Kathy Ewing

John was sure to run across the box holding the new hammock before our anniversary (Thursday) and ruin the surprise, so I decided to put it together today. Luckily, son Doug was enjoying a day off work; he skillfully interpreted the instructions (insert part BR into part GH) and providing some muscle. It was a nice day, and the assembly went fairly smoothly.

About fifteen minutes after we’d finished, John came home unexpectedly, and fifteen minutes after that, this was the scene in the backyard.

Old Dog at rest

Today our dog, fourteen years old, snapped at a kid at the park who dared to pet him. The other day he snapped at the vet who was only, after all, attempting to remove some blood from his body.

I don’t want to talk out of school, but let’s just say his housebroken habits have themselves broken down of late.

When I commented to the vet that the old guy was “getting up there,” the vet responded with a snort, “He’s not getting anywhere. He’s already there.” Dr. Wohlfeiler proceeded to eliminate several of his usual vaccinations. After fourteen consecutive shots, he has enough immunity to last him. 

He’s still our dear dog, of course, but he’s almost a new dog, in some respects. I’m resolved to keep the kids at the park away from him…but most of his problems, so far, are benign. He just requires a little more help and a little more patience on our part.

I don’t want to get too sappy, but when I boost him into the car or wait patiently for him to climb the steps (which he can still do, barely) or watch him trying so hard to listen at the door to see if someone’s home (his hearing’s shot), I feel honored and lucky to be the young(ish) person on hand to assist him in his declining years.

So now we know. An analysis of the audiotape made on May 4, 1970, at Kent State indicates that the National Guardsmen were ordered to fire. So much for the “young, untrained, panicky troops” argument. That one always seemed fishy:  how does one explain the Guard kneeling in formation and the fusillade of 67 shots?

The Guardsmen were ordered by a superior officer (and maybe ultimately by Governor James Rhodes) to fire on students assembling on their own college campus to protest President Nixon’s decision to expand an unlawful war in Vietnam into Cambodia.

Four unarmed students died. The gunfire killed Allison Krause, an honor student. Jeffrey Miller was shot in the mouth and died instantly. Bill Schroeder was shot in the back. Sandy Scheuer was merely walking to class; she bled to death from a bullet wound in the throat. Nine others were wounded. Their average distance from the National Guard position was well over 300 feet, too far away to pose a threat.

It wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t a “mistake.” Someone gave a command.

Let me know what you think.

As soon as I sat down on the big hill in front of Taylor Hall today, I thought, “Oh, sh…I’m going to get sunburned.” What a beautiful day it was today at Kent State, and my cheeks are bright red.

I was a freshman at KSU on May 4, 1970. But I wasn’t on campus that day. I was still attending the Kent Stark in Canton.  Maybe because of that, and also because I was numbed by all the violence of those years — the assassinations of JFK, MLK, Malcolm X, and RFK — I didn’t react very strongly at first.

The evening of May 4th, I walked into the kitchen and saw my dad sitting at his usual place at our kitchen table quietly listening to the radio news. As I approached, he shook his head and repeated, “This is bad. This is very bad.”

That’s the moment I started to get it. Whenever I hear about kids in the ’60’s leading their parents, when I hear Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young crooning, “Teach your parents well”…I remember that evening. My dad was ahead of me on the Vietnam War, and he was ahead of me on the significance of Kent State.

Years ago, I taught high-school English and Latin. Sometimes it was fun: students were lively and silly and often sweet, and I enjoyed teaching literature and, yes, even grammar. But there was a lot I didn’t like. I didn’t enjoy forcing human beings who had no choice to read Shakespeare and Ovid. John Holt, my favorite education writer, reminds us teachers that our students’ alternative to coming to school is going to jail. When they enjoy a lesson, they might actually be enjoying the lesson, or they might be thinking, “At least it’s better than jail!”

What else not to like about teaching? The rudeness of some students, the resistance, the refrains of “This is boring” and “When will I ever use this?” Resentful, rude, embittered parents occasionally made my life miserable. Such parents are in the minority, but sometimes they set the tone for the school year.

I hated giving demerits for uniform violations, hated checking hall passes, hated not letting kids go to the restroom. I hated monitoring study halls. I hated the glowering of another teacher when, for example, I allowed students to talk during a raucous pep rally. In fact, I hated pep rallies. They’re supposed to be fun, but to me seemed like loud worship services for hulking adolescent males.

I quit teaching with both relief and regret when my son was about to enter first grade, over twenty years ago — glad to leave behind the nasty parents and the five-paragraph essays, but sorry that I might never teach again. Because the actual teaching I liked. It was the testing and the rules and the behavioral objectives I didn’t like.

Eventually my kids got older, and our bank account diminished, and I started teaching Freshman English at Cleveland State. It had some of the trials of my previous teaching experience – endless grading and students’ recalcitrance (it being a required course). But mostly the kids at CSU were polite and hardworking and friendly, and even, sometimes, eager – unlike many of the sullen suburbanites I’d been used to. And no parents! I never had to deal with an irrational parent! So, I felt lucky. I got to return to teaching without the travails of high school – no lesson plans, no extra duties, no meetings. Also, basically no money, but that was okay.

Then I got even luckier. I slipped into teaching Latin at CSU. I had assumed, for sure, I had left Latin behind. But now, I could start from scratch with my own students every fall and introduce them to the beauty, aggravation, silliness, and maniacal order of classical Latin. Every year, a few students hang on. They finish a second year, and then they’re willing to go on, reading Vergil or Ovid or Cicero with me.

I just now left a group of them. They struggle through their hundred lines of the Aeneid. We laugh about the Trojan hero Aeneas crying all the time, and Vergil’s elaborate similes, and his convoluted syntax. We argue over whether a phrase is an ablative absolute or dative case.

It’s nerdy as hell, but so what? I’m in my ideal teaching situation. Small classes. Great literature. Engaged, hardworking, and friendly students – lovely, interesting, smart people. Freedom to teach as I like. Today I explained that “digitus infamis” describes the middle finger; it had a bad rep even then. I showed how the word molecule and the scientific term mole both come from the Latin word for mass, or mound. I recounted some deeds of the Trojan War and the curse of the House of Atreus, but my students knew more about the myths than I did.

I’m so lucky. I thought I would never teach again, but instead I have this gift. For these few years, however long it lasts, I love my job.

Recently a Cleveland State student said to me, quite empathetically, “I was wondering how you guys wrote papers.”

By “you guys,” she meant “old people.” She meant “back in the day.”

She went on: “I guess you had to actually, physically travel to the library, right? And then you’d have to find the actual book you wanted, and, what?, find what you needed inside the book?”

I nodded.

“Then you must have had to take the book home with you because that’s where your typewriter was. Then, I don’t know, somehow you ‘typed’ the whole thing. That part I don’t get.”

Yes, I said. This is how it was. And if you made a mistake you had to retype the whole thing or use that cumbersome correction tape to make the mistake disappear. And I told my young students if you wanted a magazine article, you had to go to the library and find a listing in The Readers Guide to Periodical Literature and then pray the library owned the exact issue you needed and that the librarian could lay her hands on it and then you had to write down all the information you needed in the library to take home with you. No copying machines.

The class was rapt. Mouths agape, heads shaking.