The Age of Innocence

Those of you who follow our blog faithfully (and you know who you are) will be glad to know that this week we actually have real events to narrate (not mundane details magnified into unmerited glory).

Our week began fairly innocuously with a visit to a park that we don’t often go to, although Andrew was more interested in the dogs who were there with their owner (but while he was fascinated by the dogs and kept following them, he would rapidly retreat if they appeared to return his interest). I don’t think this particular park is very Andrew friendly, though—the climbing gym has too many openings that are hard for me to cover, and I don’t trust Andrew (yet) not to step through one of them.

That evening, as usual, I had appointments at the writing center. Normally, this is not so remarkable, but this evening something unusual happened. I should probably provide a little back story. A few times in the last couple weeks I and one of the women in a neighboring office (who often works into the evening) have observed an older man lingering in the lobby area of the building after hours. Since there was recently a meeting on building security, and we were told to report anything suspicious, this gentleman’s repeat visits were all the more noticeable (in fact, it was my neighbor who first drew my attention to him). He told me on one occasion that he was waiting to meet someone (who never showed up), but he didn’t appear to be a student or a faculty member. On this particular evening, I was a little nervous about this loitering—on the surface, he didn’t appear to be doing anything threatening, but I realized that everyone else on the ground level had left the building except for me and this man. So, I did what we were told to do: I called the campus police. I explained that he appeared relatively harmless, but that he didn’t appear to have any reason for loitering in the lobby that he was; they said they’d come by and check it out—which they did, about an hour later, and escorted him from the building. Apparently, this particular gentleman has been reported before for the same thing (although not recently)—and appears to have a fondness for our building). They also discovered that he had stored a couple of bags in some lockers reserved for graduate students. I’m still not sure how I feel about what I did—on the one hand, the university is concerned about people being in buildings after hours who don’t belong there; on the other hand, he clearly wasn’t hurting anyone or anything. And it also seems particularly ironic that this incident should occur just after I finished reading a book by Susan Ruddick (for my dissertation), called Young and Homeless in Hollywood, that describes, among other things, some of the ways that society dictates social hierarchies in place—in other words, how we recognize who belongs and who does not belong in a particular place. I’ve been trying to recall what exactly made me sure that this man did not *belong* and I’m not sure that I have any clear conclusions—this has also made me think, generally, about the social cues that help us recognize belonging in particular places: mostly dress, I think, but also behavior. Ruddick’s book also describes the ways that homeless youth in Hollywood attempt to blend in to particular places—to make themselves in effect invisible, so that they won’t also be driven out of those places. In Monday night’s case, apparently this man’s attempts at invisibility failed, and again, I’m still trying to puzzle out why—he was dressed reasonably nicely (khakis and a button-down shirt), and he was acting as though he was waiting for someone—a reasonable reason for lingering in an area. Perhaps it was because he seemed uneasy; perhaps because the papers that he always had with him did not appear to be related to any academic subject I’m familiar with. Anyway, for me it was a curious reminder about the significance of place—and, perhaps not so coincidentally, one of the topics I’m working on in my dissertation!

Tuesday morning began with a bit of excitement: I couldn’t find my keys. Since I needed to drive Andrew to the babysitters before heading up to campus to meet with students, this presented a bit of a problem. Dan and I both searched all over our apartment, looking in all the random places I (or Andrew) might have put them. Meanwhile, Andrew wandered around repeating delightedly, “key, key.” I finally found them—in my purse (but not in the pocket where I normally put them). Later that morning, Dan picked up Andrew from the babysitter’s, because he needed the car that afternoon to drive up to Zion’s Camp (the youth equivalent here of scout camp—as Dan puts it, “it’s girl’s camp, basically, for the boys”), where he stayed into the evening. (Not to imply that he left Andrew home—I got home just before he came back with Andrew, but if Dan had waited for me to get home, go pick up Andrew, and come back, it would have been later than he wanted). Andrew and I had a quiet—and warm!—afternoon, playing out in the yard with a bucket of water and then wandering over to the neighborhood park. Just after I put Andrew down to bed, the skies opened up—I imagine the boys were pretty excited about the sudden downpour on their camp! Dan came home around 9:15 to report another adventure—due to the slippery roads, he had slid into a guardrail and knocked out the front left light and tore off part of the car frame. We’re just glad that he made it home in one piece, even if the car didn’t.

On Wednesday, because we couldn’t drive the car until the insurance agency had sent someone to look at the car (and even then, the car had to be towed to the repair shop), Andrew and I spent a lot of time at home. After his morning nap, we walked up to campus, to return some library books, visit Dan, and go downtown to cash a check and have some ice cream. The weather was beautiful for so late in the spring—not too hot, with a cool breeze. We had a nice, leisurely outing and returned home in time to feed Andrew and put him down for a nap. Only there was a catch. For the second time in two days, I couldn’t find my keys. Luckily, our landlady lives just down the street, and I saw from her car parked out front that she was home. She was gracious enough to let us in, so I didn’t have to resort to calling Dan to come home from work to let us in.

Our car adventures continued on Thursday: in the late morning, Dan met with someone from the insurance agency, who then okayed the repairs. Dan called a tow-truck to take our car to the repair shop, and went back up to campus. Because we were car-less, Steph had kindly agreed to pick up Andrew at our house. After I finished my hours at the writing center, she brought him home, where he promptly went down for a nap. Shortly after his nap, Steph returned with Gaby in tow (I had offered to watch Gaby while her mom had an appointment on campus). Although she and Andrew can play together nicely on occasion, Andrew was quite territorial, as it turns out, and very jealous of his mommy’s attention. Gaby, however, would have none of his shenanigans, and screeched loudly whenever Andrew tried to gainsay her. However, there were a few quite sweet moments, as when Andrew gave a somewhat reluctant Gaby a hug.

Perhaps the most interesting incident on Thursday was the email I received from my sister-in-law (Justin’s wife, Lia), explaining that they would be driving past State College Friday afternoon, and could they stop by? Normally, I would have been thrilled by this—in this particular case, it seemed like some kind of fate was conspiring against us, as they were coming by the *only* weekend all summer (well, at least until we move at the end of July) when I wasn’t going to be home! I was planning to attend a weekend workshop on “Rhetorics of Place,” part of the Rhetoric Society of America’s biennial Summer Institute, in Troy, NY (at Rensselaer Polytechnic).

Friday morning was an early one for us: I left just before 7 a.m. for my workshop. Some alumni from Penn State’s rhetoric program (Jess Enoch and Scott Wible), were kind enough to pick me up enroute to Troy (they were driving from Pittsburgh). I said good-bye to Andrew (not without a pang, as he, not unnaturally, protested my leaving). Dan didn’t seem quite as moved by my departure, although I’m not sure how excited he was at a weekend one-on-one with Andrew. Our drive was pretty uneventful, and we arrived in Troy about 12:30, with just enough time to check into the dorms, find lunch, and attend the opening of the workshop at 2 p.m. As far as dormitories go, these are pretty classic old, beat up, dingy looking dorm rooms. As someone put it, they look like a bunch of 18-year-old males have been living in them for a while. At least my stay wasn’t supposed to be long!

The workshop itself was pretty interesting, if a little less organized than I would like: the organizer asked each of us to present on our current research for half an hour. And while it has been interesting (sometimes fascinating) to hear what other people are working on, I would have liked a little more general discussion about the topic. Since this topic is directly related to my dissertation topic, I want to hear more about how people are thinking generally about theories of rhetorical space. On the upside, I’ve met some wonderful people (including a fellow Dorothy Sayers fan—always a good thing!), and I’ve had a chance to renew my acquaintance with a few people, like Greg Clark, a former English department head and current assistant dean in the Humanities college at BYU (and a potentially useful contact for the future!).

Meanwhile, back on the home-front, Dan was attempting to keep Andrew interested and pacified until his cousins arrived. For said arrival, they waited with nearly bated breath … and waited … and waited … Finally, Dan decided that they weren’t coming and put Andrew to bed for the night. Nearly an hour later (around 7:30 p.m.), the Collings clan finally put in their long-awaited appearance. Unfortunately, at this point, the only member of the Eves family who was there to greet them was Dan. However, he played the gracious host and even got out some of Andrew’s big toys for his cousins to play with. (From his description, it sounds like Julia and Eli were more interested in Andrew’s toys than they would have been in Andrew himself—in any case, Andrew has an alarming tendency to frighten older children by his sheer lack of any sense of personal boundaries and his inability to understand that simply because he sees something he wants does not automatically grant him ownership of said object).

Saturday morning found me back at the grindstone … er, workshop. After a couple more presentation, we headed down the famous (infamous?) Rensselaer steps (they remind me just a little of the famous Spanish steps in Rome—nearly as steep, though not quite so grandiose. The lower part of the stairs is in some disrepair, as apparently the university thinks it’s the city’s responsibility and the city thinks it’s the university). Since our workshop was on rhetorics of *place* the organizers not unnaturally thought it might interest us to learn something more about the particular place we found ourselves in, so we went down to the County Historical Society for a walking tour of downtown Troy. The weather could not have been better—the weather was in the mid 70s (not too cool, not too hot) and the sun was shining brightly. Even the curator who led our tour commented on the weather, suggesting that we were seeing Troy at its best. I had heard that Troy was not that pretty—and I imagine that the majority of the city is not, but the university is a pretty campus built mostly out of red brick, and the downtown area that we saw had some beautifully restored examples of early nineteenth-century architecture. (In fact, we were told that downtown Troy was where parts of The Age of Innocence were filmed). We also got to see the site of Emma Willard’s seminary, one of the first American educators who believed that women were capable of learning academic subjects as rigorously as men. Although Willard herself didn’t believe in woman’s suffrage, several of her students were among the power-houses of the nineteenth-century suffrage movement, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Back in State College, one of Dan's lab mates, Kelly, brought her dog Glenn-Coco to visit Andrew. In typical Andrew fashion, Andrew was alternately fascinated and frightened of the dog--even one of such diminutive status.

After lunch at RSA, we had still more presentations, and then an hour break before dinner—a river cruise on the Hudson. When the shuttles dropped us off at the loading dock we ran into a wedding part—apparently they were to have the top two decks of the ship and we were to have the lower decks. But I’m sure the wedding party initially wondered what this group of dressed down, disparate looking folks was doing trying to crash their wedding. At any rate, the food on the cruise was pretty decent, and although the scenery was not as spectacular as some I’ve seen (I couldn’t help mentally comparing it to a similar cruise down the Rhine river in Germany, where we spotted castles on the hills every few miles), it was still nice and we saw some pretty views of downtown Albany. (However, as you can probably tell, Dan had the camera, so I don't have any pictures. You'll have to use your imagination).