Two cent lunch

I've lost track of how many lunches I have consumed, oblivious at my desk, sandwich in left hand to free my right for the mouse. Lunch is mostly fuel in a working life: nuked leftovers, a pound of takeout swathed in petrochemicals, drive-thru cardiac incidents. It wasn't always so; somewhere I lost the knack for leisure, the rest and playfulness and companionship that once divided the day.

Not that I was ever a cafe caballero, lingering over latte and pondering Proust. What I miss is--somebody help me--the elementary school cafeteria. The simplest of fare--brown bag, white bread, gooey peanut butter, purple jelly--milk in a glass bottle, carrot sticks in wax paper, raisins in a cardboard box. And the company of two hundred other yammering children. One guy at my table would eat his sandwich down to the shape of a flipped "bird," for the benefit of his recess rivals. Another would squish the whole thing into his mouth at once, roll it into a glutinous ball and display it on extended tongue. I forget why. Carrot sticks can double as Dracula fangs. A California raisins box, once empty, makes a dandy kazoo. The uses of a milk straw are too numerous to mention, and the lunch bag itself can be inflated and exploded immediately behind a girl carrying a full tray of spaghetti and meatballs.

It's the greening grass that brings it all to mind, and the memory of milk--two cents for a half-pint bottle, stoppered with a cardboard tab. One day each year it would become transformed from funky white liquid into pure ambrosia, when the local dairyman switched from hay to pasture. You could see the Holstein it came from out the cafeteria window. If you had a good arm, you could hit it with a dried chip from the edge of the schoolyard.

A liberal artist

A reader gave me a mild rebuke a few weeks back about how I appeared to devalue my liberal arts education while reporting on the technical problems that arose while our station engineer was away. His point was that the focus of the liberal arts on creative flexibility might enable one to function in a wider variety of situations than the utilitarian approach to learning that comes with technical education.

That I should be properly grateful for my education was brought home to me again by the death Monday of my great teacher and friend, Kelsie Harder, who for many years chaired the SUNY Potsdam English Department. He had the gift for transmitting his passions, taking such unpromising material as myself and my callow classmates, and infecting us--not just with interest, but with fascination--for unlikely topics such as linguistics, grammar, etymology and onomastics. He labored in the sub-basement of language, where the qualities of time, matter and space intersect with the mind to become speech. How does a meme come to mean?—or, Shakespeare’s more-than-rhetorical query, "What's in a name?"--these are questions that will never come up in a job interview, unless the job is writer. But what the study of Clausewitz is to the general, these matters are to the author. Their study unlocks all the strategy and tactics necessary to communicate with clarity, integrity and effect.

Kelsie was a great exemplar of and recruiter for his vocation, teaching. More than a few of his students have gone on to do likewise. I think this is because he treated the student-teacher relationship as just that, a personal relationship, not a pedagogical contract. That makes his loss a personal matter to thousands.