Concerning Pickles, Salary, and Sour Faculty

One summer long ago I completed a typical teenager rite of passage: I got a job at a McDonald's. This particular franchised store had been bought by a wealthy Texas businessman who gave it to his wife as a toy to relieve her boredom. The store was located in the middle of an affluent neighborhood in Houston, evidenced by the line of Cadillacs in the drive-thru lane. The wife was a rule-driven perfectionist who spent big chunks of her day scrutinizing everything the employees did, full of criticism. I never could swirl vanilla soft serve into a cone elegantly enough to please that woman. It was the worst job I ever had, mostly because no one in management believed that I had a brain or could be trusted. Let me give you an example.

McDonald's isn't where people go to "have it their way." The menu items have standard condiments, and cooks assemble the sandwiches even before anyone orders them. Even so, employees can key in "no onions" or "extra ketchup" if someone doesn't mind waiting for the customized burger.

One day, a spoiled brat dressed for the tennis courts entered my line and ordered a Quarter Pounder with extra pickles. "By extra, I mean lots," she informed me. I surmised that she was a repeat customer who knew the rules at this particular McDonald's, where extra meant four pickles instead of two. "If I don't get lots of pickles," she threatened, "I'll have to see the manager."

I keyed in extra pickles and yelled back to the cook, "That's a Quarter Pounder with lots of pickles!"

The cook's response was "Extra mean fo'."

"If she doesn't get lots of pickles, she's going to complain," I emphasized.

"Extra mean fo'," the cook repeated.

I couldn't blame him, really; that was the rule. If the owner spotted a customer chewing on a burger piled high with pickles, the cook would pay.

When the special order arrived on the rack, the girl asked, "Are there lots of pickles?" I pretended not to hear her question, wrapped the Quarter Pounder, and placed it on her tray. I had done my part to please her. I hated the job and didn't care one way or the other if she was happy.

Spoiled Brat didn't even bother to take the tray to a table, unwrapping the burger right in front of me. She lifted the bun and counted the four sad pickles. "I ordered lots," she said angrily. "I want to speak to someone in charge."

I got the manager, a self-important ex-jock. He brought the owner in tow. I watched as the two of them wrestled with the situation. On the one hand, Spoiled Brat was a little bitch wielding pickles as her pathetic source of power [She looked smart enough to know all that salt would make her blow up like a watermelon]. I could tell the owner thought that this girl wasn't old enough to question the Exalted Franchise Handbook that said four pickles qualified as "extra." On the other hand, the girl was not asking for anything unreasonable.

Was it worth all the drama over a condiment on which the success of the store certainly did not depend? Eventually the three of them negotiated a Quarter Pounder with six pickles. Of course, by this time, the original burger had gotten cold and subsequently trashed. Despite that financial loss, the owner never would have considered disobeying the franchise manual and allowing the cooks to put six pickles on a sandwich if a counter person shouted back "Make that LOTS!" None of us could be trusted; we were all out to ruin her profit margin.

I was reminded of my one summer working at McDonald's during the department grading of the freshman composition final exams. One topic this semester was "A job I wouldn't wish on anyone." I evaluated many compelling essays on totally sucky jobs that these poor kids do for minimum wage. They are told when they can eat and use the bathroom, what to wear, how long they must stand in the hot sun. The most memorable paper explained the duties of a ground traffic controller at the international airport. Those poor folks apparently spend eight hours a day on fiery hot asphalt, breathing car exhaust and suffering the abuse and danger of irritated drivers trying to pick up passengers at the terminals. By the end of the grading, I was feeling really lucky to be teaching English as a source of income. Unfortunately, a vocal group of my colleagues do not share my position.

After the grading, I was accosted in the department office by one of our more alarmist professors. She wanted to know if I had received the questionnaire for another colleague's "research" project. I had in fact gotten the email, read the questions on the attachment, and immediately deleted the file. The "researcher" didn't want to discover a yet unknown answer to a question; he just wanted confirmation that he was already right. It wasn't research; it was biting the hand that fed us. Here is an item from the questionnaire:

When the college's compensation plan was first implemented, I had ...

• A high level of confidence that the president could deliver on his salary promises.
• Some confidence that the president could deliver on his salary promises.
• Minimal confidence that the president could deliver on his salary promises.
• No confidence that the president could deliver on his salary promises.

Yes, despite a 10 percent raise last year and another 5 percent this year, my colleagues still aren't happy. In their heads, they had already spent the second 10 percent we were supposed to get this year, making plans to put pools into their backyards or trade a Ford for a BMW. They all want to live as though they are lawyers without having to put in the long days and face the stress of billable hours.

Meanwhile, I went back to my air-conditioned office, decorated in my quirky style, and began working on the changes I am making to the research class for the fall. I will be teaching this class in an entirely new manner, which means that I will be altering how I spend much of my day. I can add brand new assignments like stacks of pickles, and I don't even have to ask permission! No one doubts that I have a brain, and everyone knows that I will behave in a manner that agrees with department outcomes. The trust and freedom my administrators give me are priceless, and a fifteen percent raise over two years ain't half bad either. I really don't understand why faculty complain so much.

Trimming the Bush

Okay, I admit it: In a few areas of my life I still procrastinate. I go too long between haircuts. I might have 11,000 miles on the car before I take it in for its 10,000-mile service. Sometimes the basenjis get their Heartgard on the third or the fourth of the month instead of the first. And I usually let the front bushes get a little "Amazon" before trimming them back. Such was the case until this past weekend:


In some ways I'm happy that I waited as long as I did because I was able to take a couple of interesting pictures. I finally bought a book to help me with my photo woes; the subtitle really caught my attention: Simple Techniques for Taking Better Pictures. Its author, John Hedgecoe, claims that photographers have to "see the potential in a subject." So I took the camera outside and shot this:


I used the "portrait" setting so that I got the crisp foreground in contrast to the blurred background. I like this photo because it looks like a serpent or a sea monster tentacle slithering towards the viewer. And the bush was indeed acting like a dragon: snatching at the car as I pulled into the garage, slapping at my face as I walked past it to the front stairs.

Not everything about the bush was reptilian, though. I also took this picture which reminds me of a flock of ducks heading south for the winter:


What I like about these pictures is that I took them on my residential street in the middle of a sprawling metropolis, but I could say that I shot them during a trek through El Yunque and no one would know that I was lying!

After the camera came the clippers, reducing my "rainforest" to landscaping that makes my neighbors happy:


The basenjis, meanwhile, sat on the back porch, hot and bored:

Elizabeth's Kryptonite

This morning I made the mistake of accompanying Elizabeth to Publix. Everyone has a weakness, and Elizabeth's is shopping for groceries. She promised, "This will only take half an hour. All I need is some breakfast and lunch stuff for next week." I knew better than to believe those words. I can shop an entire grocery store in fifteen minutes, from the time I cross the threshold to the moment I tell the bagger, "No thanks, I can take the cart to the car myself." Elizabeth, however, takes two hours to food shop.

Usually we make the long drive to Whole Foods together. [Post-cancer, I prefer as many organic items as possible.] That store is so small and cramped that we are hurried along by the tight aisles, teetering displays, and bumper-car mentality of the other customers. But this Saturday I didn't need much and Elizabeth wanted big, firm cherries instead of the overpriced, bruised, drippy organic ones from Whole Foods. So against my better judgment, I accompanied her to Publix. I knew as soon as we walked in that I was in trouble as the wide aisles, high ceiling, and perfect pyramids of fresh, firm fruits and vegetables called, siren-like, even to me. I thought to myself, Wow, I can buy some of these beautiful yellow plantains, some of these gorgeous sweet potatoes, and a package of plump pork chops. What a meal that would be!

But we are all born with super powers, and one of my gifts is to block the evil rays of product placement, "shopper" music, and flattering lighting. I knew that the plantains would sit on the counter until tiny flies start to buzz around them, that the sweet potatoes would turn into puddles of filthy juice in the vegetable bin of the refrigerator, and that even if I tossed the pork chops into the freezer, another hurricane would come, I'd lose power for eight days as I did for Charley, and the chops would end up in a garbage bag at the end of the driveway, headed for the city dump.

Food displays are Elizabeth's kryptonite. They rob her of motion and power, make her a zombie who can squeeze the same lime for five minutes. Elizabeth had, for example, hotdogs on her shopping list. Because she was born in the Bronx, there is only one hotdog as far as she is concerned: Sabrett. Although the decision was already made in her mind, I had to shiver in front of the sandwich meat case watching her pick up first Nathan's, then Hebrew National, reading the labels and gauging the plumpness of the cellophane packages. "It's going to be the Sabretts. Just throw the damn package in the cart," I growled.

The cart was another problem. I didn't bother to get one of my own because Elizabeth had assured me, "Just a few things." But then when she started loading up the rack underneath, having already threatened to crush the five things I had decided to buy with her six-packs of water, I went to get my own. We crawled along each aisle, Elizabeth choosing items she will never cook for what will inevitably be hell week, the last week of the semester, when we're just too exhausted to do anything but order pizza or go out. I saw this future, but mesmerized by the Publix displays, she couldn't stop choosing foolish purchases.

Just call me Grocery Girl. Faster than the express check-out lane. More powerful than the seductive lure of rotisserie chicken. Able to skip entire aisles with a single authoritative push of the cart.

The Cockroach

Mrs. Perfect owns a silky terrier named Muffin, Button or Zipper—I can never remember. I call the dog "the Cockroach." She's the color of a giant palmetto bug and scurries around so quickly and erratically that she seems to have six legs. Mrs. Perfect also has a white picket fence, the slats of which are spaced widely enough that the Cockroach can escape, which she does daily. The dog then runs across the street to leave pee-mail on my lawn for the basenjis and, if the cat is out, yap at and chase Felix. Eventually, Mrs. Perfect will realize that her dog is loose and stands on her steps to shout, "Come here!" a command the Cockroach ignores. Then Mrs. Perfect will come stomping after the dog, shouting, "Come here! Come here now!" which the Cockroach believes is an invitation to play and so initiates a chase down the street. It's obvious who is the alpha in that relationship.

On most days, I find the Cockroach merely annoying. If she squeezes through the fence when I am working in the front yard, I have to tolerate her standing in the street barking at me. If I want to walk the basenjis, I have to wait until Mrs. Perfect finally catches the Cockroach so that my dogs don't mistake the little mutt as prey. Yesterday, however, was different.

I was watching the news when Yo-Yo and Bug ran to the front window, their attention fixed on the drama unfolding outside. The Cockroach was loose again; Mrs. Perfect was chasing her over my front lawn. This time when the Cockroach came to terrorize Felix, Felix was already in a stand-off with Joey, the neighbor's cat. The situation was tense, tails low and twitching, ears plastered against each cat's head. The Cockroach came roaring up anyway, with Mrs. Perfect shouting, "No! NO! Come HERE!" One of the cats, I didn't see which, wheeled around and swatted the Cockroach, startling her enough that Mrs. Perfect could finally scoop up the dog and take her home.

When I took Yo-Yo out for her walk later that evening, Mrs. Perfect [who must have been watching for me?] ran out on her steps and shouted across the street, "Did you hear me yelling under your windows?"

"Yes." I thought, silly me, I was about to get an apology for the noise and trespassing.

"Muffin [or Button or Zipper] was after your cats ..." [Because I'm not married, Mrs. Perfect believes every cat in the neighborhood belongs to me.]

I started to say not to worry, that the cats could take care of themselves, when Mrs. Perfect added "... but they got her." Matthew, her son, wailed, "Her face is bleeding!"

It was then I realized that the whole situation, in Mrs. Perfect's eyes, was my fault. If I didn't have a cat who liked to lie on the front sidewalk, her dog wouldn't have gotten scratched because, of course, it wasn't her fault that her perfect white picket fence wasn't escape proof or that she had no control over the Cockroach. There was no problem with her dog in my yard terrorizing the cats, but it wasn't okay that the cats defended themselves.

I expected that today she would come over demanding that I pay a vet bill, but she must have told the story to enough people whose sympathy was with me because I never got the visit. It's too bad that spraying the yard perimeter with Raid won't keep that damn dog out.

Grass Seed Defiant

Weather-wise, Sunday evening was a perfect night. The afternoon thunderstorms had blown through much earlier than usual, so the sky was nearly cloudless and the humidity relatively low. The dogs and I were out on the back patio fighting over the two chairs [whoever got up to get a drink or chase a squirrel lost his/her place until someone new got up to sniff the bushes or check the time]. At one point, I tried to shove Bug off, but all he would do was collapse even deeper into the cushion and flash his white belly to be rubbed. So I went inside and got the camera. The evening light sparkled on the smooth, green, very long grass blades, and I wanted to see if I could capture the moment.


When I saw the picture above, I thought immediately of the Francisco Goya painting The Third of May.


On Monday afternoon, the Hurley Men, who service my lawn, came with their big mowers and "executed" that defiant grass with its revolutionary agenda—just as Napoleon's troops did the Spanish rebels in the painting. But I know all of those individual blades, mulched and crisping in the hot sun, have become martyrs who inspire the survivors to challenge my oppression, rise up over ankles and the concrete patio edge, and shout, "It's a good thing you don't live in a neighborhood with a homeowners association!"

Photo Woes

I am used to having the upper hand in most of my relationships—especially with pieces of technology. Computers tremble when I tap an inept user on the shoulder and say, "Let me sit there and see what I can do." Mighty TechnIsis can make those machines behave.

Whenever I reach for my new digital camera, however, it constantly reminds me that I am as unskilled a photographer as I am a brain surgeon. I had wanted to take magnificent portraits of my dogs, for one thing, but I usually end up with something like the one below when I load the images into my computer:



So today I decided to shoot the hibiscuses in Elizabeth's front yard.




It's hard, I've learned, to fuck up flowers.

Would You Like Some Coffee with Your Sweet'N Low?

Every Summer B, I teach two classes for a program designed to give first-generation minority students a head start when classes begin in the fall. I love working for this program because of the homogeneity of the students. Community colleges attract everyone from dual-enrollment high schoolers to seventy-year-old life-long learners. The students in my Summer B courses, however, are all cocky seventeen-year-olds who believe their recent high school graduation makes them incredibly sophisticated.

Observing these students is great fun because so many of their experiences are brand new. Most of them are sexually active; some of them have the babies to prove it. Many of them have already begun their experimentation with drugs, alcohol, and outrageous interest rates on credit cards. But they still have so much to learn!

Take, for instance, Genelle. I had booked a computer classroom in the Learning Resource Center (our fancy way of saying library). The provost built a cafe on the first floor, and in the spirit of Borders or Barnes & Noble, students can have drinks with them anywhere in the building, even the classrooms full of expensive technology. Genelle had purchased a large coffee to bring to class and grabbed a handful of Sweet'N Low packets for flavor. Seventeen packets, at least. Maybe the cafe was so busy that no one had stocked the regular sugar and Genelle just didn't realize there was a difference. Maybe she was concerned about her weight and making different food choices. Since these students consume sugar in all forms—chugging Red Bull and Pepsi, running to the bookstore during break for Zingers and M&Ms, bringing Ziplock bags full of Twix and Froot Loops—seventeen packets of real sugar would not have surprised me.

What became obvious, though, was that Genelle had never used Sweet'N Low in her short life, for I watched her tear open one pink packet at a time, dump it into the coffee, and stir before she reached for another. It never occurred her to taste the coffee between packets. She has probably never heard that salting an entree before taking a first bite is one way to signal to a corporate boss that an employee doesn't make smart decisions. I was too dumbfounded to yell, "Genelle, for the love of god, stop!"

Genelle swept all of the empty packets into her palm and threw them in the trash can. I started class; she blew on the coffee to cool it. Everyone knew when Genelle took the first sip because her "Gah!" startled us all. Luckily for her computer, she sloshed coffee on her jeans instead of the keyboard.

I don't remember when I learned that artificial sweetener packed more of a punch than real sugar. I do know that I would carefully taste anything new I encountered now. It's a shame, really, that I have outgrown all of those "sweet" surprises that youth still get to enjoy!

Mrs. Perfect and the Trap

I have buried three baby opossums this summer, one right after the other over the course of three days. I think they were emerging from under my house in search of food, water, and Ma. I live in a home built in the 1940s, up off the ground on cinderblocks so that the subterranean termites can't easily get to the wood frame. Underneath the house has been a "Club Mammal," offering temporary shelter to stray and pregnant cats, raccoons, and opossums [probably citrus rats, too, but I don't like to think about them]. None of these critters have bothered me, and I even adopted one of the cats who crawled out, all skin and bones, with a broken leg. That baby opossums were starving to death under the house did, however, upset me, especially since I have a pretty good idea what happened to their mother.

I live across the street from Mrs. Perfect, a cute blonde with an eleven-year-old son. Mrs. Perfect used to be one half of the quintessential Perfects, a family that deviated so little from the ideal that I was convinced they had struck a deal with the Devil. Mr. Perfect had a good job with the airlines, drove the black Volvo, cut the emerald, weed-free grass on weekends, and helped raise the blond, baseball-loving son. Mrs. Perfect was a stay-at-home mom, drove the matching white Volvo, and kept Mr. Perfect busy with home improvement projects and social events. She ventured out of the house on the pretext of watching her husband and Matthew play catch but was really evaluating whose front lawn was starting to compete in beauty with her own or, more often, whose front lawn was in need of fertilizer, water, insecticide, better landscaping, and the like. [I can picture Mrs. Perfect in the bathroom asking, "Mirror, mirror, on the wall, whose yard is better than mine?" only to be told that none in the neighborhood could compare.]

Mr. Perfect has since left for the arms of another woman, and Matthew seems to prefer his father's company because I hardly ever see him, and when I do observe him with his mother, he has the sullen attitude of a seventeen-year-old on drugs. Despite the divorce, Mrs. Perfect still maintains her perfect yard where she tolerates no ugliness.

Now, opossums are fucking ugly creatures. They have oily, wiry fur and a mouth full of dangerous teeth. They hiss like angry alligators, resemble giant rats, and get into the trash. Of course, Mrs. Perfect would never allow opossums to live under her house, although several have tried, especially after so many of their natural homes—the big, half-rotten oak trees that lined the streets—came crashing down after Charley, and then Francis, and then Jeanne. When Mrs. Perfect discovered the first unwanted squatter, she enlisted the help of the Ex, who brought a cage trap to catch the poor animal. After the trap was sprung, the Ex came to retrieve the "horror" and release it somewhere else. Unfortunately, Mrs. Perfect must have been passing notes to the cute guy in biology the day her teacher explained that "Nature abhors a vacuum," so as soon as the critter kingdom realized that primo real estate was on the market, another opossum moved underneath her home. The Ex took care of that one, and then the next, and then the next.

From what I have observed, Mrs. Perfect is a great manipulator. I can hear her argument: "Your son plays in the yard. Opossums carry rabies. Do you want Matthew to have to get all of those painful shots because you allowed vermin to live under the house?" Unfortunately, the food that baited the trap must have attracted the hungry mother who lived under my house, and after her "relocation," the babies, too young to care for themselves, crawled out to die.

What Mrs. Perfect will never realize is that her perfect yard which no weed mars, where no grass runner dares to creep out of its place onto the sidewalk, is a cage trap itself. It limits her options as if she were the caught animal. In her attempt to create a static ideal and hold back change, everyone who knows her finally gets so frustrated with her impossible standards that they "relocate." And she pays as dire consequences as those that my baby opossums faced.

A Prayer for Pensacola

I try not to pray. Sometimes when I am sitting in traffic, I catch myself thinking, "God, help this lane move faster; I want to get home." But mostly I think that prayer is a waste of time. God has way too many other concerns, like making sure all the electrons of all the atoms keep revolving around the nuclei, than to listen to my silly needs that have gone unfulfilled. And to be perfectly honest, he seems—to me at least—to think that humans can take care of themselves [we did get those big brains and opposable thumbs, didn't we?]. I'm also not big on prayer because there are so many people worse off than I am. Isn't it just totally ridiculous of me to be asking for advice on a problem when an orphaned Sri Lankan doesn't have clean water to drink or food to eat or a mother to comfort him because a tsunami washed his family away?

I can hear Christians thinking, "Well, she just hasn't had a hard enough life. There are no atheists in fox holes, you know. If things got really bad, she'd find herself praying with a fervor." But even that argument doesn't work for me as I spent some time in the cancer fox hole and, while bombed with chemo IVs, it still seemed just damn silly to be distracting God with requests to win my cellular war when the doctors, nurses, and I had a strategy, thanks to those big brains and opposable thumbs, for taking care of business.

That said, I am praying for the folks in Pensacola and the surrounding region who have had their televisions on nonstop as they watch that monster storm creep closer and closer, knowing that there will be those really frightening hours hoping that the roof will survive the winds, the next door neighbor's tree won't come crashing through the windows, the utility company will have amassed the necessary resources to get the electricity back on in days instead of weeks. Vaya con dios.

Show Me Yours; I'll Show You Mine

Last semester I had—there is no other word to describe him—a dolt in my research class. Every assignment I received indicated that Timothy never bothered to read all of the directions before attempting the work. For some reason [maybe he thought it would impress me], Timothy always turned in his crappy papers early. At first, I would look at the document and say, "Timothy, you haven't done _____ as I asked. Keep this until Thursday when it's due and fix the problem." As soon as I realized that he expected me to give him a heads up for each assignment, I took the work early and graded it as was, even when a glance alone indicated the document was gasping and blowing hard just for a C. I refuse to become my students' secretary, and I won't act as if they are the busy boss and I'm the office support person whose job is to run around making sure they get to appointments on time, hot coffee and the right document in hand.

At the end of the semester, Timothy had a 70 average, C-, the barest minimum to get credit for the class. We had two assignments to go: an online literature discussion that required students to post answers that their colleagues could see and respond to, and the final exam. Timothy posted two typically mediocre answers, but his third was insightful, full of sophisticated vocabulary and sharp, clear sentences. This post was so unlike his other work that I immediately uploaded it at Turnitin.com. "Timothy's" answer, I discovered, was a paragraph plagiarized from a review of Smooth Talk, the screen adaptation of the short story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"

I gave Timothy a generous 46 for his contribution to the lit discussion: 23 points [70 percent of 33 possible points] for his first banal post, 23 points for his second, equally trite answer, and 0 points for the plagiarized review. Many of my colleagues would argue that I should have given the boy 0 points for the entire assignment, but the big research project was complete, and I wasn't going to fail someone who had stolen one paragraph [of 6,000 words each student must write for this course], especially for an assignment that I didn't consider the real focus of the semester. I believed that the 46, an F, punished the plagiarism, would make Timothy sweat the final exam, but didn't get in his way of completing a class where he had met all other—in my opinion, more important—requirements. The 46 dropped Timothy's average to a 68, but he still had the final exam where, if he just read the damn directions before beginning to answer, he could maintain his C-. I sent this email:

From: sparky.lightbulb@_____cc.edu
To: timothy.longman@_____cc.edu
Sent: Thursday, May 05, 2005 9:34 AM
Subject: Online discussion grade

Timothy:

When you receive your online discussion grade, you will see that you have earned a 46 for your participation. The grade is so low because when I ran your third post at Turnitin.com, I learned that you had plagiarized your answer for "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" That's really inexcusable at this point in the semester, especially after everything that you should have learned about using Internet sources and documenting things carefully.

S. L.

Let me say again I thought that I had been fair; many of my colleagues would argue that I had been too forgiving, too lenient, a real pushover. Timothy, on the other hand, thought I was being a hardass and had the aplomb to confront me by email:

From: timothy.longman@_____cc.edu
To: sparky.lightbulb@_____cc.edu
Sent: Thursday, May 05, 2005 11:28 AM
Subject: RE: Online discussion grade

Well I admit it, I plagarized the third question only because I had a terrible headach and I had to get some sleep and I could not bare to keep my eyes open one minute more. I did most of the assignment on my own, I think a 46 is really harsh. Could you give me the points that I earned from my other posts? I really can't live with a 46 on this assignment. I must have a C or higher in this class and if I don't make that, then I'm really screwed because I have taken the research class 2 other times and if I have to register for a 4th time, I have to pay out of state tuition and I don't have that kind of money. I hope you will consider my honesty. I'm willing to write a new answer for the story if that will make any difference.

Timothy

Never as a student would I have sent such an email. At first, I thought that, yes, students really have changed since "back in the day" when I was an undergrad. In that "golden time," I sweated getting the right page numbers in footnotes; never in my wildest dreams would I have copied someone else's words and turned them in as my own—not if I were deathly ill, never for a headache! When I was a student, I lived the honor code. Yes, my colleagues were correct in bemoaning the poor preparedness of the students in their classes. "I have filing cabinets full of materials I no longer use," a senior faculty member once told me. "They can't handle those assignments any longer." Today's students, I was starting to agree, were not able to achieve the same level of academic success as I had in their place 25 years earlier.

The statistics that we constantly hear would seem to support this observation. At my institution, faculty are regularly reminded that 90 percent of our entering freshman test into at least one semester of preparatory work before they can begin college-level courses. Many of them must complete prep courses in all areas: mathematics, reading, and writing—this despite the state's attempt at guaranteeing their readiness with FCAT. This fact is no surprise when the state grades most of our feeder high schools as C, D, and F. Moreover, SAT scores, the College Board reveals, are lower; students in 1972 achieved on average a combined score or 1039; in 2004, the score is 1026. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, eighth graders rank fifteenth among 45 participating countries in their knowledge of math, eighth in science.

I don't remain exasperated for long about student preparedness, despite the numbers above or students like Timothy. I have realized that when faculty are bitching about lower standards and dumber students, they are allowing hasty generalizations to influence their perceptions. Most faculty tend to look outward instead of inward, to the present at the expense of the past, when they attempt to answer the question, Are students less prepared today?

Instead of remembering the sun-lit glory days of their college experience, faculty need to remember what utter dolts they were themselves. I can already hear my colleagues protesting: "I had a 4.0!" "Well, I graduated summa cum laude!" "Yes, but I was the favorite of the professors in my discipline!" What I would ask everyone is this: Can I see all of your freshman composition essays? All of your calculus exams? All of the quizzes that you took in biology and all of the blue book answers you produced in Western Civilization? Can I see what you wrote like, how deeply and accurately you understood the material, how well you handled details like footnoting or remembering a negative sign? Care to share the poems, songs, short stories, and paintings you produced, the ones that might have been printed in your school's literary magazine but wouldn't have a chance in The New Yorker? Because what we would find in these artifacts is that we all demonstrated naive, Jeopardy!-level appreciation of the material, all, really, that our instructors wanted back then.

I remember what I was really like at the same age most of my students are now. I was bright but naive, ill read though convinced I was close to intellectually polished, with the most superficial grasp of many subjects. When I want to be reminded of this, I dig out my own freshman compositions. I received an A in that class [at an institution that ranks yearly in the top 5 according to US News and World Report], but I will hand them over only if my colleagues are willing to do the same. My freshman compositions make me cringe at how little I knew and how poorly I could express it. When my own students demonstrate their own superficial, unoriginal thinking, I remember that I was no better. And when I have dolts like Timothy, students who are lacking considerably more than I was at that age, I realize that my own professors must have had their share. I don't remember those students because I was basking in the positive attention of my revered teachers, but when my professors went back to their offices, they had to deal with their own Timothys, and like me and my colleagues today, might have forgotten in those moments of frustration the eager and enthusiastic students who didn't give them reason to complain.

400 Degrees for One Hour

This evening I invited Elizabeth over for dinner. Her family owned several Italian restaurants, so she knows all the conventions of professional cooking. I, on the other hand, grew up in a home where pork chops were broiled until they were as crispy as potato chips, where salt shakers were empty decoration [all the adults had high blood pressure], and where most meals started in boxes [Tuna Helper, macaroni and cheese, TV dinners, etc.]. We cooked Thanksgiving turkeys in giant plastic bags sprinkled with flour. Elizabeth was convinced I made that last detail up until I showed her those very bags for sale on a shelf at Publix. Needless to say, I always have tremendous anxiety when Elizabeth comes to my house to eat.

I sometimes enjoy meals prepared as they were by my two kitchen-clueless parents, like browned hamburger mixed with a jar of spaghetti sauce served over gummy noodles. So I tried to cook the salmon tonight as close to the way I ate all fish as a child: baked in the oven for one full hour at 400 degrees. I did season with salt and pepper as I don't currently have any Mrs. Dash [the only seasoning my family used]. When my parents were still married, my father often went freshwater fishing and brought home bass to eat. Wild fish, I frequently heard, was full of worms, so it had to be cooked until all the parasites were dead. My parents agreed that one hour would surely eradicate the unappetizing contamination.

Elizabeth tried to convince me that 20 minutes at a lower temperature was better for the fish, would improve its taste and texture. Although she is the kitchen expert, I insisted that the flesh needed forty minutes more to ensure that all of those dreaded worms—real or imagined—were dead.

When I Knew

When I was twenty-four, I got carjacked early one morning in the parking lot of a 7-11. I stopped at that convenience store every day on my way to work, even though I should have known better. This 7-11 was not in the best part of town, but I was young and naive and refused to accept that there was any truth to any stereotype. You know, that bad people did in fact live in the bad parts. Then two crackheads kidnapped and searched me for money, pried the dashboard off so that they could rip out my stereo, and left with my tire iron and jack [I assumed to sell as scrap, although at one point during the ordeal, I did worry that they might bash in my head with the heavy equipment]. I quit buying coffee at that particular establishment, choosing instead a store in a better neighborhood.

My lesson was that there is truth in stereotypes—maybe not universal truth but some real accuracy nonetheless. So I don't know why it took so long [another whole year] for me to realize that I was a lesbian when I met so many qualifications of the stereotype. I drove a truck, a purchase that my family and the salesman tried to dissuade me from buying, probably because of the message it sent. I didn't wear makeup or high heels and pulled off bras as soon as I left work. I bought shirts almost exclusively on the men's side of the Gap. I didn't have a boyfriend and couldn't think of a single reason why I would want one, yet I still identified as straight. I remember I was teaching a night class one semester when an older butch told me that she had some "friends" that she thought I would enjoy "meeting." She said it just like that, as if there were quotation marks around the words, code I was supposed to recognize. I didn't get it, although I must have been sending signals that she had obviously picked up.

I finally knew I was gay the evening that Meg confessed. We were in my living room, Meg up on the sofa wrapped in a Mexican blanket while I lay stretched out on the carpet. She had something that she had to tell me, and it took forever for her to spit it out. I don't know what was the hardest part of the confession for her, that she was gay [she never used the word lesbian, and, come to think of it, in the 80s, the word did seem to falter on many tongues] or that she was attracted to me. Maybe it was that she was still in a relationship with an older woman, and her feelings for me were really complicating that situation. When she finished, the proverbial lightbulb went off. I realized that all of my feelings for her now made sense, that I was attracted as well. Of course, I didn't say that. Insight might have struck lightning fast, but I wasn't prepared at a moment's notice to become gay, so I told Meg that her sexuality didn't matter and we could still be friends.

Eventually, Meg and I did try a relationship, which ended badly. For an entire year afterward, I would hit a specific section of road on my way to work and start crying. I balled up that Mexican blanket, stuffed it in a green garbage bag, and threw it out with the trash. I dragged the sofa down to the road too. And I wasn't done: I ripped up the carpeting and repainted the walls. I'm not sure if I was trying to get rid of the Meg stain in the house or my self-revelation. But that was when I knew.

Firecrackers

Tonight is still and humid; the air choked with the smoke of incendiary devices. This is the first Fourth of July holiday when I have been able to walk Bug all the way around the neighborhood park at night. In the past, I have had to listen to his asphyxiated breathing as he nearly hanged himself on the leash, his toenails raking the sidewalk as he tried to flee to the safety of the house. While loud noises do not faze Yo-Yo, Bug is terrified of cars backfiring, skateboards rolling on pavement, and firecrackers popping during New Year and Fourth of July celebrations.

Or I should say was terrified. He has come a long way from the starved, half-hairless rescue I agreed to foster and then adopt. Since Bug was picked up as a stray with no history, I can't account for his fright. I do know that the past year brought two changes. This spring when he lost his winter coat, he started getting gray around the mouth and eyes [I have a feeling he is a good bit older than the six and a half he should be]. He also relaxed one stage further. Rescue people will say that a basenji needs six months to grow accustomed to a new home. Bug has taken [in little increments] four and a half years—and still has a way to go.

I love Bug a great deal [as does Yo-Yo on the days Bug isn't bucking for alpha], but I'm not sure I would adopt another rescue. There are too many unanswered questions. I don't know if Bug's anxiety is a result of fears he learned at the harsh hands of his original owner or acquired after he escaped. I don't know if he was deliberately dumped or lost by a loving owner who just couldn't find him. [Bug does have a peculiar habit of going out of his way to smell cigarette butts, as though he is hoping to find one tossed by a particular person.]

Since I live in the tourist capital of the world, I can imagine that a family traveling by car might have opened the door at the wrong moment, and since everyone was unfamiliar with the locale, people and dog just couldn't find one another. I can also imagine one of the many apartment dwellers in the city letting the poor boy "escape" as a way to avoid any more chewed furniture. Unfortunately, God doesn't grant video check-out privileges as Blockbuster does, so speculation is all I have.

Whatever his story, this year Bug walked all the way around the lake without anxiety about the celebratory noise coming from all sides.

Bug, who always looks worried