Temporary Truth

It happens when you feel something deep inside and are able to respond from deep inside. Then, somehow, that truth seems to fade. You question yourself and eventually the nature of the truth itself. You wonder how it was that you believed it. You question the relevance of everything in the wake of the fading, temporary truth. It was most probably a false assumption. Never a truth, delusional. This logic causes you to question and maybe deny emotion as a gateway to truth. If you could have believed this temporary truth, might you not have been capable of believing any fairy tale?
I seem to be a repository for some temporary truths. I get associated with a time best forgotten. A time or temporary truths…
Bruce Springsteen wrote, “Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true or is it something worse…” There was the essence of a temporary truth. They are sometimes displayed in dreams and not all dreams come true. Are the dreams that do not come true relegated to the status of temporary truths? Am I a temporary truth? Are our lives temporary truths?
Often we are fictionalized as part of a rendered past. We want truth to be forever even if we are not. We don’t accept the change of truth easily. We want truth to be greater than ourselves. Temporary truth seems to fail this test of longevity. Sometimes we hold their ephemeral quality in a state of disdain.
Eventually, sometimes, we learn that it is us and not the temporary truth that is found wanting. It was just what is seemed to be; true for that moment. If we invested more than that moment, we were left behind by its fleeting nature. Some might believe that the nature of temporary truth is therefore unreal. Again we are faced with the question: Are we any more than temporary truths?
Some of these truths are private but some can be public. Jack Ruby executed Lee Oswald on public television and for that instant that we saw it, the truth of vengeance applied. Later we mostly all regretted feeling that, but we had. The temporary truth was that we wanted him punished for stealing a future that we saw as our own. That may have been true but it probably wasn’t, another temporary truth.
The relief that you may feel at the departure of a lover is another of the temporary truths. It feels necessary at the time but upon reflection, not so much. Being the creator of such a truth is probably easier than being its recipient.
My mom introduced me to this girl named Barbara. She was a few years older, but there was a kind of attraction. She found out that she was pregnant. I went with her for the abortion. I tried to emotionally support her. I was not the father, but I became identified with the abortion. She would rather forget it along with me because I reminded her of it. Temporary truth was that I was good at the time and then definitely needed to be discarded. I think that I did her some good, even though she needed to discard and forget that I existed. It is that way with temporary truths?
Does being discarded mean irrelevance? Do you wind up in some tragic little bin of temporary truths, not unlike the one that Amanda Priestly describes in The Devil Wears Prada? There is a pathetic aspect to that sense of truth, a Don Quixote feel. You stand for a shining light in the realm of the blind. Perhaps the movers of temporary truth giggle about how you stood firm.
I believe in these truths. Even though they are ephemeral and their nature flies in the face of the permanent nature that we seek from truth. Perhaps the essence of truth is also ephemeral.
The earth is flat. There is a heaven and hell. These were thought to be ironclad examples of truths that did not fade, but they did. Some stayed behind and some moved ahead and the nature of those truths became barriers for those who lingered. They were defined by their reluctance to let go of a temporary truth. They can be cruel that way.
We have all constructed parts of our lives on those temporary truths that we may not wish to examine. What happens to them? Do we dismiss them? Think them products of faulty reasoning? In our most private moments do we recognize that we let those truths down?
Does a dream become a lie if it don’t come true? What could be worse? Perhaps we need to laugh off temporary truths, think of them as a kind of incidental distraction… Does that hold up to introspection?
“When I am with you,” she said, “it feels like everything that you say is absolutely true. When you are gone, not as much.” We have all been temporary truths. Perhaps they are just a manipulation of circumstances, intentions unknown or notwithstanding. More like you become a necessary fool.
I do like to harvest temporary truths. Maybe their ephemeral quality speaks more directly to the nature of who and what we are.

We have lots of pictures on our walls. They are a combination of paintings, collages, lithographs, and photographs. Many depict women and men watching them. Some are rooms, life in the sky and under the water. Some are portraits. They have color and tend to be semi-realistic, although the realism is sometimes a problem. Some rooms have ten such depictions, and others as few as three. No room is without them.

Sometimes they require adjustment. It might be the repeated closing of a door or the opening of a window or footsteps upon stairs, or a perhaps it is a breeze. But when they are off kilter, so is their space. That’s when adjustment may be needed.

The first step is in noticing that things are not quite right. Something is off; discordant to the symmetry of the room.  I love symmetry, but I am trying to learn to appreciate how it can be fractured and reformed. It takes me a while to find the picture that has been moved by slow forces that I don’t truly understand, yet.

I notice it. Then I become more aware of it and then I decide if I wish to do anything about it. That process can take weeks or seconds, but it is inevitable.

Why do pictures on walls move? Is there a metaphorical contributor to their shifting? I think that there might be but that it is one of the mysteries of rooms and homes and pictures.

Blue Rodeo wrote:

Maybe some picture appears in your head

Knocks you right off of your track

All the doubts and confusions flood in instead

One little step out that door and you never go back

 

Pictures appear and then they shift. Pictures contain a perspective that is most times partially understood.

On the first floor of my home there are three doors. Over one hangs a lithograph by Fanch Ledan. It depicts a modern apartment with no people but quite inviting because of the things that inspire a sense of well-being. After the door beneath it closes, an uncertain number of times, it begins to tilt. It wants attention of the gentlest nature.  A sweet, small touch-

Some of my pictures have a travelling history. When my mother’s employment agency closed, I took a print of a famous Lincoln pose with me. It hung in my classrooms. I talked to it. Later, it was placed in our bathroom. It was large and seemed to be staring at the person who was seated on the toilet. Campaign buttons were affixed to it. People would often be startled and we would hear these gasps and exclamations come from the bathroom and know that it had surprised them. It was a private source of amusement.  Now Lincoln hangs, without the campaign buttons, in a vestibule by a front door that is rarely used.  I still talk to it but no longer out loud.

It occurs to me that pictures are like memories, images that were once front and center but now occupy less frequented places. Some seem to stay clear and close forever and, like people, some pass through your life and do not return.

On one wall of my study, there is a very small image that I think was once part of a greeting card. It is a black and white Beardsley. It presents an image of a person in a cloak wandering in a terrain of what seems to be floating mushrooms. I know very little about the backstory of the image, but it always conjures up a time and place in my life where I felt like I lived with a collection of explorers. That small image has been on my desk, in a drawer, packed into boxes, but now enjoys a spot where it is seen many times a day but by very few people. This small picture is caressed more often than it is adjusted. It had hung with that group of explorers who may have just been young people who were about discovering themselves.

I now have a collection collages created by my friend Deborah.  They keep her close to me.  They are there for me every day and night. I treasure them as a fine artistic gift that shows love mated with creativity. Each speaks to me in different ways. One is a fragmented depiction of one of my poems. I like the fragments and the colors but wonder if she feels that this is how I appear: fragmented.

In my last years as a professional educator, I was put in charge of something that I truly loathed. It was a bureaucratic punishment for having rebelled and not been successful.  I was required to oversee performance on standardized testing and I hated it.  But for my personal aggrandizement, I oversaw it anyway. There was one question; it was called the picture prompt,and students were required to create a narrative based upon their viewing of a picture.

I found the question valuable. It seemed to tease images into language. I liked that because it was an opportunity to learn. And then came statistics. What the reviewers were really looking for was this or that. None of those things had anything to do with creativity.

I created a bastard theory. Based on what they were evaluating, a student could create one story and then apply it to any picture. It worked on the test. Maybe the learning to apply one thing to another was also valuable. I had figured out that the pictures would always be ambiguous and evocative. With some adjustments, one size could fit all. I taught them how to compensate. One more kind of adjusting pictures. Then, of course, that prompt was eliminated.

Some pictures come with a fight. My mother collected pictures and autographs of celebrities.  It started after she sold the employment agency.  She sensed the timing and opened a ceramics shop. When the work of that became arduous, she sold it and opened a video store. People liked seeing autographed pictures of their favorite stars and actors. My mom liked to write to famous people and got her fair share of genuine responses.

One was from Jackie Gleason. The Jackie Gleason Show and then The Honeymooners is one of the video tracks of my childhood. And no, it never occurred to me that “Pow, Zoom,” was ever a real possibility. When I was a little boy, I used to get passes to see movies in downtown Newark, where my mom worked.  One day I got a pass to the Lowes Theater on Broad Street and saw a double feature of The Hustler and The Guns of Navarone.  For five and one half hours, I was transfixed. I went back and saw it the next day. Why I had that option and responsibility is a different story. And then I saw Gleason in Soldier in the Rain. I respected him and in some ways worshipped his talent.

My mom wrote to him near the end of his life and told him how much I had loved his acting. She told how much she loved his acting. He wrote back and answered her question that he was more than willing to do a second Hustler film and more than willing to revive the character of Minnesota Fats.

After my mother died, and people picked through her things, I asked for two of them. The Lennox China that she had always promised to my wife and the autographed picture of Jackie Gleason. It became a dispute because another relative saw its eBay potential. I did not respond kindly, but I got my picture in more ways than one.

In the corner of our very strangely arranged and L shaped kitchen, it hangs with a lithograph of Michael and Vito Corleone and an autographed picture of Frank Sinatra that Valerie was bequeathed after her mother died. The lithograph hung in a wonderful restaurant called Mamma Lucia’s. My family and I were friends with the family that owned the place.

Strangely enough movie stars came to eat there, among them Paul Newman, who my mom could not resist from asking for an autographed picture, got turned down and then was so apologetic that he ended up having a conversation with her anyway. I find it funny how my mom had carved a space out of this essay. It didn’t start out that way.

The restaurant closed when the owner got old. It was that simple. We were given the lithograph. We cherish it.

There are some pictures that I don’t want anymore, but I know that losing them will cast them into a state of oblivion.  So, I adjust. I’m smiling as I think about the absurdity of adjusting oblivion.

Over our bed hangs an oil painting called the Statuary.  It depicts a garden in back of a villa in France. The Garden is in bloom. One white statue of a young female stands in the midst of it. Cumulus white clouds below a blue sky- I have spent hours there. I dream on it.

I never wanted photographs of family members on the walls. But then I was given an image on wood of my Aunt Dotty. She was a flapper. I had collected two images of flappers, but I saw my aunt in the face and imagined her doing the Charleston and Black Bottom. I saw her as art. So now there are photographs of relatives.

I love the work of Itzchak Tarkay. As a boy, he was sent to a concentration camp. He painted images of the women he saw there, closed their eyes, dressed them in finery and placed them in salons. He said that he was painting them into a better world. I embrace the idea of creating a better world.

So many pictures to adjust; it feels like there should be an eternity for that.

 

 

 

 

 

The nature of regret is intriguing. Sometimes regret seems like a lesson that needed to be taught. Sometimes it feels as if regret can be comforting. Sometimes regret is elusive and you are not sure if you experience it or not, but you feel that you must. What does regret mean and is it uniquely human?
A phrase common between lovers is “I regret that I did not treat you better.” Although, it seems self-effacing, perhaps it is self-effacing along with judgment. “You were not someone that I was able to treat better and I regret that.” Regret with an escape clause is something different from regret.
Regret is food for discontent, but what happens when you feed regret, what happens when you don’t? It seems to grow of its own volition. Is regret a cancer or one of the many paths to salvation? When something is both healthy and unhealthy…

Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh. Henry David Thoreau

Is that true? Is regret something to be cherished? If that is true, regret should have a different name.

Regret does not seem to be an applicable word to apply to events in which a person had no part. What does one regret in that instance? Can one regret being there to witness? I can feel badly about seeing a child burning with Napalm or a man lynched to a tree, but what can I regret about those things? Do I regret that I have seen them? Or do I feel some responsibility for them and regret that? Neither truly seems real to me.

It is such a subtle emotion only achieved upon reflection. Sometimes the reflection is not true. A boy can regret having had an erection when it was socially inappropriate. But isn’t there a secret joy that lives inside of that regret? In this instance, the regret is etched in embarrassment at the unveiling of secret desires. There is some satisfaction that one’s body or actions has made a true statement, no matter how it was received.

Is regret different from profound sadness? I think that it is because regret seems to offer hope. Ask the question of another person “what do you regret most?” Do you think that most people know and. if they knew, would readily share it?

Profound sadness lacks hope. It settles upon a person like a wet blanket. One morning I got a phone call. It was just after the holidays in 2005. I had wanted my mom to come to our home for a movie marathon sleepover. It was a family tradition dating back to when she owned a video store and the movies were free. My stepfather said that he did not think that she could come to my home and that I should get there right away. She had gotten sick during the night.

Her hands were warm and dry when I held them. She was sitting hunched forward on her couch in her living room and she gazed into my eyes with love and fear and trust.

“I think that you need to go to the hospital, mom.”
She held my hands. “Why Bruzzer?”

It was a personal name that spoke to the nature of our relationship. I was not only her son, I was her brother. And she made it into a word that she would have called “baby talk.”

“Because we need to save your life. I’ll go with you. I’ll stay.”

“I can’t get dressed.”

That was when I made the decision to call the ambulance. Everyone there looked at me to be the one to do it. But it was my decision.

They arrived so quickly and gave her a full throttle of oxygen which caused a piece of plaque to break off and cause a stroke, there in the ambulance as I sat next to her. It was her last conscious moment.

The next nine days were just a vigil of death. It ended when I made the decision to have them pull the plug on her respirator. That was an act of profound sadness, but the decision to call the ambulance is one which has come to represent regret. There is the difference. Regret is when one hopes and feels that a more positive outcome was possible. Profound sadness occurs when you know that there is not.

Regret can be ephemeral but profound sadness cannot. What is the difference between sadness and profound sadness? I think that sadness can dissipate if it is not profound. I think that it may change its form if it is, but that it does not dissipate.

Why does regret deepen with age? Is it just that we have more to regret? I am told that if you work with the dying that you hear many regrets. They seem to have to do with more personal failings. People wonder why they could not love more freely. They ponder their priorities. They wish that they had worked less and spent more time with family. I think that some regrets tend to be generational. They have the “if only” gene. I think that this is false regret. I think that they lived as they wished but feel frightened by their choices. Suppose that all this time, they were wrong?
My Aunt Dottie loved her furniture and her diamonds and her clothes, but at the end of her life, when she asked me to come and live with her, she knew that I was sloppy and it did not matter. She wanted my close love and could no longer gain comfort with her things. I treasure the things of hers that I still have more than 40 years after her death. The comfort that they did not bring to her, they bring to me because of what she infused into them with those same choices that she felt regretful about at the end of her life.

Uncertainty is an element of regret.

I wonder why I am writing about regret. I want to believe that I wish to find that sliver of hope and grow from it. I want to believe that by coming to and understanding of sadness and profound sadness that I can come to peace and integrate them inside of me. I want this because I know that if they live outside of me, I will think of them as monsters or alien growths that threaten my existence.

Having ever regretted experiencing something that was so good that what came after seemed to pale in comparison? Did it detract, because of what came after, how good that experience was? Did you finally allow the pain of regret cause you to challenge the validity of how good you thought it was? Did you tell yourself that was just how you felt at the time? Did regret cause that goodness to lose staying power?

On the other hand, I have learned that regret can be a spur. I regretted having to leave Drew University as an undergrad. I was underfunded, unprepared and willing to work myself into an unhealthy exhaustion to make up for my shortcomings. I was on the most beautiful college campus that I had ever imagined. I took my English classes in a grey castle. I walked lawns that were filled with ice sculptures made by students of the art department. Then I got sick and had to go home. I forfeited all the work that I had done. I could not afford to go back.

That regret ate at me and I made sure that it never happened again. When I got my doctorate from Drew University, I realized that sometimes regret can be a great motivator. I had been measured and in my eyes I had come up short and I did not wish to come up short again. Regret can help to instill motivation.

Perhaps regret can also be dismissed, but should it be? I have heard people say that they do not wish to let their regrets weigh them down. Is this another way of saying that they wish to act with impunity?

Is regret a form of guilt? Are they synonyms? I think one can feel guilty without regret. Can a person feel regret without guilt? I think it is more than semantics. In my youth, we coined the phrase “guilt trip” and we accused anyone who was trying to make us feel badly about our actions of “laying a guilt trip on us.” Some of us still do that. It is an effort to make the accuser at once seem like a combination of a Jewish mother and a Catholic nun. Does that mean that regret is a feminine characteristic?

I am not saying it’s attributable only to women, but in its stereotypes, does it point out that it is a portion of the feminine side of a human being? I think that it might be but I’m not sure yet what to do with that information. I’m no longer sure that the labels of masculine side and feminine side apply. I wish to be so integrated that they are conjoined and create an amalgam.

I sometimes regret that I have not realized this earlier.

Turn the Page

Sometimes turning the page is a joyful experience that anticipates what is to come next, and sometimes the same expression is filled with a wistful acceptance and sadness. If you are reading, you can turn the page and then quite literally turn it back. As a metaphor it is more of a one way street. When you say that you have turned the page it means that you are not going back. You have moved on. But from what did you move on? What did you move towards? Why did you leave?

Age affects attitude when these things are involved. Experience presents the inevitability of page turning. But the passion of a younger age is not always an asset. Some people believe that a new life will save them from death. Ironically, they kill off an old life to achieve this goal. Does turning the page imply that a person is not coming back? Or perhaps does not want to come back, or is incapable of coming back?

Sometimes a page is turned for you. Someone or something else affects your course. Sometimes they do it with your permission. Did you know what you were getting into at those times in your life? I think that I did not, although I was their author on many occasions. But I was not always the page turner and I did not always want to have the page turned.

Maybe life requires a turning of pages. Maybe the inevitability of their need to turn is less important than who actually does it. I have learned that time does not automatically do it. I’ve learned that sometimes I find it very difficult to turn a page. I’m not sure that I understand the reasons for these things.

I have friends that tell me that it is about my self-importance. I have friends that tell me that it is about love. I seem to believe that it is about discovery. What is discovery when it takes place in the past? The ways that sort of discovery occurs do not seem to have a particularly positive affect on the present and yet I know that they have value. But what is it? Does a person finally sift through the detritus of the past and find a sense of resolution? Even if it is an elusive resolution?

Bob Seeger has a song entitled “Turn the Page.”  Here is a verse:

Here I am on the road again

Here I am up on the stage

There I go, playing star again

There I go, turn the page.

That is an example of the wistful sadness of which I speak. Because of his youth, at the time, there is a hint of anger. We want to be the page turners when we are young. We do not wish to have the page turned on us.

Grief is an impediment to turning the page. It causes a person to wish to linger in a past that can no longer be. It has a finality that it takes the cooperation of time to accept. Grief whispers that turning the page is somehow a betrayal. Bob Seeger sings that it is as inevitable. Both are true. Turning the page can be a hard lesson. It can also be a relief.

Love, like grief, can stall a turning of pages. There is that fine line between devotion and obsession, at least in perception. At first I typed that it was a fine lie between devotion and obsession. Maybe there is some wisdom in typos. Love wants to stay until it wishes to go. Maybe it never wishes to go but no longer finds the circumstances an environment where it can thrive. That would mean that love is about survival, and I’m not sure that is true. Devotion allows for page turning but obsession does not.

Age may be the most persistent page turner of all.  Not only does it wish to see what happens next, it has the power to demand it. Age constantly turns the page. Reminiscence revisits turned pages and tries to see the potential of creating new ones. This rarely is successful. Moreover, it is like a warm bath. We enjoy and then know that we must leave the bath at some point. At some point we mostly want to leave the bath.

I have been guilty of obsession. I have showed devotion. I have learned the difference and at its essence is an ability to turn the page.

Melissa Etheridge sings,

“It’s not bad this brand new life.

It’s clean and it’s sharp like a brand new knife.

I just pull up the covers and turn out the lights

Close my eyes and quietly wish you goodnight”

Except that she will do it again tomorrow night, alone in her bed. What happens when you try to turn a page and fail? Persistence is essential, although it may also be necessary that to turn a page requires an adjustment of attitude.

My dad was an accomplished page turner. I recall my mom, his ex-wife and lifelong friend, locating two people from their past. She was excited to see them and wanted to know how he felt. My dad asked why he would want to do that. He explained that he had no desire to revisit those times and so no future possible for the people involved.

My mom said, “But we were close to them Eddie.”

My dad responded, “We aren’t now.”

I don’t turn the page of a book with sadness, but perhaps turning a page in life makes it sometimes a necessity. Graduations can be a happy page turning. The word implies a promising future. There are fewer of those page turners in life as I grow older. They were cooperative page turners. Most everyone wanted the page turned. There are fewer graduations as we grow older.

Retirement was my most recent graduation. The jury is out on whether or not that has been good for me. But it has not really been a trial. It is a trial only if freedom is a trial.

I turn the page and expect something new. My fervent hope is that it will bring me closer to understanding the nature of my experience and existence. My wild dream is that it will provide a pathway to some eternity. If such a thing exists, I wish it to be continued sentient exploration.

Rereading this, it is hard not to laugh at myself. What do I know of eternity? Expression of forever have an aspect of the ironic that is often beyond our ken. We only glimpse them by revisiting a turned page.

Jackson Browne wrote and sang,

“Pages turning, pages we were years from learning.

Straight into the night our hearts were flung.

You gotta bring your own redemption when you come…”

I’m not sure that I understand his last line. But the concept of discovering my redemption intrigues me.

 

You may ask, and I have no answer, “From what did you need to be redeemed?” It could be so many things and the longer that I live, the longer that list seems to grow. No, I am not suicidal. Maybe if I had a sense of eternity, I also would wish to turn the page.  But I doubt it.

Life is still a fine wine for me, but I am increasingly aware that I will finish the bottle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Retirement can be an easy gig. Most times you transition from something that is sapping your strength to something easier. Then there are these dinners and luncheons and you say things about the kind of career that you’ve had. You talk about the people who have influenced you. Respect is paid. Then you shuffle off like thousands and millions and billions before. Is there a sense of meaning to be found in it?

A simple question: to what did I dedicate my professional life? Let’s look. At first it was a form of survival, and some lessons endured. I also wanted to earn my way into the adult world and saw working as an opportunity to do that.

I was a pin boy in a bowling alley that never converted to automatic pinsetters. There was a slot under the end of the alley and when you stepped on it, metal prongs would appear out of holes that you aligned with the holes in the bottom of the pins. When you got good, you could set four pins at a time, two in each hand. I got there but it took a while. I could do two in my right hand but had to learn to do two in my left. The pay was twelve cents a game, plus whatever tips you might get. Human speed and accuracy were important.

I soon realized that I was the only Caucasian pin boy. Many of the men were mature black men, and I was a boy of twelve, claiming to be fourteen. They didn’t need the competition. They didn’t want me there but I had begged the owner of the alleys to let me pick up some money, and she took pity on me and set me to work at a job that few others would want.

Settings pins can be painful. The pin setter balances himself on the division between the alleys. You cross your legs at the ankles over the top of the division so that the pins don’t bounce up and hit you. Then you hop down and clear the alley, or reset the alley and hop back up to do the same with the other one. Some very strong, very professional pin-setters have been able to do four alleys. But it slowed the game. I learned to do two.

At the end of the games, the bowlers would slide change down the polished wooden alleys. That was your tip and you scampered for it like a delighted puppy. This was my first job.

My second stint of employment came as a stock-boy at a corner soda shop. A soda shop was not a delicatessen, which was on the next block. A soda shop had ice-cream, floats, splits, magazines, cigarettes, newspapers. My job was to keep things stocked. I worked every day from after school until dinner. I worked all day on Saturday. On Sundays, I started at 5am because I had to put together the Sunday papers which arrived incrementally throughout the week. Sunday was payday, I got $10.

Truth was though that I had my first access to soft porn. From Playboy to Jet to some the raunchy things in the Enquirer and the Hobo News, I snuck them down into the stockroom to look at them.

Wait, I have forgotten something. Before I was a pin boy, I was hired for 1$ to kill flies in a diner. After I was done, the busboy came muttering under his breath to clean away the dead flies. A live fly is an annoyance. Dead one sets off a sense of concern. I did not realize that I was making more work for an already over-worked man. And twice I was hired to shovel snow. But they were just tips, like those slid down a lane.

At a men’s clothing store I learned three significant facts. I was Jewish and not Jewish, stealing was exciting, my mother was desired by other men and she used attractiveness to get what she wanted.  She and I had a scam. People would in and place a deposit and then fail to return. It was called a layaway plan. The deposits sat there but could be reclaimed. We reclaimed them if they had been left long enough so that we could reasonably assume that no one was returning.   We also stole mohair slacks of the best variety that the store offered, and I wore them.

It was the manager of the store who lusted after my mother. I have no idea if she ever requited his need for her, but she did use it as leverage. I had expensive clothes. I had income. I saw it as a gateway to other needs.

After I graduated from high school, and one semester into college, I was in a hospital bed. My right knee had been sliced open a year after my left knee had been cut. I was behind on the work of school.  I decided to quit.

There was an IBM office at 570 Broad Street in Newark. I applied for work and after a battery of tests, they hired me to be an overnight dispatcher for a tri-state region.

My predecessor was a man named Ed, my father’s name, except this man was black. He showed me how he tailored his life to his job. He was the most alert between 11pm and 7 am the next day. The rhythm of his life was constructed around this clock. His family’s life was constructed around the dictates of his job. He taught me that I should not go to bed after work but should stay awake for the same number of hours that I would if I worked a nine to five job.  I had great difficulty doing this. There isn’t much for a 19 year old kid to do from 8am until 1 pm. I tried my best but I was bored and never got enough sleep.

Then the overnight work turned to magic. It helped me to understand how different I was. While they slept, I was awake. That was how I found my companion, Bob Fass.  It was how I learned to modulate my voice, so that those that I had awakened would want to do what I needed them to do. Bob knew how to talk in the night. He was a beacon that flowed out of WBAI, listener sponsored radio.

The things that I heard changed my life forever.  Work became a drama that was part of my life. My voice became smooth and soft.  I made it sound like a dream.  I was seductive in the way that I described things. “Hello, Red, its 3am. I need you go out and do a simple fix. I’ll make it right for you to have a late start.”  And I did. There were a dozen like him. They were my go to guys. They wanted the overtime. They wanted to get ahead. I was their middle of the night catalyst. But I did not like the life. Being alone so much made me feel unworthy and somehow reduced. I knew that I was one of the unusual ones, but I was yet to embrace that notion.

I was still able to turn it off and retreat into the immaturity and uncertainty about what I would ever be able to do. So, after two years, I went back to school.

As I think back, I am so grateful that I was not asked to work in a butcher shop or picking up trash. Some of these jobs are harder than others. I learned to talk men into waking up and getting out of their beds in the middle of the night with the promise of four hours guaranteed overtime.

So there was IBM for two years and then a yearning for freedom. I took an educational leave of absence and went back to school.

My next job became delivering water softener. It was kept in 50 pound bags and I delivered it to customers. For the first time in my life, I drove a flatbed truck.  When it rained, the bags were heavier. I slogged them in until the day in the rain when I cut off an ambulance that swerved and then stopped and flashed its lights before it continued on. I was shaking when I returned the truck and never delivered water softener again.

I dug ditches in the sun. I enjoyed the visual progress of the digging.  There were stones and roots and they provided resistance. I dug through and around them. I worked with my friend Tom, but he didn’t dig ditches. We both worked for his father. I was strong but not totally in control about how to direct my strength. I did have a sense of humor. Tom was often reluctant.

We had been scrubbing eggshell crates for a building that we were retrofitting to be a community college campus. We stood over the sink for hours, bored and scrubbing. Then a look of wicked glee passed between us and Tom took the dormant hose over to Art Williams Junior and pretended that it was a microphone. He spoke into it and then passed it over and Art Jr. spoke into it. Then Tom spoke again and readied myself at the sink. When Art Jr. opened his mouth to speak again, I turned the water on full blast. He sputtered. He choked. Tom’s father laughed uncontrollably. Art Sr. laughed uncontrollably.  It was an instant of comradery, male style, which would be relived for years.

Then I learned about the pressure that came from being the bosses’ son. One afternoon, we artfully rearranged the configuration of ballasts inside of flouriest light cases. We found that what we had done caused the casings to no longer fit. It was the end of the day but Tom looked nervous.

“I don’t think that your dad is going to pay us overtime.”

Tom’s dark eyes looked up at me and then he dissolved into a self-deprecating laugh. “No, I’ll just go home and say, we are now behind where you left us after lunch but we didn’t want to work overtime and so we left it that way.” We stayed and reconfigured the ballasts, repeating the lines and imagining how they would be received. It was a bond and I learned that life had other pressures for the boss’s son. Tom was my friend and the boss’s son. I was a bit stunned by the realization.

Magic struck and I learned to teach. I was stunned by the wonder and power of teaching. I worshiped it. I loved it as I have loved nothing else. I was a teacher and there was a sanctity and beauty to that. I was that. Everything that I loved screamed out to be that. The teaching sang back into my ear. I embraced the song.  If only I could teach others, I could achieve salvation I taught a college class as a graduate assistant.  I had power and so I ordered the Journey to Ixtlan as my primary test.

But before that, I worked as a bill collector. I called people who had incurred debt that had become difficult, or even impossible, to repay and I talked them out of money.  There were no rules. Whatever a collector could do to get a payment sent was OK. We were encouraged to intimidate children, order unrequested products and services and generally harass. The trick was to get the actual debtor on the phone. Call screening wasn’t around then and they behind their kids or their grandparents. We found ways to knife through all of that.

Some of the debtors were gamblers. Some of them had women that they were keeping on the side. They could be elusive and would promise you anything to get off of the phone. What I wanted and, was good at, was securing their employment address.  Then we were able to issue a garnishee.  It gave me pleasure because my step father had been a gambler like this and my college savings had been sacrificed to pay off his debt.

Then there was Mrs. Key. Her husband had borrowed $1000. The payback over three years was $1440. But he died and the interest just mounted. I called because I was told to call. Because I had successfully talked her out of $10, I was told to call again. One day, I just refused and was fired. The debt could never be paid off. It should be written off to profit and loss, but the company had a policy against doing this if any payment had been yanked out of her over the subsequent two years. I had successfully yanked one out of her.

I had been very good at it. I’d learned how to talk on the phone. I’d learned the power of that vague but immediate communication. When I thought about what I was doing, I recoiled.

I stopped doing it, but I needed work and there was always work for bill collectors. And I had learned how to sound so understanding on the phone, until I got the person talking and then I would turn on a dime. Once I had that shred of information that I wanted, I threatened to use it. I bullied those people and it haunts me.

I got lost in the flow of time. It isn’t linear, it flows back and forth with back-washes and surges. The teaching was a major surge. Those two grad school classes, I devoted myself to them but I was immature and brash and in need of refinement. I taught some students. I ignored others. Some, I think that I damaged. That also haunts me. I do not know how it impacted on them.

Sometimes karma plays a role in employment.  That’s happened to me twice, at least. The first time, I was hired to play chess. My only job was to sit in the manager’s office and play chess. I also had to study to get a license as an agent of Health and Accident Insurance so that I could sign off on all the loans which were made at the company from which I had been fired. We split the commissions on all the loans. It netted me five thousand dollars a year, for two years. I did nothing but play chess.

It was a strange feeling. I wasn’t a great chess player; I was just better than him and he knew me and he had fired me because I would not call Mrs. Key. His ex-lover, my now live in girlfriend, picked up the slack. In some ways I guess that he was punishing her for choosing me by him choosing me. It was a very strange time and I did what I needed to do to keep the checks coming so that I could go to school and avoid making decisions about what I would do when I could no longer go to school. Funny thought that one.

After I graduated, I worked in this wonderful day care program that was run by a Catholic Charity. We administered to schizophrenic people between their continued hospitalizations. We found ways to interact that established pathways of comfort. It was the most therapeutic environment I have ever witnessed.

Each day we met for ninety minutes before their arrival. We reviewed and set individual goals. Then they were with us for more than four hours and we worked as humanely as I have ever worked in my life. We provided reassurance like a light shining through a fog. At least we tried to do that.

When a manic depressive went off meds in those days, there was this time when things had sped to optimum and you could see the brightly shining spirit alive in this world. What they could have been… But then, it would keep speeding up and would dissolve into frantically manic states that needed sedation.  And the cycle would begin again.

I felt their delusions inside of me. They did not seem all that absurd. I wondered what that said about me. I was there only a few months before their funding was cut off.

Then I worked in a jail. Well actually it was a detention center in Paterson New Jersey. It was for adolescent males who were serving non drug related offenses and were being held in a halfway situation where they went to school but then were returned to this center which was run by the New Jersey Department of Institutions and Agencies.

For the second time in my life, I worked overnights. In the night I mopped the floors and watched late night TV. The Mary Tyler Moore show became a favorite and I would schedule my night around its repeat episodes. But sometimes I was too tired to stay awake and they would rape the younger boys. The older boys would laugh about their sore holes at breakfast.

I hated the job. I loved the kids and hated the work of being a jailer. I learned that I could never really be more than a jailer, because I was being paid to be that. I also learned that in a bad place it is easy to be used as an instrument of cruelty. One morning two guys got into a fight. And I jumped in to break it up and got punched, quite by accident. I was not injured, but the director saw the event and wanted to keep his population numbers up and so the kid who hit me had 6 months tacked onto his sentence. Eventually, the same director mistreated me and I found a way out. I went to my Allen and said that I wanted to be in more normal situations. He agreed.

My mother sent a letter and my resume to the parochial school that had taken me in when I was graduating sixth grade, working at the soda shop and accused of bringing a knife to school. I had a Bachelor’s Degree in English. I had an uncompleted graduate school record.  Sister Marie Isabel interviewed me and hired me to be a teacher of English.

It was a turning point in my life. I had always been plagued by the questions, “Did you give this everything that you had? Did you do all that you could do? Was there nothing else that you could have done?”

I decided that I would do just that. Give it all, hold back nothing, let there truly be nothing else that I could have done. It was successful beyond my wildest dreams.  I helped. I taught. I made things better! I am not sure that I have done finer work in my life. Lives changed for the better and I was part of that change. I am still so proud of my first students. To the end of my life, I will be proud of them.

On some dark nights, I wonder if I was ever that for someone else.  Was I ever part of someone’s favorite work?

Then I became professional. I would teach and touch and influence, but it was always from that professional distance. It was good. It was great! My mind was challenged. My creativity was alive and daily active.

I loved reading my students’ essays and asking questions that would cause them to probe their thinking in ways that I partially directed. I was teaching all boys now at an exclusive private school. But teaching was the rock. It was always there. I could find it every day. The classroom nourished me every day. I love the classroom.

To call it work almost seems an insult unless one says, “This is my work.”

 

There are stages that one goes through in retirement. The first I think might be relief. What was joy became burden and that burden was carried until retirement allowed you to set it down. It occurs to me that changing careers is like retirement.  But yes the first stage for me was relief. Now I have to consider if entering administration and supervision was a form of early retirement.

I stopped teaching slowly. Instead of five classes, I taught three. I think that I had one of my finest years of accomplishment teaching three classes. I promised myself and my students that every essay assignment would be returned thoroughly read and graded at the next class.  It was an honors class, AP actually. I had designed the curriculum.

That September we giggled together at our first meeting. They knew what to expect and were excited by the possibility. The real feat was their research papers. I provided a deadline that gave me a four day weekend. In those four days I did nothing else. I ignored everything around me except for my students’ papers.

I returned them at the next class and my students applauded the effort. They knew what I had done. It was a bond between student and teacher.

But times change and there is that time when the magic is no longer there to have. Or the alchemy no longer makes sense to the alchemist. Maybe that was it, but it doesn’t feel that way. I stopped teaching because of money.

I sold my skills for many tens of thousands of dollars a year, and tens of thousands of dollars in retirement. I ended my administrative career broken on the belief that I had the chance to create something better. Defeated by what I was compelled to do for my self-interest and needing to leave. I did have one fine shining accomplishment. I knew how to pick good teachers and I assembled two staffs of them. The irony was that they didn’t like me and would not let me close enough to truly communicate what I had learned about teaching.

I was the boss. Conversations changed when I entered the room. My presence anywhere could easily be misconstrued. My insights became legal questions. I saw teachers who were done and ready to be done but if I said that I was committing age discrimination. I was always in trouble and to some extent fearful. I found it difficult to stop telling what I perceived to be was the truth.

Retirement is relief from all that and it’s sweet and sometimes it is bitter sweet. I envy those “Mr. Chips” types who retire from the classroom beloved. I feel empathy for those who have overstayed their classroom time and need to be told that it is time to leave. They may have started out very much the same and then took a wrong turn and just kept going, with deference to Bruce Springsteen.

I told myself that the team was in place. It was going well. But there is always higher management. There is always politics in education. Politics is warfare that creates losers and winners. I straddled the fence by standing up for what I believed but still knowing that I would do whatever was required by the politics.

In Japanese business lore, there is the story of the position with a window seat. These are reserved for losers who are kept on as a symbol of their defeat. They do nothing. They are paid to come into the office and sit as viewable symbols of their failure.

I ended my career in an American version of this fate. I was required to supervise and be held accountable for that which everyone knew I had detested: standardized testing scores. I supervised two libraries, more than fifty teachers, five secretaries, but my primary responsibility was overseeing standardized testing. I was very well paid.

My relief from that hypocrisy was an enormous weight taken from my conscience and shoulders. That is the first stage of retirement, relief. You don’t have to do it anymore. That comes with relief. It’s like a binge. It’s a binge of relief.

My body responded well to this relief. It felt like freedom.

After a while, the second stage of retirement sets in. That is irrelevance. You are no longer what is happening today and most assuredly not what is happening tomorrow. It’s the ending of the adult phase and the beginning of that part of one’s life that can be considered “elder.”

You must accept that you are part of the process that will become a past. You are moving towards being part of a past. And for the first time, the present provides a different option. The irrelevance grants your present freedom.  There is a sweetness to the process. There is also an element of sadness. The nostalgia can be entwining.

Everyone needs a present, but suppose one’s present became a reliving of one’s past. The reliving makes it a present, but only a present of sorts. Nostalgia is one of the snares of retirement and it is, I think, connected to irrelevance.

Another stage is the contraction of a person’s professional life, and often for the sake of balance, an expansion of a person’s personal responsibilities.  A professional persona dictates a certain amount of responsibility. One has to be at a certain place and time and represent a certain point of view. The process demands a good deal of attention. A person might even become immersed in it. But retirement brings it to a conclusion. There is a retraction of responsibilities.

The energy turns inward because it is seeking an outlet, not unlike water. There can be a flood of expansion in one’s personal life.  Of course if the dedication to the profession has served as a substitute for a personal life, retirement can be lonely and even devastating.  The irrelevance is suffocating.

Some people are eaten from the inside out here and become a shell. Some can find joy that helps them to move on. Some find a little of both. It feels to me that each of my jobs in some way prepared me for the next, and that my career prepared me for retirement. Sometimes the preparation is subtle and can only be understood after the fact.

After contraction, what is next? Is there an acceptance? Is there a renewal? Retirement is a shade of death. Is there acceptance? Is there renewal?