Special Topics in Calamity Physics (4 page)

"Why should I waste my time teaching puffed-up teenagers whose minds are curdled by arrogance and materialism? No, I shall spend my energies enlightening America's unassuming and ordinary. 'There's majesty in no one but the Common Man.' " (When questioned by colleagues as to why he no longer wished to educate the Ivy League, Dad adored waxing poetic on the Common Man. And yet, sometimes in private, particularly while grading a frighteningly flawed final exam or widely-off-the-mark research paper, even the illustrious, unspoiled Common Man could become, in Dad's eyes, a "half-wit," a "nimrod," a "monstrous misuse of matter.")

An excerpt from Dad's personal University of Arkansas at Wilsonville Web page (www.uaw.edu/polisci/vanmeer):

Dr. Gareth van Meer (Ph.D. Harvard University, 1978) is the Visiting Professor of Political Science for the 1997-1998 school year. He hails from Ole Miss, where he is Chair of the Department of Political Science and Director of the Center for the Study of the United States. He is interested, broadly, in political and economic revitalization, military and humanitarian involvement, and post-conflict renewal of Third World nations. He is currently working on a book entitled
The Iron Grip,
about African and South American ethnic politics and civil war.

Dad was always hailing from somewhere, usually Ole Miss, though we never went back to Oxford in the ten years we traveled. He was also always "currently working on
The Iron Grip"
though I knew as well as he did that the
Grip
—fifty-five legal pads filled with unintelligible handwriting (much of it water damaged), stored in a large cardboard box labeled in black permanent marker, GRIP—had not been worked on, currently or otherwise, in the last fifteen years.

"America," Dad sighed as he drove the blue Volvo station wagon across another state line.
Welcome
to Florida, the Sunshine State.
I flipped down the visor so I wasn't blinded. "Nothing like this country. No indeedy-o. Really is the Promised Land. Land of the Free and the Brave. Now how about that Sonnet number 30? You didn't finish. 'When to the sessions
of sweet silent thought, I
summon up remembrance of things past.' Come on, I know you know this one. Speak up. 'And with old woes

From second grade at Wadsworth Elementary in Wadsworth, Kentucky, until my senior year of high school at the St. Gallway School in Stockton, North Carolina, I spent as much time in the blue Volvo as I did in a classroom. Although Dad always maintained an elaborate explanation for our itinerant existence (see below), I secretly imagined we wandered the country because he was fleeing my mother's ghost, or else he was looking for it in every rented two-bedroom house with a grouchy porch swing, every diner serving waffles tasting of sponge, every motel with pancake pillows, bald carpeting and TVs with a broken CONTRAST button so newscasters resembled Oompa Loompas.

Dad, on Childrearing: "There's no education superior to travel. Think of
The Motorcycle Diaries,
or what Montrose St. Millet wrote in
Ages of Exploration:
'To be still is to be stupid. To be stupid is to die.' And so we shall
live.
Every Betsy sitting next to you in a classroom will only know Maple Street on which sits her boxy white house, inside of which whimper her boxy white parents. After your travels, you'll know Maple Street, sure, but also wilderness and ruins, carnivals and the moon. You'll know the man sitting on an apple crate outside a gas station in Cheerless, Texas, who lost his legs in Vietnam, the woman in the tollbooth outside of Dismal, Delaware, in possession of six children, a husband with black lung but no teeth. When a teacher asks the class to interpret
Paradise Lost,
no one will be able to grab your coattails, sweet, for you will be flying far, far out in front of them all. For them, you will be a speck somewhere above the horizon. And thus, when you're ultimately set loose upon the world . . ." He shrugged, his smile lazy as an old dog. "I suspect you'll have no choice but to go down in history."

Typically, our year was divided between three towns, September though December in one, January through June in another, July through August in a third, though occasionally this increased to a maximum of five towns in the span of one year, at the end of which I threatened to start sporting a burdensome amount of black eyeliner and baggy clothing. (Dad decided we'd return to the median number of three towns per year.)

Driving with Dad wasn't cathartic, mind-freeing driving (see
On the Road,
Kerouac, 1957)- It was mind-taxing driving. It was Sonnet-a-thons. It was One Hundred Miles of Solitude: Attempting to Memorize
The Waste Land.
Dad could meticulously divide a state end to end, not into equal driving shifts but into rigid half-hour segments of Vocabulary Flash Cards (words every genius should know), Author Analogies ("the analogy is The Citadel of thought: the toughest way to condition unruly relationships"), Essay Recitation (followed by a twenty-minute question-and-answer period), War of the Words (Coleridge/Wordsworth face-offs), Sixty Minutes of an Impressive Novel (selections included
The Great Gatsby
[Fitzgerald, 1925] and
The Sound and the Fury
[Faulkner, 1929], and The Van Meer Radio Theater Hour, featuring such plays as Mrs.
Warrens Profession
(Shaw, 1894),
The Importance of Being Earnest
(Wilde, 1895) and various selections from Shakespeare's oeuvre, including the late romances.

"Blue, I can't fully distinguish Gwendolyn's sophisticated upper-class accent from Cicely's girlish country one. Try to make them more distinct and, if I may give you a little Orson Wellian direction here, understand, in this scene they're quite angry. Do not lie back and pretend you're sitting down to a leisurely tea.
No\
The stakes are
high\
They both believe they're engaged to the same man! Ernest!"

States later, eyes watery and focus sore, our voices hoarse, in the high-way's evergreen twilight Dad would turn on, not the radio, but his favorite

A. E. Housman
Poetry on Wenlock Edge
CD. We'd listen in silence to the steel-drum baritone of Sir Brady Heliwick of the Royal Shakespeare Company (recent roles included Richard in
Ric
hard III
,
Titus in
Titus Andronicus,
Lear in
King Lear)
as he read "When I Was One-and-Twenty" and "To an Athlete Dying Young" against a sinuous violin. Sometimes Dad spoke the words along with Brady, trying to outdo him.

Man and boy
stood cheering
by,

And home we
brought you shoulder-high.

"Could have been an actor," said Dad, clearing his throat.

By examining the U.S. Rand-McNally map on which Dad and I marked with a red pushpin every town in which we'd lived, however brief the period ("Napoleon had a similar way of marking out his regime," Dad said), I calculate that, from my years six to sixteen we inhabited thirty-nine towns in thirty-three states, not including Oxford, and I thus attended approximately twenty-four elementary, middle and high schools.

Dad used to joke that in my sleep I could pound out the book
Hunting for Godot:
Journey to Find a Decent School in America,
but he was being unusually harsh. He taught at universities where "Student Center" referred to a deserted room with nothing but a foosball table and a vending machine with a few candy bars bravely tipped toward the glass. I, however, attended sprawling, freshly painted schools with slender corridors and beefy gyms: Schools of Many Teams (football, baseball, spirit, dance) and Schools of Many Lists (attendance, honor, headmaster's, detention); Schools Full of Newness (new arts center, parking lot, menu) and Schools Full of Oldness (which used the words
classic
and
traditional
in their admissions brochure); schools with snarling, sneering mascots, schools with pecking, preening mascots; the School of the Dazzling Library (with books smelling of glue and Mr. Clean); the School of the Bog Library (with books smelling of sweat and rat droppings), the School of Teary-Eyed Teachers; of Runny-Nosed Teachers; of Teachers Never Without Their Lukewarm Coffee Mug; of Teachers Who Cakewalked; of Teachers Who Cared; of Teachers Who Secretly Loathed Every One of the Little Bastards.

When I introduced myself into the culture of these relatively well-developed nations, with firmly established rules and pecking orders, I didn't immediately don the status of the Drama Queen with Shifty Eyes or the Obnoxious Brain Who Wore Meticulously Ironed Madras. I wasn't even the New Girl, as that glittery title was always stolen from me within minutes of my arrival by someone fuller lipped and louder laughed than I.

I'd
like
to say I was the Jane Goodall, a fearless stranger in a stranger land doing (groundbreaking) work without disturbing the natural hierarchy of the universe. But Dad said, based on his tribal experiences in Zambia, a title only has meaning when others fully support it, and I'm sure if someone asked the Tanned Sporto with Shiny Legs, she'd say if I
had
to be a Jane, I
wasn't
the Jane Goodall, nor was I the Plain Jane, the Calamity Jane, the What Ever Happened to Baby Jane, and certainly not the Jayne Mansfield. I was more along the lines of the Pre-Rochester Jane Eyre, which she'd call by either of its pseudonyms, the I Don't Know Who You're Talking About or the Oh Yeah,
Her.

A brief description might be due here (Visual Aid 2.0). Obviously, I am the half-obscured, dark brown-haired girl wearing glasses who looks apologetically owl-like (see "Scops Owl,"
Encyclopedia of Living Things,
4th e
d.). I am paninied between (starting in the lower right-hand corner and continuing clockwise): Lewis "Albino" Polk, who would soon be suspended for bringing a handgun to Pre-Algebra; Josh Stetmeyer, whose older brother, Beet, was arrested for dealing LSD to eighth graders; Howie Easton, who went through girls the way a deer hunter in a single day of shooting could go through hundreds of rounds of ammunition (some claimed his list of conquests included our art teacher, Mrs. Appleton); John Sato, whose breath always smelled like an oil rig; and the much ridiculed, six-foot-three Sara Marshall who, only a few days after this class photo was taken, left Clearwood Day, supposedly to go revolutionize German women's basketball in Berlin. ("You're the spitting image of your mother," Dad commented when first observing this photo. "You have her prima ballerina grit and grace—a quality all the plains and uglies of the world would kill for.")

I have blue eyes, freckles and stand approximately five-foot-three in socks.

I should also mention that Dad, despite having received embarrassing marks from the Bridges on both his Technical and Freestyle programs, had that brand of good looks which only reach full force at the onset of middle age. As you can see, while at the University of Lausanne, Dad's look was uncertain and squinty—his hair too angrily blond, his skin too severely fair, his large frame uneven and indecisive (Visual Aid 2.1). (Dad's eyes are considered hazel, but during this period, simple "haze" was a more fitting description.) Over the years, however (and due in a large part to the African kilnlike conditions), Dad had hardened nicely into one with a coarse, slightly ruined appearance (Visual Aid 2.2). This made him the target, the lighthouse, the
l
ightbulb,
of many women across the country, particularly in the over thirty-five age group.

Dad picked up women the way certain wool pants can't help but pick up lint. For years I had a nickname for them, though I feel a little guilty using it now: June Bugs (see "Figeater Beetle,"
Ordinary
Insects,
Vol. 24).

There was Mona Letrovski, the actress from Chicago with wide-set eyes and dark hair on her arms who liked to shout, "Gareth, you're a
fool,"
with her back to him, Dad's cue to run over to her, turn her around and see the Look of Bitter Longing on her face. Only Dad never turned her around to see the Bitter Longing. Instead, he stared at her back as if it was an abstract painting. Then he went into the kitchen for a glass of bourbon. There was Connie Madison Parker, whose perfume hung in the air like a battered pifiata. There was Zula Pierce of Okush, New Mexico, a black woman who was taller than he was, so whenever Dad kissed her she had to bend down as if peeking through a peephole to see who was ringing her bell. She started out calling me, "Blue, honey," which, like her relationship with Dad, slowly began to erode, becoming "Bluehoney" and then "Blueoney," ultimately ending with "Baloney." ("Baloney had it in for me from the very beginning!" she screamed.)

Dad's romances could last anywhere between a platypus egg incubation (19-21 days) and a squirrel pregnancy (24-45 days). I admit sometimes I hated them, especially the ones teeming with Ladies' Tips, How-tos and Ways to Improve, the ones like Connie Madison Parker, who muscled her way into my bathroom and chastised me for hiding my merchandise (see "Molluscs,"
Encyclopedia of Living Things,
4th éd.).

Connie Madison Parker, age 36, on Merchandise: "You got to put your goods on display, babe. Otherwise, not only will the boys ignore you but—an' trust me on this, my sister's flat as you—we're talkin' the Great Plains of East Texas—
no
landmarks—one day you'll look down and have no wares at all. What'll you do then?"