May Day Retreats

Today, instead of dancing around a Maypole or going to a protest march, I will load up the car and head down to the Coastal Retreat Center at the Isle of Palms.  This week-end's adventure: cooking for the week-end, in support of a deaconess friend of mine who got a grant to create this retreat.  She has a vision of a retreat before the hoopla of Mother's Day, a time to be apart together before we fall apart (she's got a snappier title that I can't remember right now).

I have friends, old friends, who live in the South Carolina Lowcountry near the Isle of Palms.  I thought about trying to see them during our bit of afternoon free time, but I decided not to try to see anyone.  Far better to arrange a separate trip later in the summer or fall.  In my free time, if there is any, I need to be grading:  I have one set of grades due on Monday and another set on Tuesday.

If there's any additional time, I need to remember that I do have two papers due for my Lutheran Confessions class.  I keep hoping that I might get feedback on the two papers that I've written since the first paper, but soon I'll just write the last two and hope for the best.

Yesterday I did many things, but writing a blog post was not one of them.  I created a master shopping list for the retreat so my friend could get the food at Costco.  I baked many batches of cookies and two cakes for the retreat--and ran 4 loads of dishes through the dishwasher.  I went to my Lutheran Confessions class, which meets by way of Zoom.  I took care of some financial stuff. I took a walk.  I sent e-mails to students to remind them that they needed to meet the final exam deadline, and I answered a few e-mails.

Today's blog post will be short--let me attend to students before doing the tasks that must be done before departure.

Poetry Creating Notes at the End of a Term

It's been a week of bits and pieces in terms of poetry.  Let me record some of them here:

--In my end of the semester cleaning up of the paperwork piles, I discovered lots of rough drafts of poems.  A few of them had some potential.  A few I couldn't remember where I thought the draft might be going.  A few I didn't remember writing at all.

It was good to remember that I did more than my computer files might indicate.

--I was making some poetry submissions to literary journals before the bulk of submitting season winds down.  There are moments when I wonder why I bother.  But the occasional acceptance still makes me happy, so I persist.

--As I was looking through my file of finished poems, I realized that I had reviewed a rough draft twice, once back in January when I first finished the rough draft and then again in April, when I had no memory of revising it back in January.  I haven't circled back to see which draft I like better.  It does bother me a bit that I had no memory of doing the original revision.

--On Monday, I was thinking about the trinity of nuclear war movies of the 80's, and I listened to this podcast about them and other nuclear war movies, including House of Dynamite.  As I drove down to Spartanburg, a line floated through my head:  The apocalypse will not be televised.  Once my students started writing, I put poem ideas on paper and ended up with a fairly good draft, just two hours after the line flitted through my head.

It's not the way I usually create poems, so I was happy to have that experience, especially in a very busy week.

The Last Day of Class

I had thought I might go for a walk a bit early to try to beat the thunderstorms that I can see on the radar, a large line heading our way.  But thunder rumbles outside, so I will stay put for a bit.  I'm not complaining--we're in desperate need of rain.

Today is the last day of in-person classes at Spartanburg Methodist College.  There's still a reading day and exams, but today is the last day of regular commuting to Spartanburg until August when classes start again.  After classes, I'll stay for the end of year celebration for Humanities graduates at a pizza place in town.

As with every semester, when we get to the end, I have a bit of whiplash--wasn't it just last week that I entered these dates into the syllabus?  Back in January, when I put the spring semester syllabi together, the 28th of April seemed so far away.  And now, here we are.

My brain can't seem to focus--or maybe it would be more accurate to say it focuses on one thing for one to five minutes and races on to the next thing.  I have a lot going on in the next two weeks:  both in-person and online classes ending, which means lots of grading, two papers due for my Lutheran Confessions class, two sermons to write, and a week-end retreat this week-end, where my spouse and I are the cooks.  I've done many job duties for retreats, but this will be my first retreat as chef.

I am making a shopping list for one of the retreat leaders who will be going to Costco on Thursday.  I find myself overly worried about leaving something off the list.  But there will be grocery stores, should we forget something essential.

I am also worried about the amount of food we need.  Is it too much?  Is our menu too expensive?  I also worry that we won't have enough--and again, I tell myself, there will be grocery stores, and people won't starve.  I am less worried about people not liking the  food.  We are good cooks.  I do worry about people not telling us about food they won't/can't eat until it's being served to them.  But they did have a chance to tell us on the registration form, and so far, no one has mentioned anything.

O.K., time to focus on something else.  Let me do some grading.

A Sunday of Donuts and Other Treats

In some ways, yesterday was a good Sunday.  We had a new member officially join us yesterday--she's the grown up daughter of a member, and she's been attending regularly since Christmas Eve.  It's our 3rd New Member Sunday in a year--hurrah!  

For the first New Member Sunday, the church council president got the donuts from an upscale donut place in Bristol.  For the second one, we stopped at Dunkin Donuts between Johnson City and Bristol.  Yesterday I went to Donut Stop in Arden, NC, a few minutes from my house.  They were actually open at 5 a.m., just as they said they were in various sites.  They had a huge variety of donuts--and they were delicious.

I didn't feel wiped out when we got home, as I sometimes do.  We took care of some paperwork tasks left over from the week before.  We watched the sermons of other churches, as we often do.  We cooked the salmon that we never got around to cooking on Saturday.  We watched some of the home remodel shows, one of our go-to genres that we both like to watch, as long as we don't get derailed into talking about our own home improvement plans.

We watched the Property Brothers restore 2 multi-million dollar mansions, which was a bit surreal.  The next show was set in Las Vegas, 2 flippers taking deeply run down properties and renovating them with constantly changing budgets that made no sense.  I realized how deeply tired I was.

It was only 6:45.  I told myself I was going to read in bed for a bit.  Maybe I could make it to 8:00, a bedtime that is barely respectable for adults:  toddlers get later bedtimes.  But I was asleep by 7:10.  I drifted off thinking about how the light outside was so similar to October early evening light.

Do I feel rested today?  Sort of.  But I am still facing a week full of tasks that can be exhausting.

Still, today and tomorrow are the last two days of my in-person classes meeting, which will free up a lot of time.  I will do what I always do:  make lists, get through the tasks on them, cross them off--and look forward to the time when I have less on the to-do list.

Jesus Remodels a Fixer Upper

I have been up early, both fretful and hopeful, thinking about taxes, thinking about home renovation shows and real life fixer-uppers, working on some poetry submissions.  Usually I'd be revising a sermon on Sunday morning, but I got that done last night, after an up and down day.

I was thinking of mid-life crises, how some of us buy convertibles and others buy run down houses to fix up.  I had planned to work on a poem about Jesus having a mid-life crisis and buying a run down house to renovate--the idea came to me on Friday.  But I worried that readers would reasonably point out that Jesus didn't exactly live until mid-life to be able to have a midlife crisis. 

My Jesus in the World poems can demand a willing suspension of disbelief, since Jesus is doing activities that he didn't do in the Gospels:  bowling, going to a holiday cookie swap, helping with hurricane clean up, and so on.  But I worried that mention of a midlife crisis would disrupt that suspension of disbelief.

This morning, the solution came to me, and it's so obvious I hesitate to admit that it didn't come to me sooner.  I can take out the reference to a mid-life crisis.  Let the reader decide why Jesus is buying a run-down house to renovate. 

There are so many wonderful ways this poem could go--it's so wonderful to have a glimmer of an idea that's closer to fully recognized than just a whisp and to have poem creation to look forward to in the week to come.

Friday: Bad Traffic, Good Fish Fry

Yesterday was the kind of commuting hell day that makes me happy that summer is coming, and I'll soon have a break from 6+ days of commuting.  

Driving down, I thought that I was lucky because I was headed east on I 26.  On the other side of the highway, an 18 wheeler lay on its side across the 2 westbound lanes, with cars off the road on either side.  The interstate was closed down, with traffic rerouted.

I wouldn't be headed back west for 5 hours, so I figured that it would be cleaned up by then.  It was, but there was another accident by then.  Happily, it wasn't as bad as the morning accident.  Further up the road, another accident slowdown, even though it was cleared up and on the other side of the interstate.

I left campus a smidge early so that we had some extra time to get to Bristol for the fish fry at Faith Lutheran.  By the time I got home, we just barely had enough time to get there--until we got to the next round of accidents.  We were 20 minutes late--I got there in time to thank the first round of diners for coming.  

We still had plenty of time to help out with the fish fry:  we got there at 5:20, and the event was over at 7:00.  Everyone was in good spirits, both the church volunteers and the community folks who came for a good meal and fellowship.  It was a great night.

It's an interesting event:  all the funds raised are for neighborhood charities, particularly the ones that feed people.  It's less about evangelism:  most of the people who come already have a church home.  It's a small community, so many of the people know each other, both the church members and the diners.  There are moments when I feel like I've fallen into a Norman Rockwell painting, and I mean that in the best possible way.  

Grading in the Wee, Small Hours of the Morning

I have been up for hours, literally hours, grading.  Two of my four online classes are finished, so I decided to get the grading done, since I couldn't fall back asleep after I woke up at 1:30.  So, I graded the final research essays, did some checking to make sure that I hadn't overlooked anything in the gradebook, and submitted final grades.  Submitting final grades isn't automatic.  I have to toggle between 2 tabs and enter in each grade.  But I now have submitted final grades for 2 of 4 online classes.

Am I caught up with grading?  Goodness gracious no.  It's the time of year when I won't really be done for another week and a half.  Papers are coming in, day and night.  But it does feel good to make progress.

Let me also remember that I continue to try to capture poem ideas.  Some have been in my head for months:  every time I see a tattoo, I think of a colleague who had a tattoo of a tomato plant on his arm, and I've been trying to capture that tattoo and give it a deeper meaning.  One idea came to me in a rush when I saw someone's online outrage post about a recent vote about allowing drilling/mining above the Northern Boundary Waters, which reminded me of a friend who died recently, and I tried to write a poem about both northern and southern waters and boundaries.  Neither poem is finished yet--in fact, I have yet to have crafted enough of them to know that I have a poem or just an idea.

Next year when my year-to-year contract converts to a tenure track faculty position, I'll teach one less class each term, and I'm looking forward to seeing if I get more writing done--by which I mean not just writing but actually getting to rough drafts and revised drafts.