Enough

Enough is such a fascinating little word. In its adjective and adverb forms, it describes an amount or action that is adequate to satisfy a desire or need. As in: I bought five pounds of red, seedless grapes at the store today because one 2-lb. bag has not been enough. (True story, and I've eaten at least a pound of them since getting back from the store.) As an interjection, enough denotes impatience or exasperation. As in: "Enough of this talk about renewing the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest among us. That is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard in my life!" Both usages of the word are remarkably subjective. What is enough? When have you had enough and in what situations would you shout 'enough!' to bring an end to whatever was going on?

I've had a lot of encounters with the concept of enough recently, and not just in the produce aisle. In fact, in my professional life, enough is not a measure of mere adequacy but a constant clamor of competing agendas all looking to be satisfied. Because urban education is all about trying to bridge the gap between not enough and enough. We teachers deal with enough on a daily basis: how much teaching is enough? How much writing? How much homework? How much reading? How much test-prep? To fall short of enough is to keep my students from achieving parity with their more privileged peers. Anything less is not good enough. It can't be. There is too much at stake, starting with the 105 students in my class this year and extending out to the big, abiding, complex questions of justice, equality and the value of a child's mind, regardless of their background or circumstance. It's enough to make my head explode, but not enough to stop thinking about for very long.

And then these questions bump up against the other enoughs. Enough time. Enough balance. Enough support. Enough encouragement. When everything you give still doesn't feel like enough. I have had conversations with three different friends this week about when to say 'enough!' and how to carve a space away from the din of enough-issues at school. I spent two years in the desert trying to figure this out, and I feel better about it than I ever have before. The only real 'answer' I have doesn't silence the clamor, though. It simply allows me to hear it in a different way.

Which brings me to church. Not to religious faith in general, which is all fine and good, but to church today in Austin. Because what I heard today made me think even more about enough, and the way I'm trying to deal with it.

The New Testament reading was from 1 Timothy, chapter 6, the Bible at its social justice best. It's the passage about money being the root of all kinds of evil (see reference to renewing the tax cuts above), but there's more to it than that.

"But as for you, man [or woman] of God, shun all this [wealth]; pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness. ¹²Fight the good fight of the faith; take hold of the eternal life, to which you were called..."

This is a rallying cry if I've ever heard one. And at first glance it might sound as though a person should throw themselves into whatever they are doing, consequences be damned. Fight the good fight--and don't whine about it! Pursue righteousness--cause evil don't take a holiday! But sitting in the pew this morning, I felt the peace of these words in the phrase "take hold of eternal life." And that, of course, is what you do to save yourself from enough while still hearing its call. You take hold of life. You recognize the need of those you serve, and you find a way to build a wall with a gate that opens both ways. And you make a plan to put yourself on the far side of that gate on a regular basis. Believe me, it does take planning. It takes setting very concrete goals and then working as hard to reach them as you do with everything else. You don't wait until you're not needed. You will be waiting forever. You don't hope that someone will drag you away from the clamor, or build your wall for you, or design a cute gate with flexible hinges and give you permission to open it. You take hold of life, to which you were called.

For me, I have committed to going to Bikram yoga four days a week. I also have an advisee this year who doesn't do his homework pretty much ever. I keep him after school twice a week. I go to yoga twice a week (and twice on the weekend). The old me would have kept him after every day. The new me might have, too, except I already had this commitment in place, and, well, that commitment built my wall. The knowledge of what will happen to me if I ignore the wall is what built my gate. The reading from 1 Timothy reminded me today of why it makes sense. Even 2,000 years ago, they knew.

Fight the good fight and take hold of life. Anything less just won't be enough.

A lexicographical moment (in Spanish class)

I felt a little like Hermione Granger today, but I'm sorry. Linguistics really gets me going in that eyes shiny, face-lighting-up kind of way. It happened during my first Spanish class here in Austin, at a branch of the local community college. I was there with my principal and a colleague; we'd registered together because so many of our students and their parents are native Spanish speakers. Plus, Texas is one of the most unabashedly bilingual places I've ever experienced, up to and including Southern California, which, frankly, doesn't hold a candle to the Lone Star State's surprisingly non-strident approach to dual language issues. In public education and everywhere else. More on that another time.

My Hermione moment came during a mini-lecture on Spanish dictionaries. The professor mentioned, in passing, the Real Academia Espanola, the official body based in Madrid that guides and administers the Spanish language. Many languages, especially in Europe, have a similar group of intellectuals and linguists whose job it is to guard and protect a language against all invaders. The French academy, for example, is notorious for throwing a fit at the mere mention of borrowed words like "le weekend" or "le laptop." My fellow Spanish students figured that English has the same set up, so one of them asked about it.

"Oh no," the teacher said. "English doesn't have an academy."

"So, we just go to the dictionary to find out what words to use?" said the student. Cause, certainly, there had to be a central authority somewhere. Right?

And this is where my hand shot up and started waving in the air. My principal looked at me funny. My colleague muttered "teacher's pet" under her breath. But I couldn't help it. My heart started beating faster; my cheeks flushed with excitement. I had to share with my classmates one of the coolest things about the English language.

Because, in English, we don't go to the dictionary to find out what words to use and how. The dictionary comes to us. Yes, us. All of us speakers of English from the northern tip of Alaska to the heart of London, from the streets of New Delhi to the malls of the San Fernando Valley. We define the language we speak, literally. And the dictionary follows behind like a bloodhound on a trail, picking up the pronunciations, definitions and parts of speech and filing them away between its red leather covers. Though it is a handy reference and a big help when confronted with, say, pococurante or syllepsis, a dictionary is really just a snapshot of a language in constant motion.

If you don't believe me, read The Lexicographer's Dilemma by Jack Lynch. Books about English are a nerdy nonfiction sub-genre favorite of mine, and this is the best of the lot. In this book, Lynch explains how dictionaries are made, starting with the mother of them all, the Oxford English dictionary. The story of the OED is the story of English writ large, that crazy hodge podge generational undertaking for a crazy hodge podge language.

Because when the OED folks started to codify English (make lists of words and definitions) what they did was conduct massive and meticulous research into the way the words had been used throughout the ages. And they used those examples to construct their definitions. They didn't decide to define opalescent as 'having a milky iridescence.' They discovered that whenever opalescent was used, that's what it meant. And if we ever start using opalescent in a different sense and keep using it that way, the dictionary will re-write the definition. It won't redefine the word--English speakers would have already done that. The dictionary will merely record the change. That's its job.

Now, I love words a ridiculous amount, from those SAT monstrosities to the newest middle school slang. I love grammar. I love teaching writing. At the end of the day, I love meaning, and how it is constructed. It's one of those endlessly complex and fascinating aspects of the human experience. I can't get enough. So, when the aforementioned Spanish teacher, who was scoring mad points with her linguistics acumen, used irregardless instead of regardless later on in class, I shuddered. I'll admit. But, while I appreciate an excellent vocabulary and have pretty much dedicated my professional life to promoting the well-written sentence, I would not change a single thing about English. If irregardless comes into standard usage (it is currently listed as non-standard and dates back to the 1930s), I will not be one of the (many) people throwing my body between it and Websters. There are those who long for more rigidity in our mother tongue. As much as I love it, I'm not one of them. To try to fit English into a sturdier frame would be to rob it of its greatest strengths: it's responsiveness, its dizzying array of synonyms, its viral slang, its expansive, fascinating messiness.

So I told my Spanish class about the dictionary and why we don't have an academy. I stopped short of the OED, but just barely. I was a blaze of enthusiasm and a possible embarrassment to my friends. But I couldn't stop myself. It's why I'm writing to you now, perhaps a more receptive audience, before I tuck my inner Hermione back inside my head and wait for the next nerdy nonfiction book on English to make the rounds.

A chicken in every...

The keeping of chickens in this day and age, especially if one is not historically from farm stock or living in Iowa, is legitimate cause for comment. In truth, the three people I've met who keep chickens find endless opportunities to bring up the hilarious antics of their useful, eco-friendly pets (no one keeps them for meat, after all). And upon being introduced to the chickens of one's friends, it's easy to jump on the bandwagon (band coop?). Chickens are hysterically funny in their bobbing, strutting, pea-brained way. They might not snuggle up to you like a kitten, but they, like all domesticated animals, certainly know how to capture the fond attention of The One With The Food.

A friend in Austin has roommates who keep chickens, three of the standard orange-y/red feathered sort (though one apparently lays blue eggs). I discovered last night how these roommates come to be chicken owners, and it's a story I had to pass on because it says so much about the world these days (plus, it's the funniest chicken story I've ever heard, and that's saying something...)

Apparently Roommate #1 was driving down a fairly busy Austin street about three months ago when he saw a woman with a cell phone following a rooster down the sidewalk. R. #1 decided to pull over and chivalrously ask if she needed help. Wherein the woman explained that she'd come across the rooster (still heading east toward downtown) and was following it while dialing through her contact list on the hunt for a chicken savior. R. #1 offered to take the rooster. (I thought it'd be cool. And I have a backyard.)

Woman (concerned): Do you know anything about chickens?

R. #1 (totally lying): Of course!

Woman (who didn't own the rooster but somehow felt responsible for it according to the Societal Rules of Engagement circa 2010): Well...as long as you know what to do I guess it's OK.

Thus given permission, R #1 grabbed the rooster and tossed him in the backseat. Instant urban chicken owner.

Enter Roommate #2, girlfriend of R #1. Upon hearing that her boyfriend had picked up a rooster on the side of the road, she requested, calmly from all reports, that he build a coop, which he did. She then purchased three hens for company.

And if it all ended there, that'd be enough. But there's a coda to this story. A month later, after endless 4:30 a.m. wake-up calls, R #1 and #2 got rid of the rooster, but kept the chickens.

Me (eying their enormous lab/Great Dane mix): Umm...what did you do with the rooster?

R #1: I put him on craiglist for $5. He sold in about an hour to some lady who wanted him for breeding.

I love this story so much. In addition to the truly priceless images it evokes (rooster bobbing along the street, concerned citizen playing the part of mother hen at five paces back), it is such a charming example of freedom in action. Not the red-white-and-blue bluster we hear about from the bombasts, but daily-life freedom, the kind we don't usually think about but maybe should.

A widespread (often legit) criticism of American culture is that we have no culture at all. Instead, we are a collection of fragments: fragmented families where once extended clans lived in the same house; fragmented neighborhoods where we once knew everyone around us; fragmented values in this salad bowl of peoples and backgrounds; fragmented friendships conducted over Facebook rather than face to face. But this independence has also made us more flexible and open to the world around us. Rather than worrying what grandma or the Joneses will think (since grandma lives in Florida and we don't even know the name of the family next door), we can do things like follow a rooster down the public street or decide, in the amount of time it takes to pull over, that we'd maybe like to give that rooster a home. There's plenty of room in the backyard, after all, and no one around but a girlfriend, a roommate and a huge dog. It also makes it possible, even preferable, to interact with a cell-phone-toting stranger and negotiate the transfer of a rooster among equals, united only by their concern for the bird and uncomplicated by rigid class barriers, clan affiliation, ethnic strife or gender issues. For instance, in much of the world, this kind of interaction between a man and woman who were strangers would never happen.

Now, you can't market this story. You can't say, God bless America where a man can pick up a rooster off the street, claim him for a time, then sell him on craigslist. I'm cracking myself up just writing it. But it is still an "only in America" story, not just for its ridiculousness, but for the social fluidity of the whole thing, from the first SOS phone call from the rescue lady to R. #1's entree into chicken ownership to the craigslist-surfing new owner driving the rooster into the sunset.

Or maybe its just me...

The intellectual bling of Terry Castle

So, I'm not an intellectual. There are some people who read with interest and awe-inspiring enjoyment academic tomes on their favorite topic or Greek tragedy or Proust. Not me. The bustling literary marketplace always seems to hold something just a bit more compelling, like the latest in an ever-growing list of favorite mystery series, or some nerdy nonfiction (I recently read an ode to librarians called This Book is Overdue. Cool!) You know, something entertaining. Something mainstream. Something written with a general audience in mind. For a bibliophile, I can't claim to have delved very deeply or esoterically into my hobby of choice. A nice, broad survey of the literary landscape is more my speed. Any cred I get only comes from reading fast enough, and often enough, to cover a lot of ground.

But every once in awhile, a gem of a book comes along that is both ridiculously fun and smart (and not science fiction, which is regularly both). Intellectual smart. And I remember that, while I might not be a real intellectual, I love hanging around them, literarily speaking. To me, these authors are like glassblowers or acrobats. They possess a rare, special gift worthy of being ooohed and ahhed by the general public, or at least their adoring fans. This is not to detract for the workaday writers I can't do without. After all, watching glassblowing or high-wire daredevilry would get tiresome eventually. But there is something absolutely rapturous in the combination of true braininess and excellent, lucid writing. As anyone who's been to college knows, the two do not frequently go hand in hand.

The latest jewel in this rarefied collection is The Professor and Other Writings by Terry Castle, humanities professor at Stanford and apparently hugely well-known literary critic in intellectual circles (hence, not to most of us...). Sure, she's an expert in 18th century literature (ghost stories, according to Wikipedia!), but her command of the English language regularly transforms the page from a literary work (words adding up to something beautiful) into what can only be described as an artistic portrait of word usage. So that you could take the page, frame it and put it in the Louvre titled "The word 'adumbrate' in context." Terry Castle (b. 1953), and everyone would know exactly why it was there. I throw around the word 'page' loosely here. I'm reading the book on my Kindle, and thank God, given the number of times I've had to use the built-in dictionary. I haven't seen some of these words in print since the SAT, if ever. This just adds to the deep affection for, say, the casual use of 'tyro' in the first essay. I remember learning that word around the same time my 11th grade English class was reading The Tempest, and I always thought it'd make a great name for a Shakespeare character: Prospero, Benvolio, Horatio, Tyro. Castle, of course, uses it correctly to mean a beginner or newbie. And she just drops it in, no muss, no fuss. It's thrilling.

There's also the actual content of the essays, all of which are highly personal, even blog-like, reflections on various passions (World War I, music, interior design, rubber stamps, just to name a few) with plenty of family drama, relational angst and pop culture references thrown in. You don't have to be particularly interested in the topic to get sucked in. In fact, it might be better to start without strong feelings either way because Castle, like all good writers, has enough enthusiasm (and opinions) for all of us. I read with fascination her deconstruction of home decor magazines through the lens of the post-9/11 world, where both her love of interior design and her unease with its inherent, perhaps morally questionable, middle-class escapism, come through in equal measure. Maybe I like her writing so much because no matter how refined (or not) the topic, there is always a noticeable dose of heart and self-reflective (even self-deprecating) humor woven in.

Though I can connect with almost none of the topics (not that it matters), who Castle is is very appealing, as are some of her less-explored asides. I'm actually super psyched to find a intellectual woman writer from California who is not Joan Didion (I know some of you are fans, but her writing doesn't have enough heart for me.) Castle's parents are British, but she was born in San Diego and spent all but three years of her childhood in Southern California. She writes about the state with the fondness and honesty of a native, using it as more than a backdrop, but not quite a character in several essays. I love how she captures that "more than just scenery" aspect of living and traveling in California. It makes my own native heart smile.

She also has a (to me) refreshingly and unashamedly post-Freudian view of being a lesbian. She examines head-on some of her more gendered, even 'masculine' ideas without (in my opinion) once suggesting that being a lesbian somehow involves wanting to be a man. She writes (too briefly) about the affection between straight men and lesbians in a way that suggests feminist scholars would swoon dead away at the thought. (She even calls it "the real love that dare not speak its name.") The friendship between gay men and straight women has been examined, even televised (hello Will & Grace), but that a similar fondness could grow between lesbians and straight guys is somehow beyond the pale? I look forward to hearing more from Castle about this, especially since I don't get what the big deal is, despite all those women's studies classes under my belt.

In fact, I want to hear more from Castle about pretty much everything, which is why I'll be looking up her oeuvre and digging in over the next few months. I recommend you do the same, starting with this book. If you do, let me know! We can trade our favorite word-usage portraits and admire the trove of sparkling sentences and shiny insights. Intellectual bling at its finest, even for those of us who aren't intellectuals.