Things I Am No Good At

Organizing my tool bench, pegboard, and office. Throwing away socks. Sending birthday cards. Eating leafy vegetables. Flossing. Saying no to students who need a break, even though they have missed class, turned work in late, and given me bad evaluations. Forgetting that my dreams are full of running water. Ignoring the moon. Training my cat to sleep longer when she is hungry. Making it all the way from the house to the car without talking to rabbits. Remembering the names of colleagues. Appreciating Hallmark cards and movies with a lesson. Being around people who are successful and happy and good at giving motivational, sanctimonious speeches. Staying calm when jerks tailgate. Dusting. Keeping money in my wallet. Enforcing consequences. Self-promotion. Comforting sad people. Feigning disinterest when I hear about you. Not whispering your name when I drop into sleep. Receiving criticism. Moving on. Touching raw nerves. Doing the right thing. Forgiving myself. Losing weight. Not cussing. Being poor. Breaking bad habits. Listening when I am nervous. Breaking open to the finality and certainty of the perfection of this precious and passing moment. Living so close to the shadow of death that I can caress its cool and indifferent bleached bony emptiness.

So There Was this Guy (A Parable)

He stumbled through his days looking for a story that would give his life shape. The story could align his heart, mind, and spirit along a golden thread of direction and destiny. The thread, he knew, would give him energy and meaning. But it asked that he leave the familiar world of habit.

Every once in a while he thought he saw it down there on the floor, disappearing under the couch or heading out the door into the wild desert.

He'd reach for it, feel it, but then forget to follow it. He would drop it and go wash dishes or catch the news.

It went on like this for years, more years than he could count.

Seasons came and went and still he only occasionally spotted the thread beneath his feet, passing through a wall in front of him or winding around the base of a mesquite tree.

Gradually, a light that shone in him began to dim. A hunger remained, but faded to more of a memory. He was sad, not knowing the cause.

The thread, once thick, was now thin as a strand of spider web. He saw it in fading sunlight, waving in the breeze. It was no longer strong enough for him grab, but if he was delicate, he could still see where it led.

One day, he got up from his chair, took hold of the wispy silk, and began to make his way along its length. He had to make it up as he went along, had to trust and dance and feed the story line with drops of blood taken straight from his heart.

It led him away from safety, into the wildness of his dreams.

The last they saw of him was his entry into a deep forest.

Elder. Monk.

The emails and envelopes arrive intermittently. They carry news of fresh hires in good jobs. Most of them are tenure track with potential for promotion and growth. I am glad for the young faculty starting out on their careers. The letters express gratitude for our time together. They say I helped them with their teaching, helped them with my letters of rec., helped them navigate the first years of grad school.

All of this feels good, but I also suffer from a twinge of envy at the news. I am in more of a dead-end job, with wages that never rise, with no prospect of promotion. It's been twenty years of the same thing, more or less. I compare my place in our profession to theirs and see underachievement if not failure. My ambitions were not fulfilled. I tried, but didn't make it onto the academic escalator.

That's what it is, and I accept the consequences of my decisions. In fact, I am grateful to have had a job that provides health insurance. I would be bankrupt, given all the health issues I and my family have dealt with, if we did not have health insurance. Just my snakebite alone would have cost us around $250,000.

That said, I am still searching for the narrative that will best infuse this stage of work and life with a context and some meaning.

One way to look at this transitional moment is that I am moving from one stage of life to another. I am leaving the warrior/householder stage and entering the elder/monk stage. The warrior stage was about achievement, climbing, "making it." I have yet to let that go, even though it is over. I am not going any higher in terms of social status. Them's just the facts.

The "curriculum" of the next stage is more about spiritual pursuits than work or status. It's time to pursue wisdom rather than knowledge, acceptance rather than acquisition, kindness rather than one-upping.

The jump from here to there looms more and more. The unwillingness or inability to do so feeds my envy of these junior faculty and their rise into successful careers. The problem is mine and has to do with how I frame these simple facts.

My beard has gone gray. My hair is following. My eyes can't see as well. I need glasses. My belly is getting soft.

I still want to climb a few mountains before I settle into life in the valley, but it's time to let go of striving to be more than I am.

Like it or not, I am becoming that "old guy." It's unbecoming to pretend otherwise. But I do have things to offer to anyone who wants to listen.

Cognitive Testing

"Listen closely," she said, "to the problem. You may not take notes. Just remember what I say and then tell me your answer."

"OK," I said.

"Last year, profits for a company were $20,000. This year those profits increased by 20%."

I thought about this increase, and how it was a pretty hefty bump to profits, as my eyes and attention wandered to the skin of her belly showing between the buttons of her blouse. She was the "tech" charged with administering parts of a battery of tests that would measure my cognitive and memory function. This one was about math and memory.

"Next year, profits will increase by 15% over this year." She looked up from her script at me looking down at the openings in her blouse and the revealed belly button.

"What are the total gross earnings of the three years?"

I thought about it. Twenty thousand plus $20,000 plus $4,000, plus that plus $3,600 would be about $71,600 I guessed. I had trouble following her after the second year, and could just barely hang on to the train of sums into the third year. I had to fight down a panic that I wasn't understanding what she was saying. I'm not an accountant.I fought to focus. My shoulders and neck were as tight as banjo strings.

She offered no clue about the correctness or lack thereof of my answer as she made a note on her pad.

The tests continued all day -- eight hours -- and ranged from drawing a geometric design from memory to clicking a counter with my thumb as fast as I could. I did puzzles, took multiple choice tests about lists, and saw only a little of my tech's pale skin.

I wanted to do well, but kept wandering all over in my thoughts. I just couldn't seem to focus on the tasks, even if I could do them. Not being able to focus raised my anxiety so high it could have lifted, in not gone through, the roof.

Beneath the anxiety, of course, is the fear that I am losing it. I fear that I am losing it just as my mother did when she was my age. The signs are all there: I don't know where I am sometimes; I can't pull necessary words out of my memory when I need them; I lose track of tasks when I move from one to the next; I talk nonsense to myself, "Ooga-booga," and swear a lot.

Then there are the stacks and stacks of paper at work that I can't seem to find the time or energy to process.

I remember days when my brain would do things without my applying much effort. Those days are long gone, and I have to think -- hard -- to get even basic work done.

I can't seem to focus on what is right in front of me. 

As the test continued, I blew the word problems, could not recall simple images, couldn't concentrate on complex progressions or engage with problems like I usually do.

It was embarrassing. I began to see why I am living a disoriented and somewhat sloppy existence. It is, in part, because my brain just can't seem to process as well.

A few weeks later, when I went in for the results, I got the news that I am still OK, more or less. They said I have a high IQ, but that I am also slightly memory impaired, and suffer from extreme anxiety. The anxiety is actually part of the cause of the impairment they think. I worry too damned much, but there really is something "off."

They said I need to work more at focusing, connecting, engaging. They said my tendency to isolate and retreat is leading me into some kind of fantasy world of my own making.

Well, duh! I thought.

They said that I have been lucky in life, that my brain has been something like a Ferrari, using a car analogy. Now, however, they said, you have more of a Corolla. I guess a Corolla is OK. It's driveable, but I had to wonder what year and how many miles and how many more years it might last. 

I'd like to be able to continue to coast along like everything is OK, but the reality of decline is no longer avoidable.

My days working may be numbered, not because I can retire, but because I can no longer function. Each trip to the mountains may be the last I take. The reality is sinking in. Soft fabric covers more and more of the belly buttons.

The question of what to do, how to respond remains, lingers, growing in quiet urgency.

Changing of the Guard

The sand is running out beneath my feet. I've been standing here for quite a while, and the waves just keep breaking, washing around my ankles as the tide rises.

Problem is I don't know where to go next. This place is all I know. My feet don't want to lift up and get out of the changing seas.

I took up residence here about 20 some years ago because it was what I wanted to do. I liked this place, this stretch of sand at the University of Arizona. The days were interesting. We had a pluralistic view of teaching; creative writers, lit people, ESL folks, and rhet-comp people all found a way to get along mostly. PhDs and MFAs, we worked together to appeal to diverse grad students in different grad programs. We all agreed that writing was complicated stuff and that teaching writing was exponentially more complicated if you really respected it.

I mean the brains of students all work differently and teachers had to apply a variety of methods to try and reach as many as possible. Some students responded to talk about style and sentences, others to big ideas, still more needed to explore personal stories and identities.

Teachers needed to teach from their strengths and past experience while meeting common course assignments and guidelines.

It was not paradise, but it worked in weird ways. Young teachers found things out about themselves that they didn't even know existed before they started teaching. Of course there was chaos, creative chaos in the design of syllabi and approaches and selecting materials.

But the tide has risen and the ground I stand on is washing away, being pulled from me by time and change.

The new guard is rhet-comp focused. The new curriculum standardized. To be fair, I don't know much about it because I haven't even read the new text book or seen the new assignments.

My role next year is unclear. My personal involvement is minimal. I don't know what to expect or what I can do about it.

I do know I have to step back or the waves will carry me away from shore.

It's the way of things.

You can't fight the tide. You need a place to stand. It's time to move.

Too Damned Dumb to Quit

I was in pretty good shape, ready for the hot pace of a canoe race. The Bear and I were a father-son team in our old Grumman 17 foot aluminum sweetie. The canoe had been our common ground during my somewhat turbulent and arrogant adolescence, but we didn't paddle much together. Rather, we found overlap in our agreement that the canoe, the Yahara River, ducks, the colors of maple trees in autumn, and Wisconsin marshes were good things. The canoe was the best way to get out there and see it all.

When the canoe race was added to Stoughton's Sytennde Mai celebration one year, The Bear asked me if I wanted to sign up. What the hey? It would be fun. What could go wrong?

So I came home from college for the weekend to join the flotilla of locals, mostly Norwegian farmers and small town business owners. Of course there were a few ringers out to win the thing. They had brightly colored fiberglass racing canoes and came from the big cities. They wanted to show us country rubes how it was played in the real fast lane.

Not surprisingly, I took some umbrage at that and decided to train. The Bear was always a strong, beefy, sometimes imposing presence. He could handle steering duties. I'd be the motor in front.

I had my technique dialed -- a long, forward lean followed by a deep dig of the paddle and a swift, powerful stroke as I both pulled and sat back. It was a double whammy of core and arm effort that would pull us as fast as possible down the river to town.

The start of the race was a Le Mans style run-up to the boats, before pushing off and then jumping in wet to take seats and begin the real race.

The Bear was quick on his feet that day, and I was a good sprinter, so we hit the canoe earlier than most and launched into the river well in the lead. Even the city boats were a few feet back. When the Bear and I both had our seats, I grabbed my paddle and took a deep first pull to accelerate. It was a monster effort, and, apparently too much for the old Feather Brand paddle. It snapped neatly and cleanly between the shaft and the blade. We did not have a spare. I sat there with the two useless pieces of the paddle.

The Bear kept paddling, but we were dead in the water compared to the other boats. Already a few hundred feet from shore, we had our good start, but I wondered if it was best just to turn back.

The Bear and I looked at the hopelessly irreparable paddle and drifted for a moment.

"We can't do it," I said. "We should just go back."

A moment of silence punctuated by J-strokes asked a question as we kept moving forward. What next?

"Never say die," said The Bear. "There's an island right there." He pointed to a floating mass of cattails and moss held together by woven roots. It was more of a big raft than an island.

"Drop me off and you keep going," he said.

I looked at the grassy mat and thought of him out there in the middle of the river drifting on the current, feet breaking through as the mass fell apart. He would spend the day as a kind of Tom Hanks castaway.

There was no way that plan was going to work, but he steered to the floating swamp debris and beached the canoe on it and got out, immediately breaking through the fragile web.

"This is not a great idea," I said, defeated.

Canoes were passing us on all sides. Even mother-daughter, daughter-daughter, mother-toddler teams out for a recreational float down-river slid by. They waved, smiling, as if it were common to hang out on a floating mat of cat tails and swamp rot and have a family meeting.

Then the Bear dug around into the muddy mass of roots and wrestled free a thick, twisted, water-logged, misbegotten, crooked, slime-covered mess of some kind of tree root. It as about as long as a paddle.

"You take my paddle, and I'll steer with this. We should be able to make it to town."

I looked down-river and saw the armada of canoes receding into the distance. We would never catch any of them.

"OK," I said, after a brief consideration. This was another in the ongoing confrontations over how to live: The Bear blindly hacking away through the jungle of life while I studied the options. The Bear's blunt and unrelenting tenacity had bothered me as kid. It was one of our father-son sticking points. He had always been the military man of action while I was more of a deliberator, a Hamlet, never able to make up my mind, much less act with authority. We played out all kind of small and large dramas because of this dichotomy of outlooks.War or diplomacy? Nukes now or solar for later? Cars or bikes? Money or meaning?

That moment, however, was an small epiphany, a dawning awareness that just because he was "The Bear," the father, didn't make him always wrong. I had to admit, the stick was our best option, a good idea.I am not too proud to admit it, and I took that moment to heart, maybe too much so. I used it to get through a grueling PhD program, to stay in a sometimes tough marriage, to keep working at a job that has not been the most lucrative. I also became an endurance freak. In the middle of a bike race, especially time trials, when my heart and head both scream back off, I hear The Bear.

I also saw it in him when he cared for my mother in her Alzheimer's decline, the rupture of family marriages, the scorn of a son who cut off all contact. Now, in a Parkinson's and dementia decline, he gets up every day to watch the day progress, the seasons change. For good or ill, he modeled and stuck it to me that day when he extracted a root, the rabbit out of the hat, the sword out of the stone.

The Bear  re-embarked with his prize in the stern of the canoe, passed me his paddle, and took over steering duties at the helm. He had a big and toothy grin as I turned around to do my part.

I paddled like a lunatic, a man possessed, the paddle kicking up foam like a side-wheeled river boat. We began to move, to make progress. I found my rhythm and settled in to a long, hard, endurance effort. This I could handle and knew well.

We passed under the County B highway bridge where onlookers cheered us on, partly out of respect, partly out of pity, mostly out the slap-stick ridiculousness of the root.

Then the river opened up into the wide, slow moving waters of the marsh. We passed beneath the power lines. A few of the stragglers were taking it easy as we overtook them. More cheers went up.

Slowly, the railroad bridge that marked entry into the town came into view and grew larger as we closed the gap. I could see other canoes rocking with the efforts of final sprints to the line.

The river narrowed in town as we made our way under the railroad bridge. The finish was a few hundred yards ahead. We could hear the loudspeaker announcing the names of racers as they crossed the line. The shore was a bouquet of boats, bright yellows, reds, and greens of the fancy racing canoes. People were relaxing and watching as the last finishers made their way through town.

As we passed beneath the final bridge and closed in on the finish line, I heard laughter from both the crowd and the loudspeaker.

"Here come the Tosos. And looks like they've taken up paddling with a Norwegian paddle. Pretty high tech." Ha-ha.

The bow of the canoe nosed onto the beach and I put down the paddle to catch my breath. My heart was still racing even though the race was over. I got out and pulled the boat up out of the water so The Bear could get out near dry land. I noticed his hands were bloody and blistered from having worked that unholy twisted mess of a root the entire race. But he was smiling, a big smile, one of the biggest I ever saw.

Before we could fully remove the canoe from the water, the announcer approached us with microphone in one hand, twelve pack of Old Style Beer in the other, and said, "And now, I have the pleasure of giving out the award for most creative canoe.... and... or... paddle."

Those around us applauded. The Bear smiled even bigger. I was sheepish, but accepted the beer.

We split it with anyone who wanted to share.Creativity and damn stupid hard work: I could and would drink to that.

Outside Looking In

They were the happy ones, the lucky ones, the smart ones, and they saw only each other. He, dressed in his best, might as well have been invisible, standing there with his paper plate of chips, salsa, and spinach dip.

What separated them from him were degrees from elite Ivy League schools, the right kinds of publications, political appointments, national conference presentations and allies. He had none of those -- especially the allies. But he did have ambition and anger.

Though he was the outsider, he felt a contempt for them. They patted each other on the back with their genial academic mediocrity in their closed circle and stroked each others' egos.

He tasted the chips -- dry and stale -- and salsa -- too spicy, if not rancid, and looked around for a seat at one of the tables. He made his way across the room to sit with some of the graduate students.

He was still a lecturer, long in the tooth, having worked teaching survey courses for almost two decades. It no longer mattered how and why he had arrived there, but he mulled it over anyway, trying to discover some solace or lesson from the path he had traveled.

There was the beginning: a love for language, that and the encouragement of guidance counselors who looked at his scores on IQ and Iowa Basics tests. A cocky disregard for practicality and career choices split the waters that kept more sober peers from suffering for art. There were some cautionary influences. A family who disapproved of a son studying "soft" subjects like literature and writing didn't much help.

From the start he was on his own, going on some kind of "hunch" or inner voice. He trusted that to lead him. Now he felt the fool.

It hadn't been a bad job, but so much time at the bottom of the academic ladder had taken its toll. He was bored, unmotivated, lethargic and envious. The road to promotion had been blocked by his department head and the dean and his own lack of initiative.

Now it was too late to do anything about it. His brain was failing him. The cognitive tests and the blood draws all pointed to a decline in function. His only asset was now a junk bond and he didn't know what to do next.

He certainly couldn't tell his supervisor that he didn't know where he was sometimes or that he was dropping the ball of reports, deadlines, student appointments.

So far, he had been able to cover it up. His annual review numbers were good and the secret had been kept for another year.

He didn't know how long he could keep this up.

He took his seat next to some friendly grad students who didn't mind sharing their table. As fellow worker bees aspiring to higher places, they didn't mind the scarlet mark of failure he wore on his back.

Doors open for some, don't for others. That's just the way it is he told himself. You get a tenure track line and that leads to directing a program and that leads to becoming an dean and that leads to provost or president and so on. You don't get the right job and nothing happens, especially when people sit on you, keep you in the trenches of low wage drudgery.

It all came down to choices, and he knew it. He didn't suck up to the wonks when he was in grad school. He taught high school to make ends meet rather than submit papers to academic journals. He wrote for himself in the ways he felt strong about. None of that mattered to the hiring committees. His books never made the bulletin boards of the department, his essays the lists of achievements in the departmental newsletters.

So there he was at the end-of-year awards celebration. He didn't belong, had no group with which he might sit.

He was a leper, the dark elf, the thirteenth floor. He radiated the toxins of frustration and defeat. 

The stars walked across the stage to receive their awards; the audience applauded; the money flowed; careers were made or sidetracked or neglected.

The person who had blocked him from rising rose to take the podium as a grandiloquent punctuation to the ceremony. She was resplendent, full, and hungry for audience attention. Her teeth shone in her smile, a primate in power. Her words spread like sugar spooned out for the pleasure of those who would bow.

She had won.