Lordy it was hot this pre-dawn morning.  The heat index had to be
in the eighties.  I thought I'd come in with a severe moon burn.  It was
really beating down on me. I'm going to rewrite Ogden Nash's ditty: "Only
mad dogs and Englishmen and aging professors go out in the pre-dawn moon!"
Anyway, after a dehydrating six mile walk, I came into the house, slowly
took a couple of reviving glasses of cool water, poured the waiting
freshly brewed coffee into a cup, and went out to sit by the koi pond to
cool down.  Unfortunately, there's no cooling off in this kind of searing
weather. The sweat kept pouring out from my pores faster than the water
was falling over the rocks in my fishpond.  As was watching the smooth
sweep of the Koi, I started to think once again of a question a troubled
graduate student at a Texas university posed to me over the internet with
which I had trouble answering.

        She said in a way I could almost see the tears in her eyes, "I
want to teach and make some real difference in this world."  Her
professors, however, "think I'm wasting my time and their time with such
thoughts and that I won't get anywhere in the profession unless I publish
and publish a lot.  One professor told me in no uncertain terms when I
went to talk with her about how I feel, 'You can't waste your time on
students.  We're not training you to do that.' After that I feel as if
this professor talked about me to the other professors and I'm being
pushed to the back of the academic bus.  And they say segregation is over.
Not here.  Not if you just want to learn to teach.  Researchers to the
front of the bus, teachers to the back!" Then she asked, as if fighting
the urge to surrender, "Is it really so much easier and safer to go along
and get along with 'the system?'" she asked.  "I feel like it's harder
because it's making me be someone I'm not.  I don't feel as alive when I
try, but that's what a lot of people tell me to do.  'Just go with the
flow,' they say when I grind my teeth about how I am now being treated
here because I don't want to forsake students to research and publish."

        I sat there watching the koi being mesmerized by the hypnotic
rhythm of their undulations.  Maybe I was in a trance.  Then the answer
came to me.

        Ever have a sudden and unexpected flashback?  Ever have a scene
from your past that had lain so hidden and deeply buried in the dark,
inner recesses of your memory be brought to the surface like some
exploding lava in an erupting volcano?  That's what happened to me this
morning.  I felt like Mount St. Helens.  Without warning, I suddenly heard
a voice "from the other side" I hadn't heard in over half a century, from
maybe 1947 or 1948.  There, suddenly before me appearing on the screen of
the pond's surface was "ole Tim"  in hips boots casting for rainbow trout
with little me at his side.  He wasn't really all that "ole."  He couldn't
have been more than in his late thirties.  He just seemed "ole"  to us
seven and eight year olds.  He was a dark brown-haired local fisherman of
my youth who had taught me how to fly cast for rainbow trout in New York's
Beaverkill during the late 1940s when I spent my summers at my aunt's
upstate bungalow "kucherlein" where my parents sent me to get away from
the deadly polio epidemics that ravaged the city.

        Suddenly, in such vivid detail that I could feel the heat of the
sun beating down on me, I remembered part of one of the many conversations
we had while standing in the middle of the stream.  Standing wasn't the
real word.  Tim was standing firm.  Little me was fighting against be
lifted up and along by the current and struggling awkwardly keep my
balance and find some traction on the slippery rocks of the steam bed while
at the same time casting with a pole twice my size without getting a hook
in my rubbery butt.

        Wearing oversized hip boots that made me look like I was bundled
in a heavy rubber gunny sack, I asked Tim with the innocence and curiosity
of a seven year old, "Why do you let the fly float with the water?  Don't
the fish go the same to keep from getting tired?  How do the fish see it
behind them?

        For a minute I thought Tim didn't hear me. He didn't say a word.
Standing downstream next to me to prevent me from either floating away or
falling, he kept casting. Without turning his head, as he was casting, he
answered tersely but firmly with his quiet and patient deep-throated
baritone voice, "Only dead fish go with the current."


Make it a good day.

                                                       --Louis--


Louis Schmier                     www.therandomthoughts.com
Department of History             www.halcyon.com/arborhts/louis.html
Valdosta State University
Valdosta, GA  31698                           /~\        /\ /\
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