quotations and musical numbers from the Muppet version), and when we finished that, we read Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. If you don’t feel Christmassy after those two books, I don’t know what can be done for you!

And we bookended our Christmas celebrations with birthdays. My sister’s birthday is just before Christmas and mine is just after, but since neither of us is ever home for the actual day anymore we’ve taken to celebrating a little late and a little early, respectively. So the first and last vacation goodies that we baked were birthday cakes! We used those tasty store-bought sugar letters to spell out an appropriate message on my sister’s, but when we got to mine we discovered we didn’t have a particularly good selection of letters leftover. So my sister, creative thing that she is, played Scrabble on my birthday cake. I was favorably impressed with the result and thought it was worthy of sharing.

So I guess in the end we actually drew out our holiday celebration much longer than most people do, since we were still celebrating until the 3rd of January! Perhaps that can become part of our family tradition starting next year: Christmas for as long as possible. Maybe we’ll even manage to make it to the Feast of the Epiphany and revive the celebration of the Twelfth Night. After all, Christmas Day isn’t the END of something—it’s the beginning of everything!

Gratitude

(Because ‘tis the season.)

A dear friend recently reminded me how important it is to be grateful. Now, I consider myself a fairly mindful person, and many events in my life have taught me not to take anything for granted. But it’s all too easy to remember to be grateful for the big things and forget the little things (or vice versa), or even to forget whom we’re being grateful to in the first place.

So, in the spirit of Thanksgiving (both with a big T and a little one), here are a few of the many things I’m thankful for—and maybe a few things I should be thankful for but usually forget:


For music, the language of angels
For autumn, my favorite season
For winter, because it has to come before spring
For heat, because I know what it’s like to be cold
For hunger, which reminds us to be grateful to eat
For the twenty-first century, because as much as we fret over it, and as great an antiquarian as I am, I wouldn’t have wanted to live in the fifteenth
For my education, and all those who made sure I got it
For my family, about whom I can’t say enough (though my friends probably wish I could)
For all the people in my life, from the dearest of friends to the passing acquaintances, because they remind me how very big the world is and how very small I am
For the sky, for the same reason
For the sea, likewise
For the moments when something takes your breath away and makes you feel like flying, or makes you laugh like a child
For holidays
For literature
For horses
For cats
For chocolate

I don’t see any reason to divide sober thankfulness from the sheer pleasure of things in and of themselves; surely any pure and innocent sense of pleasure is already a half-articulated prayer of thanks to the one who provided it, or made us sensible to its charms? At least, I hope that the God who made sure Adam wasn’t lonely and who turned water into wine to keep the party going wouldn’t mind my putting chocolate on a par with the grandeur of his ocean. (Perhaps I should also mention at this point that when I hear atheists and agnostics express their “gratitude” for something no human gave to them, I always feel a secret hope that someday they’ll realize who it is they’re really thanking. I’m not an aggressive evangelist, but I’m always happy—no, grateful!—to gain a new brother or sister.)

Even as I sit here trying to wrap up this post, I keep thinking of dozens more items that I could add to my list. My health, my job, my freedom…I could go on almost ad infinitum. I won’t, just because the list is probably tedious enough as it is. But it’s uplifting to spend a moment thinking about the things we have that we have no right to expect from life—things others don’t have, or things we can appreciate that others might pass over as unimportant and unremarkable. I think if we spent a little more time in that kind of meditation, maybe we’d brood less on what we don’t have, and maybe we’d find ourselves just a little happier right here and right now, exactly as we are.

Apologia Pro Studio Suo

(Yes, I did have to use my Latin dictionary to get that right—Aquinas may have written Latin like a native, but I write it like a dunce.)

I love books. I love reading them, I love writing them, I love buying them, I love receiving them, I love giving them, I even love smelling them. But I don’t just love them for what’s inside: I am a definite judger of books by their covers. And their end-papers. And their margins. The book itself—not the text but the collection of pages between two boards—thrills and enthralls me. When I was an undergrad I used to go to the stacks of the library and delight in blowing the dust off of books that hadn’t been touched in a generation. (Here they’re too handy with the Swiffers to build up enough for a decent cloud.) I was thrilled to discover upon coming to graduate school that, even if they over-dusted their stacks, there were actually professors who thought these blockish things were a joy as well—and better than that, a legitimate subject of scholarly attention!



My very first year of grad school presented me with a course in scholarly editing that dramatically altered the trajectory of my studies (shifting from medieval language interactions to medieval manuscript culture may not seem like a sea change to anybody else, but to a grad student it’s practically a religious conversion). I followed it up with a course on bibliography (the description of physical books, not the writing of Works Cited pages) and had a ball measuring page thickness and counting quires in hundred-year-old printed vellum artist books. I then took paleography (the study of manuscripts) in Iceland, and let me tell you, you’ve never seen a room full of more excited people than our classroom on the day when we got to see the priceless manuscript of the Snorra Edda. I believe the instructor accused us of drooling.

Now that I’m working on my dissertation, I’m digging around in (mostly photocopies of) medieval books looking for marginalia—little comments and doodles made by scribes and readers wherever they found space in the manuscript. Nowadays they discourage us from writing in our library books, but it’s an age-old tradition. Even those naughty drawings that more prim-and-proper folks usually try to erase or scribble out have a long tradition; I remember seeing a medieval sketch of a nun picking unmentionable male body parts from a tree where they were growing. Truly, modern teenagers have not come up with anything that somebody didn’t already do more creatively 500 years ago. That’s not what I study myself, but you’d better bet that was the first thing that caught people’s eye when scholars started caring about marginalia a generation ago! I’m fascinated instead by the little complaints, the little notes-to-self, the verses of love poetry, and the random drawings of fish and flowers and creatures you might think the artist thought looked like a lion or an elephant only because he’d never seen a real one. They give us just a glimpse of what it was like to work in a medieval library. Turns out, it was a good deal like it is to work in a modern one now: it’s always too cold or too hot, your eyes get bleary, your hand cramps up, and pretty much anything you can think of seems abundantly more interesting than whatever it is you’re actually supposed to be doing.

Maybe that’s why we get so many mistakes in manuscripts. Interestingly enough, words like “not” tend to get skipped quite a bit. It makes a rather large difference whether “the king heard his prayer” or “heard not,” but half the time the mistake goes entirely unnoticed.

Not that the printing press has saved us from the plague of error, of course: for the clumsy phrase “slip of the pen” we simply now have the peppy little word “typo.” I make a habit of keeping an eye out for interesting typographical errors in books, especially in antique stores that sell books printed before the advent of the all-knowing Microsoft Word spell-check. I remember one old book that caught my eye by the title on the spine, which read, “John Donne’s Fright From Medievalism.” What was it about the medieval that so frightened Dr. Donne? I wondered, pulling the book off the shelf and opening it. The title page read—I assume correctly—“John Donne’s FLIGHT from Medievalism.” Eminently more comprehensible, but somehow sadly less intriguing.

You would think that at least modern typography would have saved us from the typical medieval problem of not being able to read the handwriting in the book you’re trying to copy, but it’s not so. Just recently, I had occasion to poke my nose into the French section of our library and encountered another mistake that amused me greatly. Here is what the book was actually titled:


(“Parler vulgairement” or “speaking vulgarly,” though it’s a pun because the book is about medieval French language, which was called “vulgar” that is, vernacular—like the Vulgate Bible, which just means that it’s translated from Hebrew and Greek.)

But the cover designer clearly thought, “Hey, it’s a book about medieval things. Let’s use a font on the cover that looks like a medieval manuscript hand.” Hence the cover and flyleaf:




















And the poor book binder hired to add an institutional hard cover to protect the paperback one inside clearly looked at the title and thought, “Hmm, that’s not English. Oh well, guess I can figure it out.” Hence the title on the hardback spine:



Which all adds up to a very confused graduate student staring at the shelf saying, “Well, that’s the call number, but "Darler Gulgairement" is NOT the title I’m looking for!”

Typo-hunting is the great pastime of grammar geeks. This version of the game might well be considered the next level, both because examples are rarer and because they’re usually so amusing when you find them. It’s like Where’s Waldo in the library.

You know, for when you need a study break.

Tricker Treat

Was I the only kid who grew up thinking that the phrase we shouted at the kind folks who opened their doors to us costumed vagabonds on Halloween night was “Tricker treat”? I don’t think I realized it was the ultimatum “Trick OR treat” until I was past the tricker-treating age. I always assumed that a tricker treat was a particular kind of treat that had to do with Halloween, which (like sugar plums or figgy pudding) was probably not as good as it sounded and hence had been replaced by Snickers and Dum Dums and Sugar Babies.

Halloween, I must say, was never my favorite holiday—nothing could compare with Christmas when I was a kid. Or now, for that matter. But like any kid who was allowed to, I had great fun dressing up and going door to door in our neighborhood gathering candy in a plastic pumpkin-shaped basket. The basket was small, so when it filled up I would dump it in a plastic bag my father obligingly carried around as he escorted us from house to house. I remember dressing as Zorro several times (who cares if he was a guy? He had a cool horse and he got to play with swords!), a butterfly, an Indian (I believe that’s what the package called it—Halloween is not a PC holiday), a clown, and only once a princess (my best friend was going to be one—I bowed to peer pressure).

We lived in Utah for several formative tricker-treating years, and I remember bundling up like an Eskimo underneath my costumes; it still strikes me as odd to see kids in Virginia running around in costumes that bare their arms and legs at the very end of October. I feel they’re missing part of the experience somehow. If you’ve never tricker-treated in the snow, you’ve never worked hard enough for your candy.

Which, by the way, is always slightly less fun to eat than it is to collect. I hated (and still hate) hard candies, and hard candies that come with a cardboard stick inside them that you have to chew around still strike me as particularly unappealing. And if you got anything with mint or peanut butter in it, everything else in the bag started to taste like mint or peanut butter very quickly. I often still had candy from Halloween left over in July (only the least tasty things, of course), at which point I think my parents were justified in quietly disposing of it.

I was always thrilled to get candy you could play with—candy cigarettes were a favorite of mine even though the flavor wasn’t very exciting. They don’t sell those anymore (or rather, they do, but they call them “candy sticks” as if we don’t figure it out from the imitation cigarette-carton packaging): apparently it’s bad to let children use their imagination if it entails pretending to do something we don’t want them to do in real life. Perhaps it’s a legitimate concern, but never once as a kid did I (or for that matter any of my friends) lose sight of the divide between play and reality. Just because I pretended to smoke my candy cigarettes did not in any way mean that I thought it was a good idea to smoke real ones. For one thing, you can’t eat real cigarettes when you’re done with them and that takes all the fun out of it. I pretended I was a runaway quite a lot, but never once did I actually run away. I pretended I was a pony too. It didn’t mean I thought I was one. That’s why it’s called pretend.

But soap boxes aside, I’m beginning to think Halloween is even more fun when you’re not a kid. This occurred to me the first year I dressed up to hand out treats instead of tricker-treating myself. It was such a laugh to see all the kids parading around as superheroes (Power Rangers were big that year) and Sesame Street characters and inanimate objects—much more fun than just getting to dress up as one thing yourself. It was fascinating to see which kids would push to the front demanding their treats (Power Rangers) and which ones hung at the back waiting for the crowd to disperse (princesses who didn’t want their tiaras knocked off)—and which ones refused to come up to the door at all (toddlers clinging to their parents). Well, I WAS dressed as a clown, which I suppose counts as frightening to some people. And besides, we spend so much time telling our kids not to talk to strangers—especially ones offering candy—that the whole idea of Halloween must seem rather baffling to the smart ones.

They say that there’s nothing better than being a kid at Christmas unless it’s being a parent at Christmas. Not having kids myself, I can’t weigh in on that, but having wandered through Charlottesville’s traditional Trick-or-Treating on the Lawn of UVA, I can say that I appreciate the spectacle (and the costumes) much more from behind a camera than I ever did from behind Zorro’s mask.

Confessions of a Former Invalid

This past Saturday marked four years since I was hit by a minivan crossing the street on foot. (I mention the event without preamble because I hope that anybody who reads my blog already knows about this rather dramatic incident and won’t be shocked by the revelation.) It left the minivan with a broken headlight and left me with a thrice-broken pelvis, a concussion, and nerve damage in my left leg.

Everything is healed except the nerve damage—and honestly, how important is it, really, to be able to make fists with your toes?

But that’s not what I actually want to reflect on: I thought I’d spend a serious moment or two sharing what I learned from being a helpless, bedridden patient, and how it’s changed my outlook on both health and sickness. It has occurred to me that very few people my age are fortunate enough (and I mean fortunate) to have a brush with serious health threats and then recover to the point that they can truly appreciate their wellbeing and comfort. Maybe my reflections won’t mean anything to someone who hasn’t experienced being an invalid, but on the off-chance that it might, here goes.

I learned that nurses have a very difficult job and deserve every ounce of respect we can give them. The doctors (bless them too, of course) see a patient for five minutes, prescribe an IV or a test, and disappear down the hallway. The nurses check the IVs, prepare you for the tests, help you get to the bathroom, clean up when the meds make you sick, keep you company for as long as they can when you crumble into a ball of nerves and fear in the middle of the night. Their hours are awful and they spend more time with bodily fluids than most people would even care to imagine.

I learned that when people hear you’re in the hospital and say, “Well, at least you’ll get a chance to catch up on your sleep,” they have never been in a hospital. Coumadin shots at 2 in the morning, doctors’ rounds with sleep-deprived residents at 4, the constant beeping of monitors and the snoring of your heavily-drugged suitemate…not to mention the fact that you’re broken!

Also, when folks say, “I guess you have plenty of time to do your reading,” they have never been on strong pain medication. I tried to read Chaucer’s “Parliament of Fowles” while on morphine. This was a bad idea. I STILL don’t understand that poem, and I blame it at least in part on the fact that I first encountered it while under the influence of controlled substances. And besides that, if you’ve never felt it you simply cannot understand the entirely debilitating enervation that comes from being unwell. The meds make you hazy, the lack of sleep makes you incoherent, and you just can’t muster the energy or the enthusiasm to apply your vacant mind to anything. I couldn’t even check emails while I was in the hospital, I was so incapacitated by the whole experience.

I learned that people are not themselves when they are unwell. You get cranky, petulant, waspish, and impatient, and God bless the people who put up with invalids, and God bless the invalids who manage to keep smiling. My first suitemate in the hospital was like that—a gentle soul in for some kind of joint replacement and patient as an ox through all the tests and the surgeries. People like her are a blessing to those around them.

I learned, too, that we are bodily creatures, as much as intellectuals wish to live in their minds. Never before was I so acutely aware of how entangled my own being is with the physical body that houses it. The hospital strips you of your dignity in so many ways—through no fault of its own, but simply because it doesn’t (can’t) care about your intelligence, your soul, your individuality: you are there because your flesh and nothing else matters. You are pierced, palpated, scanned, and transported like a piece of meat—the hospital ward is the great equalizer, and it is a humbling equality. I will never again take for granted the dignity of being able to shower by myself, walk down the hall without pulling an IV along like a lame pet, put on my own socks, sleep without a monitor, wear underwear.

More importantly, though, I learned a great deal AFTER I got out of the hospital. I also learned—and this is the most profound lesson of my experience—what it might be like to live with chronic pain. The nerve damage to my leg extended, at first, to my lower back (I did, after all, break my pelvis right next to where it connects to the spine), and though they swore up and down (after their barbaric tests) that my sciatic nerve was undamaged, I had the constant, unrelenting symptoms of sciatica for almost three months. The six weeks on crutches was nothing compared to the jolts of electric pain shocking through my back and leg every few moments, day and night. Neuropathic pain is cruel without being a properly treatable injury. I don’t want to harp on the discomfort, because obviously I was able to work through it, and so many, many people suffer infinitely more every single day, but, just for a short time, when the doctors shrugged and said, “It might get better. It might not,” I did realize what it would be like to look into the years and years of future and think, “I might always be like this. I might never be comfortable again.” It is a cold, bleak feeling. It has given me a much more profound respect and sympathy for those who actually DO live in constant pain, and have no hope of ever being free of it.

Last but not least, I learned how incredibly blessed I am to have a wonderful family who dropped everything to come and be with me, and, once I’d been released from the hospital, to take care of me at home. Funnily enough, it never occurred to me right after the accident that my parents would drive down from DC to the hospital; I was quite surprised to see them in the doorway of the holding area where I was put until a room could be found for me. I blame the concussion for my surprise. My poor sister, after being so distracted by the news of my accident that she put her cell phone through the laundry, took the long bus ride from New York to Charlottesville to surprise me with a visit. My father used up all his vacation time to be with me, and my mother put her entire life on hold to be my live-in nurse from October through Thanksgiving. I am, indeed, blessed.

I am changed—more emotionally than physically—by my brief stint as an invalid; if my experience can mean something to others, I would consider it doubly worth its inconvenience. I learned what it was like to be helpless, to need others for absolutely everything, and I learned how to appreciate feeling well.

And always to have health insurance.

And not to jay walk.

Knoxville-Bound

At last something to report that didn’t only happen inside my head! This past weekend my parents and I went down to Knoxville to see my sister, who is in Tennessee (the Volunteer State, I’m told) as an AmeriCorps volunteer. We were so excited to have a family reunion for no other reason than that we could do it!

I’d never been to Knoxville before, and even though it seems to have been hit disproportionately hard by the economic whatever-we’re-calling-it-now, I do have to say it has an incredibly cute Market Square—which, being a Charlottesville resident, I habitually called the Downtown Mall. I had to be corrected multiple times. My sister and two of her fellow AmeriCorps buddies also have a very cute house which they kindly opened to us during our visit. Actually, I’m not sure we asked if we could stay there or whether we just crashed, but either way, nobody kicked us out—Southern hospitality!

We had a lovely time together over the weekend, going to a huge flea market, seeing an unprecedented two movies in one day (one of which was Secretariat—see my previous post to understand how close I was to cardiac arrest due to ecstasy the entire time), playing dominoes, and getting an introduction to what my sister does in her job. Sustainable farming in the urban jungle—only wild idealists would think to try it, but that’s how the world gets changed. They’re very successful, I hear, and my sister has already learned more about solar dehydrators and rain catchment systems (and more about turnip greens, baby spinach, and okra) than I ever really knew there was to know. Example: you can make your own diesel fuel. Go figure! Part of the project of this farm is to raise awareness for sustainability issues, and after this weekend, I think my sister can consider my awareness raised!

Things that go wrong are always funnier than things that go right (and more interesting to those who don’t have an emotional investment in the heartwarming parts of a trip), so here are a few amusing snafus we encountered (or rather committed) during our visit:

- Believing we were driving toward a Burlington Coat Factory, we navigated very carefully to the geographical center of Knoxville. Explanation: we were using an iPod Touch to get directions and the map was so small we didn’t realize that the star was the starting point of the trip, not the destination. This is why an iPod should not be used as a substitute for a GPS system. I also believe I have now been permanently taken off navigator duty.

- In an attempt not to eat my sister out of house and home during our visit, we went to the grocery store nearby and picked up cereal, milk, and such things. We proceeded to eat absolutely none of it. Except the hot dog buns, which we only used because my sister already had hot dogs at home that we ate for lunch. This somewhat negates our efforts not to deplete her food supply.

- In trying to find a place to eat dinner before our second movie on Sunday (this one at one of those great two-dollar second-run theaters), we drove to no less than four places before finally getting fed. We asked directions from a local for the nearest pizza place, drove a good deal farther than she had indicated before finding it, and then discovered that it was take-out only. So we decided to be adventurous and try a mom-and-pop pizza place a few blocks away. No luck—it was carry-out as well! So it was back down the road to an Olive Garden—which we found, once we went in, to have a long enough wait that we would have missed the start of the show. So back down the road in the other direction once again to a little dive of a Chinese place, where we overheard one of the worker’s daughters exclaim, “Ooh, look, a dead bug! It’s got mold all over it!” However, the food was very good and none of us have food poisoning. (Side note to this story: when we got to the movie theater, we discovered a pizza place right next door. Oh, the irony.)

But the exception proves the rule: the fact that these little anecdotes are the biggest snags we hit in a weekend road trip from Virginia to a city half of the family had never seen before should just serve to indicate just how successful a venture it really was. We’ve always been lucky to have a very close family, and we say a hearty “Pshaw!” to anything that might separate us—even four hundred miles of highway.