Johns Hopkins University has told students to stay inside buildings, due to reports of protesters near the university’s north Baltimore campus.

UD‘s grandfather, father, and uncle all graduated from Hopkins. Baltimore is where she was born and lived until the family moved to England for my father’s postdoc year. When we came back, we moved to Bethesda and stayed there; but most of UD‘s extended family remained in Baltimore.

UD plans to be in Baltimore for a wedding this Thursday, but is keeping an eye on the riots.

… features

Borucinski, Michal & Zofia & daughter Hanna Soltan

— Hanna being Mr UD’s mother, and the Borucinskis being her parents.

Together they rescued, and hid for years in their Warsaw apartment, a Jewish boy.

As of the beginning of this year, their names appear in Yad Vashem’s list of the righteous.

… It’s spring. It’s sunny, cool, slight breeze, Garrett Park, Maryland. “The Park,” as some people call it (sounds pretentious to ol’ UD) is in industrial-strength bloom. Many friends, old and new, are emerging for brunches, lunches, and dinners at Black Market Bistro, a few hundred steps from UD‘s house.

And why not? This is the time to be here, a boffo Sunday in the right season, with UD‘s hometown arboretum pumping out its best views ever. Visitors don’t need to know how these tranquil plantings represent endless quibbling and kvetching at the Town Council (Why are we taking down the tulip poplars? Is that cherry tree unusual enough? What do you have against bamboo?…); they only need to breathe in the scent of the viburnums.

All of which is to say ne quittez pas. UD will get back on the blog horse in a few hours. At the moment, on top of her social obligations, she’s got to practice reciting It is Marvellous to Wake Up Together, which she will be reading next week at the wedding of her friends Courtney and Alicia. They asked UD to choose something, and they both very much like Elizabeth Bishop’s love poem.

It is marvellous to wake up together
At the same minute; marvellous to hear
The rain begin suddenly all over the roof,
To feel the air suddenly clear
As if electricity had passed through it
From a black mesh of wires in the sky.
All over the roof the rain hisses,
And below, the light falling of kisses.

And from the same simplified point of view
Of night and lying flat on one’s back
All things might change equally easily,
Since always to warn us there must be these black
Electrical wires dangling. Without surprise
The world might change to something quite different,
As the air changes or the lightning comes without our blinking,
Change as our kisses are changing without our thinking.

****************

‘Course, UD could get the same message across at the ceremony by clearing her throat and singing this.

… is titled Splashdown at Penn Place.

A snapshot of life in the town in which UD grew up. The town where, after college, grad school, and ten years on Capitol Hill, she bought a house.

(The zzz is a typo.)

… striding the campus. A camera crew trails him. He’s got the whole get-up, including the funny white ponytail. Like this.

I’m pretty sure this is related to the fact that prospective students are here this weekend (what luck for the school – it’s one of the most beautiful spring seasons I’ve seen in DC) to decide whether, having been admitted, they’d like to attend GW.

I just got out of a lunch for students admitted to the university honors program (UD teaches university honors courses). Families were there too, asking questions about the program, some of which UD tried to answer. We were in the City View Room in one of the newer buildings on campus, and after the lunch UD went out to its balcony to see about that city view.

Quite wonderful – the shining river, monuments galore, the grasses and trees of a heavily gardened city. Less thrilling were the squat brown buildings (State Department, etc.) that huddle everywhere and make up most of official Washington. I watched some planes land at National and then went downstairs and walked around.

**********************

Yesterday was mild and sunny – a quintessentially April day in Garrett Park, with the white blossoms popping out on UD‘s dogwood and the hydrangea budding like mad.

For a dead end street in a rather obscure town, the setting was noisy: Our neighbors across the street are selling their house (yours for a million dollars), and they had a large crew duding up the garden; other neighbors were leaf blowing and lawn mowing and playing basketball. Trains occasionally steamed through along the nearby CSX tracks, and large groups of cyclists bombed by.

A cardinal kept shrieking at me. It has built its nest in one of our front bushes, and it wants me to get the hell out of my garden.

UD herself was noiseless: She just stood in her front yard like a dummy, staring up at the clear blue sky and marveling.

… a trip to Italy that featured a visit to La Rondinaia, Gore Vidal’s famous house above the Amalfi Coast. The library, they said (scroll down to the second picture), is dominated by books by Vidal’s favorite author.

They posed the question to UD: Who do you think that was?

When UD instantly answered Gore Vidal, they were impressed.

Trout lilies? Never heard of them. Had to Google various descriptions for quite some time before they popped up. When I typed brown and green leaves I kept getting plant diseases, things that put brown splotches on leaves.

But I knew this was wrong. These were elegant splotchy leaves, a hardy ground cover scattered among my masses of vinca. Some of them had delicate yellow flowers dangling above the leaves.

So this was UD‘s own Trout Lily Discovery Walk – she happened on the things on one of her many walks along the paths she’s created through her back woods.

And how did they get there? I’ve lived here almost twenty years and I’ve never seen them before.

Margaret and Munro Leaf must have planted them, and it took all this time for them to flower.

**************
I found the image here.

UD‘s poetry MOOC (current number of students: 9,821) gets a nice write-up. (Got a nice write-up. It was written in 2013. She just discovered it.)

This summer, Mr UD will co-direct the Summer Institute of Civic Studies and Civic Education in Chernivtsi, Ukraine.

It’s an offshoot of his and Peter Levine’s Summer Institute of Civic Studies at Tufts University.

This is the beautiful building in which

meetings will take place.

… Tidal Basin.

UD‘s first cousin once removed, Shenandoah University student Joshua Fleming, interviews himself about his participation in the upcoming 88th Shenandoah Apple Blossom Festival Grand Feature Parade.

UD thanks her sister for the link.

Want to know what crushing guilt looks like à la UD? Guilt that she can’t lift the morning, afternoon, and late afternoon after?

It’s last night. We’re at Boston Logan Airport, and our Southwest flight to Baltimore is delayed an hour. Posted departure time, 10:50 PM. We’re sitting alongside one another – UD, Mr UD, La Kid – in those hard black chairs all in a row at our gate, and we’re tired and grumpy and overheated.

Suddenly a skinny young man dressed all in black bounds up before us and excitedly says Are you going to Baltimore too? Guess where I’ve been? He’s euphoric, in a state of bliss he has to share. His skinny black t-shirt says something that seems to be a pun on the word censorship.

I was just at the anime convention and guess what happened to me?

****************************

Now understand. UD flies. She flies on planes. UD‘s a reasonably functional postmodern humanoid. But she is a bad flyer, and among the things she worries about when boarding is the possibility that her flight will include a disturbed person. A disturbed person who in a state of euphoria or rage or something will act in frightening ways…

****************************

So who knows what she might have done if they’d been at an outdoor cafe or something but UD simply put her head down (she had her laptop out) and did not respond. Mr UD got up and went to get some food for the flight. La Kid, bless her, said What? What happened to you? He paused a bit, daunted by our unfriendliness. I… I got interviewed twice… His voice trailed off and then he trailed off. He took a seat by some enormous windows and was very quiet.

UD took a deep breath and felt terrible. She looked over at him and noticed that outside his window an amazing huge golden-red moon (a blood moon?) was rising, so she went over to where he was sitting and said to no one in particular Look at the moon! and the guy looked and smiled a little.

But this didn’t make UD feel any better.

She had taken the wind out of the guy’s sails, and you should never take the wind out of someone’s sails.

This guy, I realized, as I looked around, was one of many funny-looking anime convention people on this flight and I love their bizarrerie, I want to reward their bizarrerie. I want them to know I love their blue beanies that go round and round and make little whining noises (a woman on board the flight had one of these) and I love their socks that are designed to look like shoes. The weirder the better for the love of god!

Had UD‘s (fear-induced) coldness taken this young man, at the height of his bizarrerie self-confidence, to the I guess I’ll go crawl off and be a conformist for the rest of my life depths?

GAAAAHH!

UD first heard about Mount Auburn Cemetery from her mother, a gardener who loved to visit its famous arboretum. UD‘s sister-in-law recently attended Stanislaw Baranczak’s burial there.

This afternoon, she and others visited a Soltan grave on a Mount Auburn hillside overlooking a pond. A rafter of wild turkeys paraded by as they neared the hill, and they stopped their car and gawked. The tom displayed his brilliant various featherings.

… were. So what if UD has lived here most of her life. Walking to her first class yesterday (Modern British Poetry), skirting the Mall and the cherry blossoms, she was amazed at the spring, and she couldn’t imagine any students would show up to her class.

As she said to them a moment later (they all showed up):

Are you kidding me? [Looks out the windows.] No contest!

Let’s have class outside, one of them said, and others took up the cry.

I have, UD explained, an extremely long list of reasons why I don’t teach outside.

Such as? They wanted to know.

Such as even if this is in absolute urban terms a small well-mannered city it is still loud. There will be incessant airplanes taking off and landing. There will be sirens galore. Traffic will consist of groaning FedEx trucks and honking limos. If we go to the outdoor classroom (GW has an outdoor classroom, complete with podium and seating) we will almost certainly displace many innocents who have just set up their laptops in the sun. Groups of students and groups of kiddies from the childcare centers all around will drift noisily about. There are simply too many distractions.

*****************

So we went.

*****************

My students crowded into elevators, then followed, sheeplike, UD the shepherdess, past twelve or thirteen Starbucks. We tried our luck with the designated outdoor classroom, and there it was, glistening in the mild spring sun and – as anticipated – populated by various students. I felt guilty – but then I noticed a sign just under the podium asking students to please give way if a class wants the space, so okay.

UD made her voice louder than usual (UD has a very loud voice already – something about which Mr UD often has occasion to complain – but UD just as often explains that she grew up in a large loud Jewish family and then became a singer so what do you expect) as she talked about “Notes from Dialysis,” one of the many wonderful dreary British poems we’re studying. I thought of Hugo Williams inside inside inside, hour after hour after hour, so many days of the week, and sometimes gazing past the clinic’s windows at a world like this one – full sun, the flowers already coming up, and everyone milling about amazed… And within UD‘s view there were few people older than twenty-two…

***************

On her way to this poetry class (before she allowed herself to be persuaded to go outside), UD overheard the following conversation between two guys, two GW students, who were walking close behind her.

You know there’s not enough food here for the birds, right?

Well, we’re talking about the negotiations.