When it snows, I’m accustomed to rushing to the window, plastering my eyes against the glass, feeling the eyebrow-brush against icy pane as I struggle to find contrast. At night, I look at lamplight, dull yellow or hard sodium orb, straining to see flakes in the unshadow below. During the day, I find dark edifices against which I strain to find the powdery white flecks floating by. The euphoria of a real, stalwart snow, a precipitation easily visible to the naked eye from distance, either diurnal or nocturnal, is a luxury rarely felt. But this morning, of all mornings, is my third day of this in West Virginia. I can, as one would-be sardonic commercial suggested to my wife’s and my delight, “Stay in and binge-watch the snow.”
I don’t want to. I would rather be teaching.
Today should have been the last day of class in my first semester teaching since 2013, my first semester ever teaching English 101 to first-years at West Virginia University. I had it all planned out, days in advance, a brief class, one where they could go home early. I would bring donuts or bagels or perhaps just donut holes and we would celebrate the completion of their final portfolios, the culmination of weeks spent on painstaking revision and sometimes forced reflection on their growth as students. I would invite them to a brief discussion, to go around the room and name one thing they’d be taking with them from this class for their future studies. This would dovetail both with my graduate pedagogy course’s focus on “transfer,” the ability of students to take the lessons of one subject and apply it to another, and with my own deep-seated desire for closure, for proper endings, for circularity instead of linearity, for bringing it all back home. Students would smile over a donut or bagel or donut hole and articulate what they were going to carry over to next term. Half the time, it would be BS when they first formulated it in their mind but, upon uttering it, upon the passage of thought from brain to tongue, they would mull it over and realize there was actually something here. That in naming what they had learned and would keep, they actually enacted the storage of that idea, be it the need for revision (the irony of me imparting this need not lost on me), the perils of procrastination (ditto?), the value of descriptive language, the importance of writing a thank-you note, or the vitality of critical thinking and checking one’s own bias. And I would smile and nod and feel like I had maybe, just maybe, contributed something to the lives of these 42 young charges.
It was not lost on me that I had forty-two students this semester, all seeing the class through to the end, nor that today was the forty-second scheduled class (after two voluntary cancellations I’d initiated prior, one of them ostensibly for snow on the eve of Thanksgiving break). And any baseball fan or Douglas Adams reader can tell you the exaggerated import of the number 42. But our forty-first President had a hand it leaving the number one shy.
I am not here to praise George H.W. Bush. About the nicest thing I can say about him is that he was better than his son. He headed the CIA during the era when the organization saw its mission to destabilize and destroy the lives of as many Latin Americans as possible. He went on to establish the firm precedent of militant intervention in the Middle East as critical to the American project, reigniting both an imperialism and an anti-Islamic drive whose legacy continues to accelerate in death and destruction. He used racism to win the White House, then ushered in an era of hyper-focus on crime and criminality that, with the help of Bill Clinton, cemented mass-incarceration as a revived manifestation of slavery. And he maintained our national obsession with tax reduction, perhaps continuing Reagan’s legacy, ensuring that wealth stratification and naked capitalism would escalate unchecked to 2018 and beyond.
He died recently, of course, was lauded by seemingly everyone in the country, and then roundly criticized by Donald Trump. And then Trump was criticized for criticizing and he did what Trump often does, which is wildly overreact. And so Trump closed federal offices today and asked states to follow suit. Apparently, most states, even most red states, laughed and ignored this request. West Virginia’s Governor Jim Justice promptly complied. The local school district announced their closure sometime mid-afternoon. Some of my fellow students speculated on whether WVU, as a public state-run institution, was required to comply.
It was not till 6:00 PM last night that WVU finally scrambled together this awkward missive to all students, faculty, and staff:
West Virginia University will close Wednesday, Dec. 5 following a Presidential Proclamation and separate Executive Order issued by Gov. Jim Justice for a state holiday and day of mourning in honor of former President George H. W. Bush.
While classes are canceled, essential campus services including the Carruth Center, Child Learning Center, Creative Arts Center, dining services, Information Technology Services, Libraries, Mountainlair, PRT and/or WVU buses, residence halls, Student Health, Student Recreation Center and University Police will remain open.
The closure will be effective for all non-essential personnel beginning at midnight through 11:59 p.m. on Wednesday. Employees who are considered essential personnel will be contacted by their supervisor with additional information regarding the work schedule tomorrow. All dining services employees already scheduled to work Wednesday, Dec. 5 should report to work. Units with existing emergency closure protocols should follow those. Employees with questions or concerns should contact their supervisor.
Wednesday’s undergraduate classes, including labs, exams and review sessions, will be moved to Friday, Dec. 7 as a make-up day. At the discretion of instructors, classes may be canceled Friday and students are encouraged to check with instructors for updates. Graduate classes will be held at the instructor’s discretion. Graduate students are encouraged to check with instructors for updates.
WVU Extension Services offices will also be closed across the state due to the holiday and day of mourning.
The University will reopen on a normal schedule Thursday, Dec. 6.
I was unsure what to do about my own graduate work and my penultimate graduate class, the pedagogy course’s final entry, scheduled for Wednesday afternoon. But I knew I had no choice with my own students. I announced on Google Classroom that they had a 48-hour extension, that they could come in on Friday morning to turn in their paper portfolios if that was their chosen format, and that attendance would not be required. Friday had been scheduled to be a reading day to prepare for finals and surely many of my students had already made plans. It’s one thing to ask everyone to come in for twenty minutes to celebrate their successful completion of the portfolio, have a snack, and talk about what they learned. Forcing everyone to do that on a previously scheduled off-day on the cusp of finals would just be punitive.
My goal here is not to ask for your pity or lamentation. This hasty closure to prevent my closed semester is arguably the least damage that either George H. W. Bush or Donald Trump have enacted on a human being through their actions. And after all, most of my peers celebrated both this opportunity to cancel class and the ultimate cancellation of our graduate classes as well. We have a day off now, can do whatever we want, the inevitable self-defeating reverberation of days cancelled for reflection being that there is time to be aimless, to have fun. Within an hour of the all-campus e-mail’s distribution, the usual spots around the neighborhood were bumping music and emanating a slow escalation of voices and clinking bottles. No one is using this time to reflect on the life and legacy of George H.W. Bush, for good or for ill. They’re succumbing to the vices of their choice: drinking, drugs, video games, dancing, playing in the snow.
And so my first semester in West Virginia ends on this hollow, awkward note. I still have a nonfiction workshop to attend, made more meaningful for discussing my work, and a handful of diligent students will stop by Friday morning to hand off their carefully crafted printed portfolios, encased in clear plastic and reviewed with care. There will still be an opportunity for me to tie things up with a bit of a bow, to impose my desire for narrative atop the chaotic and uncontrollable nature of life. Maybe it’s an opportunity to meditate not on the death of Bush the elder per se, but on death itself, which almost always comes at an inconvenient and unplanned moment. There’s always something left undone, always an expectation unfulfilled, always an idealized moment of closure and finality to compare it to in disappointment.
Of course, how often does the last day ever live up to our expectations, even when carefully planned and deftly executed? I can think of one, maybe two times in my life. It’s rare.
Rare as fresh snow, wide-flaked and visible, descending all aflutter at different speeds to the cold wet ground. Each snowflake is unique, they tell us. And when accumulated, nestled together, reflects the light.
