What’s in a Name?

Virgin

My name is Elizabeth, but I grew up as Lisa (a common name at the time due to the popularity of actress Lisa Gaye). At any rate, some folks spell Elizabeth, "Elisabeth," so I was Lisa . . . and MAN were there a lot of us. In one of my high school English classes there were six Lisa's, and in college, there were even more! Finally I got tired of it. I was tired of being part of a crowd.

I didn't really feel like a Lisa, either. I liked the name all right; it’s a pretty name. But I thought of Lisa's as "sweet" and "good", and at the time I wasn’t particularly interested in either one of those things. I wanted to grow up--not worry so much about other people, be more straight-forward, embrace my edgier self, figure out who I really was (I’m still working on it). So I “changed” my name.

Lover

“I’m Liz,” I said at parties. “I’m going by Liz, now,” I told old friends. And soon I was her. I was Liz. I turned when people said the name; I wrote it on my college papers; I felt it when my lovers whispered it in bed.

For years I’ve been Liz: Liz graduated college; Liz got married; Liz bore children; Liz went to graduate school, got a job, bought a house, paid bills; Liz is going gray. 

Mother

But what happened to Lisa? Where did she go, that little girl, that adolescent, that young woman I once was, for so many years? I still answer to the name; I still look up when I hear someone say “Lisa” in a crowd. And when my aunt and uncle--those living links to the long-ago "me"--call me by that name, it’s sweet. It touches me. I’m still her to them . . . and to myself in that moment. How odd! And even more surprisingly, when I hear my old name coming from the people I love, and they mean me, and something in me answers them--something long-ago and real and deep--I feel a bit sad, maybe regretful even, that I just dumped Lisa off on a street corner somewhere in Ann Arbor and said, “Don’t wait for me.” Didn’t I have some responsibility for her? Shouldn’t I have given her a little warning?

But, well, Liz wasn’t as nice as Lisa, right? Not as thoughtful? She didn't care more about other people than about herself like Lisa did. At least she didn’t want to. Liz wanted to be free: to be a writer, a poet, an artist, a wanderer, a lover, a singer, a seeker, a seer. Liz was trying to leave Lisa behind.

We can’t, though, can we? We can’t leave ourselves behind, not 

Queen

any part of us. We are who we are because of all that we have been. And my parents were smart. They gave me a name that could be a hundred selves--Bess and Betsy, Els and Elspeth, Betty and Beth; Eliza and Ellie, Bet and Tibby, Lisa and Liz. And this is good thing for a restless chameleon like me, somebody who enjoys trying on all the perspectives, writing all the characters, listening to everyone’s stories, leaving nothing out. Being a million shades of me.

I was speaking with an old friend on the phone the other day. He asked me how I was. I said I was doing OK, but I was trying to figure out how to “come out of the closet” so to speak, and be who I really am now that I’m middle-aged.  

He said, “You’ve been trying to do that for 25 years!” We both laughed; because it’s true.

I added, “Well, It’s a really long closet, and I have to try on every outfit from here to the door to figure which me is going to open it!”

“Maybe,” he said, “it would be better if we just came in?” And there was a pause, “But then, we might never get out again.”

I think that’s my fear, actually, that the whole of me--Elizabeth, that girl with a raft of possible selves (with all of their ideas and enthusiasms and fears and perspectives and needs)--might gobble you up, you people I love. Better to keep it short: Liz. Better to make it sweet: Lisa.

The people who love me don’t seem to be buying it, though. These days my closest friends are starting to call me “Lizzie.” I’ve noticed it; they’re calling me by the pet name my mother, and father, and grandparents used for me in that long-ago time when my everyday name was Lisa. I don’t know exactly when “Liz” started morphing to “Lizzie”--I didn’t tell anyone to use it--but I guess I can see why. They know me.  Lizzie is more vulnerable, less edgy, a bit (can I say it?) sweeter--more (if I’m honest) true of me. Am I really Liz with her razor-sharp “z” pulled at the ready? Am I that straight-ahead sure that I am right? I’m a Liz who keeps her “Z” tucked up within her unless she really needs it, a person who begins with the “L“ of Love--has a temper tantrum of resistance in the middle of things, waving that “Z” around--and ends with the “ie” of “cutie“ and “sweetie” and “sorry” : a Lizzie.

So who’s coming out? I’ll keep my public Liz; she’s the one I introduce myself as.  I publish as Elizabeth (it’s a beautiful, classic name, with a great, big closet of possible selves). My aunt and uncle will remind me of the Lisa I still hold inside. And when my friends call me LIzzie, well, I won’t correct them.

Me?

Footnote:

The great and powerful Wikipedia says that “A hypocorism (/haɪˈpɒkərɪzəm/; from Greek ὑποκορίζεσθαι hypokorizesthai, "to use child-talk"[1]) is a shorter or diminutive form of a word or given name, for example, when used in more intimate situations as a nickname or term of endearment. Also known as pet name or calling name. However, shortening of names is certainly not exclusive to terms of affection, indeed in many cases a shortened name can also be attributed to expressions of hatred, it's a grey area.”

Cardinal Truth

 (picture source: The Cornell Lab of Ornithology )

As I sat on our little back porch last night conversing with an old friend about love, and loss, and the beautiful and sad world we live in, a brilliant male cardinal swooped underneath the grapevines that have wrapped around the corner there to create a cool, green bower. He landed not more than five feet from away, twitching his brilliant tail, his crest rising and falling as he turned his eye to look at me. What a beauty, with his orange beak and crimson feathers! He took me in; then off he flew.

Not more than a moment later, I saw him with a female in the bushes near to the house. She had the same bright beak, but was a muted, salmon-color, just as lovely but more subtle, and she was shy. The male flew to the porch rail several times, then back to the bushes while the female looked on. Each time he joined her they seemed to confer, though they didn’t make any sound that I could hear, and then suddenly, all at once, they both flew into the vines above me. When I looked up I saw what this was all about: They had built a small nest high up in the grape vines near the roof of the porch. It was right above where I was sitting and I hadn’t seen it! Poor things; there I was, all big and threatening, just where they needed to be. I didn’t go though; I sat still to watch.

Their nest is quite different from the one the robins built at the other end of the porch where earlier in the summer we watched four babies hatch, feed, grow, and fly. This cardinals’ nest is made of stiffer stuff, and it is lacy, so much so that I could see the little bodies of the baby birds (I think there are two) right through the twigs, and even a flash of a pink mouth. For the next 10 minutes I sat there as the parents--red and salmon, bright and subtle--came and went, came and went, tending and feeding their young in a fluster of parental concern, both of them often bending over the nest together.

One of my precious Buddhist teachers, Khenpo Palden Sherab, once said, “The world is always speaking to you in metaphor. But you have to pay attention,” and another great teacher, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, said, “You can even learn the Dharma from nature, from the flight of a bird.”  On a day of contemplating death, discovering this unexpected new life above me, hidden in the sheltering leaves, was a small, sweet blessing and a teaching:  hidden in joy is suffering, and in suffering joy; hidden in life, death, and in death, life; hidden in samsara is nirvana, and in nirvana, samsara. Actually there is no difference between the two. There is only this world, right here, but it can be experienced in two very different ways.

How to Write an Essay (If you're me)

First you resist. And Agonize. And hope the essay will go away if you ignore it. You clean your house, and sort the mail, and eye the essay from across the room, obliquely, hoping it won’t notice you there if you whistle and water the plants.

And you wait. You wait until the last minute. You wait until it is the day before the essay is due, and then you panic. You panic and yell at your dog, at your husband, at your kids. You walk around the house banging cupboards and cleaning very loudly. It is someone else’s fault that this essay is not done: It is your teacher’s fault who assigned you this stupid essay in the first place; It is your kids’ fault because they are too noisy and so you can’t even hear yourself think, let alone write a stupid essay; It is the stupid dog’s fault because he barfed on the rug and you had to clean it up instead of writing this stupid essay. And it is definitely your stupid husband’s fault whose stinky, dirty socks you have to waste all your time picking up instead of writing this, stupid, stupid essay!! You have to say all of this out loud, VERY loud, to write an essay. If you have a lot of self-control, you wait until no one is home to begin (Come on kids, let’s go to the park. Mommy has to write an essay.). The door slams shut. “Shit. Piss. Fuck!” You stomp around hollering at the top of your lungs, “I am not going to write this essay! I don’t have to write this essay! No one can make me write this essay! I hate this class; I hate this teacher; I hate my WHOLE STUPID LIFE! 

When you are done yelling and banging and stomping, and are all good and tired out, you flump yourself into the couch and sit there breathing hard with your arms crossed. You swing your foot wildly. You imagine ways to escape. You imagine a tragedy that will save you-- a hurricane, an accident, a fire, a flood. You imagine hitting the highway, “I’m out of here,” and the note you will leave. You imagine buying a yellow school bus and filling it with spider plants, and jars of dried beans and pasta, and putting in a wooden floor, and a hammock, and a tiny woodstove, and traveling to New Mexico in it where you will live like a gypsy selling jewelry and reading astrology charts…and where you meet a man with kind eyes who plays a wooden flute, and you get pregnant with him and forget your other children, and your husband--but not your essay—though you can’t write it, of course, because you are nursing and smoking pot and sleeping out under the cold, white desert stars. Or you drive to California, and you stand in the waves, and you learn to surf, and you live on fish, and Tangueray, and oranges, and you never get old.

Now, you have wasted an hour. Now you have wasted a week and an hour. You eyeball the clock. You chew the side of your thumb. You count out how many hours are left before your class: 11 and three quarters. You can do this, you think to yourself. You have done this before. 

You get up and put the coffee on. Then you climb to the attic with your cup, and you find the box with your yearbooks, and the one with your diplomas, and the one of all your school papers from sixth grade on, and you haul them all out of there and look at them. Papers from high school and middle school spread out around you with their 85’s and 92’s and 78’s ("Lisa, Why did you turn in a DRAFT as your final revision? Use more care!”) These are supposed to give you courage, prove your competence, give you ideas. Maybe you secretly hope that you will find a paper you’ve already written on this topic and somehow forgotten--a brilliant paper from that one class you had—what was it called?— the teacher who said that you should be a writer? A paper that you never turned it in for credit, but will be there near the bottom of the box all ready for you. 

You have wasted two hours. Your knees ache. Your back hurts. Your coffee is stone cold. You climb down from the attic, warm up the coffee, and begin:

“How to Write an Essay

The most important part of a well-crafted essay is…..”

And then you stop. What is the most important part? What is it supposed to be, anyway? You remember a little about “thesis” and about the importance of having an “outline,” but isn’t there a “body paragraph” something or other – more than one of them—which makes you think of paragraphs with legs coming out the bottom. How are you supposed to write an essay if you can’t remember the rules? Now you are having a little bout of hopeless self-loathing: you are clearly stupid, and you can’t write and you never could write, and you know nothing whatsoever about grammar or punctuation, and you wouldn’t know an adverbial clause if he jumped off his sleigh and handed you an nicely packaged “LY” word from his big red bag. Sooooo…. you pour yourself a glass of wine at three-thirty in the afternoon and sit in the winter sunlight feeling like you’ve wasted your life.

Your family comes home and you lie to them. You say brightly, “I’m almost finished.” You play cards with your children. You mop the kitchen floor in penance, then you take a hot bath and stay up late goofing around on Facebook.

* * * * *

In the morning, you are desperate, repentant, and ready to write. An hour and a half before class, you open up a Word document and start typing. You dive in like an Olympian. Your heart pounds. Your fingers race. It’s you against the clock, but you are in the groove now, and the words flow out of you like out of some font of language, like you were made to do only this in life—to write with passion and power and grace. You are a word machine, you are a Craft-Mastah. Caffeine and a deadline are your best friends.

Five minutes before class you hit “print”—no spell-check, no proofread, no edit, no draft—It’s just you on your snowboard, taking the jump: there is one moment of flight, then you land it, or you don’t. It’s just you at half-court at the end of the game with the score tied: the ball has left your hand in a perfect arc, and the buzzer is sounding: the ball will or it won’t go in.

As you jam the pages of your essay into your bag and grab your coat, racing for the car (hoping there’s gas and that there isn’t a wide-load going up East), you vow to yourself, once again, that next time you have to write an essay, you’re going to start writing early . . . ..

My uncle called my mother to say the house was burned to the ground by an arsonist last week: RIP old house, old memories.

                                                      The House

The house sits close to the road, square as a die, its empty windows watching time pass. It was built when the road was little more than a dirt track leading from the lake and fairgrounds out into a monotony of small farms that cut the Pennsylvania countryside into 100 acre parcels.  Now, cut and cut again, the pieces are measured in halves and quarters. And instead of homesteads, there are trailers and white painted tires ringing petunias, feigning a kind of permanence where once there was a sea of greening corn.

           

The house was built to stay though, and it has. Now it is falling into its own cellar and becoming one with the land: the ultimate commitment to place.  My uncle has tried to save it, hoisting it up like a drugged cow, propping it with timbers and metal posts, but still it sags and shrinks.  Entropy is a powerful force, things falling back on themselves.  

             

My grandfather, the son of a traveling Methodist minister, tried in middle age to capture the past and make up for his childhood of always leaving everything, of never having, anything: he bought the farm with all its sad and faded ghosts.  It is the place inside of me where summer lives.  For every summer memory, small and terrible, or golden and tentative, is hinged to that white clapboard house purpling in the twilight.

It was always only a summer place, holding the musty secrets of its eight unoccupied months.  Each May we’d drive out in my grandparents’ long Buick to open the house.  We’d sit on the hot red seats, shiny with automotive upholstery wax, testing the power windows, raising and lowering the plush armrests, clicking the ashtrays open and shut.  We let the hot wind rushing past the windows dry our tongues until they clung to the roofs of our mouths. We splayed our hands against its weight, while it pushed our fingers back and back, pointing the way from which we’d come.  Then the car would slow, gently turn into the dip that marked the drive, wind past the crippled apple tress and stop at the back door, pinging and clicking as it cooled.  We never got out right away.  We always sat there, together, looking at the house.  Then the crooked back step peeling paint, the jangling keys, the rusty lock unlocking, and the door swinging wide from its jamb letting in the summer light.

             

Each year we cousins moved through the closed rooms of the house reestablishing our dominion --  raising window shades, banishing shadows, brushing aside the curled and desiccated bodies of flies trapped in those rooms, born too early.  We turned the glass knobs on every door, met the closet’s hangers ringing empty against each other.  We found the robes we’d worn last summer, dusty, too small. Our grandmother’s faded apron; our grandfather’s brown canvas work shoes.  We opened drawers in old bureaus that stuck like grief, and emptied the cracked pitcher in the front bedroom into its basin finding nothing but air.

A memory: 3 am.  A train lows its warning into the night, moving freight from Erie to Cincinnati, steel to plants and presses.  It roars, steadily eating the miles, a one-eyed dragon breathing steam and smoke, shitting clinkers along the rails. I lie in my grandfather’s Lincoln bed, the cherry-wood curve of its upper lip rising far above my head, the lower licking my feet.  I lie in the maw of the Lincoln bed, sweating, the only one awake in the pith of the night.  I lie stick-straight beneath the heavy sheets, pulled out of a heat-stunted half-sleep by the train’s cry, now unwinding itself down the long valley.  The house itself is leaden with silence, only the out-of-doors contains sound: the soft pat of a moth bumping at the screen; the crickets’ endless drone; and, rising and falling like the sweet-sour breath of my cousins sleeping beside me young with dreams, is the peepers’ thrum, against which I unravel and fear takes hold.

For all of you Luddites out there (In response to the assertion by the digital pundits that "the writing's on the wall--the book is dead.")

     My son found an old Underwood typewriter, a "Finger Flight," from 1954 at the Salvation Army and brought it home under his arm. We outfitted it with a new ribbon (yes, you CAN still buy them, though the last typewriter company shut its doors in Mumbai, India in 2011), and he began to type, and type, and type. Then his sister saw it, and she started in typing, too. Then our friends came over the other night, and we shared a bottle of wine in front of the fire and composed a add-a-paragraph short story on it. 

     Suddenly everyone in our house is arguing over who gets to use the Underwood instead of who gets to use the Mac. There are long scrolls of language rolling out of that thing with all of the requisite x-ed out corrections (though I did find some old Eaton's Corrasable Bond and a box of Correcto type by rummaging through the detritus of my life). So for all you digital pundits, I'm looking at the mechanical handwriting on the paper wrapped around the return carriage (ding!) and it's a beautiful thing to see!

Purse Dreams

Purse Dreams

When my grandmother died, I ended up with all her purses. She didn't call them that though. They were "pocketbooks," a word as crisp as the sound they made clicking shut. There is a fat black beaded one like a loaf of bread, and a strange wire bag shaped like an egg basket. There is one my Aunt Ruth crocheted made with silver lam`e thread and spangled silver disks; it has a tortoise-shell bottom and draws closed on a tasseled cord. There is also a cream quilted satin clutch with its hankie still inside. My favorite, though, is the white leatherette. It has a flaring bottom and a flat wide strap that used to hang from my grandmother's wrist, or the crook of her arm, like she was Laura Petrie or Jackie O. The knobs of its clasp are round and gold and so big and shiny you can see your face bending away from you, and the strange warped slits of your eyes. Those gold balls slide tightly against each other so that the metal has worn, and when they finish their hard caress, suddenly they clear, letting you in. 

This purse, it opens like a yawning mouth. It is red sateen inside. My grandmother let me play in there, with the rattling keys and gum-paper chains and everything else that rolled and knocked about as I tipped it back and forth like a rocking ship and tried to remember what I had seen. It was a kind of game I played: to take it out, and put it back in, and try to remember it all:

A compact--no, two--one face powder (slim, gold, heavy, Revlon), One rouge (new, Cover Girl pink plastic); A lipstick (either red or a coral frost); A round brush and a teasing comb; Kleenex and a hankie (why both?); Rhinestone hair-pins; An emery board; A short green pencil from the Conneaut Lake Putt-Putt Golf Course; Wrigley's spearmint gum -- sticks, ripped in half (a lady never chews more, you look like a cow); A rubber jelly change purse that opens when you pinch its sides, stamped "Meadville Tribune" (it's got a lucky penny); An Avon rain hat -- at least one -- for sudden rain, folded into impossible pleats and tucked into a plastic suitcase stamped "April Showers"; Sales slips.; To-do lists -- lots of them;  Clippings from Dear Abby; A postcard on which she's copied a poem, "Man's best friend"; And notes to herself on how to improve.  If I stick my face way down deep into the pocketbook, and close my eyes, I think I can still smell her there: powder, rouge, lipstick, hairspray, and Wrigley's spearmint gum. 

You May Say That I'm a Dreamer . . .

I was truly a child of the sixties. I was seven in 1967, so the “summer of love” for me was moving from a small, protected provincial Pennsylvania town where all of my extended family lived—cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents and friends-- to Ann Arbor, Michigan the site of sit-ins and demonstrations and movements of all kinds. During the years I was growing up there, the University of Michigan was home to the growing anti-war movement, the Trans-Love Energies, the Black Panthers, White Panther Party, the Black Action Movement, and Students for a Democratic Society. There were strikes and sit-ins and teach-ins, and since both of my parents were liberal thinkers and graduate students at the University in the late 1960’s and 1970’s, my brothers and I grew up hearing about all of it.

At home my parents discussed politics, education, issues of racial equality, and the importance of the growing Women’s Movement. Instead of being read the Bible, my father talked about Abraham Maslow and self-actualization at the dinner table. Instead of being told to obey our teachers, my mother taught us about the crisis in our schools and discussed John Holt’s classic book, How Children Fail. Instead of being told to respect authority, we were taught to question it.

Peace, love, justice, social equality, and a creative revolution in thinking were the air I breathed as a child, and because these were the “norms” that my brothers and I were raised with, I BELIEVED them. Then, suddenly, seemingly overnight, everything changed: Hair was short again; Lennon was dead; Regan was president. Suddenly, it seemed that all but a few of my friends just wanted to get into a good college and make a lot of money. What a shock to find myself facing adulthood in a world that seemed to have forgotten those years . . .  all that promise, and all those promises.

People say that those years were a time of pipe-dreams and wishful thinking, filled with ideas and ideals that would never and could never be realized..  But I think they are mistaken. I’ve found over the years that I’m not alone in still believing in those dreams; as Lennon sang, “You may say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.” There ARE many of us dreamers still out there, and I am finding in my teaching that the children of the children of the sixties have inherited a great deal of their parent’s early optimism, along with their commitment to social change, but that they are more able than their parents were to tolerate the ambiguity and hard work that the world asks for in exchange for any lasting transformation.

My Research History

                                                                                     

In Kindergarten, even before I could really read, I discovered the quiet joys of our two out-of-date sets of encyclopedias: The Children’s Book of Knowledge and a worn set of World Books where the map of the US had only 48 states. The Children’s Book of Knowledge (the more exotic of the two) had tooled, leather covers, and the heavy, glossy pages were filled with old-fashioned pictures of horses and elephants and kangaroos. I remember the section on “Araby” as being especially enticing, with pen and ink drawings of harem girls and turbaned men, and hazy black and white photographs of stringy camels under arched doorways with titles such as, “At the old Kasbah Gate.” The smell of these books was so rich and promising and gave me such mysterious pleasure, that I used to press my nose into the secret folds of the spines and inhale as if I could gain the secrets of these fat tomes just by smelling. I don’t know how many hours I spent lying in the sun on my stomach on the braided rug of our front room looking at these books, but I believe my obsessive need to know took root between their pages.

The Christmas I was six, I received The Human Body book and discovered that I had a passion for the human organism and wanted to know everything about my mysterious insides. This interest remained with me and grew over the years, but the unfortunate result was a not so occasional bout of “hysterical illness” and endless teasing by my cousins who were with me on the outing, in the boat, in the middle of the lake the time I became sure that I was having a heart attack and made my Uncle Tony turn back for shore as I clutched my chest and gasped, “My heart! My heart!”  I’d just seen a documentary featuring open heart surgery, and to this day they greet me with a sing-song chorus of, “MY HEART! MY HEART!” and peals of adolescent laughter (though we are all near fifty).

By third grade, I had my own library card and I delighted in going to the Public Library, where, for FREE, I could take out as many books as I could carry home (This fact continues to amaze me, especially in our consumerist world where everything costs somebody something.) Like all the girls my age, I borrowed series books such Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and Amelia Bedelia, eating them up, one after another, like peanuts from a bowl. But I also took out books on "peoples of the world," and my special favorites, "how-to" books, with titles such as A Rainy Day Book for Girls, and How to Make Almost Anything from Almost Nothing, at Home.

In fourth grade, I wrote my first research paper. Our class was studying Hawaii, so I hauled out the old World Book and began my “research.” The search went only so far as that one volume, but I was very diligent and very serious about getting the facts straight. I felt all grown up doing my research, even going so far as to ape my graduate-school parents’ use of 3x5’s for quotations and page numbers. I was quite proud of “The Pineapple Industry in Hawaii Today,” and so, I was equally disappointed when my teacher shook her head over my use of only ONE source and an antiquated one at that. (“Lisa. Your paper is about the industry forty years ago!” she wrote.)

None-the-less, my love of research continued, and I became particularly attached to the objects surrounding the research process: The short yellow pencils and slips of paper the library left out in tiny boxes like offerings; The colorful walls of books with spines arranged like abstract art; the hushed upper floors of the Graduate Library where I walked among the study carrels and long wooden tables with their focused lamplight looking for my father while my mother waited outside, double-parked with the car idling.

My favorite research object, though, was the card catalog, and fifth grade was the year we “graduated” to its use. I loved everything about it: the smooth pull of the oak drawers; the buff-color cards tight-packed inside it; its mix of order and serendipity. Looking for information on cats, I might find a book on cattails, and next to that another one on catalogs of all kinds (the card catalog included!) Or if I searched by an author’s name, I might find Maurice Sendak and all of his many books within flipping distance of Doctor Seuss. I liked the feel of the cards too. They were soft with use in some places, like the skin on my grandmother’s neck, but in the drawers for recent acquisitions, the cards were so stiff and crisp and official that they made me stand up taller myself. I decided right then that I would write a book some day and add it to the file.

That same year I became a member of the “We Never Guess; We Look it Up” club (I still have the tiny metal pin they gave each of us) and I took what I assumed was a solemn vow to--you guessed it--never guess, but look it up. From that day forward, each time I wondered how to spell a word, or where a common act found its origin, or who that actress was in that movie that starred that other actor who was in that other movie (you know, with what’s his name?), I felt compelled—no, duty bound—to look it up. My fate was sealed in that hushed school library, in the fifth grade, in the big-kids’ section, when the librarian stuck my shirt through with that pin.

I admit it; I’m an addict. Every research paper I have ever written has unspooled across the page, lengthened unchecked, as lush, untamable, and unkempt as Methuselah’s beard. Word upon word, fact after fact, I have followed the research out of my life and into another one. In every class I’ve had to ask for extensions and incompletes to accommodate my lust for more. And unfortunately the computer has not helped one bit: out of three page essays, book chapters have been born, and out of twenty page papers, whole books. Sadly, for us “look-it-uppers,” the internet and its endless avenues for research and “rightness” is as much a curse as it is a blessing. Even now, when I am no longer a student--and though I am unfailingly gratified by the ability to cut short arguments with my spouse over proper English usage and word etymology with the click of a mouse--I have gone to bed too late, on too many nights because one of my daughter’s simple study questions has become a grail quest for a factoid not worthy of the expenditure of time or electricity. Mommy should NOT be up at 2:00 am researching Tiberius’ reign when her daughter sleeps like an angel. It has to stop.

 So. I have decided to renounce my vow and turn in my pin! Too much, you say? Well here’s proof of the depth of my addiction: I lost several hours during this “quick free-write” researching the origins and organization of the card catalog!