Retrospective Conversion and a Story of Celebration
I know. There are horrible things going on in the US and in the larger world. I know. We need to continue to do what we can to fight against such things. But even as we resist, there are still some things worth celebrating. Perhaps celebrations will distract us from the trauma for at least a few minutes. But there’s more than distraction here — celebrations expand the narrative of our lives so that we can find meaning even in the face of trauma. This morning’s post is a bit different from other things I’ve written. Call it a story of celebration.
I start with this from Vivian Gornick:
Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say (The Situation and the Story, p. 13).
Last week I returned to the university where I earned my PhD to attend a one-day symposium honoring and responding to the work of my teacher and another of his students. The symposium was held in one of the university libraries. While in graduate school, I spent almost all of my waking hours in this building doing classwork, preparing for exams, and researching and writing my dissertation. I had a carrel on the second floor where I did much of this work. But I’m not sure I could find that carrel now. Though the building retains the outer footprint that it had while I was there, the inside has been extensively remodeled. I didn’t go up to the second floor; with all the changes, I think I might have been lost.
In fact, it was at least two hours into the symposium before I realized that I had also spent a considerable amount of time in the first-floor room in which I was sitting. It’s not quite accurate to say that I spent time in that very room — I’m not sure, but I think that the room as it exists now is larger than the room in which I spent my time. Perhaps they expanded the room during one of the remodeling projects. I’m positive, though, that I spent many early morning hours in that corner of the building.
While there I worked on the university’s retrospective conversion project. This was a crucial step in the university’s move from the card catalog holding physical notecards, one for each book in the library, to an online database. I worked early in the morning because access to the the OCLC database used in the work was less expensive before 8:00a. Several mornings a week, I arrived in the library at 6:00a and spent two hours working through book cards one by one. Using the information on a card, I had to locate the database entry for the same edition of the book held in our library and modify a copy of the record to indicate that we had a copy of the book. It was tedious work, requiring that I learn the codes for all the different fields in a book record and making sure that I really had identified the right book. However, once I learned all the codes and developed my searching strategies, I found that I was able to handle the occasional distraction without interrupting the flow of the work.
Of course I’ve forgotten most of the codes, though I’m pretty sure that the code for a book’s title is 245. But as I sat in the room last week a particularly vivid memory came to mind. My workstation was next to a window. The window looked out on one of the university residence halls. One of the students living in that hall was a woman whom I found attractive in all sorts of ways. In addition to being physically attractive, she had a reputation for being rather intensely involved in social justice causes that I cared about. I had met her briefly once, and I was hoping that our paths might cross and we could, one might say, get to know each other. For several weeks, though, such encounters were limited to the occasional glimpse of her leaving the residence hall on her way to breakfast.
All of that, Gornick might say, is the situation. The story? Later this month that woman and I will celebrate our fortieth wedding anniversary. The memory of times I saw her leave the residence hall and the anticipation of the coming anniversary together form what Gornick describes as “the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer.” Over forty years ago, while sitting at that terminal, I was doing retrospective conversion for the library. But these days I celebrate in retrospect the much richer conversion she brought to me. Simply put, she’s changed my life.
But not just my life. To return to the troubles of the day, she still maintains a fierce commitment to social justice and is hard at work responding to injustice. All of that is worth celebrating.