Syllabi, shrines, and moonpies

I’m busy right now starting to grade another set of papers, and also trying to get book orders straight for my spring courses. I’m teaching the sophomore-level fiction course next semester, and I’ve been trying to figure out a good coherent approach to the class. I’ve about finally settled on contemporary southern fiction--I read Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees last night, and I ended up staying up late to finish it. It was wonderful.

The main character in the book has this special collection of secrets--little things that were her dead mother’s. The book was full of icons, small symbols, rosaries, shrines. When I finished reading, I couldn’t sleep, so I started thinking about making myself a little shrine: not quite like the wailing wall in the book, but something small and personal and holy. So here it’s something like 2:30 in the morning and I’m wandering around the house with a silver platter looking for river rocks from when we lived in Alabama to go with my mother’s jade Buddha and a piece of driftwood.

Unsurprisingly, it was absolutely all I could do this morning to get up and go to school. The students in my composition classes were about an inch from having the day off. I did finally drag my sorry self into school, but it was a dozy day. But I’m glad I did get in--I think the revision exercise we did helped some folks really see what to do with their papers. I hope.

My mother just called. She’s coming this weekend, and bought Moon Pies for Will and Laura. How appropriate. It must be a sign.