Board meetings and watching squirrels

I had my last Board of Trustees meeting today. Thank goodness. I hate those meetings. They’re so presidential—the big conference tables, the giant cushy black leather chairs, the flag and the university seal printed carpet, even a spectator and press gallery off the side of the conference table—all the way down to the water decanter at each place. One or two women besides me, and one black man, and otherwise a lot of presidential-looking white men. I am a faculty representative this year, and the youngest person in the room by probably twenty years. I have this invisible neon sign over my head that says “She doesn’t belong.” My job is to sit and listen. Very respectfully.

All that’s bad enough, but it’s summer and Laura’s out of school. We are not millionaires, so we can’t send her to camp. We have her scheduled for a couple of day camps later in the summer, but it’s more of those 9-1 deals that really make it just that much more impossible for you to do anything while the kids are in camp since you’re driving back and forth too. Essentially, then, while Chris is teaching summer school, I am keeping Laura. (Poor Will gets marched off to school as usual all year, since we have to pay through the summer for his spot in the room or he’ll lose it and then we have no daycare in the fall—and if we’re paying for it, by gosh he’s going. Not to mention the fact that I can never work a lick when he’s home.) Staying home with Laura (and with Will, for that matter) would be great—except that I’m working on a faculty development grant myself now, and it’s tough to get my work done with her underfoot, although I’m managing.

She’s been to school with me several times, where I give her my cell phone in case of emergencies and let her watch movies on the big screen in the multi-media classroom just downstairs from my office. She generally me at my office calls to say, “I’m hungry” or “When are we going to have lunch again?” and once, “I love you,” and so far this arrangement has worked out fairly well. It certainly helps me to concentrate hard on whatever I have to do so I can finish it and we can get home; work time of approximately one movie’s length will focus your attention, let me tell you. I can write at home while she plays or reads or watches tv or whatever, but at work it’s strictly whatever business needs taking care of and then back home again.

I had something arranged with a sister-in-law in Columbia for Laura for the Board meeting, but then—they changed the time. I tried several other plans: nothing worked. If the meeting had been in town, I might have left her—gasp—home alone for the hour it would take, but I have to drive to Columbia for it, which makes it a minimum three hours and more usually four, so that was out. Finally, I decided she’d just have to come with me. After all, she’s ten years old now, plenty grown enough to sit quietly and read a book during a meeting. I bribed her with the second volume of The Babysitter by R. L. Stine (the pre-teen Stephen King—and yes, I had a certain amount of anxiety about the non-literary book my daughter would be reading at the meeting, but tough. It’s summer). Driving down for the meeting, I gave her her instructions: Sit in the back row. Be still and quiet. Read your book and don’t ask anybody questions. If somebody speaks to you, answer politely. When we go into executive session and you have to leave the room, stay with Mommy’s friend C. I wondered if maybe it would be good for her to see a meeting like this, if she’d be better prepared herself one day to move into the working world if she knew what it was like. And in the back row, after all, she’d be short and maybe nobody’d notice her.

Mostly it seemed like nobody did. She wasn’t bored, she said, and when I asked why not, thinking perhaps she’d been interested in observing the power structures of the university, she told me it was because she’d gotten almost halfway through her book. Afterwards I took her for a walk around the main campus, which she’d never seen. She liked the library and the quad, but especially all the squirrels. She’s had a squirrel fixation since before she could say the word. We’ll be at the zoo standing next to the very rare lemur cage or something and she’ll be hollering, “Look, a squirrel!” I’m convinced she’s going to be a biologist. And maybe she has something there. Maybe there’s not all that much difference watching squirrels store their food and flout their tails in defensive postures and going to a Board meeting.

Nothing changed in the world—on the one hand, I wasn’t summarily fired, and on the other, nobody on the Board now thinks we should make better arrangements for the care of school-aged children in America, I’m sure. No squirrels were harmed in the progress of the day. Laura and I rewarded ourselves with ice cream for lunch and swimming in the afternoon with a friend of mine, declared it a pretty good day, and came home unscathed ourselves. I imagine that she’ll remember a good day of squirrel watching and ice cream, and I will have a good reminder about a child’s perspective on the world.