It Is Dark Inside the Wolf

February 10, 2023

How much of my preoccupation with the Woes of Saint Xavier is ego, how much is a need for justice, how much is simply a nagging thought that we’re close to a better way, and, with a little tweaking and compromise, we can find solutions that create a win-win? 

I need to be suspicious of the “ego” part. I suspect I can be vindictive and passive aggressive. I want satisfaction, and my appreciation of the intrigue of a long-game payback gives me pause. Nursing one’s wounds is necessary for recovery and survival. But watering and tending the garden of one’s grievances is the wrong path. It is self-destructive, at least in life, despite how satisfying it can be in stories and imagination.

This week’s reading in class of Margaret Atwood’s The Testatments is relevant here. The novel is a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, which was written a lifetime ago in the early 1980s. Atwood explains that she had no plans to write a sequel, but then 32 years later, propelled undoubtedly by developments in American politics and social movements, and The Handmaid’s Tale TV series, she found herself desirous of creating a sequel. The problem, she explained in “The Writing of The Testaments,” was that she had lost the narrative voice of the original. Always a student/teacher of creative processes, Atwood explains that there are ways of continuing the story in such a case—for example, by shifting the perspective or by starting in the middle. She uses “Little Red Riding Hood” as an illustration, which could have started, “It was dark inside the wolf.” And so, we’re on a different track, with different narrative possibilities.

In The Handmaid’s Tale, the wolf was the repressive society of Gilead—and that story does in fact begin in medias res in that dark place. The Testaments, it turns out, also begins inside the wolf—but here the wolf is Aunt Lydia, one of the founders/collaborators/subversives of the repressive Gileadean society. Atwood’s novel takes us into and through the psychology and history of that wolf—and the story provides rich, detailed portraiture of the proverb, “Revenge is a dish best served cold.” My satisfaction and sympathy with Atwood’s depiction of this very cold dish worries me a bit, as I feel stirrings for similar satisfactions in connection with the wrongs that have been done to me and mine.

Is SXU’s situation a problem of local significance—one employer’s bad behavior—or is it reflective of a larger, world turning moment? Grappling with that question is one of my challenges. As I look on in shock and horror, maybe I just need to take a breath and recognize: sic transit gloria mundi, don’t take it personally, ‘twas always thus, it’s bad all around, two steps forward, one step back, there’s still some hope…. But how much comfort and hope can there be in recognizing the scale of the problem is the whole world, rather than just the place where I work?

I’m trying to grow up a bit about my expectations. Here’s what I’ve recently discovered about how I’ve approached life through my youth and adulthood up until recently: I’ve been waiting for the “end of history”—in the sense that we will have arrived, through progressiveness, reform, and enlightenment, to a time beyond—not all human frailties—but some of the big ones, at least, like (extreme) racism, sexism, and bigotry (or at least the more obvious bigotries). Atwood’s essay cited above (“The Writing of The Testaments”) helped me perceive my bias. She said she was leery of the phrase “on the wrong side of history.” The phrase suggests that history pronounces judgment and advances on, in a more or less settled way, and posterity situates itself on the correct side. But in her explanation that “history is simply human beings doing stuff,” she spotlights how random and impermanent and potentially backsliding history can be. “It winds around, it reverses, very much depending on the circumstances.”

Enter Donald Trump. He unveiled to me (and others) just how so many “solved” problems of the past have not at all been solved, but still are there, lurking, seeking out their point of entry into the fray. With Trump, we’ve learned that the term “backsliding” is too much of an understatement. What would the term be for the dissolution of entities that we had, more or less, reified into existential absolutes—democracy as the American form of government, for instance?

At SXU, the reifications that have been dissolved for me are, in a nutshell, the values of higher education: the assumption that higher education is a worthy pursuit in and of itself; the view that higher education improves standards of living and the significance of living. All these things can go away. All these things are going away. The process of going away takes with it the hopes I had had in colleagues to stand up for education. Too many of us have been insecure about the value of higher education’s “product” in comparison to other products—be they technologies, skills, professional credentials, or new careers churned up by the market, or supposedly so, in programs deemed as “in demand.” Never mind that the criteria for measuring demand are specious, drawing on bad data, bad projections, bad assumptions.

Undeniably, what is happening at SXU is transpiring on a broader stage. Across the country and world, there are hard questions being asked about the value of a traditional education organized around foundations in the humanities and liberal arts. Mixed in with the elegiac reflections that arise in me are other considerations with their own disturbances—e.g., personal nostalgias that bespeak my privilege and perhaps invite harsher scrutiny. Part of my grief, I confess, involves the loss of ease that comes from a shared recognition of privilege and value—to titles (hearing “Dr. Bonadonna” still causes a flutter in my soul), to academic routines, to assumptions of authority and value. Nonetheless, a large part of the grief, undoubtedly, does stem from the ugliness of transformation in this specific institution.

I’ve seen friends make peace—through retirement, through job switching, through capitulation. It does seem that the administration’s strategy is to clean house of anyone with a memory or a grievance, the two go hand in hand. I suppose it’s possible that a new entire staff could adapt and progress more productively than aggrieved old timers—and so, maybe the intensity of what I’m feeling is just a case of “my ox is the one being gored”—and so that’s why I’m in such a state.

I walk through the halls, and I have brief and lament-filled conversations with each colleague I encounter. There’s the shaking of the head. I’m thanked for my efforts. We commiserate in our futility. In my office, I get the emails from any of several back-channel faculty groups—planning future actions, or offering new tidbits of offenses, or strategizing about next steps. I write in my blog about the depression that I feel; I hear professions of depression from others. It’s heartbreaking.

We seem to have gone to a place beyond “morale.” A few years ago, some of my most respected advisors told me to stop framing SXU’s challenges in terms of a morale problem. All agreed morale was bad, but my advisors preferred a different way of framing our needs and visions. Today, our morale has not improved, and that term continues to fail to describe our reality, but in a new way. Perhaps we are too depleted to have a morale problem. If morale falls in a forest and there’s no one there, does it make a sound? The absence of so many who have left, and the planned absence of so many who have informed us of their plans to leave, creates an emptiness and pain that might better be addressed as a form of grief. The climate is one of hopelessness and loneliness. There’s bitterness and anger and disbelief too. There are twinges of the old fight here and there, but most are putting their head down in whatever salvageable way they can, and trying to move forward, somehow, with a will to survive, or just persist, but in a short-term manner.

Through it all, the pragmatist in me maintains there’s another way, a middle ground. Maybe. I want to reach out to my adversaries and try rapprochement—if only for mutually self-serving goals and ends. But dialogue has failed in formal and informal ways, and the power of the adversaries has been consolidated. I and many others have become hardened in our perspective of the other side’s autocratic, power-oriented stance and modus operandi. I have trouble letting go of foregone conclusions and despair—though I’m not convinced I can’t, however dark it is inside this wolf.

The stories of some of the victims—faculty and staff who have been pushed out or mistreated through punitive and harsh economic measures—fill me with sadness. I think of a staff colleague, described recently on Facebook as “one in a million,” and I see the impacts and the heartlessness of this institution in simply stepping over her and ignoring her in the face of mistreatment.

I am in agony over the consequences of the inexorable march upon which SXU, in a kind of Menippean satire, has embarked. I can give to students, but only so much. Ultimately, it’s they who are mistreated, as it always comes down to the student experience. The deprivations of resources and care inevitably lead to disengagement and failure and loss—of them, and all of us.

The Fixations of February 2

February 2, 2023

Was it Bill P. who said that every important life lesson could be taught from The Godfather? Bill, now long retired, is still with us, still sharp as a tack. I’m thinking of Bill as I picture the convalescent Don Corleone, rehearsing over and over again the details of the operation ahead of them—or was it the Barzini matter? Obsessively, Don Corleone would repeat the steps, with self-awareness of his preoccupation. He was talking to Michael, who had matters in hand (kinda).

I think of the Don, and Bill, as I contemplate my plans and prospects. I keep going over the numbers, the possibilities for retirement, as the idea has loomed up as a salvation of sorts. It still feels too early. Is my main motive that of escape? I know I need a change. I know I’m paralyzed with depression. But yet I function on. There’s a comfort in rehearsing the Barzini … er, retirement, business.

The woes of SXU: I keep thinking that all these vanities will pass. But they still seem so important. Here I am in a class, with all these young people, and their futures are so important, so full of promise. I need to be the adult and to lead them. But under the weight of my depression, I can’t move well.

Bill P. always brought a smile—he was always on, always performing. His schtick didn’t play well with everyone. My UIC classmate, Mary Kay, was thrown off by Bill’s irreverent demeanor during her interview in 1996, a day or two before my own interview. Maybe something about that interaction got me the job? I too was thrown off by Bill—but his voluble, comic, and I would eventually learn, Italian, nature made it easier for me to roll with him. Bill wasn’t, of course, the decision maker in the hiring for the position that I won—but he captured or represented some kind of favor that fell on me then in that life-changing accomplishment of becoming the English Education Coordinator as an Assistant Professor of English at Saint Xavier University. I still can’t believe it, and I still look on that moment as … what … a blessing? Curse? Miracle?

It was lucky in so many ways—to get the local job in a disciplinary area that was my first choice. To have gotten it when I did—with the family I had when I did. To have been able to send three children here—so proudly—when the institution was so worthy, though it did not ever know it, or appreciate it fully enough. 

Through the twists and turns of the late nineties and early aughts—before tenure, there was such energy, hope, vitality. I could name conferences that were transformational—in Arizona (the Grand Canyon being a big part of that) and Florida (on vacation with the family in Orlando, and my catapult into technology with Nicenet and Web Course in a Box). When Angelo became a student in 2004, everything changed, and the promise he pointed towards—intelligent, moral, carefree, free-spirited and free-wheeling engagement in the world—became an incarnation of what it was all about—the life of the academic, the purpose of education, the purpose of raising a family—the promise of it all.

It wasn’t necessarily his greatness (though he was great)—he was just the first of the kids to make that transition into adulthood. And he did it in a time when, despite being in the near aftermath of 9-11, was still a time of hope and promise … and even innocence.

I’m thinking of retirement … only because life has gotten so unbearable at SXU. I take that word “unbearable” from my colleague Amanda—who, young as she is, didn’t retire, but moved out of state and into a different teaching career in high school. Such were/are the conditions of worklife at SXU. Our best and brightest—our future—our most dedicated are made to feel the unbearable, and they leave in search of a better way to work and serve. Her farewell letter was polite and upbeat—no shots fired—and her use of the word “unbearable” was uttered in a more or less matter-of-fact way, but the word now rattles in my mind.

Part of my problem was just how good I had it. When we’re living the dream it’s hard to be aware that it is just a dream, that it all can vanish in the face of oncoming realities. There is some truth to the privilege of being a white guy, an older white guy, a tenured professor white guy. So many of the challenges now swirling about in contemporary society have spotlighted, if not outright critiqued, the accrued benefits of each of those adjectives and nouns—and it’s all justified. But those justifications don’t necessarily rehabilitate the motives or effects of the dismantling of academic mission that our university has suffered since 2015. The victims have been people of all kinds—varied in race, age, and gender. We have all lost—first the faculty, then the students. Our bloated, over-paid, over-self-congratulating administration seems to be the only winner, as we collectively descend into whatever version of us is to settle into place.  

There’s always hope that a new order, a new approach to justice can, yet again, put us on a path to a new prosperity, a structure of things that sidesteps some of the old injustices and deficiencies—and builds on new principles of inclusiveness, youthful vigor, and academic promise. But the grief over the things lost will still be there. Today is Groundhog Day—a “holiday” that invites a hope for sunnier days sooner rather than later. It’s a day also that has come to mean being trapped in a deficient—but improvable—environment, and one complete with all the resources needed for escape and future happiness. In the mixture of hope and imprisonment endemic to Groundhog Day, I struggle with my depression, and I smile at thoughts of Bill P. and Mary Kay, and I shed a tear for all that is unbearable. I hope to wake up to a better tomorrow; I long for February 3rd, and what might lie beyond.

Reflection on Friday’s Faculty Meeting, (January 27, 2023)

February 1, 2023

Many faculty and staff colleagues believe that SXU has lost its way. 

But even in its meanderings, we see signs of the old possibilities. At last Friday’s faculty meeting, there was principled discussion of varied topics. ChatGPT was on the agenda, and many colleagues shared their early experiments with and assessments of, or threat analyses of, the system. Many commented on pedagogical principles that might be developed around AI; about how assignments might be structured to avoid pitfalls or capitalize on new opportunities; about how to approach the teaching of writing; about how there was nothing new—or there was something new—in the tool; and so on. Also at this meeting, there was discussion of the student request to adjust our holiday schedule to be more inclusive of Muslim religious holidays. Other topics were raised—some in new business—about the state of SXU in terms of finances, programs, and structure of colleges/programs. Through it all, the discourse was civil and multifaceted. Time was monitored for each topic; comments ranged, and the overall experience seemed “normal”—an airing of viewpoints, casual politeness in presentation and reception, and a “move on to the next thing” progression in the handling of business.

But the ordinariness of the meeting made me uneasy.

I suppose it’s my impression that we are in the midst of an existential threat—that we are living through an identity crisis—that prompts me to think there was something insidious and dangerous about the “business as usual” feel of things. But this dynamic has been going on for some time, and Friday’s meeting was merely the latest of many others like it the past several months and years. I worry that we are in danger of normalizing a kind of blindness to some essential questions and needed discussions; we’ve lost our sense of priorities and urgent needs.

So many of the people who have built SXU, and have drawn on and extended its traditions have left the university. In silence, tenure is disappearing. Institutional memory is sketchy. And so, when there is talk about restructuring, the advocates for the old programs in the humanities in particular are not present. The larger community lacks awareness, and so the supporters of Administration—often those who have been favored with resources or positions—are free to make claims and push agendas.

Since the arrival of the current president, there has been a steady push to shrink general education—in terms of requirements, in terms of majors and programs, in terms of emphasis and value. The push to develop—or rather promote (since precious little goes beyond lip service)—professional programs as our “brand” has created a false dichotomy or tension between professional formation and the liberal arts. 

There’s an irony here. In promoting, for instance, a program in nursing as its flagship program—all the while whittling down disciplines that serve general education—the University is neglecting some compelling economic realities. The programs and courses in general education are among the university’s most efficient and cost effective, while those in nursing are most costly. Deemphasizing the humanities, if only in the reduction of general education offerings and requirements, not only weakens the education of students (including nursing students whose programs traditionally have required a fuller formation in the liberal arts)—but it also weakens the university’s bottom line financially.

We find ourselves on a march in pursuit of an agenda, not explicitly stated, to allow for smoother adoption of not only restructuring but also all the changes needed to facilitate the agenda. The march is without check: it brazenly defies governance structures; it employs the disciplining of “troublesome” faculty according to criteria and practices proscribed by the bylaws and AAUP; it shows refusal to meet faculty halfway on responsible requests (and thus promotes attrition through the loss of faculty who choose to retire or leave the institution); it weaponizes Human Resources to reprimand or intimidate faculty who are perceived as problematic for whatever reason.

On top of all this there is the creation of new committees where faculty representation is limited, or diluted, or pro forma (as many initiatives are fait accompli upon introduction); there is union busting; and there is direct disregard of Faculty Senate in the closing of programs, and the changing of bylaws.

All of this context leads to a restructuring plan that eliminates department chairs and shrinks the College of Arts and Sciences in ways that are defended as data driven, even though the data are structured in questionable ways, with many factors of what led to current data sets left unaccounted for (e.g., the starving/closing/misrepresentation of programs).

The bottom line is that the vision of the administration needs to be discussed in ways it hasn’t been discussed. Is it the right vision? Is it a pragmatic vision? Is it a vision that advances our mission? More to the point, we must discuss, and provide remedies for, the breaches in trust we’ve experienced the past six years. These breaches run the gamut—from questions of governance; to an unwillingness to engage in open dialogue (through established structures like the Faculty Affairs Committee and the Senate); to unnamed policies for resource allocation; to silence about the institution’s disinvestment in the academic product; and, of course, to revived, faulty approaches taken to program closures and restructuring.

Saint Xavier has lost its way, and in northern, cold waters. Let’s not normalize our waywardness with more meetings and conversations that gloss over our crises in accents of “business as usual.” If that is indeed an iceberg up ahead, let’s not concern ourselves so assiduously with rearranging the deck chairs….

HLC’s Critique of Shared Governance at SXU

[NOTE: For an explanation of my commitment to “bearing witness,” please see this post.]

April 12, 2022

Saint Xavier University, once again, finds itself at a crossroads. After a Higher Learning Commission (HLC) accreditation review that resulted in reaccreditation (but only after the raising of concerns, some of which involved sharp critique), our institution must plan a return visit before January 31, 2024, and we must show progress in the interim.

The critiques centered on issues of trust. The HLC report writers commented on how several people they interviewed from both sides of the divide, faculty and administrators, made the point that “they individually had never personally encountered such an antagonistic work environment fueled by diametrically divergent perspectives and professional objectives.” The HLC reviewers’ critique was directed at members of both the faculty and administration. The words, “toxic,” “dysfunctional,” “bullying,” “badgering,” “dismissive,” “contemptuous,” “disrespectful,” “unprofessional,” “sexist,” and “dismissive” were used, pretty much in equal balance, though ascribed to one or the other group.

As could be expected, the reviewers made reference to the May 28, 2020 decision by the university to discontinue Collective Bargaining with the faculty union and the Faculty Affairs Committee. I was involved in that crisis, pretty much at the center, as I was Chair of the Faculty Affairs Committee (FAC), and it was I, along with Associate Chair, Jackie Battalora, and our attorney, Robert Bloch, who was on the phone when the Board of Trustees Chair, Trish Morris announced the university’s decision.

The interim monitoring called for by HLC includes several steps aimed at rectifying what the reviewers saw in their site visit, our documents, and our apparent institutional culture. SXU must, as an entire community at every level, including the Board of Trustees, engage in professional development in the area of shared governance. We must engage in an assessment of shared governance. We must work to strengthen our culture and reduce distrust. Guiding the initiatives in this regard should be the work of an independent third-party consultant who will report out to the entire community.

I hope that, as part of the process our community engages in, we can produce a full report on just what led up to the May 28 phone call, and what has transpired since. I understand that several colleagues from both sides of our divisions would prefer not to rehash old wounds, and instead would rather move on—either out of pragmatism, or hopelessness, or annoyance, or frustration at the impracticality and inadvisability of litigating old grievances. I don’t want to revisit arcana from collective bargaining dynamics that produced conflict and impasses. But if we’re talking about building trust, all parties need to feel listened to and respected. Before and since May 28, I have been criticized in ways that have been equally hurtful as they are misinformed or distorted from the facts of what transpired. 

Bearing Witness as a Starting Point

I will say it again: I don’t wish to summarize the “he-said, she-said” episodes of negotiations and email wars and accusations and power moves made during the period of breakdown.

What I want to do is to bear witness to my experience as a Saint Xavier faculty member and as a human being and as a scholar of rhetoric and literature. I’ll begin with the last: Our Western literary tradition from the Bible to Dante to Jane Austen to Disney teaches us that “Pride goes before the fall” (Proverbs 16:18). Pride is the ur-sin, the sin from which all others derive. So, I ask: was I too proud in my approach to problem solving during the troubled negotiations? 

Of course I was. All of us were, on both sides, in my opinion. We all approached negotiations as “power players,” perhaps, understandably, out of a perception of necessity for a good end. I think both sides viewed power as the best tool or means to an end, rather than as an exercise of a personal need or ego gratification. But the exercise of power was, and perhaps still is, favored by most over genuine problem solving through respectful compromise. Let’s look at the power dynamics of both sides.

FAC’s Power: On our side, FAC was able to operate in a more demanding way than other committees at SXU. The administration was legally obligated to share information, negotiate, and work with us as a more or less equal partner—all in the context of tenured faculty exercising free speech. The Faculty Affairs Committee had some tremendous assets at its disposal: a long tradition of successful negotiations that brought faculty strong benefits (and staff too, through a long-respected tradition of matching staff provisions to those afforded through collective bargaining with the faculty). We had highly experienced negotiators. We had, I believe, a balanced and compromising attitude; we had earned credibility from the other side (at least in prior administrations) through our support of opening the contract in times of need. We had strong data; we had informed and beneficial opinions undergirding our attitudes.

Of course, not everyone agreed with FAC, even among faculty colleagues, and during the time of SXU’s financial crisis, several critics from both sides were quick to wave their hand, so as to indict all past administrators and faculty groups like FAC as being equally responsible for the troubled state of affairs.

But in any case, I wish to bear witness to my pride in thinking that FAC would prevail; I truly believed the Administration would not try to abolish the union! I truly believed we had a win-win dynamic, where the welfare of the entire institution was best ensured through a balanced agreement, with strong provisions for all who might merit them. Surely, (I thought) we will all come to our senses and find a suitable consensus. Others were more clear-eyed about the imminent danger to FAC’s future, and of course those individuals were correct. With one exception, perhaps, we all on FAC were somewhat prideful in our engagements with the Administration. We were, in polite but firm and intellectually aggressive ways, poised for combat and victory, even if the means were through respectful, but always challenging argumentation. An exception among our members who was not noticeably prideful (in my opinion) would be Arunas Dagys, the paragon of pragmatism, who, if he could just follow his instincts unchecked by the necessarily collaborative give and take required by committee work, would have found a way to “make it work”—find an agreement that might have forestalled an event like May 28.

Administration’s Power: Afflicted as I and others on the committee were by the incentives of “power moves,” we were up against an administration that knew, it would seem, only power moves. Some of their moves were obvious and ineffective, but many did work, and of course, the faculty union has been crushed. The hiring of an anti-union lawyer sealed the deal at the onset, closing off safe and collaborative dialogue before it could get started. The refusal to discuss negotiation matters outside of a formal setting involving lawyers prevented the thawing of tensions. The setting of ultimatums (e.g., a deadline to accept the Rollover proposal in summer so as to make genuine discussion among the faculty unlikely or impossible); the slow-walking of communications and proposal-sharing; the harshness of critique—up to the point of slandering of the committee—in characterizing the slow rate of progress: all these tactics and more prevented any kind of transcendence out of a pure power dynamic as our only way forward.

But now, as I stated at the onset, we are at a crossroads again. I hope the institution might respond to HLC’s interim monitoring in a truly constructive and less power-oriented way. I hope there can be a genuine assessment of shared governance, aside from the question of how this process might be engineered to result in more control or more effective implementation of an agenda. I hope there might be some genuine attempts to bridge the divisions that pull perilously at the fabric of our community. 

As we step back, I hope, from pure power moves, we might wish to consider shifting our terminology. “Governance,” possibly inescapably, puts us on the slope of power moves. I wonder if “stewardship” might be a better term, as it is more oriented to service and welfare. Is not shared governance, at its most elemental, about good stewardship? As an activity, stewardship stretches back into the past and helps us preserve what may still be of service. And, as a vocation, it helps us reach across into an unknown future. If stewardship is what we all shared, might we have a better chance to acquire the tools and build the team that will be needed for our continued efficacy?

Atwoodian Car Parking

I want to continue taking inventory of all my reactions to Margaret Atwood’s Burning Questions. Here are her themes, as I see them at this moment:

  • Environment
  • Second wave feminism
  • Her literary appreciations
  • Canada
  • The 20th century
  • The 21st century
  • Pandemic
  • Story-telling
  • Tales
  • Optimism
  • Writing
  • Her life

But wait, more than getting the list complete, I want to bear witness to how I’ve fallen under the spell of Atwood’s essayistic style. Burning Questions takes us to so many places, but the itinerary is always one of Atwood’s distinctive voice and literary appreciations and optimistic cautions and wry appreciations, while she (and the rest of us) “hang by a thread.”

It’s not unusual, I suppose, to want to write like a great writer after reading her. I find myself wanting to place down layers, or vectors of story/message, and have them, at some point connect in key, and unexpected, ways. I’ll try, but what follows, perhaps, is more a plan for bearing witness than the act itself—but I’ll see where it leads:

Seated at the kitchen table, I told my daughter Gen, who was standing some feet away at the counter, that I had gotten an email from the Cubs with a picture of Gallagher Way. Gen couldn’t see the picture, so I tried to describe it. As I did, I found myself saying positive things—things I did not want to be saying about the Cubs, or the Ricketts, or baseball. I told Gen that “July 30” (2021) had become a date for me like September 11 or December 7 for Americans, or May 28 for SXU faculty (whose union was busted that day). It was a day of crisis, a date that becomes an epithet. “July 30”: The willful dismantling of the World Series championship team was a display of ugliness that counterbalanced so much of the pastoral and idealistic and wishful and yes, childlike, joy I had associated with baseball. I vowed I would not come back, or come back quickly, or come back the same.

Still, here was this email, with the picture of Gallagher way.

I spoke to Gen of the complete take-over of Wrigleyville by the Ricketts. I told her of my days, 40 years prior, parking cars on game days across the street at the Mobil station. Gen asked, “Did you ever envision complaining about the Cubs’ owners to your adult daughter after you had received an email from the owners who were trying to purchase an English football club at the cost of several billions of dollars?”

Her question led to a swirl of meaningful strands set in motion by the Gallagher Way email. I started unraveling by asking her if she knew about the “knot hole” project at Wrigley Field? Her brother, Terry, had told me about this idea a few years ago. It was a faux nostalgic type of “hole in the outfield wall” that enabled people to walk up to the park and catch a glimpse of the game without paying. Of course, in the intervening years, the low-key idea was amped up, and evolved into the current Gallagher Way pictured in the email. The simple knot-hole had grown into a kind of theme park, with an over-sized big screen TV, concessions, and possibly other attractions (along with, of course, paid admission). Despite myself, as I looked at the families on the green artificial turf, the bright lights, the HD video, I thought, “that looks kinda fun.” And so part of me was thinking how we need to keep growing, keep changing with the times, keep searching for those essences of baseball, which, I guess, come down to sunshine, smiles, and lots of color. And let’s not forget families being together.

But … Gen and I have understandings, and one of them concerns rants, and I felt one coming on. I talked about “July 30″—how I needed, in the aftermath, to turn away from the Cubs for a period of time (Months? Years? Decades?) to heal. I told her about the sadness I felt over the changed character of the neighborhood, how the complete takeover by the Ricketts constituted a grotesque kind of gentrification—something which even in its best aspects is always heartbreaking and confusing, if not blatantly grotesque.

The talk of the neighborhood brought my focus to the gabled roofs of that iconic, but now gone, Mobil station on Clark Street. I worked there three summers while I was an English teacher at St. Scholastica Academy (1980-1983)—and every task of that job brought its own universe of meaning and significance. I wish I had the words to describe the parking of cars in our lot on game days. Somehow the memories here eased the pressure to rant. Instead, I now felt a need to capture a feeling of that time, the feeling I had in that job, of … what?

There was a lot of movement, and I became quite skilled at jockeying cars. The people handed over their cars, and they were all so happy to do so as they disembarked, with the flush of excitement and stretching after being cooped up in city traffic on their way to an adventure. Our prices were high, but we were right across the street from the ballpark, and we were “easy in-easy out” lot. To quote Terrence Mann from Field of Dreams: “For it is money they have, but peace they lack”—and so our high prices and our “easy-in-easy-out” guarantee accommodated both halves of Mann’s reflection. These people left their cars—but they also left the hurry and bother to me, which I was glad to take from them in some kind of converted and joyful purposefulness. In my efforts, I felt none of the stress but all of the exhilaration of service, of service in a happy maelstrom, of service making possible the escape that was soon to be entered into by children and parents, men and women, men and friends, women and friends, retirees, and every kind of traveler. They handed over their cars, and I put these cars into spaces, tightly, backing them into places I could find again, when the post-game chaos (after the lull of the game) required I do so swiftly and efficiently.

The memory I found myself trying to convey to Gen is one I have often thought of, and have found impossible to relay to others. It is a primal experience that can’t be characterized by comparing it to other experiences or building it through component experiences. It’s like the taste of something—how to describe it? How to convey the “taste of an orange” to one who had never tasted an orange? The experience I wanted to share was the experience of a ball game, several ball games, from outside the park. To be so close, yet so far. To be “in”—but definitely “out,” too. I have a picture of me in my gym shoes and tight fitting 80s t-shirt running here and there solving the placement of cars issues with great purpose, dexterity, and urgency—with the sound of the ball park organ, yes, the PA announcer, yes, but … most of all, the roar of the crowd, always expected, always a surprise, always communicative of something so big, so joyful, so unique … as the taste of an orange.

Gen and I talked of creating an audio documentary … of Wrigley Field, then and now. But the project seems so insurmountable. Is it my experience of “car parking guy”? Is it that “in and out” kind of participation? Is it the Ricketts tearing down of all the gabled roofs of Wrigleyville? Is it the uneasy mix of July 30-gentrificaiton-loss of soul-but sill smiling despite it all?

My essay seems to require Atwood’s masterful interweaving method and ability. Maybe I’ll just go to a ballgame with Gen instead, and we can try to talk about the passing away of things between pitches. That’s a different kind of experience, but one that, too, is its own “taste of an orange.” Fortunately, that’s an orange we have shared, and can share again, even if, at times, in silent nods.