Epitaph of a Career

The last semester of my work life began last week. I have, tentatively, identified a last day, though I won’t begin a countdown just yet. Some principal colleagues and family know this will be my ultimate semester, along with a number of the already retired—who recommend it without exception. My advisees have been informed. I have not, however, declared my last day to the wider universe owing to a certain superstition about such announcements and the universe’s proclivity for mischief. One never wants to appear too sure about such things, such big things, lest the universe invite you to reconsider and recant. Which can be especially embarrassing for someone whose career has been all about careful consideration.

Retirement, to me, is a death of sorts, the end of a life of a certain kind of significance, of a life of “work,” which has, for most of us, been a source, if not the primary source, of our public sense of identity. We were condemned in an old book to a life of work, earning our bread by “the sweat of our brow,” owing to some relationship misunderstanding and miscommunication—who has not participated in that original sin! The consequence of which was a lifetime of tillage and shepherding. That modern life affords a respite from an entire lifetime of labor in fields and vineyards reveals a blessing of no small import, and yet, that blessing mixes rest and relief with anxiety and even a touch of remorse. What have we done with our work lives and what further in ending them?

We in education like to claim that our work and our impact on the world is categorically good, undeniably positive, incontestably positive, and everlasting to boot. (Maybe, maybe, maybe, and absolutely.) My dear Henry is often quoted in support of this attitude, “A parent gives life, but as a parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life, but his deed stops there. A teacher affects eternity; he [sic] can never tell where his influence stops.” This seemingly beneficent passage often gets boiled down to a slogan emblazonable on a T-shirt:  “A teacher affects eternity.”  Henry, more skeptical, noted that we make of our students—and advisees— “either priests or atheists, plutocrats or socialists, judges or anarchists," almost in spite of” ourselves.  An educator affects eternity, for better and worse. Whether by art or science, we instruct and profess and advise in the faith that… human beings are ennobled by learning, not merely enabled. “In the faith that,” which appears on the entablature of Northrop Auditorium at the University of Minnesota, now appears here as the epitaph of my work life.

Old Man Outlasting Grief

My brother Stevie died fifty years ago today. In November he would have joined his big brothers in old manhood, but instead, we reached old age without him, and his loss has been, at least for me, the most important fact of life. I grew up forlorn, prematurely elegiac, that is, hurt pretty bad. Twenty-five years later, with little relief to speak of, I found poetry that was not reassuring. “They say that time assuages,” Emily Dickinson wrote, “Time never did assuage. An actual suffering strengthens/as sinews do with age.” Except that Time does, actually, you know, assuage—you just need a lot of it, more of it than Emily had, and much much more than we are led to believe by the greeting card industry: time heals all wounds and everything happens for a reason (It doesn’t, and it doesn’t). But in this case, my case, it does assuage after another twenty-five years: for a total of fifty.

I returned to Mercer this week to observe and reflect upon those years this anniversary of his death. Every summer there has seemed less to remember—it might be just a seeming, of course—but not only do I recall and feel less, less remains of the world he died in to prompt my memory. Our mother and father are gone now. At Brandy Springs Park, the pool, from whose poolside I watched his body turn that single broken fatal somersault, is gone, too, a raw escarpment capped by a lunar kiddie playscape. The basketball courts remain in some repair, not yet in ruins, but with the park’s halting renewal come those changes that efface the destroyed Arcadia that was my childhood at that moment. Soon enough there will be no one to remember.

What is the metaphor for a life that formed around such loss? A hole in the heart that centers one, that terrible presence of absence about which this self is styled, that silence in which I have bespoken myself in low tones—now minus the terror. After all these years.

Photo Credit Steve Van Woert

 

 

 

Living Dead

My brother, Alex, received this fascinating and highly amusing fax last week regarding my untimely death and an official invitation to benefit therefrom. 

 

Good brother that he is, Alex inquired after my health; I replied that I was feeling fine. And actually, now that I reflect upon it, somewhat flattered in the error, or more precisely, the scam. Two of my favorite writers, Mark Twain and Henry Adams, were mistakenly identified as deceased in their early old age, so heady company, indeed.

The specifics of my alter ego’s life and passing raised a smile

The transaction pertains to an unclaimed “Payable on death” (“POD”) savings monetary deposit in the sum of Eleven Million, Five Hundred & Fifty Thousand, and One Hundred United States Dollars ($11,550,100.00). The policy holder was one of our clients, Late Dr. Charles BOROWICZ who was a real estate investor and precious stone dealer. He was a Covid-19 Victim. Who died about 2 years ago. Since His death no one has come forward for the claim and all our efforts to locate his relatives have proved unsuccessful.

and the thought “who thinks this stuff up?” Someone with more imagination—and effrontery—than intelligence, I suspect, unless, of course, this ruse actually worked. But that would speak more to the victim’s lack of intelligence than the grifter’s.

Still, one is tickled to have been done away with so casually and so deviously. But for the record, this report of my demise has been greatly exaggerated, as has my net worth, alas.

Old White Guys, One Still Living

In my old age, I am rereading the Letters of Henry Adams, who, at the moment as I read, is my age in 1901, sixty-three. His observations of old age are mordant and unsentimental, “At sixty one is running one’s last ounces [of reserves]” and “You need not waste sympathy on us people of sixty. We are not worth it.” (v. 261-2) While he often claimed to be living posthumously anyway and predicted his own demise with blithe frequency, he lived another seventeen years and quite fully. Which is not to discount his sense of loss and world-weariness, which fueled in many ways the fullness of his later life, but rather, perhaps, to recognize that much of life at our age is loss—parents, siblings, old friends, acquaintances, colleagues, our generation’s celebrity heroes, and others, even perfect strangers, many of whom were nicer people than oneself. All the sadder. And, if there are gains, they are gains gathered in an age of loss, making them all the more precious.

“There is a little mild light about it [old age],” Henry could admit, “a sort of Indian summer, which has a certain kind of repose and tone, if not much color.” (v. 261) I see it illuminating my own retirement, the not working, the travel, the loving, the caring and thinking, the reading and writing: “it occupies me to write; which is something—at sixtythree.” (v. 202)

Announcement

I have decided to retire. Without yet setting a specific date, I will terminate my university “career” at the close of fall semester, 2022—a year or so from now. Forty plus years of university life and work will come to an end, and I shall achieve emeritul status.

Retirement has been on my mind in a speculative way these last couple of years, a relatively certain eventuality, but at the same time, somewhat fictional, contingent, even fantastical. But in these last couple of months, the idea has ripened, seemingly rapidly, to fullness. My circle has inquired as to reasons, but no new reasons have been revealed; only all the many older ones have matured at last under an autumn sun. Perhaps some gathered nascent impulse to free oneself from the school calendar has emerged, that schedule which has governed so many of my years. I will redress the balance with a second childhood, not without its cares, but with many less adult responsibilities, most of which have been met as well as they are going to. I have been more than content with my workplace, my colleagues, and my work—helping students to discover, author, and enact their future and hopefully better selves. But there are other things to attend to.

What will I do? I can only say at the moment, “Not work.” Oh, and “think.”

Superannuated Man

My career at university began forty years ago. For quite a long time now, I have been teaching and advising students for much longer than most of my advisees have been alive. I’m three generations or more removed from them. (And now, I have been advising longer than some of my advising colleagues have been alive.) With the passing of those generations, I have been encouraged to familiarize myself with the pop-cultural worlds of Gen-X, Xennials, Millennials, Gen-Y, and i-Gen, as a form of professional development. I don’t, in part because I’m not the keenest of “professionals.” That orientation to the world has something mercenary and bureaucratic about it, necessary, no doubt, but unfortunate. But more importantly, young people’s worlds, like my own, are infinitely complex and not to be rightly felt and understood by interloping geezers. Instead, I’m quite resigned to becoming naturally irrelevant and increasingly uncool—not unhappily. And then retire.

They, on the other hand, are sometimes fascinated by the fact that I have lived in what they know only as history and seem to appreciate me as a sort of mystical animatronic survival of days long gone by. A living fossil, a coelacanth, a long-lived passive drift-feeder—whose primordial habits I’m inclined to admire.

One trend of the current generation I have not been able to avoid has been the film adaptation of old-time comic super-heroes. They’re everywhere these days, righting wrongs, salaciously filling out spandex, snarking on their colleagues, and saving the universe, all the while subverting cinema for older generations. I didn’t pay much attention to these graphic narrative busybodies in my own youth, but I cannot escape them now. One has even been asked, in a professional training icebreaker, to imagine oneself a superhero and identify a superpower: I, Superannuated Man, not giving a shit.

Okay, much.

Rock On

 

 

 

Nothing says “old man” like a rocking chair, which I purchased last weekend—and began to rock. It’s not a new rocking chair, in fact, rather an old one, an antique actually, Stickley, circa 1910s. Vintage, classic American, if you will. Not unlike its latest owner. It creaks a bit, and the leather cushions wince and gasp age appropriately. A little pricey, but even as he gets old, a man can show a little style.