Notes from Below Sea Level
Splitting Infinitives
I had been home from work for maybe a half hour yesterday when my sister called. Her oldest granddaughter—a freshman at Furman University—emailed my sister an English paper she needed help with. The assignment was to write a paper on What the Constitution Means to Me, a 2017 play by Heidi Schreck dealing with women’s rights, immigration, domestic abuse, and the history of the United States. The play (first produced on Broadway in 2019) made the short list that year for a Tony for Best Play and was a finalist for a Pulitzer. Anyway, my grandniece wrote a draft of the assignment, handed it in, got the draft back with notes from the Professor, and was reaching out to my sister to understand some of the Professor’s comments. And that’s where I surreptitiously come in.
First let me make this clear: my older sister is whip smart and her granddaughter even more so. But notes from college professors can be intimidating, hard to understand, vague, and confusing. This sort of conundrum happens to fall in my wheelhouse. At least according to my sister. So, five minutes after getting that phone call, I was in front of my computer reading a freshman essay on a play I previously had never heard of trying to decipher cryptic highlights from a Professor I didn’t know. This is what we call entertainment in my family.
The Professor’s edits were lazy and mostly unhelpful, so my sister and I dug in a bit to make notes on how the draft could be improved, talking through each recommendation and why my grandniece would or would not push back on a particular suggestion. My sweet child (she is only 17, so I get to call her that) is as precocious as she is sensitive and suffers from a mild case of often being the smartest one in the room—hence the walking on eggshells about her writing. For her—honestly—too much help is cheating (by having someone else write what is supposed to be her work); so mostly she wants you to note comma splices, verb tense issues, a misuse of “it’s” when it should be “its.” You get the idea.
Through my sister, I try to get my grandniece to understand that writing is part science, part art and that seeking advice on grammar only ignores the magic of what our language is capable of producing. She would never raise this objection if I were reviewing her math assignment; like math some combinations can be wrong and need to be corrected, such as a mistake in multiplication or forgetting to carry a negative. Then again, some formulas and proofs can be made more elegant, and there is no shame in getting help on this aspect of what is considered a pure science. Anyway, it takes my sister and me an hour to get through this thousand-word essay because with each sentence we parse and each paragraph we outline, we visit a thousand connected topics from her grandson’s latest baseball game to the disastrous election. Each argument over hyphenation reminds us of our differences in understanding; each time we try to improve a sentence summing up systemic racism or the prevalence of misogyny in legal systems, the more we share common ground.
And while I swore to myself that I would not write about the election, my sister and I couldn’t help but share our worries in deeply personal ways. We are old (this sister will be 70 next year); we’ve been disappointed before and have lived through inane, inept administrations (this is Louisiana, after all, so we have local experience). But we haven’t in our lifetimes witnessed the retraction of rights on such a grand scale and the abject acceptance of this retreat by a large swath of our fellow Americans. There is nothing like arguing the modern acceptance of using split infinitives in formal writing in a 17-year-old woman’s essay on a local production of play about abortion rights and the availability of contraceptives that will make you weep. Weep for ourselves and weep for her future and eventual place in a society that values her less based on a phenotype as random as any genetic expression. As random as one coin flip in a thousand. A burden she may be too young and too inexperienced to even sense yet; but one no less real, no less tragic.
Last night something broke in me. There is, I believe, a natural tension in trying to focus on the personal and universal simultaneously: that space where time is relative and we are forced to surrender to perception or recognize that we hold in our hearts the seeds of a better future. I reached bottom, I guess. Rather than succumb, though, I began the process of putting aside my lamentations and ceased the rending of garments. I owe it to my grandniece, if not for myself, to accept the present only insofar as it provides the opportunity to build a world more accepting, more kind, more understanding.
Like a debate on the existence of inalienable rights, life is partly merely our survival within a social system subject to manipulation and fraught with opportunities to leverage human frailty.
Like my grandniece’s essay, the next draft will be better and, years from now, when she pulls that assignment out of a tall stack of papers she saved from her long-past college years, she will delight in its innocence, its pretentiousness, and its overall lack of true understanding. She will, eventually, get to that place we all aim to reach.
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Cheers everyone and here’s to a lovely Friday and a relaxing weekend.
Be well, be kind, and appreciate the love you have in your life.
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Grab your coffee or tea and join us, please.
What's on your mind this morning?
