Betrayal: CU Style

I am at heart a curmudgeon.

I know this, and you know this, but reading Facebook this morning reminded me of it in a whole new way. The Christian liberal arts college I attended—now twelve or thirteen years ago—just announced they were killing their entire theatre program, and the visceral screams of all my theatre college friends are still echoing through my feed.

And it IS terrible, ridiculous, sad, and frustrating.

Art brings beauty and understanding to life in a way nothing else can, and if you aren’t giving your students places to foster, articulate, explore, and grow as entire PEOPLE, then the claim to education starts to get pretty sketchy.

But that wasn’t actually my first thought.

My first thought was one of those simple impulses that, often unfortunately, tell you so much about yourself. My thought was just:

What did you expect?

My college friends are bright, creative, interesting people. They worked really hard to build up the theatre program and community. They invested a lot. They made lifelong relationships and were changed for the better by the experience, and those are all really good things.

But however enlightened I aspire to be, however many zen books I read, and no matter how many deep breaths I seem to take, it’s starting to look like there will always be a part of me with a pickup truck and a sawed off shotgun living off the grid in the woods some place.

What do you expect from life, from institutions, from other people?

It’s hard enough to find people worth trusting, but institutions? Forget it. Not businesses, not governments or schools, not churches, political affiliations, or religions. It’s not personal, and only sometimes is it evil. In fact, the whole thing is probably best summed up in the first statement. It’s not personal. Most people are living so hand-to-mouth emotionally and spiritually there’s very little left over to care about anyone or anything else. My friends care about the theatre program because it meant something really special to them. The administration just sees a financial spreadsheet that ends in zeroes.

As for me, I have the luxury of not being heartbroken because my primary identity was more literary than theatrical. I participated, but I didn’t live it. I was a commuter, three years out of step with my peers in age and self-confidence. I watched the dust move lazily in the windows of the library instead. I wrote. I did my own thing.

And it’s been a long twelve years for me.

But trust me on this: I am not unfamiliar with the emotions of betrayal.

I also know what comes after: a lot of processing, a lot of sorting, a lot of letting go. Honestly, I think this announcement mostly feels poignant to me because it mirrors other betrayals in my life, and I’ve often wondered if the changes those hard times have etched on me are more good or bad.

I think there’s a lot of value in learning over time to focus on the things within your own control, to live in the present and not the past, to expect very little from other people. To cultivate an appreciation for that life off the grid with the pickup. But, of course, there’s always the other side of the coin. I can’t tell you how many times people have finished a story of some interaction gone sour by staring at me expectantly, and I have literally no idea how to respond though they obviously expect some kind of emotional reaction. Like wow, those people suck! or I can’t believe he said that! When all I’m thinking is: Yep. Totally not surprised those people did that. Totally believe he said that.

Sometimes I feel that I’m an unusually cold, cynical, or angry person. Sometimes I can’t relate to other people’s euphoric sense of community or identification with an institution. Sometimes it’s their surprised sense of injustice that throws me instead.

Good, bad, a mixture of the two. It’s life, I guess.

And life is what you make it. The end of an academic program doesn’t change or diminish the good memories I have from my own days there. Friendships will not falter or fall away because a program no longer exists. And opportunities will always exist for the people determined to find them—maybe not at CU, but somewhere. Art and theatre and friendship and community will go on. Before there was a theatre major there were still CU graduates moving to LA and doing residencies at theaters and directing plays in their new home towns. I know because my older sibs and in-laws and friends are those people.

Life goes on, even if it is harder. Then again, sometimes the life and art you build for yourself is all the more valuable for being hard.

Use the Right Tools

This was Iris yesterday, standing out in the rain, proudly holding up a stick she’d found as an umbrella, peeved to find it didn’t really work.

I held Oliver under the covered porch and watched her experiment, putting out a hand to check periodically.

Still raining.

Just my reminder of the day that there’s a time and a tool for everything. Sometimes hard work isn’t all it takes. Sometimes it’s ok for money to be the answer. Sometimes negative emotions are deeply appropriate, and sometimes (rarely) a stick can’t be anything you want it to be.

Use the right tools.

Storytelling

I started scrapbooking maybe ten years ago—which suddenly makes me feel a bit impressed with myself, actually. There aren’t a lot of things I can say I’ve been doing for ten years, and ten years is such a nice round number. Lends a sort of established credibility to what is, after all, a hobby and financial sinkhole.

But such a nice sinkhole.

There are lots of reasons to scrap, and I’m sure more than I realize. I do it because it’s an easy kind of art, somewhere between paint-by-numbers and paddling solo out to sea. The infinity of canvas and sketch pad unnerves me. The mess of sculpture deters me (to say nothing of the problem of what to do with 15,000 little clay heads. Because I would have to make busts, I can tell you that right now, and they would all look sort of similar, and it would get to be creepy).

I like my art to be comfortable, something I can slip into and out of without worrying about “losing my edge” or needing to improve. Something so essentially selfish that I don’t have to worry about appealing to public taste and needing to market. That’s probably the real key.

I like the mixing of colors and patterns.

I am seduced by embellishments.

I like to play with ink stamping and collect odd-edged scissors. I like ribbons and mismatched buttons and the occasional sticker, although I am finicky about stickers. They’ve come a long way in the last ten years.

And, of course, I am addicted to flowers. This is slightly painful to admit because there is a secret hierarchy of crazy ladies (the cat lady being most famous), and the scrapbooking one with the flower addiction is, I feel, alarmingly near the top. I never set out to be her, and I don’t think I am yet. Although self-diagnosis is always a bit sketch.

But if I had to pick just one reason, I scrap for the stories.

That’s really what makes it addicting. I like stories. I like memories, and I’m going to be perfectly candid and say that I also like the ability to mold them. Not create false ones or cloud real ones—I haven’t reached Slughorn heights yet (we’re playing through the LEGO Harry Potter game in the evenings, can you tell?). But I like to put things in context, to open them wide enough to make the meaning visible and let the color soak back into the emotions.

That’s what I like.

The baby book has been fun to assemble in little pieces, a picture here and a layout there. I can’t do the title page yet, and I’m almost done with the preparing and the pregnancy snaps and the baby shower and the 9 month breakdown… Tiny woman needs to show up before I can go really crazy with it.

But I was thinking as I was scrapping about all the things that are too grown up for a baby book. Things I want our children to know. Things that don’t fit on cute pages with bright colors. I’ve become more attune to stories about our families since I got pregnant—little snippets and snaps about our relatives. I want our children to have a sense of the past, though I don’t particularly kid myself that they’ll be quite as into the enterprise as I am. Most people aren’t terribly enthralled to discover that their great-grand might (or might not) have been kicked out of Canada.

When we took Carl’s mom out for her birthday a few weeks ago, she started telling us all about the family history. I wish I’d had a tape recorder. The dramatis personae are always interesting, but so is the direct, unapologetic spiritualism that runs through everything. We don’t have anything quite like that in my WASPy family. We are sadly lacking in dreams and portents of death (surprisingly accurate, by the way).

But the story that will stick with me was about her grandfather. This was in Mexico years and years ago, when her grandfather was a boy of six or seven. (This is also the Yaqui side of the family, by the way, Native Americans settled mostly in the Sonora area). His family went to a festival one day, a huge gathering, where he accidentally got separated and lost.

He never found his family again.

He was eventually adopted by another Yaqui family who found him wandering at the festival and tried unsuccessfully to locate his family. Over the years, he became part of their family and ended up taking their last name—Carl’s mother’s last name now. She said she’s been trying to find records of her grandfather’s biological family, but no luck so far.

The past is a strange world.

I don’t know what that story means, but it’s heartbreaking to me—heartbreaking from a human standpoint and fascinating from a literary one. I feel as though it means something, one more piece of the hidden history that exists in Carl and is now a part—an infinitesimal part, but a part nonetheless—of our baby.

I like knowing those things.

And I know I will like telling her.