Not All Who Wander Are Lost

Glen Hiller, 35, doesn't get it. He expresses shock that a Bush rally would be filled with people who support Bush, and more shock that he'd be asked to leave for heckling -- when in fact we used to kick people out of the Boston Museum of Science for heckling our lightning shows, too.

Then, to top it all off, he thinks he was fired because of his politics.

But was he? A quick look at the backstory puts this into perspective: Hiller, a graphic designer working for "an advertising and design company," was at the rally as a guest of a client. An adman's job depends on making clients happy. If one of those clients takes you to a public event, and you embarass them by getting kicked out of that event -- why, you failed at your job, demonstrated crass insensitivity to the very people whose bill-paying keeps your company solvent. Wouldn't you expect to get fired?

Hiller's not the only idot here; CNN doesn't get it either. As we've seen in the past, they have a knack for spinning facts like this to make them seem like news. (At least they're transparent about it, so we can make fun of them.) Here, they clearly report this as news because it was a Bush rally, not, say, a Tony Orlando and Dawn concert in Vegas, at which Hiller did the dirty deed -- this should be so obvious as to need no mention, really.

Heckling at a rally isn't news. Getting kicked out of a rally for being disruptive isn't news. Getting fired for offending a client not only isn't news, it isn't even unexpected -- that's the way the adworld works, folks. In fact, it isn't even news when a guy claims that he was fired because of something Bush-related, when the logic is as tenuous as this is -- it's a cry for psychiatry, or perhaps for a course in basic logic.

Net result: a headline that says "Man fired for heckling Bush." In fact, the first paragraph makes plain that he was fired for "offending a client who provided tickets to the event." With that headline, though, we are clearly and pre-emptively meant to believe that Hiller is somehow a victim of Bush&co, which is patently silly. Boos and hisses to CNN for providing fodder to the Moore-minded. (Kudos, though, for the excuse to rant again -- it's been a while, eh?)

Last night the rain
and a lightning clap like God's hands
close by over the mountains.

I am driving North to see you,
past all this: along the roiled river
brown with mud, the blasted rock,
the rushing water runoff.

Here and there
the green trees
tipped with red leaf patches
new since yesterday.

Commonwealth School, Boston

Working the NMH Volunteers Weekend this weekend, and thinking about my own beloved schools. Though my educational background was sporadic at best -- I switched to a private high school for Junior and Senior years after almost flunking out of public school, and took little from Bard, my first-try college, other than a spouse-to-be, a bunch of neat writing courses, and a love of the rural life -- I consider Commonwealth School (that private school, shown above -- a tiny liberalarts thinktank in a Bostonian Comm Ave. brownstone) a long-ago savior. Despite low grades and a total failure to keep in touch with any of my 33 fellow class-of graduates, that place was the first to show me that aptitude was little without interest, and application impossible without commitment. Also, for a school whose population never rose above 120 from 9-12, we sure had some great parties.

Meanwhile, most grads of my collegiate alma mater seem to be flailing -- a recent visit to Brattleboro met me up with several old roommates and friends, most of whom have new stories to tell of failed marriages and part-time dead-end jobs. Dave just opened a cafe and performance space in town, without Anna; I met Brandt inside, up from Washington, and Dan, Mike, and Jeremy on the steps, all of whom are either between jobs or on their way somewhere else pretty soon, it seems. Meanwhile, Carl was in line behind me at Mocha Joes, and reports he's still doing solo construction work, his daughter living in Cali with his ex.

As for me...well, I'm still here, and still married happily. But some days -- like yesterday, pulled over for an out of date car registration, and spending our last cash on a tow; looking ahead at a week of full-on work with no time or money to reregister, or renew the surprisingly out-of-date license to boot -- take me closer to the edge than I've been since those last few disastrous days at Bard, hiding out in Darcie's dormroom after being dismissed, living off of stolen dining hall broccoli.

But Marlboro College itself is in the pink. The new president seems, by all accounts, to be well-liked, the grad school's ads come across strong on our local public radio station, and the undergrad school scored higher than ever in the just-released Princeton Review Annual College Guide:

In the 2005 issue of The Best 357 Colleges, Marlboro ranked first for "Professors Bring Material to Life" and second for "Best Overall Academic Experience," "Class Discussions Encouraged" and "Professors Make Themselves Accessible" and 13th for "Students Never Stop Studying."

It's not Harvard or Princeton, and thank god for that. Happy to hear that the tiny school-on-a-hill -- all 300 students and 30 professors -- seems to be doing quite well without me or my cash, though I gave a token sum last year, all we could afford. Maybe one of these days they'll be ready for a communications and media prof, and I can quit the prep school rat race for good.

This morning a gleeful trip to the Brattleboro Retreat Petting Farm, once a theraputic treatment for the mentally ill, now a mecca of last-ditch summer entertainment for children and the childlike. Willow crowed at the roosters and fed goats grain pellets from her bare hands. The emus glowered at us, and the llama's didn't spit; we all held baby chicks, and a tiny baby piglet climbed through the bars of her family cage to get a full-out scratch from me, which made my day -- doesn't everyone secretly wish they could have a wee pink pig for a housepet?

Skinny dipping this afternoon again, Brattleboro yesterday (and a nice yummy dinner at Max's for our anniversary while the in-laws watched the kid get filthy in the garden). Sitting on the porch rocker just a few minutes ago after the kid went up to bed with her mother, I watched the hills beyond the hills glow gold with a sunset rain-and-fog, and listened to the Canada geese call to each other as they bed down in the horsefields. But the buzz in the back of the brain has started, and a chatter of email messages unsent, plans and sequences for the days ahead flits through my brain familiarly, distracting me from the universe, as it always does. It's the end of the summer, and only this morning seems clear in retrospect. Too soon it will be a distant memory.

I'm off to the "office" tomorrow to prep the tech for this weekend's reunion planning committee events -- set up data projectors and lapel mics where needed, and, while class chairs learn to sell the school to their fellow alums, stand by at $18 an hour during their use in case a battery blows. I'll be in the apartment solo all weekend, while Darcie and Willow entertain here at the housesitting gig until Monday late.

For me, starting Monday, it's meetings meetings meetings, three days straight. Followed by meetings, and quite probably some meetings until Friday.

And then the kids arrive, and once again, we live where we work.

This year I won't be teaching any major courses, for the first time since I started working the prep school gig in 1998. This year, too, there's a little person running around at home, once who finally kisses me and hugs me goodnight, instead of the old pre-verbal to miss all day. And this is the year we'll be shopping the prep school market, along most of my teaching peers, I gather -- the school goes down to halfsize at the school year's end, and given the tight time frame for placement in the prep school world (basically, a three week period in March), it's far too late to start the process when the pink slips start coming down the pike.

No wonder my back aches.

It was another wonderful summer. I wouldn't trade it for anything.

But there's nothing wrong with wishing it could have lasted forever.

Silly me -- I thought eighth anniversaries were traditionally celebrated with gifts of daub and wattle (or is that taupe and bottle?), but Britwomen's reference site iVillage claims this to be the year of the Bronze -- and reccommends tanning lotion, sculpture, sun, or a servant's bell. Finding these not our style, I'm still thinkin' -- let me know if you've got a good one, and I'll happily lay the thanks on here in public.

Has it really been that long since Darcie and I walked down the narrow aisle, stood beneath the woolen huppah, danced on the lawn with friends and fam, wearing homemade clothes, surrounded by next-door neighbor's gifted farmstand sunflowers? Since the rabbi helped us make sandwiches beforehand, and all my college friends got high in the parking lot during the reception? One of the things I love best about marriage (well, our marriage) is that it seems like forever, and just yesterday, all at the same time. For those still looking, here's a hint from my playbook: growing together is blessed by comfortable silences as much as the yakkety-yak therapist's paean.

We've been dating since 1991, dropped out of college together (and boy, did her parents like that at the time), lived with roommates and Willow trees, in cities and farmvalleys; had a child, want more; grown a dog and a stray cat into family, too. I wouldn't trade a minute of it, from nickel to rose, and can't wait until we celebrate our diamond years...nor our formica anniversary (next year, right?).

What with the rain steady on the slate roofs and leadglass windowpanes in this old borrowed house, we've been mostly inside all day, except for a quick trip for farmstand berries and homemade chicken cutlet small-market sandwiches. The cats come in and out of the rain all day, and for the first time all showed up for lockdown this evening -- guess even the barn's a bit damp. And though the house is leakrpoof, the fog comes in these cracked windows, raising mildew, giving us headaches, making yesterday's fresh biscuits grow greenspot mold in their kitchen bag.

So not much to report today, really, except time with the wee one. We plopped in a beanbag ("swing me in this chair, daddy!"), watched over an hour of JoJo, the claymation Disneychannel circus clown on the huge-screen television this afternoon (Willow insisted on "holding" the three little bunnies she saw onscreen, so I "let her"); hopped out to the aforementioned while Darcie slept off a touch of nausea; played with the pool table (wherein Willow sits atop the felt and rolls balls in the holes to hear them run through the table's innards, and I use the cue to gently knock back those that miss).

Willow nods her head and smiles when asked questions on the phone, not realizing that only words come through both ends, I guess. But we're coaching her, and watched amazed as, after supper tonight, she had an actual conversation with Darcie's father, hello through goodbye. That kid just blows me away.

Somewhere upstate of here, thousands of neohippies are crying as Phish goes out with a hundred water- and fish-based puns. Their follower's clothes and bedding are filthy and damp; their cars are still stuck in the mud they lodged in Friday, when they arrived for the weekend farewell at Coventry. According to today's Brattleboro Reformer, the promoters spent 50k on mud-pull tractors and winches, but honestly, there's no hurry -- many of these folks have been on the road following the band for so long they've got nowhere to go.

Imagine if Moses came to the Isralites after the first 30 desert years and said "Okay, guys, you're on your own -- go home." Like the Jews that moment God decided to stop stopping by, Phishheads (Groupies?) have suddenly become people of the book, too.

Though I can't resist a good concert, I've never been the kind of guy to follow a band around the country. I went to my first and only Phish show at the Somerville Theater way back in '91, when the shows were still general admission and there was only one cassette to buy, and I bought it; got there early enough to snag sixth row, with drummer Jon Fishman's mom in the next seat over -- we had a nice chat between the trampolines of "Bouncing Around the Room" and the intermission animated film of "Esther." Later, I convinced my deadhead college roommate to try their show at then-nearby Albany, the famous set where they did almost all (but not quite) of the legendary Gamehenge cycle, unannounced as always -- I've always regretted not tagging along.

But the albums and live cuts will live on forever in the coffee shop soundtracks and road trip tape decks. Their jams were tight, the production lush, the energy sublime throughout their career. Their SNL self-parody several years ago, on the comeback trail after a year-long band hiatus, was a thriller; from Bathtub Gin and Fee to Back on the Train -- the track, incidentally, from whence this blog's subtitle comes -- Phish made music that stepped into the high gear of my soul. Trey, Mike, Page and Jon -- though your solo projects rock, each and every one, and will surely continue to do so, things will never be the same without you.