Sometimes teaching just fits

I gave up long ago on ever being one of those teachers that students nominate for awards or remember in their memoirs or acknowledge in any other public way, but I'm pretty much okay with that. I'd love to be the kind of teaching genius I saw in Randy Pausch before he died this summer, or Taylor Mali, whose humorous videos on YouTube flatten me. But I'm not, and I'm not going to be.

Still, once in a while I hear from one who is grateful to me. A few years after I lost my last position teaching high school journalism (which had turned out in some ways to be a blessing), I got a call from one of the few students I had had there who told me I needed to know that "we" had won a pretty significant award. He had gone on from my class (which he had taken as a sort of a fill-in-the-blank elective) to major in journalism at the local university, but his call was to tell me that he had learned the things he really needed to know in my high school journalism class. Needless to say, I was thrilled.

A couple of years ago, another student cornered me at a departmental function to tell me she had pretty much hated me when I graded her lab reports while she was an engineering sophomore, and her feelings had softened only gradually as she had moved through our program.

When she was in our master's degree program, she had sometimes come to my office to discuss her thesis project, and she began to see that the lessons from the undergraduate courses had taught her more than she had recognized. Now, as a PhD student in our online program and a drilling engineer for a major oil company, she was using the same lessons she had learned as a sophomore to write routine reports that sailed through management—and she attributed her success with them to those dreaded lab reports.

Just last week, a student emailed me with a question and noted that another former student had advised him to pay close attention in my writing class because those lab reports had turned out to be invaluable to that former student, too.

Nothing major, no student-driven awards, but still nice for a teacher to hear.

Monday night's class was one of those that reminded me why I like to do this. The class meets at 6 p.m. in the largest room in our building, which is filled to its gills with nearly 140 students. I'm pretty sure the students were on their good behavior more because they were hoping to get out a little early for another event than because my lecture was fascinating, but they were more attentive than they often are.

The lesson was fairly complex. I was trying to help juniors understand my philosophy about writing introductions to engineering reports, and as an example I was using a paper written by my coteacher, who has also often served as my mentor as I have learned to function in an engineering environment. I've used this paper (and the story that follows) in my course many times before, but this was the first time I had used them with him sitting in the classroom.

The students mostly recognize my collaborator's prestige; they know he has published textbooks, and they know that he is well-respected within the industry. So when I scanned to the end of his paper and showed them a references list of 37 papers, they were impressed with the importance of reading and citing literature—a lesson I really, really want them to learn.

We spent a couple of minutes on the conclusions to the paper and talked about their meaning and their merit before I zoomed back to the introduction. There, my point was that my collaborator—who holds the highest awards his professional organization can confer on him—includes the concepts from the conclusions right there, near the front of the paper, in the introduction.

The story I have told for years (and repeated Monday) is about another paper, though. The first time the two of us taught this course together—probably 14 or 15 years ago—he had told a class not to do that: putting the conclusions in the introductions spoils the surprise, he said. And I rudely interrupted his thought with a stage-whispered "or not." After class, he came to my office to debate the point, which I was comfortable enough conceding since I had only a couple of degrees in education, no professional publications, and nearly no comprehension of engineering at all.

A couple of days later, he showed up in the office with copies of three reports from a consulting company where he worked part-time as something like vice-president for technology. He dropped the reports on my desk, informing me that the client, the Gas Research Institute, had assured the consulting firm that their reports were consistently the best GRI received, although G RIfunded projects for a large number of organizations. The challenge: read these papers and see whether they contained conclusions in the introductions.

Recognizing the words from the conclusions in the introduction might have been simple enough, but recognizing their meaning would mean reading the papers more thoroughly. Besides, I needed to learn more about petroleum engineering, and what better place to start than some of the best papers in the industry?

The first paper was painful, some sort of gibberish about hydraulic fracturing in the Devonian shales, whatever any of that meant. As I told the students, reading it was a lot like reading Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky":

"'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

did gyre and gimble in the wabe.

All mimsy were the borogroves

And the mome wraths outgrabe."

I knew better than to be surprised by the students' quizzical looks; Carroll was way ahead of Dr. Seuss in making up words, and most of the words in "Jabberwocky" apparently were outgrowths of a drug-induced stupor. But the analogy is still pretty good.

The second paper was easier to read, but logic suggested that I had somehow developed some rudimentary vocabulary while reading the first one, and surely my growing expertise with the language made it clearer to me. I had high hopes for the third one.

Imagine my disappointment, then, when the third paper was about as perplexing as the first; the lessons of the first two apparently had made no discernible difference at all.

But the challenge had been to find the conclusions echoing in the introduction, and I set out with all three papers to search. The first and third ones—the more difficult ones to read—sort of danced around the concluding ideas, but they never quite got to them. The third one was markedly different: I pulled out my brand new little yellow sticky notes and carefully marked the places where each conclusion was spelled out almost exactly in the introduction.

When my collaborator rolled back through my office in a couple of days, he said somewhat smugly that he bet I hadn't found the conclusions in the introductions.

"Well, not in this one," I said, picking up the first one. "Or in this one. But let's talk about this one." And I started thumbing to the pages with the sticky notes.

"You didn't," he answered, but I showed him unequivocally that, indeed, I did.

With him in the classroom Monday, I had to stop a moment to warn him to get ready for the students to laugh.

"Oh," he had said quietly that day in my office. "That's the one that I wrote."

They're young students, and they weren't particularly comfortable, but a ripple of chuckles crossed the room.

"But I don't know why I did that," he had continued. But I did, and it's the object lesson that makes the story so good: even though he has worked very hard to learn to write well, talking with writing teachers and taking additional courses well into his career, he ignored the advice of professionals who were not engineers and listened instead to his own brilliant intuition instead. His training told him to save the conclusions for the ending to keep from "giving away the surprise"; his heart told him his readers probably already knew the ending but instead needed closure, gentle reminders all through the paper that what the writers claimed would really turn out to be true.

"You weren't writing for those technical writing teachers," I said Monday. "You were writing for these young students who want to learn from your paper and need you to guide them through. You were writing for people who don't know the subject as well as you do. You were writing for me."

Sometimes a class of 140 students can be almost eerily quiet, and Monday night, it was.

But it reminded me why I love standing in front of it, and why sometimes teaching just fits.

Beware the midnight pocket call!

When my throat started hurting Sunday night, I didn't think too much of it. I cough a lot anyway (my pulmonologist says I have bronchioectasis, which apparently translates loosely to "stuff in my lungs that makes me cough a lot"), and I live in a place my general practitioner used to call the allergy capital of the world (changing GPs apparently didn't change that, but the new one doesn't talk about it that way).

So between the general cough and the junk in the back of my throat (which the ear/nose/throat guy insists on calling "post-nasal drip," although in Backwards World, where I live, it seems as if it should be "pre-nasal drip"; that junk is going directly from my sinuses to my throat without ever making it to my nose), a sore throat didn't seem like a big deal. In retrospect, of course, I realize that sore throat is one of the symptoms of the dreaded H1N1 flu going around, so maybe I had a mild case of the flu instead of just a sore throat. Too late now.

At any rate, by the time I woke up Monday morning I was too hoarse to tell the dog to go outside, so I took the day off, took care of the business of logging out of a day's work (including coming up with a solution for missing class that night), and curled up on the couch with a tall glass of tea and a small bottle of antihistamines.

I thought I'd done a pretty good job of taking care of myself, and Number One Son made sure I had a good supper and plenty of liquids once he got home and could pitch in to help out. I watched the usual Monday night lineup on t.v., then dragged myself off to bed to read the paper and try to face Tuesday.

A little before 2 in the morning, my cell phone rang. My initial inclination was to ignore it, but a good friend had been calling regularly about her husband's deteriorating conditions of cancer, and I wanted to be there if she were calling about him.

I dragged myself across the bed, flipped open my phone, and saw my daughter's number. She's quite a mature, independent young lady who had been a bit out of touch lately because the current flame had just moved halfway across the country to be with her, so I was not at all surprised that I hadn't heard from her recently. The vibes I had gotten had been few but positive, so my only thought was that if she were calling in the middle of the night, something must be terribly, horribly wrong.

I hit the dial back button and heard her voicemail message. Well, I sort of heard it; what I really heard was a great deal of background noise broken by what seemed to be a teary, strangled "Mom!" and then more noises muffling what seemed to be a teary "want to come home!" accompanied by more background racket. Then the call shut off.

This was beyond strange; this chick has been out of the nest and on her own for nearly 10 years already, and I couldn't believe she'd be calling me unless something were really, horribly wrong. And if she were calling me instead of one of many friends in Los Angeles who had a chance of getting to her quickly, things must be beyond "out of hand."

Even in my antihistamine-induced stupor, I knew I needed to find out what I could do to help her, so I hit the speed dial and tried to reach her phone. The first three times I called, I got the "not available" message; either her phone was not in her hands or something else was going on that was keeping her from answering, and I was becoming frantic. Had someone grabbed her, taken away her phone (which is sort of like taking out one of her arteries), and continued to do harm to her?

From what I know of the boyfriend, he's a jewel, and even if he were somehow implicated in this, if I could at least get through to him, maybe I could get to the bottom of it. Lord only knows why she would have called me instead of him unless he had gone Jekyll and Hyde on her, but if calling the perp would distract him, well, maybe that was worth a try. I dialed his number.

Antihistamines really do stupid stuff to me, you know?

He didn't answer, but a few seconds later, my phone rang again, and my daughter's number popped up. I answered immediately.

"Hello?" The voice was the BF's, but it was calm and rational, and there was no background noise. This didn't even seem like the same phone that had called me minutes before.

"BF?" I asked. "Is Daughter there?"

"Yes," he said calmly.

"Can I talk to her?"

I couldn't figure out what he was doing calling me on her phone, but it cut out before he could answer. A heartbeat later, he called me back.

"She's here. Just a minute."

"Mom?" The voice was a little shaky, but not teary or scary, and the background noise was still completely gone.

"Are you okay?" I asked her.

"Yes! Are you? It's-2-o'clock-in-the-morning-there! Why-are-you-calling-me?"

"I didn't start this—you called first!"

"Oh my god. I didn't call you. My phone was in my pocket—my pocket called you!"

Two a.m. is no time of day/night for me to try to figure out how in the world her pocket called me, but I had heard her voice, it was fine, and I felt better.

"Okay. I've been sick, and you called me. I thought you were hurt and crying and telling me you wanted to come home."

"Could be that I called you," she said more calmly. "My phone sometimes does that. We're having a party here, and since I haven't talked to you in so long, I was talking about you, and I probably said 'home' and no telling what else you might have heard. But I'm okay."

Several days passed before I had a chance to chat with her, and we both laughed when we found out the other side of the story:

I was too groggy to recognize that probably what I had heard on the voice mail was mostly just gibberish coming from a room full of people in the middle of a weekend football party; she was too horrified to answer my calls when she calculated the time of night it had to be back home in Texas and lord=only-knows what sort of terrible things might have happened to one of her brothers. The party had stopped to be sure everything was fine at home, and I'm still not sure whether it had a chance to fire back up again.

But I learned not to pay too much attention when her cell phone calls me late at night from her bluejeans pocket.

Remembering my brother

I heard from a friend last summer about how hard it was for her to lose her grandmother; I could empathize even more when lost my older brother. This is an entry I wrote in another venue about him; I post it here on his birthday because I want to save it somehow.

In some ways, I'm grateful (but not at all glad!) that he was something of a loner and a hermit; I'm not tempted to pick up the phone every day or two to ask how he is or to tell him the news in my world, as I did my mom several years ago when she died. On the one hand, that's nice; I don't have that hole in my heart. On the other, it kind of sucks; why didn't I talk to him more?

I've thought some over the past few days about what I could say to give you a bit of insight into just how crazy and wonderful this brother really was, but a couple of others have done it for me, and probably better. (See our nephew Chef Bruce's blog at http://thebranchrestaurant.blogspot.com/2008/08/ogg.html and our niece Stephanie G's nice notes at http://sdfgarcia.blogspot.com/2008/07/don-ogg.html, then follow the link to the notes his Buckskinner friends made at http://www.buckskinning.org/2008_ogg.htm.)

But Don and I shared a lot: of five kids in our family, we were the two whose names began with D; his dyslexia (and even his left-handedness) gave him legitimate reason to feel as if he didn't "measure up" to our parents' standards for years, so he understood that I never felt as if I "measured up" in comparison to our two sisters; we both loved being outdoors and both had life memberships in scouting (and both had camped out in the year before he died—although his skills were immeasurably greater than mine!); we both loved handcrafts—the only two left in our family who actually made things on treadle sewing machines; we both knew that we had a special bond neither of us would ever share with the others.

He was different from me in many ways, too: I loved to read from the time I first figured out words on a page, and I made a career of writing and teaching writing, while he found both of those arts painful and only learned to love them as an adult, when he finally realized the treasures of knowledge in books (especially old ones) and that all of us loved every word he wrote to us, even when he broke every grammar and spelling rule we knew. He never had children (he shipped his mail-order bride back to the sender six months after he met her), and he scraped by for most of his life on a meager income that would never have accommodated them. He was an inveterate tinkerer; if he wanted something, he often managed to build it (or to modify something close enough to make it work), although some of his efforts were remarkably more or less successful than others.

I miss him, but I love the blogs his niece and nephew and friends have built to preserve his memory. My former mother-in-law volunteered to pull together some of our memorabilia of him (pictures, copies of email he sent us, the web pages linked above) into a scrapbook that I hope will one day enter our family archives.

One thing is sure: He'll never leave our family memory.

An Alexander kind of day

I'm sure that somewhere along the way I read Judith Viorst's Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day to my kids, although I don't think I recall anything at all about it except that it was about a little kid named Alexander who had a really, really bad day.

I wasn't far into yesterday before I realized that I was well into an Alexander kind of day.

I woke up, more or less, and dragged my body into the kitchen for my morning dose of thyroxin and vitamins. For some reason, my eyes fixated on the flight itinerary attached to the calendar. I'm really not traveling until next month, so why I stared at the itinerary that was mostly covered up by this month's remaining days is beyond me. But I did.

As I read over the dates and times, I realized that the itinerary said I'd be leaving for New Orleans Saturday morning, 3 October, at 8:45 a.m. That can't be right, I thought in my still-too-early morning stupor; my meeting is Saturday morning. I need to be there on Friday!

Still somewhat hung over from lack of sleep over the past several days, I flew to the laptop, flipped it open, and frantically looked up the airline website. Special deal: Change your flight to a different flight on the same day, and pay only $50. No good for me; I have to change to the day before—and hope like crazy that I can still get a seat.

Getting a seat wasn't the problem, and neither, really, was the $23 charge for the ticket at the "current" price. The $150 charge for changing a cheap ticket tied my stomach in knots.

A few minutes later, my eyes popped open and what sounded like the logical half of my brain kicked in and said, "Hey, stupid, you made that reservation while you were looking at all the details about the trip. Those meetings have been on Sunday morning for years. Your room is set up for the same days as the flight. You have to be flying on Saturday."

I checked my computer for messages—any messages—that would confirm that the meeting was Sunday, but nothing on my computer gave me any help. I couldn't even find my hotel confirmation to see if maybe I had set it up for Saturday, since I knew I had made at least one change in it since I got started, and maybe that had happened whenever I had heard that the meeting was actually going to be Saturday. But no, nothing. And that had to mean the meeting was really on Sunday.

Back to the laptop, find a phone number, and try to talk my way out of the change fee. After 30 minutes of dialing repeatedly, I gave up on the number to help the "rewards" clients and threw myself into the fray with the "normal" people—where a nice kid named Mark answered my call on about the second ring.

The frantic nature of the call apparently hit home with Mark immediately, and while he couldn't undo the charges for the new ticket and the first change, he could change me back to the Saturday flight for only $23 more; the Saturday tickets had gone up, too, since I canceled mine. Big deal! What's $23 if it will get me to New Orleans on the right day?

I spent the morning in my usual routine of grading papers, which didn't go as smoothly as usual for one reason or another, not the least of which being the knot hanging in my stomach as I considered the fact that I'd increased the cost of my ticket by $150 that might or might not (and logically not) be refundable on my travel allowance. (I was pretty sure I could get away with the $46 in increased ticket charges; the original ticket had been pretty cheap.)

Even the dogs seemed to sense my frustration. I usually take a short break in the morning for what other people would call coffee, but since I don't drink coffee, mine is more accurately a slice of toast and a few minutes of fetch with the dogs. Sherman, who adores fetch, ran out to where I had thrown his ball and stood looking back at me as if to ask what I expected him to do next. Parker, who has become a pretty competitive little fetcher, brought back her ball about three times and then wandered around the patio with it as if she were lost. I finally gave up and went out to collect Sherman's ball and pried Parker's out of her mouth and went back inside.

I had a class to teach at 2, but I needed to swing by a framing shop to collect some certificates for an upcoming awards banquet before then, so I cleaned up and headed for the office. On my Alexander kind of day, the frames weren't ready yet, and I'd have to return later. I handled a couple of small tasks before I fired up the computer to check my email. Oh. my. god....

Several messages from the top was one from one of the other members of my committee, apologizing for having to miss the Saturday meeting. The Saturday meeting. The Saturday meeting!

By this time I really was frantic. I flashed an email back to the meeting organizer, who assured me that yes, the meeting was set for Saturday. Drat.

I called the hotel and changed my reservation, then went back online to the airline (I was far too gone by then to face the idea that Mark might answer again) to move the flight back to Friday. The good news was that the ticket price hadn't changed since early morning; the bad news is that the airline slapped me with another $150 fee.

I was still finishing the ticketing process when one of my students showed up to ask me if I was going to class, although I had asked them to delay the start of class by 10 minutes so we could use a conference room instead of the big, barren classroom I had been assigned for a group of 8 students. I was less than cheerful when I got there, and even less happy when I glanced down in a chair next to the lecturn to see that someone had obviously spilled a drink and just left it, balling up on the seat of the chair. I thought maybe my luck was changing when I walked back to a storage cabinet, where I found that the group that had left the drink in the chair had also left a lovely plate of brownies on the cabinet. At least we had one tick up.

Class went swimmingly and I was really proud of my students when it was over, but I was still pretty balled up over spending $300 on what could be considered nothing more than a Stupid Tax—money I might as well have flushed as spent the way I did.

I had one possible out: I had a paper that needed to be edited for a consulting fee, and working on it when I got home could at least get my mind off the Stupid Tax. I worked on it for a couple of hours before Garry got home from a business trip.

As I recall, the one last thing in the Alexander book was that after all, Alexander's day turned out okay.

And so did mine. I still felt pretty miserable about the Stupid Tax, but I had a ball watching Garry. He's starting back to college 10 years after barely escaping high school with a diploma, and he's excited about getting going again. He's taking only an introduction to college course, but it's such a foreign world to him that he's really enjoying it. Part of the course challenges him to learn to operate a computer, and he's really stepping up to that challenge. Last night, when I was just beginning to unwind from my Alexander day, he was in a chatty mood, distracting me from my work and the t.v. news but filling me to the brim with the list of long, if basic, new things he's learning.

So if Alexander ended his day realizing that he's got it pretty good, then I really did have an Alexander kind of day.

Dogs are good for me

I've been a believer for a long time that pets are good. My family had a couple of dogs when I was a teenager, and I let the kids smuggle cats into the house when they were little because I thought they needed to learn about pets. One of those two cats lived 17 years; the other made almost 20. And while I loved the first one from the beginning and thought frequently about giving the other one a laryngectomy or lobotomy or something to shut him up, I was crushed as each of them died.

I was hurt in other ways when I lost the dog I had gotten the kids after their dad and I split up. I knew her time was coming—she was close to 14 years old and showing signs of glaucoma and maybe arthritis and other things—but I was not at all prepared for something to get over a 4-ft fence in our backyard, attack, and kill her. I had only recently acquired a kitten to replace the last cat who died, and here I was without my loving, smiling, always forgiving dog.

Within a matter of weeks, my daughter came home for Christmas and we hit the animal shelter. The little dog I found there was a ball of black fluff that I somehow hoped would stay small and fluffy; that didn't happen. Her 30-pound size makes her a little larger than I'd have liked, and her fluff straightened out into stiff, straight hair a couple of inches long and thick around her scruff. She's something of a weenie most of the time, but around her "cousin" Sherman who has been living with us lately, she becomes an alpha dog and I sometimes want to pinch her head off. For a long time I was pretty sure she was part hobbit; she could get from the den to my bedroom under a screen that kept Sherman out, and she'd steal all the toys from the den and hide them back in my room.

I specifically picked the runt of her litter because I was hoping for something fairly small; I didn't want a large dog because of the cost of maintenance and the challenges of assuring that it got plenty of exercise in spite of my own less-than-active lifestyle. Then Sherman moved in.

I hadn't intended to have a Sherman dog. Shortly after I adopted my little Parker pup, Second Son decided he needed a dog, too—only he lived with a roommate who had a large dog, and he had determined that large dogs were cool. Since he was out on his own, I had no reason to care, and he had picked out our delightful little Nikki dog.

SS trooped off to the shelter and called me to announce that he had found "his" dog. He had a long list of steps to follow before he'd be eligible to adopt this animal, and he had to wait several days for its previous owners to be sure they wanted to release it, and SS was second in line to adopt it. But SS was confident: the dog he had seen was going to be his.

I dropped by the shelter to see what I thought. SS had told me the animal was a boxer named Duke, and I sorted through the pens until I found a miserable looking beast who was so starved his ribs seemed to be cutting through his skin and whose hound-dog eyes begged for someone to love him. Much as I didn't want a large dog, I could see how easily SS could have fallen in love with him; this beast needed love! But there was still that one more name ahead of my son's on the list.

Sure enough, after more than a week of waiting for others to exercise their options and figuring out the logistics of taking the beast home, SS called me to tell me he was on his way to buy a kennel. The dog was still a puppy at only about 4 months old, but he was clearly not going to be the pocket-sized beast I had had in mind when I set off to find my dog. He also wasn't just boxer; the hound-dog eyes and speckled chest and gentle jaws have to indicate hound or bird-dog or something inside.

And a few months later, the puppy was living with me. SS graduated from college, moved away to start his first job, and needed a place for the puppy to stay. Sometimes I'm just too easy....

By the time the erstwhile Duke, who had now learned to answer to Sherman, moved in with me, he had already gained practical experience at fence jumping, so I was resigned to keeping him on a chain, even inside my fenced back yard. I had tried ropes of various sorts which had always been fine with Nikki; Sherman chewed right through them. I made a daily point of hooking him and Parker on leashes and hoofing through the neighborhood to get some exercise, but I knew I'd never be able to get his heart rate up beyond an occasional thump. At least he enjoyed the outings!

Once SS got settled in to his digs in Houston, he picked up Sherman to take him "home," which was a nice relief for me: I had my house back with just me and my puppy and kitten, who had fallen a bit behind in their bonding; Mandi the cat had been terrified of the much larger, more boisterous Sherman.

For a while, anyway. Within a matter of weeks, SS had decided that the job just wasn't working, and the only option open to him was to move back home, reorganize, and start the job search all over again. Sherman, of course, managed to move "home" several weeks before his master did.

Sherman managed to get out of the yard a couple of times before SS moved back home, and I made the first order of business after the move the establishment of a fence high enough to keep him in. Our old fence was farm fencing that let me look out onto the virgin forest in my backyard, and the cheapest option for a taller fence was another, higher round of the same stuff all around. I spent a few days collecting parts from the lumber yards, and SS and I spent a weekend giving Sherman a place to run.

And run he did. When daughter came home the next Christmas, she was appalled that Sherman had pretty well done in the groundcover that had once made my yard look lush and cool; now it looked like a beach. The aspidistra that mostly hid the fence from view was already badly trampled, and the tree stump that used to be low enough to mow over was sticking about 8 inches out of the ground. But Sherman was healthy and happy, and Parker bounced happily along at his heels.

I had been trying to teach Parker to fetch a ball by tossing it out and giving her treats for bringing it back, and she had seemed to be catching on until Sherman moved in—and he was a whole lot more fun to chase than a silly ball. The logic of "fetch" escaped Sherman completely.

Until he discovered we could play with his stuffed tiger, Romo. He dragged Romo over to my chair one day, I guess to play tug-of-war, but I just picked Romo up and tossed him across the room. Sherman happily brought him back so I could throw him again. Ah—he had the concept, but could he transfer it to a ball?

Since Parker and Sherman are about the same age, they both went through the chewing phase together, and they chewed everything in sight. In my search for toys that would suit them, I stumbled over an old basketball, which took Sherman's big mouth about a day and a half to pop. For some reason, he picked up its carcass and hauled it up to SS one day, and SS flung it back into the yard. Sherman ran after it and schlepped it back, ready for another round. The game of fetch was on.

SS found an old baseball in the house and decided it was too small and too hard for fetch. We found a softball, and that was better until Sherman chewed the cover off. We went to tennis balls and found they got so filthy we couldn't even find them in the yard again. But it didn't much matter what we threw; Sherman would bring it back. One afternoon I came home from work to find SS playing with him in the backyard, flinging the ball into the last of the aspidistra plants where Sherman had to dig around to find it, but he never failed: regardless how lost it seemed to us to be, Sherman always came back with his ball.

Then we discovered that if we didn't just throw it but bounced it on the patio, Parker also would join in the game. With both of them playing now, we were going through cheap tennis balls pretty quickly, so I started looking for alternatives. I found a goofy, weirdly shaped, heavy rubber toy with a noisemaker inside that Sherman enjoyed for a while, but it lost its appeal when the noisemaker died.

Then I found an off-balance ball that bounced high but erratically when we threw it down, and both of the dogs thought that was fun to chase. In somewhat rapid succession, we acquired several rubber balls the same size as the tennis balls but much more resistant to dogs, and a small collection of racquet balls that bounce like crazy. Sherman was in heaven, and even Parker learned that if Sherman was chasing the rounder balls, she could claim the goofy-shaped one as her own.

Before long, I learned that I could throw one of the round balls for Sherman to chase, and Parker would chase and return the goofy-shaped one. I spend a part of my day working from home, and the dogs will beg me to take an occasional break to throw the balls. Sherman is currently working on his ability to catch low pitches, and Parker is loving chasing her ball as far as I can bounce it.

As much as I've enjoyed playing with them when I can catch a break, I didn't realize until today how much they give back to me. Things on my job have been really frustrating lately, and I've grown to resent having to drag myself to the office to endure the latest vexation. Today's class met after usual hours, I discovered some reasonably significant errors in the assignment that was due today, and I don't have an appropriate workspace for the teaching assistants I need to help me with the course. I came home tired, angry, and tense.

I had left the dogs in the backyard when I went to the office, and SS had left them out when he buzzed through from a trip to Houston to scoot to his job, so I figured they'd be eager to come inside and soak up cool (and maybe dry—we might have had a shower today) air.

Not so much—both of them seemed eager to get on with the balls. I grabbed a couple and chunked them across the yard, and the dogs both took off eagerly to round them back up. Sherman has perfected a way of placing his ball gingerly on the step so it doesn't roll away until I have a chance to pick it up, but he's working on catching slow pitches just off the corner of the patio. Parker tends to toss the ball at me so hard it often bounces away and she has to go round it up again for me, but she's getting good at charging out across the yard and coming up right under it when it lands.

Sherman bounced a couple of tosses off his nose and right back into my hands, and Parker grabbed up a couple of big aspidistra leaves along with the ball when she brought it back, and she seemed upset that she hadn't been able to separate them before she gave the ball back to me. Both would stay with their balls until they were sure I had them firmly in hand, then take off for their various starting points to wait for their next pitch. Both of them would wait eagerly, eyes bright and tails wagging, for their next chance to chase the ball.

Fifteen minutes of fetch didn't take my frustrations off my plate, and it didn't help me figure out how I'm going to handle tomorrow. But it made me laugh, and my spine relaxed, and I knew I will figure this all out somehow.

Sherman's too big and Parker's too cranky and I don't have time to exercise them much, but I'm sure in spite of it all that these dogs are good for me.

My in-laws, my friends

The idea that my in-laws might also be my friends may seem foreign to folks who share jokes about how terrible their in-laws are. For me, the case is inverted: I love my in-laws; it's my ex who's out of my life.

Suffice it to say that ours wasn't exactly a marriage made in heaven, whatever that is; where the divorce decree said "irreconcilable differences," it largely meant differences that I had recognized from the beginning, but it didn't cover a lot of similarities that I had really believed would give us enough wiggle room to make the differences work. Not so much.

The divorce wasn't nearly as messy as some I've heard of, but it wasn't exactly congenial either; I complained about his shortcomings, he complained about mine, and ultimately we agreed that we disagreed—too much to make it work. We've hardly endured even casual encounters since then.

Enter the in-laws. Full disclosure dictates that I have to admit that I said some things about their son around the time of the divorce that not only could have but probably should have locked their door to me for eternity, but somehow they both managed to nod and accept it without killing me, and the last time I left their home before the paperwork was signed, I got the feeling that of all the members of both sides of the family, those two incredible people were my strongest allies.

But the hard feelings between me and the rest of the family (mine liked him best, too), combined with the challenges I faced in trying to keep my life together as the single mom of three teenagers, meant that I steered clear of their apartment for the next several years. I never felt as if I would be unwelcome there; I was more embarrassed by the unkind things I'd said about their son and unwilling to remind them of that.

And then one of their daughters invited me to Christmas lunch one day. The kids had all made a practice of having Christmas on Christmas Eve with their dad and his family and on Christmas morning with me. My life had fragmented to the point that I almost never cooked, and the idea of a big Christmas feast for me, two carnivore sons, and a vegetarian daughter didn't enchant me. The in-laws loved to cook and so did their two daughters, and having the grandkids troop back for Christmas lunch suited all of us pretty well. They were happy to eat together, I was happy for the piece of quiet I got, and the leftovers were always delicious.

After the ex remarried, his Christmas dinners moved more and more toward his wife's family, and the in-laws had an extra seat at their table. So the sister who always got along with me best asked if I would be welcome. The in-laws and the kids were all delighted, and I was pleased to join them.

Then the accident happened. Father-in-law lost control of his car for long enough to bang it up enough to have to replace it. The ex and his wife called the sisters in Texas City to tell them about the accident, but the information they gave was too spotty to be helpful to the medical professional. Recognizing that their communications with their brother were typically irregular, the sisters determined to find a better source of information about their parents' situation.

For reasons I'll never know, they picked me. They called and invited me to go out for a drink on their next visit to town and outlined their request: Would I be willing to check in on their parents from time to time to see how they were getting along?

They seemed to think their request might be an imposition; later, my own sisters were shocked by their presumption that I might be willing to comply. I saw it as a welcoming open door; after all, these people had been kind and generous to the kids and me through plenty of opportunity not to be, and they are my kids' grandparents. I was happy to agree.

My first visit to them was on a Sunday afternoon. I typically shop at a store near their apartment, so I just dropped by on my way home from shopping to see how this would go. I had armed myself with updates on the kids' latest adventures and some other pretense for dropping by, and they greeted me as graciously as I had expected them to.

After my excuses for being there began to run thin, my father-in-law stopped me dead when he asked, "Okay, so why are you really here? Did the girls put you up to this?" Busted! I wasn't in to this to deceive them, so I admitted the ruse. He assured me they loved having me over, but more than 60 years of marriage had taught them plenty about how to take care of each other. He knew the wreck must have been part of the reason their daughters had called on me, but he was curious as to whether that really were the whole story.

Well, no, not exactly. As a matter of fact, one of the sisters' biggest concerns was their eating habits: The sisters had heard the parents occasionally resorted to eating at, of all places, Taco Bell!

Now, when the sisters had reported this, I had had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing or admitting how frequently I also swung through the Taco B drive-through on my way home for work to pick up a quick meal before an evening of grading papers or consulting or other business. I know that's not the healthiest way to eat, but offset by lots of meals of fruits and vegetables and yogurt, it seemed not to be wreaking havoc on my health, and hey—I enjoy TexMex. So I certainly didn't share their concern about the in-laws eating at Taco Bell.

But once the truth was out, I admitted to my father-in-law: The girls are concerned because they've heard you're eating at Taco Bell. I thought my mother-in-law was going to pull her whole 4 ft 10 up on her lounge chair as they both chimed in unison, "It's good!" This time I didn't have to bite my tongue; I just laughed and told them I agreed. I also understand their lack of interest in cooking for two in their 80s, and I understand the frustration of buying healthy food and watching it turn green in the refrigerator because you just don't cook enough to use it up. From my perspective, an occasional jaunt to Taco Bell is a convenient and healthy-enough solution, especially for a couple who have survived into their 80s and want an occasional change of pace.

Once the ice was broken, I started making a point of dropping by as often as I could; my Sunday routine has generally included a stop by their apartment every couple of weeks to check on how they're doing and to update them on the latest goings on with me and the kids. They are dependably attentive when I talk about myself, and they are intent on hearing the latest with the kids; I sometimes feel as if I'm their old-fashioned radio serial, bringing them the latest installment in the story of 20-somethings trying to carve out a life in this crazy world.

And I think they appreciate the company. Father-in-law joked today that everybody who knows him is getting tired of hearing the same old stories over and over again, but at "four score and seven," he delights in revisiting the times of his life that brought him to where he is today.

The kids have always been amused to see that he has so often been an early adopter of technology, even if neither they nor he has known what that meant. I saw my first microwave oven at his house, my first hand-held calculator, my first VCR, my first audio cassette, and my first DVD recorder. I had a computer several years before he did, but 30 years past retirement he checks his email daily, knows how to use instant messengers, and today I set him up with a blog. He's not too sure he'll be much of one to use it, but it's there, and I'll be surprised if he doesn't try.

In fact, when I set it up, I suggested that he capture some of those familiar stories—the dogs that used to nip at him when he delivered newspapers, the pet he had to shoot, the adventures of his military life. I reminded him that I don't have those stories from my dad, who died far too young; the efforts I made to capture them from my mom were much too little, too late. I hope he'll use his blog to capture the stories for his grandkids—and, if ever, their kids, too—to treasure long after he is gone.

And I want to see my mother-in-law there, too. When I started a list of possible blog topics, I included a couple that would focus on her life, too. In fact, when I suggested that they write about why she likes scrapbooking, they both carried that to her interest in lots of crafts over the years, and she was bursting to tell me about her childhood, when her mother and aunts used to get together and work on their hemming or their quilting or whatever handwork was in progress as they visited—an image of her life that reminds me of an awfully lot of mine.

I'm really hoping they'll do it. Octogenarians are too rare in our world today, and these two just happen to be particularly lovely people. I want to help their stories live on forever, just as their humor twinkles in my children's eyes.

I love those fine old birds!

First day of school

Yesterday was Number One Son's first day of school. Not your typical first day, by any means; certainly no weepy young mom packing her darling five-year-old off to school, or even me, who was neither weepy nor young when NOS tripped eagerly across the threshold of the kindergarten classroom door—I was too busy wondering how I was going to shut up the two littler ones who refused to understand why they weren't going to "school" (daycare) that day, too, and whether our family was going to survive the somewhat rocky financial conditions we were in. One in kindergarten was a load off my mind for several hours a day.

No, this was NOS's first day at Blinndergarten, the knock-off name for the local community college that charges out-of-district fees because its main campus—half the size of the one here—is 35 miles away. And the course he's taking is called "Blinn 101" because it's designed for kids like NOS—coming back to the college whirl after a lot of years out of school. "Packing him off" in this case wasn't as easy as dressing him up in the new shorts and t-shirt his grandmother had bought for his first big day and hanging his bright new backpack on his back; no, this time it meant scraping out a part of my home for him to live him, getting him into an old, junker car that would get him back and forth to school, and helping him start dealing with several thousand dollars' worth of debt he's accrued.

But it was a good first day, I think. He came home a little irritated because his teacher had assigned the students to set up their Blinn email accounts before the end of class, but in his case the computers on campus were not cooperating. He was pretty sure Second Son had set up the account for him, and he was pretty sure he was making the right moves to get into it, but nothing he did at school had made it work. Somehow the "packing him off" part had also included my move to a newer computer so he could use my retiring one, and he flopped into a chair and went to work on it about as soon as he got in the front door.

Sure enough, within a matter of minutes he was in the email account, and he paused long enough to tell me his next assignment was to set up the debit card he had received a week or so ago to handle his school financial transactions. I had tried to spell out the need to do that when the card had arrived, having had the benefit of SS's job last spring with a call center for a university financial aid department; I'll bet SS had tried to explain it, too. As usual, NOS didn't want to do it on our advice, so I was tickled pink that he was willing to do it to satisfy the teach.

In fact, I'm pretty tickled that he's doing this, anyway. NOS got off to a fairly good start in school, but soon after he started kindergarten he started mirror-writing. I had documentation that he had been writing his name correctly for a year or more, so the reverse approach had to have started after he started school. When I asked, he explained that he was writing it the way his teacher did; in his five-year-old mind, if she wrote from the side where she held her pencil, he should, too. Since she held her pencil in her left hand and wrote from left to right, he held his pencil in his right hand and wrote from right to left. Why did I wait until the third grade to ask him that?

In the third grade, he was mirror-writing in earnest—and in cursive. That's when the teacher called me in to consider testing him for learning disabilities, which showed that—major surprise—he's dyslexic. Since he'd been mirror-writing since kindergarten, struggled to learn to read, and had a father, an uncle, an aunt, and a younger brother who all were dyslexic, I wasn't particularly surprised.

His real problems started in middle school, though. There, he signed up for band (his dad played the French horn in school and the cornet in the Marines) and basketball, but was prevented from participating in either of them when he failed a six-weeks period of Spanish. Without the band or the team, he was at loose ends and found other ways to amuse himself—with friends whose ideas of fun were mostly pretty far away from school. His dad agreed to let him help out at the bus station Dad ran, and that gave NOS a source of income and of pride.

Unfortunately, in retrospect the income may have also opened doors better left closed. He loved being outdoors, so Boy Scouts had seemed a good way to keep him occupied—until I discovered that the troop leader wasn't concerned that middle-school-aged boys were smoking on the camp outs. And his friends outside of Scouting had taken up the habit; if NOS wasn't buying cigarettes with his earnings, he was likely bumming them either from friends or from his dad, who frequently left parts of packs lying around and forgot them.

Before long, I could see that he was headed toward trouble, and I tried to get his dad to take time out of whatever it was he was doing (I still can't answer that) and invest some time and energy in his son; he was out of my control, and headed for being out of others'. Dad's response was a pretty clear "I can't," and our marriage was headed for the rocks over it; we split up about the time NOS got to high school.

For the first year after the split, NOS went to live with his dad, and things didn't get better; after a year, he decided to try living back at home. The summer went reasonably well; he passed driver's ed and I bought a used car so he could drive himself to work and play, and he enjoyed the freedom if not the rule that he had to have the car home by 11 o'clock .

Once school started, things got worse: he was caught on school property not only smoking but also carrying a small pocket knife, which didn't work in a no-tolerance zone. Having taught at the high school for six years, I knew the school staff enough to wiggle him down to a lighter penalty than he might have had, but I knew we were on a slippery road. Before the end of the year, he had decided to move on to a place where he could have his freedom from my rules—and from anybody getting him up and sending him off to school.

He rolled around for a couple of years before the school practically dragged him in and made him earn enough credits that they felt they could tack a diploma on him and call him a graduate. (I still don't think he really earned the diploma; I think the district was in trouble for having too many dropouts and needed every graduate they could dredge up, and he was one they could find. He was plenty smart to graduate—still is. I just don't think he legitimately did.)

After that, he spent a couple of more years living with friends and cobbling together a life, then he signed himself up for an auto mechanics program at a school in Austin. He took off to start his future against my better judgment, but things worked out mostly okay for him; ultimately, he got a decent job at a Goodyear tire shop, and he walked away with a really enthusiastic letter from his boss, assuring some future employer of the best traits I know of in my son: he's sincere, he's willing to work hard, he plays well with others.

What he doesn't do well is pay off his debts. Somehow, nothing he did in arranging for a place to live, food to eat, and transportation to and from work fit into his income level, no matter how well he did. And then last fall he went to Los Angeles to spend a few days with his sister. Little Sis has way more debt than he'll ever have; the difference is hers is all in college loans that she accepted when she signed on for them, and she has worked hard to pay them off and still make a life for herself. And it's paying off for her.

What he came away with was the perception that her degree was giving her a lifestyle that he could only sit by and envy. The difference, he decided, was in her education. When I was in Los Angeles to visit her for my birthday, he called me to announce that he'd decided to leave his job and go back to school. He'd landed on a position in radiation technology as a career he'd rather pursue, and he wanted to know if he could move back home, live with me, and get himself through school.

So here he is.

I'm not sure radiation technology is really the place where he needs to be, but I suspect that he's closer there than in auto mechanics; he has way too much heart not to work well in something in medicine, and if he's willing to stick to it, radiation technology may turn out to be "it." And if it's not, I'm willing to hang in with him while he continues to look.

And I was really glad to drive home from work yesterday to find him sitting on the front walkway reading a book, and to watch him bound down the stairs this evening to finish the last of his assignments from last night.

One way or another, we are going to make this work.