moving along

Today has been rather uneventful. It seems Mother Nature is still being a cold-hearted bitch and keeping poor Kentuckiana freezing it's nads off... I brought an umbrella to school to try and shield myself from the cold biting wind... it blew inside-out as soon as I opened it instead. Ugh.  I was worried the rest of the day would be as frustrating as an inside-out umbrella... however, I've been pleasantly surprised!

I got into my L140 class and I sit next to the teacher. She looks over at me and I'm worried for a second she's going to berate me for not participating in class. Instead, she asks if she can have an ecopy of my last paper e-mailed to her so she can circulate it within the class. Apparently, it was so well-written, she wants to show it off! I got an A+ on it, and she wrote a few wonderful compliments on the back of the paper, including: "You have a better defined prose style than most of your colleagues."  That made me feel quite excellent, and also guilty for writing that paper in a few hours with miniscule, half-assed research methods...

I don't talk much in her class because my interpretation of the fiction we're reading never seems to be on par with everyone else's. And I'm not saying that everyone has to agree on fiction interpretation, of course it boils down to personal experience, point of view, and emotions, but for the most part, there's a general "right" and "wrong" no matter how vague those words are in the context of interpreting literature.When someone comes up with an off-the-wall interpretation of a passage, a professor will entertain it for a few moments, but the class just waits patiently for the discussion to get "back on track" and in the blase zone.

So I tend to keep my mouth shut and just bob my head in agreement with my fellow students. I don't feel that my interpretations are better or more accurate, I just know they are different. Today's discussion was very much in that same vein. We read a short story by Bobbie Ann Mason called "Shiloh". The plot of the story is simple enough, "After 26 years of marriage, Leroy and Norma Jean find themselves at a crossroads where Norma Jean decides she wants to leave Leroy, but Leroy wants to stay with Norma Jean."

The remarkable thing for me about this story was that it coincides so damned perfectly with my parent's current state of being. My dad was an over-the-road trucker for many years. He quit the long haul stuff when my younger brother was born because he wanted to be around to see him and I grow up. He started driving locally, and that lasted for the bulk of my childhood. In the past few years, he started developing major health issues (sleep apnea, a damaged rotator cuff in his right shoulder, and gout in his feet) and had to give up trucking altogether.

In the story, Leroy was in a terrible accident where his rig jackknifed and his leg is badly injured, stunting his trucking career.

My mom has lately been obsessed with exercising. It used to be all she would talk about. She lost a lot of weight and is almost TOO skinny now. She also took up a ton of hobbies when Dad quit trucking, like volleyball and Euchere. She's never home, always riding her bike to the store or going out with co-workers or her parents or brother. She's never at home, whereas Dad is always at home, sitting on his ass, watching TV.

In "Shiloh", Norma Jean is so similar to my mother, it scares me. They both become obsessed with exercising. The story even mentions Norma Jean wearing ankle weights and my Mom totally wears those around the house, to the store, all the time. She attributes a lot of her weight loss to them.

As the class discussed this story, I felt very much like they were discussing my parents' current state of affairs. Dad's life seems to have ground to a halt when he had to give up trucking. Mom picked herself up and ran with her life, becoming more active and exciting. I feel that in reading "Shiloh" and hearing my class' discussion on the story I gained a lot of insight into the situation.

Perhaps their marriage worked because both of them always had jobs and when Dad was driving over-the-road, he wasn't home all that much... Perhaps Mom became so into her hobbies and never being home because she didn't know how to cope with Dad suddenly being home all the time... Maybe she got so busy to try and gain his attention... Maybe Dad wants to build the screened-in porch on the back of their house for Mom because like Leroy (who wants to build a log cabin for Norma Jean), he feels it could rekindle or restart their marriage and things could work out...

All I know is I'm thinking a bit more broadly and differently about their situation. I'm also mailing Mom a copy of the story in a plain manilla envelope with the words: "Read this. You might find it interesting..." written on it.

We'll see what she thinks of it. She'll know it's from me because she'll recognize the handwriting, and I'm almost certain she'll think I wrote it! That's how much it parallels their current life... Weird, huh?