An existential crisis for my beloved English Department

What follows is a letter I wrote to the administrators currently debating the fate of the English Department at UMass-Amherst. The new building, proposed to take the place of the crumbling old Bartlett Hall, traditional home to the department, is designed to house almost exclusively large lecture halls. This is anathema to we humanities sorts. To my fellow UMass alums, if you’re willing to join your voice to this fight, please do it quickly. Public hearings on the plan options are slated for next week. Leave a comment if you need contact information for the powers that be.

Bartlett Hall, dubbed “worst building on campus” by the college newspaper. But once it’s gone, what will be left us?

Dear Dean Hayes, Associate Dean Bartolomeo, and Associate Provost Harvey,

I was an English major at UMass Amherst. The decision to become one remains one of the best I have ever made. Our ranks may be dwindling, and the clamor for more STEM graduates seems, at first glance, to further threaten us, to elbow us from the table, but I have always felt confident in UMass’ continued commitment to the English course of study, for what it gives its graduates, and for what they, in turn, give to society.

When I arrived at UMass, I feared I would be subsumed by it, swallowed up. Anxious and diffident, I didn’t make friends easily, and on a massive campus thronged by more than 20,000 students, it was hard to keep track of anyone anyway. A person could melt into the crowds there and not be seen for days. The exception, for me, was Bartlett Hall. Crumbling, musty, but beloved to me in its dingy decrepitude, it became the center of my life my four years at UMass. I was never the sort of student to swagger into a professor’s office to chat, or discuss a reading, not because I didn’t want to, but because I was terrified. The only thing that saved me from slinking through my entire course of study without speaking to much of anyone outside of classes was that building. I sold coffee and donuts in the lobby on Tuesday and Thursday mornings to raise money for the English Society’s small literary magazine. Most everyone–faculty, undergrad, bleary-eyed grad students–stopped by our stand for the sludgy brew from our vat-like percolator one time or another, and we’d talk. I ran into professors and poets and students as I tramped up and down the stairs posting flyers about Open Mic mights, book signings, and one giddy March, the impending visit of Seamus Heaney. I spent my free afternoons reading in our closet-like English Society office, taken up mostly by bookshelves. With the door standing open, anyone might stop by, or no one might, but the simple, companionable feeling of occupying a common space started me feeling like I had a home there.

Now, that home’s continued existence is in jeopardy. I won’t mourn the physical  building of Bartlett itself, but the building set to replace it, the SCAF, concerns me greatly. As currently planned, the SCAF will offer almost none of the sort of classroom space English majors require. Our needs are modest: a small room with desks ranged round in a circle, so that we might be facing each other and within speaking range. We read, we speak, and we listen. We are hamstrung by large lecture halls with their chairs bolted to the floor.

Since I graduated from UMass with my B.A., I went on to become a veterinarian and now teach biology and animal sciences at a local community college. If my college brought forward a plan eliminating all laboratory space, I would join all my colleagues in righteous outrage. Laboratory space is fundamental to science education. Microscopes, bench-tops, dissection space, Bunsen burners, the litany of things we need to teach science–if our administration bustled in, bagged it all up and told us to figure out some other way, I’d follow them right out the door and off campus to find another job. English majors need their basic supplies too. The technology is simple, and the list modest: something to read, a group of other readers, and a room small enough to hear themselves think.

The request before you is modest in the extreme: reserve at least 6,125 square feet in the proposed SCAF building for that sort of small room. We are a low-tech people, with simple needs. I hope that the school I love and to which I owe so much will deem our small but fervent ranks worthy of this small consideration. Without it, I fear for our survival, and the world needs its English majors.

Sincerely,

Sarah (Fahey) Courchesne, DVM
Class of 2002

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Perspective gleaned while sewing curtains

When I was pregnant with my second son, I spent many hours alone with my first son, reading boring baby books and playing repetitive baby games, and feeling deep ambivalence about doing it all over again. I wanted two kids, but in an abstract sense; I envisioned a future with two kids in it. But the thought of raising a second baby, that often led me into deep despondency. Now, I live in the early years of that shining future I had envisioned. My two boys play together for hours at a stretch, with no intervention from me. I read to them, usually at least an hour each day, but beyond that, they play with each other and away from me, and that is a very great wonder indeed.

This semester, my teaching schedule worked out that I have no classes on Fridays. To save money, we pulled my younger son, Simon, out of preschool that day as well, so he and I are on our own a full day each week. Sometimes, I take him on little enriching experiences to the library or the art museum. Other times, he watches two and a half movies back to back while I do other things. Sometimes he plays on his own, punctuated by occasional games of Guess Who? or Candyland with me, under duress.

Caring for young children is about the most boring job I can imagine, so when I’m playing Candyland, I am often thinking of how lovely it would be to be vacuuming or folding laundry, able to think my thoughts without being interrupted by indignant shouts of, “Mom! Did you hear me? I said, ‘I got Princess Frostine!” The other day, I mentioned to someone that I often fantasize about just disappearing. Driving off without a word to anyone. “Oh,” she said, “Me too. Like to the Caribbean? Or Costa Rica? And lie on the beach and get away from the cold…” I looked at her in a mild state of confusion. The cold? The cold isn’t even on my radar of things to flee. My escape fantasies rarely take me farther than a meagerly furnished room on the outer reaches of the Cape, or a cabin in the wooded border between Maine and Canada. It’s not the cold, it’s the need I dream of leaving sometimes.

Coming home after work, or being home on the weekends is not unpleasant, and I have no babies anymore, so the intensity of my children’s needs is thankfully more bearable now. But there is still never a day where I am responsible only for brushing my own teeth, or finding my own socks or feeding my own self. I don’t need a warm beach, and I’m not looking to do nothing. I’m just looking to be able to choose vacuuming, or tooth-brushing, or laundry folding on my own time, and without interruption.

On our most recent Friday together, Simon was playing by himself while I stitched a hem onto some curtains I was making as a wedding present for my sister. It was, for a short span, quiet, aside from intermittent sounds he was making as his action figures crashed into things or were dissolved in a river of lava. For a moment, I was choosing to sew. Then Simon came in and asked me to play something with him. Feeling put upon, I sighed and told him to wait. “Just let me do this line.” I said to him. “Of stitches,” I said in my head. I’m doing a line of stitches. And suddenly I was feeling much better. Some days he may watch too much tv or play computer games too long before I remember to stop him. But sometimes I take him to the museum, and we read a long time everyday, and I feed him good food. And above all, I’m not snorting coke.

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Simon’s anxiety dreams

Four year old children are predictably irrational. Their fixations, meltdowns, and obsessions frequently border on the bizarre. This is normal for them.

I consider myself to be in remission from anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders, but I find myself keenly attuned to symptoms in both myself and my kids. Part of being in remission, of course, involves periodic check-ups, and I do these almost sub-consciously now, evaluating myself for signs many times a day, and making small adjustments. There is the potential that my kids might one day exhibit signs of such disorders too, but since I’ve been in remission, I genuinely don’t worry about it. And though nature may dictate that they have a predisposition to it, nurture will argue against it since I no longer model anxious behaviors to them.

When a person doesn’t suffer from anxiety and obsessions, it can be hard to understand them in others. The anxieties are irrational, often seeming silly or ridiculous. From the outside, it seems absurd that a person would worry about such things at all, much less be reduced to a sniveling wretch rocking on the bathroom floor over them. Such is the nature of anxiety. Simon, my four year old, has been talking about his own worries lately, and they mirror the workings of the anxious person’s mind. “Mom?” he’ll say from the back seat of the car, “How does a package delivery guy deliver really big things?” “With a little cart called a dolly,” I tell him. “What if the dolly breaks?” he asks. “He’ll get another,” I tell him. “But Mom, what if all the dollies are broken and the man who fixes the dollies is dead?”

This is almost comical in its resemblance to the thinking of an anxious person. The what-ifs accumulate and snowball until a series of improbable possibilities have accumulated into an inevitable catastrophe. I’ve been there, and I can envision this world he’s describing, where everything that can go wrong, does.

The other day, as he was getting ready for bed, he turned to me and said, “Mom? What if my lunchbox falls down a deep cavern and you can’t reach it and Malcolm can’t reach it and Dad can’t reach it?” “Then we’ll get a new one,” I said. “What if I loved it?” he asked, his voice breaking, and I know the cavern he’s thinking of; I’ve spent years fretting over what I might lose irretrievably too.

What I can teach Simon is the practiced skill of managing these fears. I will probably be fine-tuning these skills for the rest of my life. After all, it’s a remission, not a cure. But what I love about Simon’s worldview is that while the fear of losing his lunchbox can send him into a tailspin of dread, the big questions, he’s got settled. Yesterday, I was eating lunch with him and he said, “Mom, if there are too many Asian Long-horned Beetles wrecking the trees, we’ll just call some woodpeckers to eat them until no beetles remain.” Seemingly insoluble ecological disasters like invasive species threatening entire ecosystems? Fret not, citizens, for Simon shall call down an army of woodpeckers.

On the way to school the other day, though, came the ultimate. Simon, who worries about the UPS man’s dolly, told me, “Mom, my friend at school doesn’t know where God lives.” “Well,” I said, “I don’t think anyone really knows where God lives, Simon,” (and certainly not this atheist). “Mom,” he answered sternly, “God lives in your heart.”

Of course. How could I be so stupid. I must not have been thinking. Or maybe I was too busy checking the ropes that lead down into that cavern where I can just make out the glint of a lunchbox in the deep gloom.

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Snowy owls and the social order of chickens

This can seem a quiet time for bird watching. Winter is, literally, quiet; there’s no dawn chorus of songbirds trilling for mates, no high pitched begging by disheveled fledglings of haggard looking adults. But winter does bring certain rewards, and this year, it’s partly in the form of an incursion of Snowy Owls from the north. There are so many of the birds that a trip to the New England coast is almost guaranteed to generate a sighting. Sure enough, when Malcolm and I went to Salisbury Beach last week, we spotted two of them. The first was hunkered down on a rock at the water’s edge. After half an hour, it took off, swept low over the sand and landed on a jetty 200 yards off. There is stayed for the rest of our walk. There were two photographers trailing the bird, both with expensive looking cameras on tripods and telephoto zoom. They followed it to the jetty and set up next to each other, their cameras trained on the bird from the best angle like twin cannons.

The photographers watch their quarry.

Owls, being predators, don’t do a whole lot most of the time, and sure enough, the bird sat atop the jetty staring out over the water. Occasionally, it would swivel its head and cast its dire gaze toward the photographers. At those moments, there would be flurry of audible shutter clicking, and then, when the bird looked away again, silence. I was, like many bird watchers, delighted to see this bird; it’s the first time I’ve ever seen this species. I felt compelled to stand and watch it for a while with my binoculars, though it barely moved. I found myself stealing glances at the sea ducks off to the left. Diving mergansers, Gadwall awkwardly picking over the rocks, and a Common Goldeneye struggling to choke down a whole sea urchin. This eye-watering feat took several minutes to accomplish, and when it was over, I looked back at the owl, feeling somehow guilty at not wanting to watch it much more.

Returning home, I checked in on our flock of chickens. They’re in close quarters these days, unwilling as they are to walk in the snow, and we introduced a new hen recently, who had worn out her welcome at my father’s coop for criminal behavior. On placing her in my coop, she underwent what resembled nothing so much as a gang’s ritual jumping in. Before her feet even touched the floor, the knives were out. The older hens in my flock started posturing, wings down, necks stretched up high and feathers flaring around their heads. The new girl made some nearly imperceptible movement and the old girls were suddenly leaping at her, jumping in the air and driving their feet at her eyes. She attempted to fight at first, but quickly realized she had no chance, as three birds pecked her comb bloody and gouged at her back. She tried hiding under the waterer, the feed bin, and in an old bucket they sometimes use as a provisional nest box. Everywhere she went they waited for her, and if any part became accessible, they launched an attack. Two or three girls whose social positions are somewhere in mid-flock hurriedly excused themselves and fled to the outside pen to wait it out. A perch was knocked awry, feed was spilling everywhere, and a clod of dried manure flew at me, striking my neck and slipping down inside my shirt. By the time the fracas eased, the new hen was cowering, flat to the floor, her face pressed into a corner of the coop, her breathing just barely perceptible.

Two degrees out. Negotiated peace and the queue for the morning’s warm water.

Now, several days later, things have settled down, and everyone is settled onto a rung of the social ladder. Though their methods of enforcement are brutal, there’s something recognizable in chickens for this. It reminds me of a high school cafeteria, with its sharp demarcations between tables of jocks, drama geeks, beautiful people, the untouchable castes. There may be no overt violence, but there is a humming current of tension, of lines constantly being drawn and redrawn, tested and reinforced. Watching the chickens is like that. A subtle tap on the head to remind a subordinate that it’s not her turn to eat yet, or the nightly scrum for the warmest position on the roost, the omega always on the outside, one half of her body exposed to the cracking cold.

Though there is little more quotidian than chickens, there is something compelling about watching them. And while the owl was stunningly beautiful, it was also boring in its way. We are social animals ourselves, and concern ourselves almost constantly with the social strivings and failings and negotiations of other humans. What wonder, then, that I find little affinity with a stunning and solitary predator as it sits, alone on a rock, surveying the sea? A beautiful and a rare thing, but with no use for our sorts of social anxieties or aspirations, because it has no use for society.

Though they be humble, there will always be something compelling about chickens. I can admire a lone owl on the windswept beach, but I can see myself in the chickens, strutting, or creeping, alpha or omega, uneasy truces and manure flinging battles, and hopefully, at day’s end, a simultaneous, sometimes companionable rustling of feathers on feathers as we hunker down against the cold.

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Capacity for mercy: teenage murders and the court of Massachusetts

A decision came down from the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court last month holding that juveniles may not be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. As a result, a slate of prisoners who were teenagers when they committed murder will now become eligible for parole, provided they have already served the minimum fifteen years. When I was 12, a 16 year old boy a few towns from us beat a 15 year old girl to death with a baseball bat. I remember the case for the same reasons most people in our area did; it was a small town, and a horrendous crime committed in an upstairs room of a benign looking suburban home. No one ever thought it would happen here. But of course, it sometimes does.

The boy who killed the girl was sentenced to life without parole and entered prison never to be seen or heard from again. Now, he may be after all. Since I grew up in the county where this crime occurred, my friends and relatives have been signing petitions opposing even the consideration of parole, decrying the SJC’s decision and expressing their sorrow for the girl’s family, and their continued rage at the boy, now a man of 36. Some friends of friends know the girl’s family and their outcry has been that much louder. I, for one, am pleased by this decision, as it represents for me a step along the path toward a more enlightened and humane justice system. The decisions also gave a nod to the ever-increasing body of evidence that teenage brains are not like adult brains, a fact most of us have long suspected. After all, the anthem of anyone parenting a teenager typically runs something like, “What were you thinking?” They bewilder and confound us because we very genuinely cannot relate to their profound lack of judgment, their irrational feelings of invincibility, and their seeming incapacity to consider consequences.

When I look at the deep anger and outrage that has met this court decision and its impact on this particular murder case, I find myself genuinely bewildered at its intensity. The criticisms fall into three categories: this crime was so awful that the only appropriate punishment is keeping him penned up forever; the girl’s family shouldn’t have to think of him walking the streets as a free man when she’s dead; only someone depraved beyond all recovery could be capable of this kind of act.

In fact, that last one goes to the heart of the SJC’s decision; life without parole is a punishment given to those who are deemed “irretrievably depraved,” incapable, in other words, of ever being rehabilitated and regaining a place in society. I’m not a lawyer, but I have, over time, picked up the few scraps of legal education that my lawyer husband drops around the house, and he has taught me (“Criminal Justice 101,” he says) that sentencing criminals serves three purposes: deterrence, retribution, and rehabilitation. That first, when applied to teenage brains, seems of dubious value. A sixteen year old will dive from a trestle bridge into shallow water because he has a poor grasp on his own mortality, let alone on mandatory minimum sentencing. The second, retribution, is not, in fact, so much about justice for the victim’s family, but about a more impersonal kind of justice exacted for society. Were it your own murdered daughter, you might fantasize about torture, castration, and publicly stoning the murderer. Yet we do not turn over murderers to the murdered’s family. We don’t let them anywhere near the jury. We leave the retribution to an impartial party. In the case of a homeless drifter murdered, with no known family or friends, society would seek its retribution for his murder just the same. For a family bereft, no punishment would be sufficient. But society judges what it is due differently.

Finally, the last of the three: rehabilitation. I have seen several comments and posts about the boy who killed the girl saying he was and is evil, that he was always corrupted, lacking a soul, or morality, or whatever might have kept him from this act. I reject the existence of evil generally, insofar as “evil” is considered to be some mysterious separate force that infests a person’s soul and drives them to do things. But what worries me most about these posts is what they signify. To turn our backs on a sixteen year old boy who did such a thing means we reject childhood. It means we believe a sixteen year old boy is fixed, no longer malleable, his nature set and unchanging. I know we don’t believe this. A sixteen year old boy sent to war would be a child soldier. A sixteen year old boy is judged marginally able to drive a car. A sixteen year old boy is not judged capable of living on his own. A sixteen year old boy is a boy until he kills someone, and then suddenly we call him a man.

Some of the people who have joined their voices to the opposition to this man’s possible parole have teenage daughters of their own, which complicates things. When a parent can see her own child’s face in the victim, it becomes their own, vicarious trauma. When a classroom full of children the same age as my elder son were shot to death, it affected me as I had not imagined anything ever could. I appreciate that I cannot see the world through the eyes of a mother of daughters. The packet of fears that is slipped under the blankets with a baby girl going home from the hospital is different from the one slipped in with a boy. There are things that lurk in the dark for the parents of girls that will never lurk in the dark for me.

All parents fear the phone call that comes in the middle of the night, or the policeman on the doorstep. For parents of girls, it’s the abduction, the rape, the rage-blind boyfriend who finally did it. But for the parents of boys, it’s different. I am raising two boys, so I peer into the dark for the perpetrators. The murderers, the batterers, the rapists, the school shooters. People like to say that it won’t happen to me, that mine are good boys, that they’d never be capable. It’s true that they are good boys right now, at 6 and 4. But I read the stories of the perpetrators with a mother’s zeal, and I am not naive. I have read too many aftermath interviews with bewildered family or neighbors that say, “He was a nice boy,” “I never imagined,” “I didn’t know he was feeling this way.” I will work tirelessly to keep my boys good, to teach them to be gentle and kind. But some boys go awry, and if mine ever should, I would plead with this society for their humane treatment. Not to evade consequences, but merely to be treated with compassion, and not be stripped of their humanity along with their freedom.

A sixteen year old boy is not complete yet, and so, by definition, he cannot be “irretrievably depraved.” It is fitting that my last post was about my good Catholic grandmother; she would always counsel rehabilitation, a second chance, mercy. There will be criminals who cannot be salvaged, and who can never be released. This boy, now turned man, may be one of those. So be it. Don’t let him out, in that case. But to throw away the key at sixteen is something only a bleak and hopeless society would do. I don’t believe we are one. We can choose to be humane, and just, and all the things these men did not choose when they were boys. Mercy is not an expression of weakness or naiveté. Mercy is the luxury possessed by those with power over the powerless. In those moments, when one wields power over another, whether with a baseball bat, or the keys to a prison cell, we would, at our best, always counsel mercy. It isn’t weak, and it isn’t easy, but it is human, or, at least, it can be, if we choose it.

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