Caveat Lector

My father’s father died long before I was born; I know no more of him than his name (which would have been mine if I hadn’t inconveniently been born the wrong gender) and the story of Grandma’s diamond which I now have and wear.

My other three grandparents are all gone now. I was only on the fringe of the ends of their lives.

In my grandfather’s case, that was really because I wasn’t needed. Grandpa had prostate cancer, chose not to treat it aggressively, lived quietly among his books and his genealogies and his investments (he was a county treasurer and freelance investment manager most of his career), went into hospice when he needed to, and was lucid to the day he died. I talked to him on the phone in hospice a few times. He was laconic about the state of his health. “Good days and bad days,” he said, and that was all he would say, having other things he preferred to talk about.

When he died, I felt that dying wasn’t so bad if one could manage it the way he did. He was never anything less than himself. I didn’t go to his funeral, though. I wanted to, but my mother said I shouldn’t in the tone of an Imperial Command. I felt strongly that wrangling over it would betray him and the way his death had decently and with dignity closed off his life, so I shut up and stayed away.

My father’s mother was overtaken by diabetes. She pleaded with her sons to live out her life in her own home, the home she’d lived in some fifty years. Her sons fought like gladiators over what to do with her—the option she actually asked for was never on the table—and she died in a nursing home, blind, confused, and helpless.

There were certainly discussions to be had about how best to care for her; I don’t mean to imply otherwise. But I was in on the email exchanges for a while, and let’s be clear that Grandma’s wishes were at the bottom of the concern pile for everyone. (”It would shorten her life,” they said of her express desire to stay at home. “It would be too expensive, poor value for money,” they said.) Grandma was a trophy, and the field of battle was who could most loudly and dramatically proclaim concern for her. It was a disgusting display of chest-pounding oneupsmanship, and when I visited Grandma in the place she eventually died in, she surely didn’t look any the better for their vaunted solicitude.

My mother’s mother, who died a week and a half ago, sank into one of the nastier sorts of dementia after a series of mini-strokes, her temper turning white-hot vicious. To make a long story short, my aunt cared for her after Grandpa’s death until Grandma’s temper escalating to physical abuse wore my aunt down enough to heed Grandma’s repeated requests to be institutionalized. (“She only says that because she thinks she’ll die,” my mother told me mournfully on several occasions. Well, and so? I thought.)

The change, it turns out, was not good for Grandma, who bit and kicked and spat at staff at the home until they had to sedate her for their own safety. She died in the body a few days later. If you ask me, which you didn’t, her mind and her self had died long before that. Grandma was the properest, most gracious lady you can imagine; she tried and failed to teach me manners and sewing throughout my childhood. She was also the paradigmatic church lady, generous with her time and effort, invariably kind to children, a credit and a help to her community.

Whatever was kicking and biting wasn’t my grandmother. I don’t know how else to put it. I don’t understand why changeling fairy tales are all about babes-in-arms; I think it more horrible that so many changelings are elders, that a solid and stable personality can not only vanish, but turn inside-out just in time for that to be the last memory that friends and children are left with.

My mother’s family is rather less contentious than my father’s, so I expected Grandma’s funeral to go smoothly. It didn’t. Whether because she felt that her siblings had deserted her with Grandma’s changeling, or out of plain ordinary vanity, my aunt shut my mother and my uncle out of the arrangements altogether, and my mother nearly came to (non-metaphorical) blows with her over it.

The most I can do, sitting here appalled and afraid, is try not to repeat the mistakes my parents and uncles and aunts made. I will listen to what my parents say they want, and let them govern their fate as much as I possibly can. I will take seriously Andy Clark’s contention that our physical surroundings are our cognitive scaffolding, and so I will think very hard before I change them for my parents. I will not force my parents to trade dignity and quality of life for mere quantity. I will do my level best to solve problems instead of creating them. I will remember that my parents quite properly reside at the center of their own lives; I will not relegate them to mere symbols in my own psychodrama.

I do not expect this to be straightforward.

Me, I am afraid again. Perhaps the reason my grandfather managed his own death while both my grandmothers could not is the gender difference. Men are permitted autonomy and self-direction, but everyone expects to take over for women. Men’s voices are heard and heeded; women are thought not to know what is best for them, are not trusted to make their own independent decisions about themselves. I hope this isn’t true, but it surely sounds plausible. I’m afraid to search the sociology literature, lest I find out I’m right.

I’m afraid of having my wishes disregarded and my dignity violated. I’m afraid of being robbed of my identity, becoming a changeling, losing the habits and abilities of mind that make me myself—and I’m even more afraid of being forced to live on as not-me. Hell doesn’t need an afterlife; plenty of scope in this one.

One small crumb of consolation is that I won’t have children to fight over me, smother me with misplaced kindness, and bungle my disposal. What I want is simple: recycle whatever’s recyclable—I am an organ donor, so all that’s in order—cremate the rest, and scatter it wherever because I’m past caring. And don’t spend a penny more than absolutely required. Money is for the living, not the dead.

My second grad-school advisor, who treated his grad students like the dirt under his fingernails, nonetheless managed the end of an emeritus professor’s life with true kindness and complete respect. The old man came in to do work whenever he wanted to. My advisor looked after his finances and got him to the doctor when he needed to go. Like my grandfather, the old man died lucidly and quietly, and had a quiet, dignified memorial.

Finding someone to do for me what my advisor did for him is all my hope for the end of my life.

I took the day off from work in hopes of hitting a few museums downtown, or perhaps the zoo, but since the sudden transfer of the Pantanal to the eastern seaboard created a tremendous transit mess in DC today, better I should stay home and pontificate a bit.

I’ve been thinking about my adventures with whuffie. I don’t have as much as I once did, which in itself is a lesson: whuffie is context-dependent, and if the context disintegrates, you can’t always transfer its whuffie to another context. Nobody in libraryland actually cares that I used to be a content and standards developer for ebooks. That’s just the way it goes, with whuffie. Clinging to stale, outdated whuffie only makes you look outdated (and dumb enough to be unaware of it) yourself.

You can also outgrow old whuffie. I took a freelance job that was offered me based on my old ebook whuffie; I said “no” to it several times because that just wasn’t where my heart was any more… but finally I said yes (being nervous about the whole no-job-yet thing), and I shouldn’t have, and it hasn’t worked out well for reasons having nothing to do with them and everything to do with me. The last few pieces of the experience have been so disheartening that I have an invoice for them that’s been hanging fire for months because I don’t have the cojones to send it.

A lesson I should have learned faster than I did is that while being sought out for your whuffie is nifty and flattering, it isn’t always salubrious. I shouldn’t have taken the job Steve Potash offered me; it was offered solely on the basis of my ebook whuffie. Steve didn’t have any plans for me—he didn’t even really know me—and I didn’t have any (practicable) plans for OverDrive. While the whole trainwreck had a lot less to do with Steve than with my inability to cope productively with the horrendously vicious micromanager he had running his conversion department, it wouldn’t have happened at all if I’d been smarter.

So I’m telling you: when you get a neat offer, find out why it’s been offered. Secondhand whuffie, the “I’ve heard of you!” syndrome, is insufficient reason to accept, even (perhaps especially) if you’re desperate. Mismatched expectations (on both sides) make huge messes.

To make that concrete—I’m cool when somebody says “I’ve been reading CavLec for ages, and love it!” Anybody who can read CavLec for years and still like me pretty much has to be my kind of person. No comment on whether my kind of person is a good person or a bad person—you’ll assuredly find folks who’ll take either side of that question. But my kind of person isn’t likely to be shocked rigid at sight of me, or put off by my general style, or wholly unaware of my take on things. My kind of person and I are likely to get along famously and do good things for each other.

“You were recommended to me by X,” however, needs a little work. Did this person actually check me out? What does s/he actually know about me? Is s/he just looking for a warm body with basic articulatory skills? (Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing in whuffie-driven academic librarianship; I just like to know first.) Fundamentally, am I there because I know something, or because my name supposedly lends lustre? I distrust the latter motivation. Your mileage may vary.

One positive about academic conferences is that the review process dilutes the role of whuffie in the system. Sure, it doesn’t hurt to have a big name when you’re submitting a paper proposal—but it doesn’t count for everything, either. A good paper by a relative nobody can and does get heard.

In a way it’s rather nice to be starting over again on the whuffie scale. I can be reasonably certain that such offers as I get these days are genuine, and the friends I am making in the profession will be my friends a long time. I do have a couple-three friends from ebook days still, but a lot of those relationships, I now see, were superficial at best.

So be careful of whuffie. It occasionally bites.

Reputation, distance; consistency and change; perspective; these are a few of the themes running through my head after a week with my dad and at a conference with people I now consider friends. (Not that I didn’t like them before, but for whatever semantic or sociological reason it is easier to attach the “friend” label to someone I’ve shaken hands with.)

I got from DC to Raleigh via the good offices of someone who lives locally and was driving down to JCDL anyway. I was (and still am) fully prepared to split the cost of a tank of gas, but I wasn’t asked to. It so happens that not long ago I was involved in getting the driver a new (and so far, better) job.

My involvement, mind you, consisted of a bit of serendipity (the job is repository-related and the employer got in touch with me first) and two or three emails. That was it. Honestly. Anybody would have done the same thing. I do understand, though, that from the other side that transaction looks a bit different—quite a bit more momentous—and so right or wrong, I wasn’t quite prepared to insist.

When we got to my house, we stuck around for a bit so that the driver could figure out directions to his hotel. That important task accomplished, he asked for a tour of the back yard, whose water-gardens and vined trellises and profusion of plantings represent thirty years of my parents’ labor. I hauled my stuff to my old bedroom, got whacked a couple times by psycho-puss, and went out back to see what was going on, in case my friend needed rescue from one of my dad’s hallmark political tirades.

Which he, um, did. I grew up with my dad. I know how he behaves. Some things don’t change. I was expecting another get-rich-quick scheme; I heard all about the latest one at Sunday lunch after the tutorial. I was expecting fulminations against his former place of work; I got ’em. I was expecting status-conscious praise; shortly before I left, Dad told me that he’d never imagined I’d be doing what I am, but he’s proud that I’m in the forefront of my profession.

I’m not. I’m not even in the forefront of my niche in the profession. How could I be, a year in? It’s not even a goal of mine. Kicking Elseviley Verlag’s butt to the curb, that’s a goal of mine (though if Springer keeps pulling stuff like this, I may have to apologize abjectly to Jan Velterop and find myself another bit of shorthand slang). Putting scholarly publishing and archiving on a sounder footing, that’s a goal of mine. More usable electronic texts, that’s a goal of mine. Fame, fortune, honorary degrees? Not so much.

And as for his imagination, he never once imagined me anything but a tenured university professor at a Research I. I daresay he’s trumping up my status to console himself for his deep disappointment in me. But if playing silly-buggers with my career helps him, I won’t argue it with him. I said “thank you” and shut up.

Funny thing is, couple days into the conference, my friend said to me, “Your dad—he’s a really cool guy!” Which put a new spin on things entirely. Maybe my dad isn’t the problem. Maybe his too-easily-embarrassed kid is the problem.

The day after the conference ended, another new friend emailed me to invite me to a party. Dad talked her into town over the phone when she got a little lost. So she and I went to the party, and we hit a comics shop and a coffee-dessert place afterwards, and I at least had a wonderful time. Dad didn’t say word one against it, though it was my last night in town. And she, too, complimented me on having a cool dad.

On the train trip home, I occupied two-thirds of my brain with Willinsky and Benkler and let the other third wander about considering how Dad and I are perhaps more alike than I like to let on, both for good and ill. And how he’s not such a bad guy. And how a little outside perspective is a good re-evaluation tool.

And things like that.

When I came to interview at George Mason University a year ago, I was struck by the energy of growth and change. This was a young place, too young to have any ways to be set in. This was a place still stalking its niche, all elbows and knees and scrappy attitude.

Not polished, not at all; institutions with many decades of history behind them don’t brag about Nobel prizewinners, especially since anybody who is anybody in academia knows that Nobel prizewinners are trophies to be bought and sold. Snagging a few and parading them about is the act of an insecure arriviste.

But I sensed during the interview and still sense that Mason genuinely wants to live up to its own hype about itself. The place doesn’t just want to seem good; it wants to be good. And that’s an ethos I can live with, even as I cringe at how it plays out sometimes. (We’re not free of creeping adjunctivitis. Heck, we’ve got it as bad as anyplace and worse than many. And no, we do not deserve a Phi Beta Kappa chapter.)

Some of my own colleagues, even, privately sneer at the institution’s opportunism and quick shifts of mood and strategy. Myself, I’m just as happy to be somewhere that crosses borders, fills in gaps, turns on the occasional dime. I saw the polar-opposite stance firsthand in one of my other interviews, and it didn’t make me happy at all. I can relate to an institution that tries hard and learns fast, but now and then chases the wild goose or doesn’t remember to behave with old-school decorum. I’m like that too, after all.

Our basketball team’s grand chariot turned back into a pumpkin last night. That’s all right by me. What’s impressed me all along hasn’t been the on-court action, but the impeccable class and irrepressible joy exhibited throughout by players, coach, and school. Even after the loss—disappointment, certainly, but no spite, no anger, not the least lapse of sportsmanship or in the school’s support for its team. An awful miasma of crass idiocy surrounds college sports; Mason kept free of it this tournament, and that’s something to be proud of.

I’m proud to work at Mason. I have been since I started here. It’s a fine school.

I’ve had myself quite a year, here. Well, and there. Not just here.

I began it getting ready for my last semester of library school and fretting about the librarian non-shortage and what it meant for my just-launched job search. It’s a rollercoaster, job-searching is. It’s putting yourself on the altar and handing knives to random passersby. It’s spending two of the most intense days ever, traveling and meeting people and talking and eating and minding my manners and trying to be impressive while still being plain ol’ me… and then doing it again, and again.

And then there’s moving, which is intensity of a completely different sort, a calculated frenzy of planning and fussing and annoyance that is probably the way it is to distract mercifully from the altogether different intensity of leaving a place you’ve lived in for eleven years.

There’s been some intense anger this year (and you should all be glad I kept most of it off-blog), some intense physical pain (though it only served me right), and some intense joy I’ll remember all my days.

All in all, I think I’m a little tired. I’ve been reverberating, sometimes as out-of-tune as the strings on my door-harp. If I’ve a goal for 2006, it’s settling down, letting the intensity go, and remembering how to tune myself to the right note, my note.

She was eighteen, a college freshman. He was a first-year grad student. But they weren’t as far apart in age as all that, really; he’d skipped a few grades in school.

They met online, as the cliché would have it. The VAX cluster ran a creaky, semi-illicit bulletin-board system. They both posted on the roleplaying board, a few other places. He was delighted to hear of her interest in Arthuriana, invited her to guess what was up with the stories his character was telling. She didn’t guess; he had to tell her. He was retelling Malory.

They got to talking, via the VAX equivalent of IM. (Anybody else remember BITNET?) She realized quickly that he was formidably intelligent. He got around soon enough to telling her that she was the smartest girl he’d ever known. It was five or six weeks before they saw each other in person, meeting geekily and gawkily in a campus computer lab. He turned out to be a skinny, out-at-elbows lad all over denim; she recognized him the minute he walked in. He had to look around a bit before he zeroed in on her. She was a tall, chunky, rawboned woman with long untidy muddy-copper hair, wearing a magenta T-shirt that commemorated the previous summer she spent learning beginning geology in Montana.

Neither of them admitted how much they liked each other. There’s always a fly, isn’t there? The fly was—she was taken. Had a boyfriend already. If I weren’t taken, she wrote a friend, I met this other guy…

Come Halloween, she was abruptly not taken any more. Dumped. Dumped pretty hard, actually. He kept quiet, not wanting to seem importunate or insensitive. Even so, two and a half weeks later they spent the night together… no, not like that.

That was fifteen years ago tonight. Three graduate degrees, two graduate-school flameouts, two years of enforced separation, two major moves, a wedding, one house and three or four apartments later, they’re getting to be quite the old couple, they are.

We are.

I had an idea for a fractured fairy tale some time ago, but I don’t write those things, so I’ll toss it out for those who do. I think it’d be publishable, done right; I’ve seen similar in best-of fantasy anthologies. Though I don’t have the patience to do it right, it’s nagging at my brain, and I wish somebody would write it. So.

The young emperor inherits (along with his empire) his predecessor’s old clothier, who is the narrator of the story. This clothier, he knows his stuffs. One blindfolded touch of a new fabric, and he can tell you its precise fiber content, how it was woven and by whom, and what process was used to dye it. (Sometimes even the color.) It’s not magic. He was taught by the best, and he’s learned all his life long, learned from his work as he did it.

(Here would be space for some satire on court fashion. I’ll leave it to a real writer to pull that off.)

He is unceremoniously dumped from his high position when a pair of new clothiers come to town, promising marvels. As word of them filters back to him, he knows immediately that they’re charlatans. They make hash of weave, cut, color, weight, technique, and everything else the old clothier spent a lifetime’s education and experience learning. He doesn’t even need to hear about the magic, the ferreting-out of fools and so forth. Just what those two windbags say about clothing is enough, to one who knows.

What stings at first is that the emperor didn’t even bother to consult him; he wouldn’t have minded sharing his position nearly as much as he minds the emperor’s eventual disgrace, which he can see no way to forestall. At length, the old clothier reflects that perhaps he ought to have expected no different. Why should the emperor respect skill or experience? He has none, has worked for none; he gained his empire by dint of being the son of his father. He’s been surrounded all his life by fawning toadies looking for advantage, and would-be Machiavellis weaving spider-schemes in corners; how should he have learned to value honesty?

When the promises become dangerous, the old clothier tries to make himself heard. No one believes him, of course; he is only the jealous loser. Not an iota of the evidence he can muster arrives at the emperor’s ear; when he challenges the charlatans, he is dismissed with uneasy laughter.

Heartsick, the old clothier stays home for the emperor’s disgraceful promenade… and I’m not quite sure how the story ends, really.

As I said, I’ve had this rattling around in my head for some time. It started screaming for escape right around the time of the Miers nomination, of course.

Like the rest of us Stateside I’m sure, I’ve been watching the aftermath of Katrina with queasy horror. Beyond words.

I’ve also seen hints of a lot of generosity. Sure, the give-to-charity type is all over the place, but that isn’t actually what I mean. I’m talking about someone taking in an abandoned greyhound, someone else saying “Stay with me; I have room,” others picking up and heading south on no notice.

I don’t know anyone on the Gulf Coast. The only time I ever saw New Orleans was at the age of eight, when my parents insanely drove from North Carolina to Laredo to pick up a train into Mexico. (I’m serious. They did. It was insane.)

That doesn’t mean I have no responsibility to help. It just means I’m limited to help-by-proxy, faceless help; I can’t offer a flesh-and-blood hand if I’ve no one to offer it to. As it turns out, I do better with helping when I can offer a hand, make a human connection. I daresay I’m not alone in that. I also say that I don’t find it particularly praiseworthy; need is need, and limiting my response to need is not what I hope of myself.

I suppose that’s why I don’t talk here about the occasions on which I do extend my hand. Partly that shame, partly others’ privacy, partly a (salubrious, I’m sure) reluctance to claim virtue.

I’ve a story to tell, just now, aimed at someone on the other side of my outstretched hand. I hope the rest of you will forgive the indulgence.

It was years before my mother accepted David. Years. She had her reasons—at least, the ones she told me about. Honest or not (and to some extent they were), those reasons were not the entire story. David was my freedom, many years ago. David taught me how to build an independent spirit, and I don’t know that my mother ever quite got used to that, either.

I think she knew how it happened, though. I do think she knew.

As the days counted down before my departure for Madison to start graduate school, everyone in the house knew what the plans were, but none of us dared say anything. Peace was like that, in our family: artificial, bounded by thick slabs of silence. I was racking my brain trying to sort out how to move us and our stuff, given that we didn’t live in the same city and I didn’t drive. And how to do this without material assistance from my parents—well, that bordered on impossible.

So finally, one sweaty-hot July morning, I marched myself out to the garden where my parents were working, and I came clean. I tell you three times, it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Leaving grad school was a cinch by comparison (of course, I was so beaten down by the time I left that really there wasn’t much else I could do).

In the pictures, these scenes always carry dignity. Well, I didn’t. I was crying and gulping for air and sweating bullets and doubtless looking a right sorry specimen. But for once in my sorry excuse for an adult life, I didn’t ask permission; I told them what I was going to do.

My mom had a way of smacking me down in my teenage years, whenever I came close to asserting myself. Only once did she ever actually hit me, and this was not that time (but I remember that time, yes, I do). She’d just say something deeply cutting and completely unanswerable, shocking me into stunned silence. This time, she said, “So what do you want from us? Our blessing?”

That made me stammer, more than a little. I certainly hadn’t envisioned asking for, much less receiving, any such thing. I knew better. Finally, I got hold of myself long enough to say that no, I didn’t want any blessing they weren’t willing to give; all I wanted was their help packing and moving.

And what do you know, I got it, essentially without further argument.

My parents and I have kept a careful arms-length distance ever since. One thing I have never done since that day is accept money from them, though we could have used it in those early years. Mom offered. Repeatedly. But it was easier to live the grad-mouse lifestyle than attach the marionette strings. (I paid for both my master’s degrees. My parents paid for both of my sister’s—and she still lives at home. Coincidence? Well, it’s always more complicated than joining point A and point B… but no, I’m sorry, it’s not mere coincidence.)

What it comes down to is that yanking myself free hurt like the devil and scared me silly. I did, however, survive it, and I have never had reason to regret doing it.

The same will be true of the person I’m writing this story for. I offer the story, then, along with my hand.

As usual, my first instinct when I hear nice things is to duck and cover. Instead, though, I find myself thinking about the bloggers I’ve met, the ones I know, the ones who have enough experience with me to form an opinion.

How those opinions do vary. Frank offers me “warm” and “brilliant” like desserts on a tray. For another blogger, though, I’m a rigid hypocrite who talks a good game about openness and honesty and friendship but never misses a chance to backstab someone who disagrees with me, or back cravenly out of a fight for the ideals I hollowly profess. I might be a shining example of post-academic recovery, or I might be a bitter loused-up old failure lashing out at my proven betters; depends who you ask. One blogger considers me anathema (is there a word stronger than anathema? if there is, this blogger would use it of me) because I don’t make any particular secret of not liking ill-behaved children and not wanting children of my own (ill-behaved or not).

So who’s right? Eh. They all are, to a greater or lesser degree. Perception formation is partly a function of the interaction, the dyad; I can’t control it because I can’t control the other half of the sketch. Even my perception of myself is dyadic, in a weird way, as I am both observer and observed. As I’m not exactly anyone’s world-champion for perceptiveness, I’m not at all sure I should privilege my observations of myself over anyone else’s.

I do have information y’all readers don’t. There’s stuff I’m reticent about here, both on the good and the bad side. For everyone who thinks of me as a favorite agony-aunt or counselor or general helping hand, though, there’s someone I tried to help and missed helping, sometimes pretty badly. So I certainly shan’t make the claim that my ugly spots are all above the surface, while the iceberg below is shining bright white. There’s an iceberg below, no question. It’s as polluted as anything else.

Do I use Caveat Lector to manage perceptions of me? Sure, now and then. I can think of a couple examples I’d like to take back, because they weren’t completely honest. Turbulent Velvet caught me cold once. Such is my weakness that I was angrier at her for finding me out than at myself for being such a lamer. (I will say for myself that I behaved decently about it, whatever my inner upset.) I’m not sorry I wrote the post in question, though, because the subtext was all in the juxtaposition, and by itself it’s a good post, one I sincerely meant and am happy to reread. Flowers from manure. Does happen, sometimes.

What’s most salient for me at the moment, though, is how the written perceptions of me I’m thinking of say at least as much about the people who produced them as about me. I’m sure Frank has a range of reactions to others, but I would guess he nonetheless describes a lot of them as he did me, because he’s the kind of guy who brings out warmth in people, and wants to see brilliance.

This gives me to ponder about how I talk about other folks, here and elsewhere. Sure, sure, this all fits into the blog-job thread (oh, and Rochelle’s on a roll; check it out!), but it’s larger than that. I would genuinely prefer to be someone who thinks and speaks well of others whenever possible. It’s better for them, of course, in these days of Google-employment-surfing, but it also builds a more decent and honorable me.

Shall have to see what I can do about that.

The closest I ever come to the mind-freedom of meditation is during travel. While Sita Dulip’s Method comes highly recommended, I have never tried it; I don’t know that I even need it. I’ve gotten very good at letting go frustration in one long sigh and reminding myself that I get there when I get there, not one moment sooner.

I’m the traveller angry passengers hate and airline agents love, the one who can walk up to the counter after the flight-cancellation announcement, smile calmly, and say sincere thanks when the interaction is over, even when the result is an extra night away from home (as it all too often is; some day I will break myself of the habit of booking the last flight out, but that day is not this).

Today I got to the Madison airport far earlier than I needed to, which gave me leisure to grin when a security agent recognized the Silver Surfer logo taped to the Silver Surfer’s silvery surface. (Say that three times fast.) I re-buckled my shoes, settled into a seat with Midori Snyder’s Innamorati (highly recommended; I must read more by this woman) and let the time take care of itself.

(In passing—and I am certainly in passing, typing this 35,000 feet above ground and hurtling toward Montreal at some hideous rate of speed—I wonder if anyone has named the fantasy subgenre that essentially consists of reinventing existing semi-historical, semi-literary genres? Innamorati is a fine example of the type, part commedia, part Boccaccio, part straight-up Italy; and so are Kij Johnson’s brilliantly-revamped Japanese pillow-books. I find that I love these dearly and want to read more of them. If I got ambitious, I’d even write one, set of course in Spain, the country that is still the imaginative terrain of my heart despite everything graduate school did to me. But the Spain of brave wandering Egeria? Or the Arcipreste de Hita? The Cid? Or the doomed Spain breathing through the Abencerraje? I don’t know. Such gorgeous Spains they all are.)

My flight to Chicago, as you might have gathered from all this prating about patience, was late.

Air travel shares one trait with investing: sometimes keeping too-close track of things creates nothing more than pointless frustration. I wasn’t sure what time my flight to Montreal left, only that I had a fairly hefty layover, so I simply didn’t worry. I even laughed when the flight attendant announced my connecting gate and I realized I’d have to walk most of the length and breadth of Terminal 3. I did, however, grimace a bit (even my travel-hardened patience has limits) walking off the plane, when I checked the departure screens to find that my flight left at 5:36 and was listed as on-time. My faithful clip-watch said 5:01, you see, and I really needed to stop at the little artisans’ room.

Nothing to do but hoof it, so I did, weaving past janitors with a creaky-wheeled dumpster, oblivious knee-high children, and the usual raft of people grafted to cell phones. I arrived panting at the gate to see the door still open, but nothing showing on the announcement screen save the name and number of the flight. Bad sign.

The gate agent’s time was taken up with some yahoo (see, patience worn thin) who needed to be at another gate entirely, but still insisted on finding out why his plane wasn’t departing on time. “I’m guessing I’m late,” I said ruefully when he finally left, sliding my boarding pass across the counter.

She glanced at it. “No, you’re fine,” she said, though it was five-twenty-something by then. “We’ll start boarding in about twenty minutes.” Never been so glad to hear a plane was late, I tell you what.

When I flew into Montreal last August for Extreme Markup, customs was an unbelievable four-hour nightmare ordeal, something about a work slowdown by customs officials. I’ve no notion whether that’s been resolved.

I’m not worrying about it, though. I get there when I get there.