Kathy Ewing

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.

Today I attended a funeral mass celebrated by a priest who has lived and worked in the same neighborhood for over thirty years. Four generations of the family were present, and the priest knew them all. He knew the great-grandmother who was being buried at the age of 92, her daughter disabled by a stroke, her granddaughter, and her great-granddaughter, a lovely girl of college age.

He had spent the preceding days visiting the hospital and sitting with the family as they decided to remove the ventilator that was keeping the woman alive. He was there and prayed with them when the ventilator was removed. He met with the family to plan the funeral. And he had met with the elderly woman more than once, discussing illness and end-of-life matters, but mostly joking and cheering up and telling stories.

In his homily, the priest referred directly to the great-granddaughter’s birth, saying that he knew the family before she was around. Everyone had been so excited, he said, anticipating her birth and wondering what she would be like. Her great-grandmother’s death was a little like that, he said. It was a great labor, like the labor of giving birth. It was a labor that all of us, even the men, would have to undergo. And it was also similar, the priest said, that in that final labor we give birth to our true selves.

At the end of the homily, he hesitated for a moment and then commented on the travails of several generations living in the same house, as this family had done for many years. He himself had grown up in his grandparents’ house. Sometimes he would hear other kids talking about the fun they had visiting their grandparents for holidays, and he would smile ruefully. Not quite the same thing, when your grandfather had yelled at you that very morning for stepping on his well-manicured lawn. Such a living arrangement creates inevitable tensions, and the priest knew that this family had endured some of these tensions. So, he advised, let all those grievances go, if any are still nagging at you. The person who has passed has let them go, so we should do the same.

All these gentle remarks the priest was able to make because he knew the family and had known them for decades.

Caleb Morris & Fr. Dan Begin

Now, as the Cleveland Diocese “reorganizes,” this priest may be removed from this neighborhood, where he knows literally hundreds of families, their family stories, the relations, the histories, the tragedies, and all the rest.  He may be moved so far away that he’ll be unable even to attend the weddings and funerals and baptisms in this neighborhood.

Instead, the families will probably have to rely on strangers — unfamiliar priests, no doubt kind and well-intentioned, who will administer the sacraments and perform the rituals as well as they are able. But they won’t be able to say they baptized your mother, or that they married your parents and your aunts and uncles, or that they sat by your great-grandmother’s deathbed and remembered the day you were born.

I just became aware of a weird habit that may be unique to me but probably isn’t.

First, I should explain that when we attend plays and concerts, we usually buy cheap balcony tickets. Touring company actors and concert soloists are generally unfamiliar to me and also several miles away, so I have no idea what they really look like.

Too far away to see clearly,  my vision muddled by foggy contacts, I involuntarily metamorphose each performer into someone familiar. I envision them as someone famous whom (I fancy) they resemble. I do this subconsciously.

For example, at Cosi Fan Tutte this week, we sat in the tippy-top seats of Severance Hall. Though we had brought both my grandmother’s little opera glasses and our whopping binoculars, I didn’t use them much. (Veering from the stage to the supertitles induces vertigo, I discovered).

Not Married to Matthew Broderick

So the little soprano playing Despina, the maid, became Sarah Jessica Parker in my eyes. She didn’t take on any other SJP qualities (except maybe a little spunkiness), so if you don’t like SJP, this transference had nothing to do with her really.  The singer just seemed, at an immense distance, a similar body and facial type. In fact, as I discovered later looking at her photo, Martina Jankova looks nothing like Sarah Jessica Parker, but I had someone to visualize during the show. Invariably, when I look the headshots in the program, I see how far off I have been.

Tonight at a Cleveland State Orchestra concert, the tall handsome student-clarinet-soloist became a Ben Affleck sort of person.

I didn’t even know I was doing this until, after seeing the musical Young Frankenstein, I said to my husband that the actress playing Inga, the blonde bombshell, reminded me of Victoria Jackson, formerly of Saturday Night Live. I didn’t mention that I was actually picturing Victoria Jackson whenever Inga appeared on stage.

He looked at me blankly. “She didn’t look anything like Victoria Jackson,” he said. When I checked out the actress Anne Horak’s picture, I saw he was right. The two merely share blondeness, but the faulty image served me just fine in the performance.

Does anyone else do this?

Say what you will, the snow (it’s still coming down!) is really beautiful.

It wakes up our old dog Shucks. He drags himself around the house on his arthritic legs, but outdoors in this weather he trots and even runs! You can see him here.

He digs his face deep into the snow to sniff, just like when he was a puppy, and raises his head with a neat ridge of snow balanced on his snout.