Parents and children

I believe my last post here — almost a month ago — was all about <a href=”https://crookedtimber.org/2007/05/03/time-check/”>not having enough time in the day</a>. Well, today my summer finally begins. I returned the last of my twelve graduate seminar essays, and I dropped off the First Child. I left him the car in which we drove 800 miles in one day, and flew back to central Pennsylvania the next day. Now that’s efficiency! We decided to forego <a href=”http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/reporting_for_duty/”>the traditional father-son knife fight</a> upon parting, because I had myself a one-way airline ticket that I’d purchased only eight days before, and we figured I would attract quite enough attention in the airport without having to explain away sundry fresh flesh wounds.

Nick turned 21 last month, and will begin his senior year of college in the fall. I don’t know whether that makes me the CT contributor with the oldest child, but I figure I’ve got a shot at that dubious distinction. And so, for my return-from-little-hiatus post, I’m going to dilate a bit about parents and professors.

When we picked Nick up from JFK airport three weeks ago after his semester in Florence (he’s an architecture student, and apparently they have architecture there), we swung through my old neighborhood in Flushing, Queens in order to escape New York traffic by way of one of the city’s lesser-known and lesser-traveled outlets, the Throgs Neck Bridge (and yes, I have a post planned on Flushing. Just you wait!) in order that he might get in a visit with Janet’s family in Connecticut. (<a href=”http://www.forgotten-ny.com/YOU%27D%20NEVER%20BELIEVE/Throgs%20Neck/throgs.html”>Throgs</a> are now extinct, but legend has it that they were abundant — and reached a length of over four feet — when Henry Hudson sailed down Long Island Sound.) In the course of making these travel plans, though, I’d requested and received Official Spousal Approval for bringing along my stack of graduate seminar papers, so that I could read four or five of them during the time we’d be staying chez Janet’s mother. Since Janet’s family places great emphasis on “sociability,” and is not used to having one solitary family member squirrel himself away in a study, Official Spousal Approval was required. So I read papers in the quiet of my mother-in-law’s pleasant assisted-living facility when the rest of my family visited with most of Janet’s family during the day, and then in the evenings I emerged from my fortress of solitude and went to dinner and movies and such.

As the week wore on (and I did get five papers done), I noticed a most amusing thing. Janet, of course, would refer to my work as “work,” and would explain to her siblings that Michael wouldn’t be coming along on X venture because he was “working all day”; and each day, her mother would say the same thing — even though my activities didn’t look like any form of “work” she knew. Each afternoon, I would read an essay at a table, or read a bunch of pages in a chair, or read while lolling around on the sofa; then I would get out the pen and go over the essay more carefully, line by line; then I would open up the laptop and type about two single-spaced pages of more general comments. I don’t suppose I need to convince any CT readers that the six or seven hours spent on each essay was, in fact, work; but you have to admit that it doesn’t <i>look like</i> work until the laptop comes into play, at which point Janet’s mother could safely think, “my son-in-law the literature professor is writing.”

I mean no slight to my dear mother-in-law, who was always a great help to us when we were in graduate school and when our children were born. She just doesn’t come from a background in which people sit around and read all day and call it “work,” and neither did her husband. So quite apart from the fact that it’s really kinda rude to bring a pile of work to your in-laws’ house, I’ve tried, over the years, to make sure that when we’re chez Lyon I don’t have any important reading to do. Because I learned a long time ago, when you’re dealing with parents or in-laws who don’t have any idea what you’re doing other than “getting a degree” of some kind, you’re often dealing with people who don’t see reading as “work.” Oh, Janet’s parents tried: her mother is hospitality itself, and her father, who died in 2004, was among the kindest men on the planet. But my reading in their house was often treated either as a leisure activity (and therefore interruptable by any number of other leisure activities or random conversations) or as downright antisocial (in which case the interruptions for activities and conversations were really attempts to bring me back into the human fold). Now, there’s a dicey question of cultural capital involved here, because although my birth family usually found itself in more precarious financial circumstances than Janet’s, both my parents were familiar with your basic <i>New York Review of Books</i> kind of literate culture. So any complaint from me along the lines of “I can’t do any reading in your parents’ house” could be taken, under the wrong circumstances, as a complaint about other people’s places on the International Bourdieu Chart. The funny thing was, though, that despite my parents’ familiarity with the idea of reading as “work,” I could never get anything read in their house either, because they too, on some level, saw my reading as “not doing anything” or “not doing anything in particular,” and therefore interruptable with news of distant family members, recent headlines, political controversies, sports updates, and the like. I remember vividly a vexed visit long ago to their then-new place in Virginia Beach, to which they’d moved when my father got a job at Old Dominion University; it was 1981, and I was a junior in college who was desperately trying to write a paper on <i>Tristram Shandy</i> over spring break. I would up having to be ferried to the tiny local public library each day, because (1) there were <i>no other public places to read in Virginia Beach</i> at that time (there’s a study to be done right there: Thomas Bender to the white courtesy phone! — and while I’m on the subject, thank goodness for Starbucks, which introduced the concept of “reading outside one’s house” to the entire area), (2) I had no car, and nothing is walkable in Virginia Beach, and (3) my parents simply could not stop themselves from chatting to me about whatever was crossing their minds no matter where Laurence Sterne and I tried to hide.

Occasionally, Janet’s parents’ cluelessness about their daughter’s and son-in-law’s chosen line of work made for uncomfortable moments — as when, on the eve of the 1988 MLA convention at which I had my first-ever job interviews, they asked me if I would try to look for a job in New England, preferably in western Massachusetts. “Preferably in western Massachusetts?” I replied. “Do you have any specific zip code in mind?”

No, I didn’t really say that. I may be an antisocial paper-grading Sterne-reading misanthrope, but I’m not a complete asshole. Instead, Janet and I patiently explained that academe doesn’t work that way, and that, in fact, I would be fortunate to find a job of any kind anywhere in the country. This came as a real shock to them, I’m afraid, and I could see their puzzlement in question form: You mean you both spent the better part of a decade getting these degrees and you can’t even decide where you want to work? You say <i>you’ll be lucky to get a job at all?</i> What kind of “line of work” is this?

So it was especially lovely, earlier this month, that Janet’s mother indulged my graduate seminar paper-grading; and I repaid the favor by digging a couple of holes for the rose bushes Janet had bought her. That was nothing. Much easier than reading, I assure you.

And these days, when my graduate students tell similar tales of growing increasingly incomprehensible to their families (and their partners’ families), who understand neither why they are studying the technological sublime in Futurism and Vorticism nor what kind of “job” this study will produce in the end, I tell them, first, there’s an easy way to find out whether the parents or in-laws in question have any idea how academe works. If they know what a “provost” is, then there’s a good chance they might understand the job market, hiring committees, the tenure process, the mechanics of peer review, and so forth — even if they don’t understand anything about Futurism or Vorticism. I mean, in what social context other than academe would one ever hear or use the word “provost”? (“Decanal” is another good one, since most people outside academe tend to assume it is the name of a powerful sedative.) But then I add, critically: it is not necessarily a Good Thing that one’s parents be literate in matters academic. In some cases — <a href=https://crookedtimber.org/2007/04/23/the-baroness-and-the-nutter-apologies-to-john-creasey/>like Harry’s, I gather</a> — it can be great fun. But you never know: sometimes it’s better to have parents or in-laws who have no idea what in the world you do than to have parents or in-laws who are up on the latest academic gossip. It all depends on whether you want to talk about provosts and deans and job searches with your parents. And, after all, there’s no guarantee that you’ll get any more <strike>reading</strike> work done in a house where everyone’s read the latest <i>NYRB</i> and <i>Chronicle of Higher Education</i>.