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It's difficult to say something and difficult not to say something about the shootings at Virginia Tech yesterday. Thirty-three dead, including at least two professors, endless pointless coverage by CNN and other news burners. Blogs and more blogs whining about gun control on both sides.

The most interesting coverage, I think, happened between students over Myspace and Faceboook and via cellphone and IM. I myself was teaching when one of my students received a text message that a shooting had happened at VTech. By the time my other class met yesterday afternoon, the number of dead had swelled from 1 to 22, and when I mentioned that number towards the end of the period, several students jumped on their phones and laptops to listen for the heartbeats of their friends and family in Blacksburg and nearby.

As someone who has been teaching in universities for about ten years now, I know that college can become a cruel crucible for many. Perhaps selfishly, I can't stop thinking about the professors killed by that student, how they chose a life of the mind and were visited ultimately by an indiscriminate blow to the body. Professor Liviu Librescu reportedly even tried to protect his students by blocking the door as the gunman approached. He survived the Holocaust but not his lecture on Monday.

Don't know really what else to say.

316-659-2906 R.I.P.

I've called my parents every week, more or less, since I left their house more or less twenty years ago. When their house was also my house, I called home innumerable times — for permissions and rides and excuses, among other things. I've dialed the number so many times (sometimes actually using my babysitter's heavy, Bakelite rotary telephone) that it was usually difficult to tell someone what the number actually was. I still know it so well that I simply let my body remember the shape of the number in the keys; my brain has long since decided that it doesn't need to be involved in that transaction.

The number no longer works.

My parents have just completed their move from the sparse Kansas town that they've lived in for about forty years. It was where I was born, and where my brother first started remembering things. They arrived with little, and the town, though fairly small, had much to give them. They put down thick roots, worked and moved up, became a good part of the community. My father, a lawyer, came out to the southwest part of the state to join a small firm, eventually going into business for himself in a log-cabin office he shared with the town optometrist. (It's perhaps sometimes overlooked that in small towns key services are often identified with the few people who offer them, as in the town optometrist, or dentist, or doctor. When that person goes, people have to set out on the highway to fill a tooth.) My mother taught school and took care of us. My brother and I went to school, and (more or less) let my parents take care of us.

The whole town took care of us, in fact. My brother and I had a movie-worthy childhood: We didn't lock any of our doors, whether inside or out, to our house or cars; we knew (and had been in the kitchens of) nearly everyone within several blocks of us; during the summer when we were older we would fall out the front door in the morning and magically materialize for meals throughout the day. We shot baskets incessantly in a neighbor's driveway until the day's light gave out. A doctor and his wife lived across our street a little before it ran from asphalt to dirt, and when I slammed my finger in a car door, my mother and I found him working in his shop; he quickly yanked off the hanging fingernail and pushed my head between my legs until I could stand without wobbling. We had a tree house in our backyard, built by my grandfather and hoisted into the joint of a giant cottonwood. (It even had a hand-made rope ladder for a while.)

It's a precondition for nostalgia that what one is wistful for no longer exists, and every adult’s childhood can by definition be nothing but a toybox of recollections, however lovely. But the town I grew up in no longer exists, too. It's a farm community, founded by a railroad baron, without a natural center or industry to keep it vibrant. Nearby Dodge City has the packing plants and a critical mass of population; other smallish dots on the map in the surrounding counties have seed companies or family legacies to keep decent jobs and money constant. My home town, having none of this, is drying up and dying off. Most young people have little reason to stay and fewer reasons to arrive in the first place, and my parents' friends who did so much for the community— the dry cleaner and fire chief (not to mention town Santa Claus), the principal, the optometrist, the pharmacist — have died or retired or moved closer to their kids. Some have been replaced; some haven't. My family has now completely joined the list of those who have left.

As I come up from my train home and the World Trade Center PATH station, I think about the phone in my pocket. Spring hasn't taken hold yet, even this late into April, and all the concrete framing out this work in progress holds the cold all the way up to Church Street. Many (including both my mother and father) have numbers that can ring on us nearly wherever we are. On these steps I could be asked to bring home more eggs, or I could help my wife begin to unravel the knot of her day. I am always at home in this way, as are those I care about, and I like that.

My parents’ move hasn’t sent me off my axis as I thought it might; too much has changed about that town and about me. And about phones and their numbers, too, I suppose. Mom and dad tell me that their new number — whatever it is — will ring over the Internet.

What they say is true: you can't go home again. Who knew that you can't call home again either?

From one American Scholar to another, I suppose

For what it's worth, I've contributed a guest post to Printculture, a blog by academics and related folk on academics and related matters. They asked me to respond to an article by Thomas Mallon in The American Scholar about the future of the humanities in America, and I, among other writers for that page, did.

I sure hope that the Easter Bunny has insurance

Not to mention the children.

So the weekend before Easter we take the kids to a local park for an egg hunt sponsored by some church or other (one that promises Sunday services full of "fun" and free coffee and God and everything). It's still cold despite being the last day of March, but the prospect of little plastic eggs filled with sweets helps warm us a little.

It's a madhouse. The folks running the show have set aside a large pie of ground consisting of several slices dedicated to different age groups. We decide that for our kids to have a chance they should concentrate on the slice of their actual age, which is to say the "Under 2" for Q (now at 23 months) and the "2-3 year olds" for The Boy (now pushing 4 but still, strictly speaking, 3). Good thing, because many many parents have decided that this event is some kind of measure of personal worth; failure to dominate, therefore, is not an option. My wife overhears a mom counsel her 2-3 year-old son to push other kids if necessary. And it will be necessary.

Someone dressed in a saggy bunny suit holds up a "Go!" sign in the pie's center, and the surge starts. The place is thick with fake eggs, but at least in the section that Q and I are trying to work in, the parents rush out onto the field and park themselves at the near edge instead of going in to the center. As a result, many little kids get squeezed out while adults gorge their kids' bags. I did not see one child actually pick up an egg directly from the ground — there simply was no time. Q and I only manage to snag two, and if I hadn't reached over a knot of crowd to pick those up myself she would have gone home with a big goose egg. Only after I loudly remark to my daughter that she got ripped off by absurd parents does a woman set a half-dozen of her wobbly, mute son's eggs at Q's sneakers. He had plenty to spare and can't count anyway.

These are the people we will fight for spots in good schools and who will soon start prepping their toddlers for the SAT. We just wanted some free chocolate and something to talk about over lunch.

Now we must beat them all.

On Q

Who is Q, exactly, now that she's very much a little person?

Q’s character proves easier to state than to elucidate, I think. It usually comes through in the way she angles her head and the ease with which she throws a look.

Well, anyway, let me try to fill things in a bit with a story or two.

Not long ago, Q and The Boy were horsing around in their room, and Q accidentally hit him in the nose with a book. It wasn’t anything major, and he didn’t cry or throw a fit. We told Q that she should say “Sorry” to him despite it being an accident, because that’s how you treat people respectfully. Q and The Boy actually get along remarkably well most of the time, and these days she normally apologizes for such things even without being prompted. But though she readily acknowledged that she hit The Boy (and that it was an accident), she refused to say “Sorry.” Refused flatly. We told her (again) why it’s important, and asked her nicely to express regret. We soon moved to threats of a Time Out, and when she held out, we put her in her crib with no blankets or toys, leaving her in her room with the door closed. She wailed pretty good, as one might expect. After the standard two minutes, we offered her another opportunity to say “Sorry” to The Boy who, always wanting Q to feel happy, repeatedly let her know that it was No Big Deal. No dice; Q said nothing. We asked nicely again, and again moved to threats. Still nothing. We put her back into time out; more wailing. Two minutes later we tried again. We all went through this five times. Five. On the fourth she did go so far as to say, “Momma say sorry to [The Boy].” We weren't interested in a lesson on proxies, of course, so back she went one last time. Coming out of her room the fifth time she did finally apologize. The Boy, always the prince, replied, "That's okay, Q."

So what I’m saying is that Q has a certain steeliness about her, much like her mother. Some might simply call her stubborn; I prefer to think of her as resolute.

Here's why. So one night my wife had made rice and tofu with vegetables for dinner. It’s a dish she makes a lot, in no small part because both Q and The Boy usually eat gobs of it--tofu, vegetables, and all. Q, though, decided that night that she wanted “Just rice.” Try as we might, we could not persuade or bargain a single rectangle of tofu or kernel of corn into her mouth. The Boy can usually be distracted or otherwise convinced to eat. My wife has negotiated billion-dollar deals with relatively rigid adults and is particularly good at getting him to finish just about all of anything. This night, however, even she couldn’t shake Q. At one point, she used Q's spoon to scoop up a bit of rice and added a single, small, slice of carrot on the top. Q calmly took the carrot off the spoon and set it gently on my wife’s plate, adding: “Just rice.” We tried offering candy in exchange for carrots. “Just rice.” Cake? “Just rice.” The Boy cleaned his bowl, and we ostentatiously rewarded him with gummies. She was unmoved. And in what for me will always be a defining moment in the way I think of Q probably forever, my wife asked her if she would eat just one bite of tofu. Q looked my wife directly in the eye, paused for the briefest of moments, inclined her head slightly, and shook it gently and silently a few times. No crying or whining, no throwing food or fork. It was another one of those proud/not proud parental exchanges. (As you can probably tell, I’m slightly more proud than not proud, but then again I wasn't on the business end of her self-possession.)

This story, like the other, risks portraying Q as nothing more than obdurate or bratty. She's not. She's generous and quick and loving and funny, among other many things, and I’ve been trying to think of a way to describe her right then as she is in full, been looking for the right-sized brush to paint the detail as well as the background. I keep coming back to “regal.” My wife usefully compares Q to Audrey Hepburn's character in Roman Holiday, especially at the beginning and the end. That comes rather close, I'd say.

In any event, “Just rice” was what she ate that night.

Let me be clear. People--and children in particular, I suppose--resist doing things for all sorts of reasons, often to take power over others or to cause grief to those who have power over them. And there are times, of course, when Q won't give up a book or a truck that The Boy wants merely because he wants it, and she knows how it twists him up when he doesn’t get whatever it is. But Q also does many of the things she does because, quite simply, she believes thoroughly in herself. I’d like to think we taught her that, but I’ve been around her enough to know that she showed up with it. If she's anything like her mother (which she is), she will quite possibly rule the world.

If she wants to, that is.