I write this sitting in a Starbucks, as my wife prepares for a trip to the Outer Banks for a few day’s respite on this holiday weekend.
As of Wednesday I will be 72 years and 8 months old, with my next birthday in 4 months. I am feeling my age, and wondering about the future, even as I reflect about the past. And I write in the context of having just read a Facebook post by a student I taught in the 2013-14 school year when he was a junior, who just started his student teaching (I offered a few thoughts to consider). I think he will be at least the 80th person I have taught who have at least for a while stepped into the role of K-12 classroom teacher. Perhaps that is a comfort as I begin to accept that my own time in the classroom is in all likelihood coming to an end, perhaps this year, in at most another 3-4 four.
The thoughts I will offer will have no overall arching theme, nothing to connect them beyond coming from what passes as my mind. Come along if you are inclined. I certainly will understand if you do not.
My father died from the effect of Parkinson’s disease shortly after he turned 84, only a bit more than a decade older than I am now. That seems more relevant than my mother passing at 47, less than a week after I graduated from high school. For sometime before his death I saw his mind begin to deteriorate. This was a man who was Phi Beta Kappa at Cornell, who reached ABD in Economics before he gave it up for a career that included being an executive at a number of companies, being chief statistician for the Republican National Committee during the Alf Landon Presidential Campaign, serving in the Navy during World War II, and reinventing himself in his 50s as a consultant. In many ways his career was far more distinguished than mine, although I think he would be proud of what I accomplished as a teacher. I know his older brother, who lived into his 90s, who himself had been a distinguished history teacher in NYC before retiring to Miami, greatly respected what I did as a teacher, and his daughter (who had herself taught for a while) gave me all of his books after he passed.
But it is the Parkinson’s that is on my mind. No, I am not exhibiting symptoms of shaking. But I have lived most of my life by my mind, my wits, and now I am exhibiting signs that concern me. I am becoming increasingly forgetful. It is not just that I experience not knowing where I have just put something down. I had three such episodes today. My mind is not supple enough — I am finding it harder to learn new things, and things I used to know well seem less and less accessible to my accessing them in my memory.
I look at where we are in American society right now, and for all the hope after the elections in November, I find myself close to despair. The damage I see being done to American society, to countries around the world, to the environment, seem increasingly irreversible, at least in whatever is left of my life, and I worry in the lifetimes of nieces and nephews, who range in age late 40s to less than ten.
For more than two decades I have largely defined myself as a teacher. One can note my screen name here and elsewher (eg, Twitter). If I am honest, I am no longer the kind of teacher I was even 5-6 years ago, say, when I taught that young man who is now becoming a teacher.
For a long time, I was highly visible here, writing on a variety of topics, interacting with lots of people through the words we exchanged online. I ran panels at some of the conventions, starting in 2006 in Las Vegas. I would go to local gatherings. My wife and I had one organized in our honor in NYC when we were visiting a now deceased aunt.
Now I sometimes go more than a week without writing here. I last attended Netroots (and led a panel) in 2012. My reason has been that it usually conflicted with volunteering at free clinics in Wise VA. But that was not true this past summer, I had the money to go (which in the past was not always true), and yet I found I could not bring myself to register, to come and connect.
My writing, like my teaching, seems to be declining in quality.
In the past I would read 100 books a year, even with all my writing and a commitment to teaching that was far stronger than what I currently exhibit. Now? I have not completed reading a book in at least three weeks.
I was originally excited to go to the school where I now teach. I was recruited by a woman now in her 30s who is herself teaching 8th grade US History as I do — she was one of the students my first year of teaching at Eleanor Roosevelt High School, where I spent a total of 13 years, and where I had my greatest impact. The woman who interviewed me was at the time an assistant principal, but had been the math teacher with whom I shared 8th grade students my first two years of teaching (although she was promoted to principal at another school before I started). Our IB coordinator is the father of a student from my last year before I tried retiring. The school is more than fair to me, in many ways. I think I have the respect of my peers. But it is not working.
I think about exploring other options. But at my age, and with the number of jobs I have had recently (even if there are good explanations for my recent transience) makes it unlikely I could find another job in the kind of setting that would appeal to me. There are two job fairs on February 2 and February 9th for independent schools to which I will probably go, but I have low expectations — I went to both last year, got exactly one interview (for a school that would have been a very good fit, but they hired someone some 3 decades younger than me) — after all, independent schools put a lot into their hiring process and they want someone they can keep for a good number of years, and I can at most promise to try for 5, by which time I would be 78.
The real issue is I have to recognize that I am not connecting with a fair number of my students. I am not alone in the school, but I cannot use that as an excuse. We have serious discipline and attendance problems, to be sure, but I have in the past been in such settings and been able to make a difference. I find that I no longer want to expend the energy to do so, which means I am failing those kids who want to learn.
My wife and I live with the reality of her blood cancer. It is in remission for now, but it is not yet curable. While she is almost 11 years younger than me, it is not at all unlikely I will outlive her. And yet, I now begin to have health issues. I have a stent in my aorta to control an aneurysm, a byproduct of being a heavy smoker until I was in my late 20s. The two displaced fractured ribs I got from a fall on Christmas are still painful, albeit slowly healing, but I have since then had several balance issues.
The renewal on the registration of my car expired in October. Somehow I did not get stopped until early this year, and that policeman was kind enough to let me off with a warning, and I was able to renew online with a penalty fee that evening because the expiration was within 90 days. But what else am I forgetting? As I think about it, there are too many times in the past few years where I failed to pay bills on time, even though I had the money, so now I make myself pay bills as soon as they come in.
We begin to seriously think about downsizing. The value of our house is going up, and with Amazon coming to Arlington will go up even more. We talk about both retiring and moving to Charlottesville, but for now, so long as my wife’s father is alive, she does not want to move to a place that is 2 hours further away.
I find myself thinking a lot about the past. I will turn the radio in my car to either the 50s or 60s channel on SiriusXm, and let songs remind me of things in the past.
It is not that I have regrets, or wish I had done things differently. I am quite aware of wrong choices, but tend to look at my life in total, recognizing that different choices when I was much younger would mean I never would have met Leaves, and had her love and friendship to sustain me over the past 44+ years (Sept 1974 to now). A part of me regrets not having taken the Peace Corps appointment to the Philippines in 1967, after I had dropped out of Haverford the 2nd time, but Leaves outweighs that.
I do regret some things I have done, or not done, in the years since Sept 1974. I try to live differently now to make up for it.
But now I am old. Not ancient, but old.
I may look younger than my 72+ years, especially getting my hair colored every six weeks, as I did again today (remember those forthcoming job fairs ...). But I feel tired, I am too often short-tempered.
I wonder what choices I would make if either or both of us did not have to work, to bring in a good income? Would I work, even part-time? How would we spend time and energy? So long as we need both incomes our choices are limited. At times that is frustrating, irritating..
I have for most of my life been a political animal. When I was ten, in 1956, my older sister and I did some campaigning for Eisenhower (my mother was a moderate Republican party official). With very few periods since (during my stint in the Marines being most notable) I have in some way been involved with politics. At times I knew I could make a difference, as I did in local politics in Media PA and in the past here in Arlington. I have been involved in campaigns from local offices in both, to state legislative, to Congressional, and even to some degree in Presidential campaigns (at least in primaries, for Fritz Hollings and Howard Dean). I have been active in statewide politics in Virginia in the past, but now?? I read, I blog occasionally, but I no longer lobby people on educational policy, and I am not sure what I have to say verbally or in writing makes a difference to anyone anymore.
And yet, and yet ….
I am old enough to remember when a row of shops in Larchmont NY where I grew up were torn down, as was the old railroad station for what was then the New Haven Railroad as part of the construction for Interstate 95, the section of which passed through Larchmont was called the New England Thruway. Before it was open we used to sneak on and ride our bikes on the pavement.
I think of all the companies I knew that have gone out of business — Eastern and Pan Am Airlines; Robert Hall; Hecht’s and Woodie’s and Garfinkle’s here in DC, to name just a few (with Sears perhaps not far behind).
When I was in the Marines stationed at Quantico in the mid 1960s the DC Beltway was relatively new, driving south from DC to Quantico on either I-95 or Route 1 there was lots of wooded undeveloped stretches. When we moved to Arlington in 1982 I-66 outside the Beltway ran through relatively open land, and Route 7 past Tyson was fairly undeveloped. The old Parkington Shopping Center still existed, and the famous Putt-Putt miniature golf course was an Arlington institution. We have seen local shops move or close as their owners aged or passed on.
These are memories of places I remember. Some I encounter every day. Others, like those in Larchmont?? I have not been back since my 50th high school reunion in 2013.
It is also people. College classmates, including one roommate, have now passed on. I wonder how many will be alive when I pass on, and what they will remember of me?
But all of this mental meandering is less important than, despite my aging and my fading energy, what I feel when I look at the world in which I now find myself.
I look at the people suffering because of the current shutdown.
I look at those whose economic future has been destroyed through tax policies and lax regulation that has shifted wealth ever upward, and shrunken the chances for opportunity for increasing numbers, including making college ever more unaffordable for the students I teach. I become angrier than I have ever been.
I look at the accelerating climate change, and am prepared to weep for those people whose livelihoods and homes will be lost — by increasing likelihood of fire, by loss of water resources, by rising seas, by ever more extreme weather.
Then I look at my complicity. Yes I drive a hybrid, and on my daily commute to school I average 50 MPG. But I am still driving 57 miles round trip.
As a middle class American I consume so much more energy and cause so much more environmental damage than do people in less developed countries. Am I contributing to the destruction and disorder they are experiencing?
I am of an age where I can look back and while I can see some good I have done — as a teacher, as a political activist, perhaps even occasionally as a writer/thinker — when I look forward at the decreasing years left to me, I have to confront real moral dilemmas — what is the moral thing for me to do at any moment, with any decision I make?
I sit in a Starbucks, using electricity to write on my computer, While my coffee cup is refillable for free, how much energy is used to make it? If I have fresh blueberries on my packaged cereal for breakfast, how much environmental destruction results from transporting that pint from say Chile, where as it is summer blueberries are in season? How do I weigh that against the income provided through international trade to people in other countries, or is my involvement as a consumer in international trade not also contribute to the diminution of life, the expansion of economic inequities, in other nations as well as my own?
As I age, I think what becomes increasingly important to me is morality. It is not merely the question of morality on the macro scale — our economic and politics systems for example. Rather, it is the question of my own personal morality.
When is outrage moral? How should it best be expressed in way that can make a difference? Should not that inform my thinking, my speaking, my writing?
Whether or not what I do or say makes a difference on a macro scale, does it not make a difference in who and what I am?
I did something stupid in school on Friday. I overreacted to a misbehavior. My reaction was disproportionate to the improper act of a student I do not teach.
It was that incident that got me thinking that maybe it is time for me to leave the classroom.
George Fox, normally viewed as the founder of the Religious Society of Friends, wrote that we should walk gladly across the earth answering that of God in each person we met.
Where is the gladness in how I live, how I act?
Where is the kindness?
Does it really matter whether or not kindness is returned?
“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”
and yet, why should I be required to compromise by someone who deliberately expresses an opening position that is very extreme in order to move any “compromise” totally to her advantage?
How should I respond to someone whose words and actions are dismissive or demeaning to things I or others hold dear?
When does someone’s cumulative words and actions place them beyond forgiveness?
Mental meanderings, questions to which I claim no answers, topics for which I offer no expertise….
So why then write these words? Why post them on a site primarily devoted to liberal Democratic politics?
Perhaps if there are responses I will learn something, gain an insight I would not otherwise experience.
Perhaps in this mass of bloviation there will be something that in some way speaks to someone else.
Perhaps, if anyone reads all the way through, the notion of thinking about personal morality will make sense in a new way.
I don’t know.
In a sense, I am very much of a shy person. I acknowledge I am probably far more insecure than I should be. After all, regardless of the mistakes I know I have made in my 7 plus decades on this earth, I have done some good, accomplished some things.
It is in sharing through words that I am sometimes able to connect with others.
At other times, it is in simply being present — ask our one remaining cat.
Will anyone read all this? It really does not matter. I needed to write it, to think “aloud” for myself.
If you have read this far, thank you for being patient with me.
Peace.