The Bridgetender

At the far end of edge of a bridge spanning the Delaware River between New Hope and Lambertville sits in a booth that is just large enough, perhaps, for two chairs.  Sometimes, crossing the bridge on foot, I've peeked in the window, wondering what it's like to sit there in the same spot for hours day in and day out, watching the river pass, watching the people pass, confined to a space just slightly larger than your body.

Today, I heard an interview with a woman who left an office job where she worked for 14 years, realizing that if her life ended suddenly, she didn't want to have woken up that morning not wanting to go to work.  The job she took: tending a bridge.

"The pay was terrible, the benefits worse," she confessed.  But what she loved about the job were the intangible benefits: the cultivation of vigilance, patience, and attention.  She became accustomed to the rhythm of the days and the seasons, seeing the same joggers and fishermen, people she knew intimately, despite their complete anonymity. She would overhear people's lives: the marriage proposals, the arguments, the deep conversations unaware of an observer.  It made her appreciate the world in a way she'd never done before.  

I wonder how many bridgetenders are left, now that so many of them are automated, or built to accommodate larger boats, or don't open at all, because they no longer get that kind of water traffic. It seems like the sort of vocation that you don't see much any more.  Which is sort of sad, given how important that role of watcher can be.

Some days, I'm a bridgetender, too.  Though I'm plenty busy, at work, the students move past me through the semesters and the seasons that I feel more keenly towards the end of the year, when final exams and graduation looms; my job is to make sure that they can get to the other side safely, that the obstacles in their way are removed (or at least that they have some means of getting past), that they have someone watching over them, someone they might not even notice.  I overhear private moments, the kinds of things people say when they cross a bridge, when they think their voices will be carried away by the wind and the current.

                               

Maybe it's not so bad, the sitting still.

What bridges do you tend?  Would you be a bridgetender if you had a chance? Who are the tenders of your bridges?

Four Hours Out of the Cloud

I was just updating my phone.

You know how it is.  You reach a point at which you're tired of "ignore" and "remind me later" and you go ahead and bite the bullet because you have power and wifi and a little time on your hands, because you're reading your email on a desktop to which your phone is connected.

At least, that's how it was for me.  Pedestrian update.  So imagine my surprise when I looked down to see my phone stuck on a screen with the iTunes logo that wouldn't go away no matter how many times I restarted, and looked up at my computer, where a pop up window implored me to restore my iPhone to factory settings.  After wrestling with it for a while, not feeling ready to dump everything and start from my last cloud backup (Mel is right: go do your backups. Of everything), it was time to leave work.

Without a functioning phone.

It's one thing to take a voluntary break from the grid, to step away for a few hours or days, to be in control of the drug.  But to have the plug pulled by someone other than you, and to not know whether you'll get your data back, or when: that's a different experience altogether.

I drove home in silence, feeling an overwhelming urge to call someone, doubtless the result of not being able to do so.  I waited for the phone to buzz, telling me I had new email from students during the pre-dinner internet rush, but of course, it didn't.  I worried that my husband would text me that he'd been in some terrible car crash with the kids, and I wouldn't know.  I worried that a student would try to reach me, and would get only voice mail, which I'd never hear.

An hour later, after I'd hastily crammed some tacos into my mouth and kissed my family hello and goodbye, I was on my way to the Apple store.  This is madness, I thought.  How did I become so reliant on my phone?

Because I don't spend much time in the Apple store, I didn't know that one needs an appointment to get a seat at the Genius Bar.  I confided to the friendly-looking gentleman with a clipboard that my students have my number, and that they use it for emergencies (which is a slight exaggeration, but also completely plausible).  Taking pity on me, he sat me at what I called, in conversation with the grandmother sitting next to me, "the second-class Intelligensia bar."  He plugged me in, started me up, and did what I probably could have done at work, had I had time to do so: rebuild my phone from the Cloud (did I mention that you should go make your backups?  Make your backups).

My table-mates and I talked about raising young people in the digital age ("it's how I keep track of my 14 year old granddaughter that I adopted; I know everything about her," confided the woman to my right), about the attachment we have to our devices, both for work reasons and personal ones ("this is where all the things I really care about live," said the older woman to my left, "the pictures, the texts, the things nobody but me cares about.").  We talked about feeling disempowered, disconnected without our devices (without having control over the disconnection).  It was a delightful way to spend an hour with strangers I would have never met, except that karma took my phone away.

I was back in business by 9 p.m., four and a half hours after I lost connectivity to the mobile universe. Everything was just as I'd left it; nothing had blown up.  I hugged the employee who helped us, who blushed sheepishly.  I told him I'd hate to deal with people like me all day, in store so loud you can't hear yourself think.

And I drove home in silence, without feeling the need to call a soul.

Have you ever lost connectivity for an extended period of time, for reasons beyond your control?  What was the experience like?

Help

From a young age, my daughter has insisted: I want to do it myself.

My son, somewhat less adept at expressing himself, despite impressive verbal skills, also demonstrates stubborn self-reliance.

I've encouraged this independence; it's in our best interest to raise children to be self-sufficient, to be people who can make themselves a meal, put clothes in the laundry, wash dishes, eventually go to work take care of themselves, making a contribution to the world.

But I worry, sometimes, about tempering the message.  About teaching them about accepting help, or even better, seeking it out on their own terms, making help part of what it means to be independent.

In case it's not obvious, I am terrible at asking for help.  I like doing things my way, having control. I have a plan, and I carry it out.  It took me months before I finally called a therapist to get help for what, by that point, was crushing depression and anxiety.

The irony, of course, is that this is what I do all day long: connect students with help, get them to consider help, help them to accept help.  Hypocrisy at its best.

S. has been traveling again, and the child care situation is, as usual, challenging.  While I pay for care from 6:30 (for I.) or 7:30 (for N.) until 6:00 (for N.) or 6:30 (for I.), it's simply not enough when I need to drive from work to get them, not really great to leave early four days in a row during one of the busiest times of the year.

I have called people to help me pick up the kids quite a bit over the past two years now.  It doesn't get easier.  Sometimes I start with my mother, who sometimes says things like "it will be difficult because I'm supposed to get the bagels for book group" (which drives me bananas; I'd rather she tell me she just doesn't want to do it).  Sometimes I start with a stay at home dad friend who I am convinced is a superhero in disguise.  Sometimes I ask our friend down the block, who tells me how much she likes helping us, though she has two small children of her own and a traveling husband to contend with, too.

The other day, my colleague (whom I like a lot, and who I find generally quite kind and considerate) commented to me that he raised a child without the help of any grandparents.  I felt embarrassed at my neediness, at first, and then a little upset: how could he compare his situation with mine?  Good for him for not needing help.  Did he spend $40K/year in child care, which still didn't cover enough hours in the week?  Did his colleagues encourage him to take flex time, but then also send the message that presence after hours was actually important after all? Did his spouse travel for days at a time each month?  The answer to all of these questions, of course, is no.

I worry, when we move, that I'll lose this village, that I won't know how to make friends again, that they won't want to be friends, that I'll forget how to ask for help, a skill and a grace that has taken me so long to learn.

Thank You: A Parent-to-Parent Love Letter

Dear Stay-At-Home-Parent,

I'm tired of the barbs I see thrown from either side.  And today, I wanted to write to say thank you for being who and where you are.

I wanted to say thank you for helping to run the PTO whose meetings I can never attend, but whose fundraisers I consistently support.  I wanted to say thank you for volunteering to be the class mom and organizing the parties to which I can send fruit platters, and from which my children bring home crafts and holiday themed pencils that they cherish.  I wanted to thank you for volunteering in the library, for organizing the Scholastic Book Fair and making sure there's a family night I can attend, for chaperoning school trips that I can't.

I wanted to say thank you for helping to get my daughter to dance class because I would never be able to pick her up from school before aftercare is over, so she'd never get to dance, which is her heart's desire, and part of what she loves best about dance class is attending it with friends like your daughter.  I wanted to say thank you for picking her up from school on the days when I know I can't get to aftercare on time, because she is learning that is takes a village to raise a child, and that she can trust lots of adults, not just me.

I wanted to say thank you for being a role model for children who can choose to become stay at home parents some day, if their finances permit, just as I am a role model for your daughter, who may choose to work outside the home.

Maybe there are times I envy you, but I also know myself well enough to know that I am where I need to be, and you are where you need to be, and maybe it would be helpful if every once in a while we were just grateful instead.

Love,
Working-Outside-The-Home-Mom

Typecast, and (Not Your Typical) Shepherd's Pie

I don't think it happened to me until I started baking cupcakes.  But maybe I never did anything serially until I started baking cupcakes?

No, now that I think about it, it happened before then, too: with the web.

I was always the person people asked, because I was often the youngest in the room, and so people assumed that I had some superior aptitude (and interest) in technology. The web was in its infancy, and I'd been there in my dorm room to see it sprout out of Gopher.  Which made me an authority.

While I've always appreciated technology, for me, web design was more about an outlet for an interest in art, my lost sketchbooks, things that I dabbled in throughout elementary school.  And a love of fonts, if truth be told.  I loved how different looking words made me feel different about the words.  For someone who loves words and appreciates art, font design is like Nirvana.

So I built web pages.  The first when I was an intern in the academic services office in college; they liked the masthead so much that they made it in miniature on post-its that they distributed liberally to all incoming students.  And then another in grad school, in the grad office where they needed some help making fellowships more accessible.  And somewhere in there I had a short part-time stint in a web design company that I named, but had little interest in actually building.

I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm not actually very good at building web pages.  I'm better than your average technology-averse person, I guess.  I understand how to organize information; that's less about technology than it is about my obsessive type-A personality that likes everything organized.  I know how to appreciate good design, but I'm not motivated to learn programming languages.  I like the ease of drag-and-drop, as if I'm drawing or painting or making collages.

But somehow now it's a thing, especially at work: Justine builds web pages.

I resent the throwaway nature of web-page-building-assignments; in my case, where people don't spend much time on the pages, it's busywork.  A necessary evil.  No one is making important decisions about web pages.  And even I know that people don't really browse the web like they used to.  I know that all of the important information is in more ephemeral media, or more complexly designed sites that no longer feel two dimensional.  But even if the work felt more important, I hate feeling typecast about something that I don't even really want to be known for doing, or at least, known only for doing.

For a while, I was (maybe in some circles still am) also typecast as a cupcake-maker.  I was baking cupcakes regularly for friends and colleagues who appreciated them, partly for my own entertainment, and partly as a shameless attempt to win their love (that totally works, BTW).

But then came my second child, and less time, and long months of no job and no colleagues to bake for. I could have started a cupcake business, but I didn't want to be only known for that, either, really. I don't like being single dimensional.  And I couldn't claim expertise anyway; it was never like I was inventing recipes all by myself, so I could never really take full credit for development, just for execution.  After I got my new job, I baked for a while for students, but that labor of love quickly lost its lustre when I realized they were too busy and too overfed to appreciate them.  And--it seems to me, at least--I lost my touch.

The same thing happens in blogging, right?  At some point, perhaps your brand doesn't fit you as well as it used to.  But somehow, you feel sort of like you should be producing the same thing you always have, because you know that your readers come back for it.  You write the same thing, in the same way, because it's too hard to recreate yourself.  You typecast yourself.  Maybe you start to feel a little single-dimensional.

The real problem with being typecast is that (aside from the annoyance of feeling like you've been reduced to one dimension) you start to wonder what you're really good at, outside of what people tell you you're good at.  Your internal compass becomes corrupted, and it's hard to recalibrate.  You do nothing, perhaps, wondering if you should explore some long-lost talent (you used to be good at the piano, didn't you?) or take up something new (Swahili during the commute, perhaps?).  You spin, disoriented, wondering where you started, and whether it's still possible to find your way back, or if that's even what you'd want to do, anyway.

Have you ever been typecast?  Was it or is it for something you enjoyed?  Did you embrace the label or reject it?  How did it make you feel?

Sweet Potato Shepherd's Pie
Shepherd's pie is usually made with white potatoes, and usually involves ground lamb.  The original for this recipe originally had sausage, but I decided on beef and beans because we're having sausage later this week in soup.  And the apples and chard and nutty crunch are a welcome change from what you expect.

8 sweet medium sized potatoes
1 lb. ground beef
1 15 oz. can black beans, rinsed and drained
1/4 t. dried sage
4 apples, diced
1/2 onion, diced
1 bunch (4 c.) chopped swiss chard
salt & pepper to taste
5 T. butter
splash milk
1/4 cup toasted walnuts

Boil sweet potatoes until soft all the way through. Drain and return to pot. Add butter, splash of milk, and salt and pepper to taste. Feel free to add more or less milk depending on how you like it, or use olive oil instead of butter if you prefer the nutty taste. Beat until smooth then keep lid on to retain warmth.

Brown beef in a large skillet. When cooked through remove, reserving dripping in pan. Mix black beans in with the beef.

Add diced apples and onions to the sausage drippings. Cook until softened and onions are translucent. Add sage and stir until fragrant.  Remove and set aside.

Cook down Swiss chard in skillet (about 2-3 minutes).

In your pan of choice (I used a 9x13") layer meat and beans, apples and onions, Swiss chard then mashed sweet potatoes. Top with toasted walnuts.