30 minutes

I find myself with 30 minutes and no obvious task pressing itself upon me, demanding to get done. Next week is a short one, only three days of classes before a four-day weekend. I'm running (well, jogging) (well, mostly walking) (okay, all walking) a race tonight, so I don't need to squeeze in time at the gym. I glance up at my open tabs and there is my blog, opened when my browser starts like everyday. So here is my 30 minutes.

Like this unscheduled time, I feel the unbearable lightness of waiting. The steps toward my book's publication have been many in the last four months -- some big, like the compiling of the index and the final proofing of the galleys, which I did in late July and early August; and some small, like approving cover copy and answering copy-editor queries. But on October 5 my patient production editor sent the book to the printer. Now I look forward to holding it in my hands. A part of me worries that it will seem small and insignificant when I do, not worth the years I invested (not to mention the unbounded generosity of my interviewees). A part of me defensively shouts that I don't care if nobody reads it. But of course I do. All those steps, large and small, have left me proud of what it's turned out to be -- a pride that makes me vulnerable to what becomes of it.

And meanwhile my husband takes his own career-expanding steps (like his byline in the New York Times) and my children grow (into their choirs and online communities and YouTube channels and artistic endeavors). I think about what comes next after this book. I'm contracted to write a volume in this series, and I'm looking forward to it, but taking the first step is always difficult. I'm having a great semester teaching, and that makes me want to create new classes, but I also know that I should be making what I'm already teaching even better, for next time -- learning by redoing.

I turned 50 last week. It was marvelous; I feel great, I've lost 30 pounds since this time last year, I'm so much happier than I was two years ago. 50 feels like a freeing milestone instead of an ominous one, like the moment when the drive to the trailhead ends and the actual adventure begins. Noel threw a little gathering over Mexican food and fishbowl-sized margaritas, and I thanked my lucky stars that my terrible friendship skills haven't yet driven away my generous and forgiving friends. We're starting our twentieth year of marriage. I find it hard to believe how much we've done of what we always wanted to do, and how close we are to what we always wanted to become.

My time is up, and I'm off to the conclusion of a work week, spent as always with my students listening to some provocative, challenging, informative ideas. Until the next half-hour presents itself ...

The holly and the ivy

It's Christmastime in Conway, and a couple of times recently Noel has reminded me what we were doing at this time last year. The forecast showed a snowstorm bearing down on us, and for almost a week ahead of time, I fretted and made contingency plans for our planned drive to Nashville and flight to St. Simons. Eventually we made the decision to open presents on Christmas Eve and drive to Nashville on Christmas Day, mere hours ahead of the storm which ended up dumping nine inches of snow on our empty home.

The contrast with this year couldn't be greater. With no place to go, we are baking cookies, watching movies, crafting with the kids, and paying attention to the weather only with respect to the best time to make a grocery run. Noel's folks are arriving on Christmas Eve. I'll play handbells at the midnight service. And we'll open our presents on Christmas morning, as the baby Jesus intended.

I'm highly aware of my stress level these days. Many of the big decisions I made about my future this year were based on observation of what stresses me out in bad and good ways. Whole-family travel is a high-stress affair for me. I worry and make multiple levels of plans and try to keep everything as under control as possible. It's not something I should try to avoid in order to make my life more relaxed, of course (although to my shame, I do). But when I am not obligated to trek with everyone to some far-off destination -- especially on a tight schedule at symbolically-charged and heavily-trafficked cultural moments rendezvousing with multiple branches of the family, like at Christmas -- my quality of life shoots through the roof as my level of stress stays comfortably low.

As the years go by, the kids grow up, and the parents get older, each year's holiday planning is haunted by the shrinking number of opportunities it's using up. A chance to see the grandparents. A chance to establish and reinforce traditions. A chance to give. A chance to enjoy. A chance to worship. A chance to reflect. With every chance taken, exchanged, or passed up, a chunk of our family's life slides into memory.

I know everyone experiences these tradeoffs at this time of life. I wish I handled them with more grace, less self-absorption, more generosity, less anxiety. What you don't expect, I think, is that these phases of transition just keep coming at you, at times when you once thought that you'd be settled and finished with all that. And whatever choice you make, there's no way to completely avoid regret.

Nothing but a number

When I was a kid, like any good middle child I measured my birthdays and age against that of my two brothers. Specifically against my older brother, who was born three and a half years before me. When his March 30 birthday rolled around, I know I had six months ahead where he would be four years older than me, in terms of the round yearly number we all use post-toddlerhood.  Then in October, I would catch back up, and enjoy six months of being only three years his junior.

Yesterday my brother turned 50. That's a big one, and I've known it was headed my way for some time. The fact that Dwayne has hit it brings the reality of its approach home again.  Right now he's four years older than me; in October, I'll close the gap again.

Another way to look at age is in terms of career. I got started pretty late, as many academics do, having taken my time wending my way through grad school.  I landed my first and only university job in 1999, and I'm currently completing my thirteenth year of teaching. I'll be eligible to apply for full professor status after next year (my first couple of years of teaching were non-tenure track, so I lost a couple of rungs on the ladder).  And then I'll be started the next phase of my career, probably looking around to see if my administrative experience might make me useful elsewhere, probably putting myself in position to succeed my current boss when he retires in a few years.

I've got maybe twenty years left in this business. More than I've got behind me. That's kind of the opposite of the age number staring me in the face.

This morning I ran my second 5K of 2012.  I hope there will be a handful more before the year ends. When I say "ran," it's even more of an exaggeration than usual; not only was it my usual 12-minute-mile slow jog, but I also walked a lot more than I usually would find acceptable. You see, on Thursday afternoon I came down with the most sudden, violent fever I can remember. I was knitting with my students one minute, and the next I was feeling like crap and trying to get home before the shakes started in earnest. I shivered for an hour, ached for another, then took Motrin. And it was over. I waited for the next twenty-four hours for the other shoe to drop, for the gastrointestinal part of the virus to take hold or whatever, and it never did.

So I took it easy today, still cautious after that strange interlude.  And I remember that even though this is the first time in my life that I've ever attempted to run 5Ks, meaning I'm about as healthy as I've ever been, I'm not getting any younger. I don't know how 50 is supposed to feel, and I'm pretty sure I don't feel it anyway, but I wonder how long I'll be able to ignore my age. No use asking Dwayne; he's a lifelong distance runner and still looks and acts like my default image of him, the athletic collegian.

What really makes me feel young is that I keep changing, I keep learning, and I keep reinventing myself. In that respect I really look forward to becoming a full professor and being liberated to look around and see what opportunities are out there for me. It's the kind of new stage in life that gets me energized. Sometimes the years you put into a career are better than a time machine that could take you back to the beginning.

A weekend away

For almost all of the last twelve years -- I don't think I've missed one since I moved to Arkansas -- I've been coming to Dallas on this weekend. It's the annual meeting of the Southwest Commission on Religious Studies, an umbrella organization that organizes a conference for the members of the American Academy of Religion, the Society of Biblical Literature, the American Schools of Oriental Research, and the Association for the Scientific Study of Religion in Texas and surrounding states.

Soon after I started attending, some of the organizers asked me to take leadership roles. I started as a chair of one of the program sessions, then served on the executive committee for the AAR's local branch, then agreed to become the AAR coordinator for the region. The six years of that job are almost up; next year will be my last in that position.

When I come to this meeting, I have a lot of jobs to do. Make decisions as a director of the Commission. Liaise between the AAR portion of the meeting and the meeting planner. Drum up attendance for the plenary. Give most of the reports at the AAR region's annual business meeting. And almost always, give a paper, moderate a session, sit on a panel.

This same weekend, my dad is going to a meeting that he's been attending for years. He's a member of the Kairos team that goes into a prison and spends three days with a group of inmates. The meeting involves months of preparation, like mine. It's packed with activities and a tight schedule, like mine. My dad has several leadership roles to enact, like I do. And there's a connection, too, with the premise of the meeting being religious. Mine is about the study of religion in an academic setting, and his is about practicing one religion's mandate to visit those in prison.

I'm sure readers will have their own opinion about which one is more in sync with their values and more salutary for society. As for me, well, we do good work here at the Southwest Commission on Religious Studies, but it's certainly neither as risky nor as courageous as the work of Kairos. I dare say that while our meeting may reach more people to advance their understanding in ways that improve their teaching of thousands of students, those people reached are already committed to that path, and so the advance is not revolutionary for most or all.

I dare say that the 40 inmates this Kairos weekend will reach are much more in need, and the effect on those men of being listened to and loved is potentially enormous, life-changing. College professors are used to being listened to. We have high social status. We are respected. The opposite is true, in all cases, for men in prison.

You might want to read about my dad's experience this weekend in his blog: http://walkinganewpath.blogspot.com. I am always humbled by what he relates. He may be the most self-critical blogger I read among the hundreds of feeds I follow. While serving others and seeking truth, he's always questioning his own motives and actions -- sometimes to a fault. I need to have more of that in my life, though. My confidence and ambition frequently lead me to believe that I'm a much better, more worthy person than anyone has a right to think themselves.

My dad has always been my role model. These days we often start from different premises in terms of our political and religious stances. The measure of our sincerity and effort surely is that sometimes we end up in the same place.

Those who are with Dad on his Kairos weekend don't have the same doctrine or politics as he does, either. Kairos is interdenominational, and folks participate from the liberal mainline churches, the nondenominational fellowships, the evangelicals and fundamentalists. When they read the Bible, some are reading God's dictation while others are reading human efforts to bear witness. But all are convinced that following the example of Jesus and Paul to pay special attention to society's outcasts is a good idea, good enough to take lots of time and effort and risk to undertake.

I'm convinced of it, too, and convicted. Here I am doing the work given me to do, and I'll do it with all my might, and I know it will make a difference and be appreciated. But how thankful I am that those rockier fields have found their laborers, too, and that I have some insight into their efforts through my dad.

Ahhhhhhh

Noel is home from Sundance. Two weeks of faculty candidate visits, kid transport, lunch construction, orientations, book discussions, and early bedtimes have finally ended!   I'm always so grateful when our routine goes back to normal.  Here are some of the things that change when Noel's film festival trips are over.

1. I only make breakfast once a week.  This is good because I really have only one breakfast plan: honey toast.
2. I don't lose track of whether I had a shower that day or not.
3. Somebody else makes the tough decisions of which show on the TiVo to watch first.
4. The grocery shopping gets done in a much more thorough and orderly fashion.
5. I feel a greater obligation to blog, because if I don't, Noel will ask me if I'm going to.
6. I resume learning about new (and old) music.
7. I'm not the only one telling the kids to pick up their books and games.
8. Somebody gets my references to "don't have a car like that Google" and "it's a bleeping burrito."
9. Packages get opened and boxes get recycled instead of piling up haphazardly on flat surfaces.
10. I get uninterrupted crafting time while the kids are taken on errands or to playgrounds.

Life is so good when we're all together again. This weekend is going to be a celebration of all that goodness.

'Twas the night

Being home on Christmas Eve is a lovely thing.  As a member of the handbell choir, my traveling on Christmas makes it difficult for the church to enjoy bell music at the midnight Christmas Eve service.  So when I'm able to be here, it's not just me that benefits.

This year we worked through December 20, which left precious little time to think about packing or traveling.  Instead of making all those preparations and undergoing the attendant anxiety, I have sat in the front room with the lighted tree and knit a sweater, Noel has baked, and the kids have enjoyed each other's company.

Tomorrow morning we will wake up at our usual early hour, have a relaxed breakfast, and open a roomful of gifts.  I will make the brined turkey I didn't get to make at Thanksgiving, and we will have a festive midday meal.  In short, it's just the holiday I remember from when I was a kid, and the one I always dream of.

But there is a sacrifice to this kind of holiday -- the absence of extended family.  Sometimes Noel's parents come to us at Christmas or Thanksgiving, but this year they were tied to their home by an elderly relative whose alternate caretaker couldn't travel to take their place.  My folks have better, closer options to be with kids or in-laws around the solstice holidays; we can't expect them to make a two-day drive to be with us.

I've dealt poorly in the past with the pressure to pack up my kids and make that same trek, or even a shorter one, at such a busy and hectic time.  We've had some awful ordeals to make the family gathering.  I admit that I never want to do it again.  But my desire for a Christmas at home is at increasing tension with the passing years, and with the advancing age and potential decline in health of my parents.  Am I passing up the only Christmases with their Granny Lou and Papa that my children will ever be able to have?

When I was a kid, we drove an hour or so to see my paternal grandparents on Christmas Day for a second round of gifts and a big dinner, and visited my maternal grandmother at her apartment in town.  Later my Papa and Nana lived on our property, and my Mamie was in a nursing home about ten minutes' drive away.  I'm sure if that were my familial obligation these days I'd find a way to complain about it, but compared to the effort and expense it actually takes for a visit, I wish it were an option.  Over the river and through the woods for us means down to the airport and connecting through Memphis, fraught with peril and costing more than a grand at the best of times, let alone at the packed year-end season.

I don't feel guilty about staying home on Christmas and enjoying the coziness of leisure, church, local traditions, and immediate family -- I really don't.  But I know that it's more important year after year to find some way to gather with the whole clan.  If not at the holidays, then during the summer when schedules are looser and weather less treacherous and transport easier.  We're lucky to still have a nearly complete family tree with which to reunite.  And we won't have them forever.  Whatever the season, we can make it a holiday if we're all together.

Half hours of cheer

At this time of year, Noel likes to put searches for "holiday" and "Christmas" on the TiVo and see what comes up.  This year he's harvested a bumper crop of Christmas-themed sitcom episodes from all across the TV spectrum, from Happy Days and Bob Newhart to Becker and 8 Simple Rules For Dating My Teenage Daughter.

The plots are pretty standard.  People obsess over getting the right gifts for each other.  They try to find the perfect tree.  They attempt to make up for the shortcomings of Christmases past by engineering an ideal Christmas in the present.  They get sloshed on eggnog and sing carols and do what everybody does in sitcoms: bond with their families, natural or engineered.

I find myself touched by this slow parade of sentiment.  Christmas doesn't necessarily bring out the best in sitcoms in terms of originality or humor.  But it's that family element that almost always comes to the fore and reminds us what our culture makes of its entertainment and its holidays.  We're too independent to be completely tied down to the families we were given, but we long for the acceptance and closeness and belonging that only family can afford.  And so all these shows hinge on us assembling something to do that job for us.

Watched all in a row, the message can't help but come across.  I'm lucky to have a family that loves me.  Especially at Christmastime.  And especially since we don't have to go through three acts in 22 minutes to get there.

The scrapbook of memories

One way Noel gets me out of my homebody ways, up off the couch, and out into the world doing things I ordinarily judge to be too much hassle is to remind me that we need to make memories for the kids.

That resonates with me. My childhood is full of such memories, from vacations to family gatherings to all sorts of special events, and I realize now that my parents were going out of their way to make sure we had experiences to tuck away in our memory banks.

We don't have the resources to give our kids some of the trips I took as a kid. But thankfully, our kids are of the disposition to take our word for it that some little trip or experience is special. They open all their senses as wide as they will go and drink in those hours and days. Then they regale us with their memories for years to come. I know we have been successful in making memories when I see their eyes light up as they fall over themselves telling us what they saw, felt, heard, tasted, and did.

Because we're the only branch of the family west of the Mississippi, it's hard on everyone else to find a reunion location far enough our way to make travel reasonable. We're always going to have the longest drive or be the ones who have to take a couple of flights, and I'm grateful that my brothers and parents appreciate and understand that. For my part, I promise to remember how important those memories are, especially when they involve family, and cooperate as best as our schedule will allow in setting aside time and taking some trouble to make sure they happen.

Off the grid

We're heading to the Tennessee mountains on Tuesday (by way of an overnight stopover at the in-laws' on Monday) to meet up with my extended family.  My parents will be there ... my older brother and his wife will be there with their college-bound son and teenage daughter ... and my younger brother and his wife will be there with their three children who are close to our kids' ages.

I am on record as an unreconstructed homebody.  Normally, it's fair to say, I resent being uprooted from my comfortable recliner and routine in order to vacate and recreate.  Sometimes I even dread it.

But I'm actually looking forward to the upcoming week's trip.  I'm actually thinking that I can let Noel drive a leg or two while I read or knit.  (I'm a nervous car rider and usually insist on driving the whole way, but 9 hours is ... a lot.)  Here's what would make this vacation enjoyable for me:

• Time with my kids.  They've been on the go and away from the house in various camps for the last several weeks.  I find that I've missed their company more than I expected.  They love having fun, and I'm looking forward to having fun with them.
• Time with my siblings and parents.  We have a great time when we're together.  My brothers are a barrel of laughs.  When we get together to play games and share memories, it's always a blast.
• Time to read.  I've got a couple of good books going at the moment -- Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, which is our freshman summer reader this year and a favorite of mine from my own teenage years, and Anthony Trollope's The Warden.  A half hour of uninterrupted reading time at lakeside, or on the patio, or while the kids play on the playground, sounds like heaven, especially if I get to rinse and repeat.
• Time to knit.  Of course.  Two projects going, one that's completely mindless and one that's semimindless.  What a joy it would be to see measurable progress on them for each day we're away.
• Time to gain perspective.  There's been a lot of anxiety in my life this summer, from the treasured colleague interviewing for another job to the political crisis in Washington.  I need to get away from the relentless grind of those stressors.

I think I've reached a new point in my relationship with both my families -- the one I was born into and the one I've made.  On the one hand, the kids are at the age when they find it exciting to travel and are willing to see the disruption of their routines as an adventure.  So I worry less about the problem we're getting ourselves into by uprooting them and making all that effort.  On the other hand, I sense the increased urgency in spending time with my parents and siblings while we can all be together, in continuing to stock the storehouse of memories with those experiences.  

I don't mean it to sound morbid. I'm happy that these two movements have coincided at this point in my life.  Only if it had happened too late, or if I hadn't recognized it in time, would it be cause for regret.  Take it all together, and I'm hoping for a vacation that's more renewal than endurance test this time around, and for many years to come.

Familiar ways

There are a lot of ingredients to a good marriage. One that is frequently overlooked (except in wedding movies) is in-law compatibility. I was raised in a family that didn't take kindly to roughing it. I've never spent a night in a tent. And if I had married into a family of rugged outdoorspeople, shared vacations would be considerably more difficult than they are.

Instead, fortuitously, Noel's family likes a little good life with their nature. Their idea of relaxation is an afternoon with a complicated board game or a jigsaw puzzle rather than outdoor exertion. Not that they are averse to a stroll through the woods or a campfire; just that it's not their raison d'etre.

So vacations like the one I'm on now are low-stress for me. I don't have to gear myself up for unfamiliar adventures. "Familiar" is, in fact, the key word in my ability to relax and enjoy myself. Doing what I did with my family: playing games, reading books, going to the pool, locating and utilizing all available park amenities. I enjoy challenges and doing new things -- but if doing them is being pressed upon me rather than emerging from my choice and sense of adventure, it's stressful. This week is not about any more stress than "when's dinner." And key to that sense of calm is a family atmosphere that wraps me in the familiar.

The limits of obsession

When I get on a roll, real life annoys me. I'd like to do whatever I am currently obsessed with doing with from morning until night. Moderation is not for me. If it's something I enjoy, I'm not interested in taking breaks. Right now there are three things I'd like to just keep doing until they are done. I'm working on a storage and decorating plan for our extensive collection of games; I've got loads of yarn I'd like to knit up; and I'm at the beginning of a couple of fascinating research projects.

But that way of working isn't compatible with family life. Kids won't let you take over their spaces for days to decorate. Parenting can't be put on hold for marathon knitting or research.

The summer comes with longish stretches of time during which my obsessive nature can express itself. I can take hours or days and just do one thing, because there are fewer tasks to get crammed into each day. No classes, fewer meetings, periods of time when people are on vacation and the office is empty. And I can start to think that I have a right to that organization of time and that one-thing-at-a-time, all-the-time lifestyle.

Home brings me back to reality. It's not worth thinking about huge redecorating projects until somebody could be persuaded to take the kids for two weeks. I can't pull all-nighters in the library or crank out a sweater in a weekend. So the things I want so much to do have to get done in bits and pieces. And to be frank, that's a good thing. Because the problem with that obsessive tendency is that it can be an excuse not to do anything at all on the grounds that you can't do everything you'd like. Better by far to tackle a minor reorganization of a room than a wholesale retrofit, since my visions for the latter are probably unrealistically grandiose Better to fit my knitting and my research around the other tasks for which I'm responsible, lest I fail to live up to what I imagine limitless time at those occupations would produce.

Knit one, teach four

There's an absolutely beautiful LYS (local yarn store) on St. Simon's Island. It's called The Stitchery, and to walk inside is to be inspired. Floor-to-ceiling shelves of Cascade, Araucania, Malabrigo, and (it being the balmy seashore) cotton and linen of all kinds.

So I don't just credit my own gifts of knitted accessories this Christmas for my two sister-in-laws' desire to learn to knit. They had ample temptation in the bins and shop samples of The Stitchery.

Some of it was the gorgeous, buttery Malabrigo Worsted that they picked out for their first garter stitch scarves. But can I admit to a touch of pride that I taught them to knit?

Karen learned to knit.

Dawn learned to knit. (Although I could use her help taking a decent picture.)

Even my camera-shy mom learned to knit. And although it was harder for her because of problems she's been experiencing with her grip, she not only kept doggedly at it, but even went back to the LYS after I left to get more help and advice.

But best of all, Cady Gray learned to knit.

She took to it like a fish to water, if I might say so without undue pride.

It's her own pride that really makes it worthwhile. As we knit, she tells me how she knows what steps come next and how she is reading her knitting to see when she makes a mistake and how to fix it. And I tell her how wonderful she is, and she smiles and knits another stitch.

Modern marvels

Two interesting, seemingly unrelated events occurred today. Noel talked to Jim Parsons, the actor who plays Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory. And my dad joined Twitter.

Sheldon has become quite a famous television character in the show's two seasons, at least among a certain community. Although he's portrayed as simply a particularly obsessive and socially tone-deaf scientist, people on the autistic spectrum (and their families) have become convinced that the character has Asperger's syndrome. I certainly see the diagnosis. The way Sheldon interrogates anyone who brings him Chinese food to make sure they got everything exactly right, or the way he tries to explain the possibilities of a potential friendship using a flow chart -- it all seems eerily familiar.



Sheldon, like Archer, is most comfortable with numbers and computers rather than people. On the other hand, my father has always been quite social. But he's a savvy adopter of technology, as well. I'm not sure what led him to create a Twitter persona -- media coverage? Facebook? -- but there he was this morning, sending me a follow request.

I wonder if he'll be a listener, or whether he'll join in with his own status updates. Who wouldn't enjoy seeing what their dad is up to several times a day?

Twitter skeptics -- and technophobes in general -- tend to decry the ascendency of mediated communication over face-to-face interaction. But when you move away from your family and friends, practically all your communication is mediated. As older generations start to adopt social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter, they're finding that these are ways to have more contact with the people you care about, not less.

For people like Sheldon, the mediation is essential; people are bewildering bundles of chaos without some filter to increase the signal and cut the noise. But even for the most socially adept among us, these tools can aggregate our loci of concern and allow us to stay connected with more people, more often.

How others see us

Archer made a carousel at school out of a circle of paper, crayon-colored horses, and signs affixed to popsicle sticks. I'm guessing that the assignment was to represent his family. Here's what he wrote:

Noel
He goes to work.
He is my dad.
He takes trips.

Donna
She goes to UCA.
She is my mom.
She goes to meetings.

Cady Gray
She is my 4 yr old sister.
She goes to Child Study Center.
She is my friend.

My uncle Dave

This is my uncle Dave. It's 1978, and he's at my grandparents' house on Lake Chickamauga opening Christmas presents.

I can hear him right now, as he rips open the paper. "Oh," he might say in his soft, expressive voice. "What's this? Oh my! Well, thankyouverymuch!" Uncle Dave was always understated. He had a low, ready laugh. He talked quickly, and usually quietly.

Every Christmas I looked forward to my present from Uncle Dave. He always got something unusual -- something a little exotic, usually with no practical purpose. I could never predict his presents. They were always a total surprise. I treasured them for their complete lack of utility.

Uncle Dave was my father's younger brother, the second of three boys. He studied music and became a renowned and accomplished pipe organist. He was the first in my father's family to get a Ph.D.

Uncle Dave was gay. Nobody in the family talked about it. I don't know anything about his relationships. I have vague memories of hearing my parents talk about his roommate. Of course I didn't understand anything about it until I was well into adulthood.

My uncle Dave died on Saturday, of complications brought on after a fall. I hadn't seen him in many, many years. I hope that for all those years of our separation he lived as I remember him: a world traveler, an effortless artist, a keeper of rare and unusual gifts.

The single life

Noel and the kids took off this morning for Nashville to visit Grandma Libby and Grandpa Alex. I was originally supposed to go with them, but my boss needed to go out of town this weekend for a family matter and I was needed to take his place on the podium at the summer commencement ceremony.

So here I am with four days of singlehood. And I can't help but remember the long years of singlehood after college, when I lived in apartments alone. I enjoyed being in control of my destiny. I liked my self-concocted routine. I felt comfortable being accountable for my time to myself and no one else, at least during my off hours.

It's been more than a decade since I've lived that way, though. Marriage, initially, is almost like living alone -- just with two people. By that I mean that as a couple you are in control of your destiny, as a couple you have a self-concocted routine, as a couple you are accountable for your time to yourself and no one else. As long as you reach agreement on those matters, you live life independent of alien agendas.

Almost seven years of parenthood, however, have put me in a psychic place far, far away from that lifestyle. Being a parent is the opposite of being accountable to an authority figure like a parent; power to set the rules is beside the point, because the responsibility flows from the weakness and vulnerability of the other party. One quickly adapts to being tied down to other people, with only stolen hours of respite -- a night out, a getaway when the grandparents are visiting, etc.

When my boss initially asked if I could take his place, I thought of the option of sending Noel to Nashville alone. It had its attractions: several days to myself to get work done and to enjoy leisure time, just two weeks before the start of classes. But I didn't feel like I could ask him to take on that burden of solo parenting and travel when we had confidently planned to go as a family. So I didn't even mention it. Instead I presented the option of delaying the trip by a few days, until after commencement. That didn't work for him because of his writing schedule, which he'd already juggled to fit the original dates. "Why don't I take them by myself?" he suggested.

He may be regretting that offer now, as he tries to squeeze into his visit the hours of concentrated work he's going to need to meet his professional commitments, all the while parenting two kids. The grandparents provide backup, but not at the same level as a spouse; foisting the kids off on them while begging for time to work is a bit harder when they are your hosts, hoping to have fun with the grandchildren but not be overburdened with them.

And I was regretting the offer, too, at 8 this morning when they drove away with what seemed like far too little fuss or preparation. Toss some clothes in a bag, make sure their backpacks have crayons and stuffed animals, and then suddenly, without any buildup, they're receding southward, out of my control. I was briefly convinced that I'd made a major mistake -- the loneliness that hit me was like a battering ram. That tiny car, those little people in the back -- how could I let them go?

Yet even as I composed myself, went on about my day, and started to revisit the rhythms of the single life, they still have a hold on me. They've given me four days -- a gift of time. I have to use it to make progress on important work, to indulge in recreation, to revitalize and prepare myself for the coming academic year, to organize their birthday party next weekend, to buy their school supplies and plot a course through the various decisions we've been putting off.

By Saturday evening when they're scheduled to return, I'll be desperate for their presence. (I'm desperate for it now, but the tasks ahead of me, both pleasurable and dutiful, are covering up the ache.) Meanwhile, I'll be taking a vacation in Single Town.

The drift

I've been speeding through my next book for review -- Hats And Eyeglasses: A Family Love Affair With Gambling, by Martha Frankel. The bulk of it is a breezy memoir about growing up a precocious math whiz with an extended family that played the ponies (and less reputable games), getting interested in poker while doing research on a screenplay, and becoming a successful home game and card room player. But at the end it takes a dark turn, with the author becoming addicted to internet poker and losing a small fortune.

While reading it during lunch, I was blindsided by a scene that left me blinking back tears at the cafe table. In the grip of online madness, unable to tell anyone about her failures, Frankel neglects her loved ones and loses her grasp on normal relationships. Several months into the episode, in 1999, her mother calls her up, causing her to lose her dialup connection to Paradise Poker. Because she'd told her family and friends to stop calling her at work for this very reason, Frankel snatched up the phone and snapped at the caller. But when she heard the desperate voice of her mother, one of the women who taught her to love gambling, on the line, she became frightened. Her mother sounded on the verge of a breakdown. Frankel was afraid that she was ill, that there had been an accident, that some tragedy had occurred.

When her mother finally blurted out what was wrong, between sobs, she said, "What have I done to hurt you?"

Frankel's short temper, her refusal to come visit as she used to and her distant demeanor when she did, her anger and depression and coldness toward her mother -- as toward all of her family and friends -- had caused her mother to conclude that she had wronged her daughter somehow, without knowing it. After months of suffering, she finally worked herself up to the humiliation of asking how she could fix it.

Something about the mother's tragically mistaken read of the situation moved me deeply. I see parents and children in the process of estrangement all the time, for all kinds of reasons. Heck, I was estranged from my parents for a few years after college, and I know it hurt them terribly. The worst part must be the powerlessness to fix it, the inability to repair the relationship. And in this case, when the mother blamed herself, at least in the way Frankel told it, there was no martyr attitude to the move, no claiming of the moral high ground of victimhood -- just a naked plea to be allowed to apologize and make it right.

The saddest thing about Frankel's story is that she can't confess to her mother, even then. She turns off the computer, drives home, and spends the rest of the day talking to her mother on the phone, weaving a system of false explanations and reassurances. And then next day she turned on the computer and lost another three hundred dollars.

There's an extremity to the situations I sometimes see between my students and their parents, as there was on a smaller scale with my family at one time. Boxed in by the press and weight of the obligations they've taken on, oppressed by the looming expectations they feel from their families, students sometimes light out for the territories, burning their bridges behind them. I can empathize with the attractiveness of that kind of escape. The problem is that life goes on, the relationships do not dissolve, and at some point the consequences of running will be added to all the other consequences being run away from. And that particular tragic arc hits me right where I live.

Requiescat in pace

Less than a week after Noel returned to us, he's off again -- and this time on a somber errand. His stepfather's father died last night after a short hospitalization. The memorial service is Wednesday in Nashville.

Alexander McDowell Smith, a retired stockbroker and an avid follower of the markets, was gracious enough to welcome me and our children into his extended family. He and his wife had no biological grandchildren, and so they embraced the children of their son's wife. They were generous always. I'm glad I got to know them in the years before illness began to claim their vitality.

Archer's middle name is Alexander, after Noel's stepfather, Alexander McDowell Smith, Jr. -- and therefore after his stepgrandfather as well. We were proud to carry on that name for them. This is a picture of the three generations of Alexanders, taken at Christmastime 2001. We'll miss you, Pops.

The street where I live

Part I: Growing Up

I don't remember the first house I lived in. My folks refer to it as the "Lakeshore House," somewhere in the Lakeshore Estates development in an unincorporated part of Hamilton County, Tennessee. It was the first place my parents lived after they were married. Even photos of this house's interiors or exteriors don't bring back any memories for me, although I'm sure my brother, three and a half years old than I, remembers it. This picture is my father's birthday in 1966 -- I'm about eight months old. That's my paternal grandmother's famous homemade caramel icing on a yellow layer cake. We moved out of this house when I was two or three years old.

What I'll always think of as my childhood home is this stucco Tudor on Glendon Drive in the Brainerd neighborhood. That's my older brother in the Tennessee Vols sweatshirt, riding his sweet banana-seat, high-handlebar bike on our quiet street, sometime around 1970. You can see the fake half-timbering that needed to be repainted by a friendly guy named Roy every five years or so. There was a full finished basement, four bedrooms and two full baths on the second floor, and an entirely inadequate kitchen from back in the day when homebuilders and homemakers thought it was more important to have a huge formal living room than a functional place to make jello molds. My favorite room in the house was the massive cube stuck on the back -- two car garage below, den/TV room above, complete with a flat concrete roof that comprised the view from my bedroom window.

When I was fourteen years old, we built a house on a clearing atop a hill on our farm property, twenty miles away in the miniscule crossroad town of Apison. Here's how it looked in one of the snowstorms that periodically prevented us from making our way down the steep blacktop that connected us to McGhee Road. Separate garage doors for each car -- that must have been our dream. You can just make out the basketball goal we put up on the slight upslant of the driveway, the area where cars backing out of the garage were supposed to make a Y turn. This picture must have been taken in 1979 , because we hadn't yet built the tennis court that took up the entire foreground, surrounded by chain link fence. It was a 45 minute commute to high school, carpooling with my dad whose office was just across the river downtown. Once the nest was empty, while I was in graduate school at Georgia, my parents pulled up stakes and moved to St. Simons Island, Georgia. It's hard for me to imagine other people living in this house, which we designed and built, on this land that I visited every weekend with my dad to tend to the dwarf fruit trees we planted and the dozen or so head of cattle we raised. But the nature of houses is that they change hands, and the current owners, whoever they are, would probably find it just as odd that anyone else might feel proprietary about it.

Stay tuned for Part II: On My Own.