Prologue to a Car Crash

 It’s only been two weeks and I’m already carving out a routine. I love that: “carve”. It’s a word that carries both the laborious and interminable, but there’s also something affectionate about it, right? Like you imagine someone scooping away at a boulder, but to make a little place for themselves. Weighty and personal, I guess that’s a routine. 

 

Part of this carving comes from seeing the same people over and over in the same places and, usually, in the same attitudes. Coworkers behind their desks, service workers behind their counters, and those who work in the same area drafting around the neighborhood at lunch time, enroute to cafés and lunch counters, 20 minutes left before they have to be back behind their desks, cheerfully hurrying along, slightly over-caffeinated. 

 

I bike to work, which makes a big difference in what’s mundane. Instead of seeing tired commuter faces on the bus, I watch the fog roiling in the foothills of the Coast Range and the Humboldt Bay at various stages of ebb and flow, sometimes reflecting a clear sky over the ocean, sometimes clogged with mud and portraits of pampas grass mirrored in the puddles: the quiet terminus of oceanic voyages for all kinds of debris. 

 

And then, when I get around the bay and come into Eureka, I see a lot of the same homeless population making their daily movements. One guy is always walking down the same block when I ride by. He’s usually looking straight ahead, so we’ve made eye-contact enough times now that I’ve started giving him a familiar nod. Of course, I’m usually a bit sweaty and slack-jawed by this time in the ride, so he probably doesn’t think much of me or even take notice of this wild-looking character on the bike; this, at least, was my impression until the other day. 

 

Until mid-August, we work “four 10s”, meaning four 10-hour shifts, rather than the usual five-day spacing of a 40-hour week. I like it. The schedule suits the American temperament which can work without a break if there’s a compensation in time at the end of it. Our desire, for example, to skip lunch and just leave work half an hour early, I’ve found is not a very common thing elsewhere in the world. People want their breaks and aren’t in such a hurry to get home at the end of the day. In the country we are, after all, very focused on the next thing. Or maybe that’s just me. 

 

So, it was Thursday and my last workday before the weekend. It’s been an almost excessively foggy summer, so the light was very typically early morning: silvery gray, like it is on a rainy day, but the humidity was not the sort that condenses into rain but just slinks along the lowlands until mid-day when the intensity of the sun finally burns it up. Of course, this conflict between sun and humidity is a duel and the humidity saturates the air as soon as the sun’s power begins to wane around 4 or 5, and evening has the same clammy, rainy day feeling as morning. Only one is a little more gracious to it, having enjoyed a few hours of sun. When the day ends, and the fog is piling up around the base of the mountains, one is glad for it. It’s a bit like seeing a blanket being drawn over the earth to prepare for evening and, indeed, it makes me tired as hell to watch it. The author of Grandfather Twilight must’ve been from this part of the country. His gauzy gray beard spreading over the sky as he walks to the shore with his pearl? That’s what happens here every afternoon.

 

But in the morning, even after two cups of coffee and a seven-mile bike ride, I’m still only half awake under that interminable gray blanket and riding to work under the eucalyptus and along the muddy estuary—elements which seem to generate their own fog— everything starts to go a bit dreamlike. So, it doesn’t seem strange when I get to Eureka and see the homeless guy who’s become part of my routine lift his arm and point, somewhat frantically, back behind me.  

 

Up until this day, the guy has scarcely paid me any attention. I’ve been giving him my sweaty nod for about a week and his response has been to continue walking north, looking straight ahead. So, for him to be all agog, making such deliberate eye-contact, and pointing in this manner, well, our relationship has shifted very abruptly, it would seem.  

 

I hate to say it, but my first impulse was to think he was pointing at something only he could see, that some condition which I wouldn’t understand, was inducing some vision in him and that it wouldn’t be worth turning around. It was a bit like in childhood with the whole “made you look!” thing. I assumed he was pointing just to get a reaction from me, or maybe, despite his eye-contact, he was pointing for someone else’s benefit. So, rather than immediately turning around, I swung my gaze back to the street in front of me, denying him my corroboration in whatever he was doing, but there was a visual echo of his intensity—this guy who was always so mild-mannered, so focused on his destination. And I was past him now, he wouldn’t know if I turned around anyway. So, expecting nothing, I glanced back—I tried to make it look mechanical, like I was changing lanes and checking for traffic—and immediately squeezed my breaks without thinking, acting on the same impulse that had made the man lift his arm, point and go all pop-eyed. I hate to say it, but I actually thought OMG!

 

Behind me, in the street, there was a movie scene playing out. While the sky remained as gray and impassive as ever, an SUV had rolled up onto its side and was rocking with the momentum which was still washing over it in waves like the wake of a boat recently passed. There was a cluster of cars behind it, perhaps some of them had crashed, or maybe they’ve all just been stopped by this catastrophe. The SUV didn’t just flip over on the curb, or a result of taking a turn too quickly, no, the reason for the derailment is pluming dramatically over the entire scene, a jet of water is spraying about 20 feet into the air. It’s Hollywood, that scene in so many movies where someone hits a fire hydrant. And having seen this so often before in movies, the man and I stand there watching it with a few people on the street, waiting to see if anything else will happen, waiting I guess to see if Bruce Willis will emerge from the SUV, bloodied but unstoppable, with a sawn-off under his arm. 

 

But the scene goes static, returns to reality and the SUV ceases rocking. It doesn’t look like anyone was hurt, just a really lousy way to start Thursday morning for someone. But maybe so lousy that it might even be funny. It’s not impossible to imagine someone in that SUV laughing at the ridiculousness of the overplayed scene. In fact, there’s none of the ‘oh-my-god-could’ve-been-me!’ scariness to the scene. It’s just, like, “wow! Look at that! Gee!”

 

And then I remember that I could’ve missed it, could’ve just kept going were it not for my acquaintance who pointed it out to me. And, as I turned back to work and began pedaling, this gave me hope. I know now that when some earth-shattering tsunami or 9/11 scenario unfolds, people really will stop and point and signal to others: so many prairie dogs barking at the entrance of a hawk into the sky overhead. Despite our tendency to wrap ourselves in our own lives and carve out routines to build up the walls between us we’re still all wading through the same daily fog which, as it turns out, is more substantial that the boulder we’re trying to make something of.  

 

I coast the rest of the way to work wondering how this will affect our interaction on Monday. 

Presence of Mind is a Difficult Thing to Establish

 At the airport, waiting to board my flight back to Armenia—my second return since I left in 2010—I thought of Paige’s words. When she returned after an absence of six or seven years, she reported, upon her return to the States, that the experience had been a little flat, or at least, not as she’d expected it. Now, I’m paraphrasing her, so don’t make too many assumptions. She had a good time, but, if I remember right, she reported that now, having nothing to do, that is, no work, she didn’t feel the same. She felt idle.  

I thought about this at the airport because when I heard Armenian voices at the gate for the flight to Yerevan, I felt uplifted. It had been hard to leave my family and do something that felt a bit unnecessary—perhaps I could’ve done the training online, for example. Yes, I was going to facilitate a teacher training. I had a clear job to do, but obviously, I was also going to indulge in a bit of memory lane, which is not something I do nearly as much as I used to. In fact, children tend to keep me quite firmly rooted in the present. Which I can tell you is a damn gift for me. Until my daughter was born, I’d spent a lot of time with my head in the oh-so-easily-fashioned clouds of nostalgia. I knew that everything looked better in hindsight, but I suppose that’s the reason I spent so long looking at everything that way, just like glossy social media addictions. We know the images are untrue, but we want to believe them, so we do. My past, to me, was your friend’s perfectly curated Facebook page; it always looked amazing and even envy-inducing. 

 

It wasn’t just kids that changed this. I had also come to strongly distrust my nostalgia after an incident with a false memory that felt a bit like an out-of-body experience. When you discover that the things you remember are a bit like dreams, you stop putting so much stock in them and understand just how subject to influence they are. And finally, I guess I used to take refuge in memory because there was something I was looking for it in, a happiness greater than the one at present which felt more real than any potential happiness of the future, especially when the future looked bleak or things didn’t seem to be moving along very quickly. For now, I am satisfied with my present which includes a three and one-year-old who are constantly taking me away from my musings and into the very real present. 

 

So, perhaps this is why my first return to Armenia five years ago felt so different than this time. Back then, I still had this idealized (and frequently visited) Armenian memory. Coming back was a bit like stepping into that memory and probing it, scrounging in it, mining it. When I first lived in Armenia, I had been a Peace Corps volunteer. I traveled freely enough, but I was never at liberty to do what ever I wanted at any given time and I couldn’t go to Nagorno Karabakh for obvious reasons. When I returned as a private citizen, a tourist even, I ranged around with nothing to do but return to the homes and people who had been kind to me. Returning in itself was no gift, but my former friends and neighbors seemed to appreciate it as such. 

 

I was also curating that trip. In the first return to Armenia, I took my wife (then girlfriend, though I think we were engaged—not that it matters) back to the place I’d been telling her about since I’d returned. The storied roads and paths, tufa stones and meals were almost recreated for her benefit. “Look at us!” The stones cried out.  “We exist exactly as you remember us! Perhaps we are even greater than in your memory!” Ah. Who wouldn’t have enjoyed such a trip? It was like justification for my nostalgia. 

 

But Paige, I don’t think, looked backwards as much as I did. Her memory of Armenia was a little more realistic and when she went back, she didn’t bring anyone to show it to. I imagine her, silent most of the time, getting on and off public transportation, saying ‘thank you’ but finding it muffled from disuse. I imagine this, because this is how I felt for parts of the day today—my first day back on my third time in Armenia.

 

I got in so late last night, and all the drama of long-distance travel following me like a comet’s tail. I’d been checking in through video chat in and out of airports and, when I arrived, I felt the relief of being a traveler who’s managed to make it to the other side of the world and find their luggage on the conveyor belt. And early in the morning, Mt. Ararat is something incredible to behold, looming out of the dawn, like the ethereal mountain it is. Where I live, the mountains are low, but green and solid. In half a day’s walk, you are in them. Ararat was like a vivid ghost, encompassing the entire horizon, but gauzy, a bit like a projection. It looked like it could be walked through, but not to. 

 

And then I went to bed. 

 

I woke up around 10:30 in the morning and wandered up to breakfast before stumbling out, jetlagged into Yerevan. Then I met up with Anna and despite the richness of the world I had left behind, I didn’t feel superfluous. Even my strange, touristy rhythm had its place in Armenia. After all, I still had lots of memories to chase back down and see how they were getting along since I’d last examined them. But there’s where things went all homesick on me. 

 

After Anna went back to work, I walked off, confident in my mission to continue looking around. I didn’t have a destination in mind, but there were so many places I wanted to revisit it didn’t matter which direction I went in. I started walking south, stopped and took a picture of myself in front of an impressive cathedral. I still wanted to walk, so I didn’t stop to go in, but continued, in a new direction, up toward the old Peace Corps office.

 

I knew they were remodeling the place, but I hadn’t expected it to be so empty. There were still a few memories floating about the place, despite the plaster dust and new walls, but, maybe that was where I began to feel out-of-place, like the ghostly projection of Ararat. The last time I’d come had been to show the place to my wife and there had been volunteers here doing the things I had done as a volunteer. It was as if I could point to these living people and say, “here it is, my experience. You can see it in these volunteers. They are living it now.” In that sense, my Armenia was still intact as I remembered it. Others were living it as I had, making the same connections, and learning it in the same way, letting it open their hearts to something outside their expectations. But now, they were gone. There was no one here in my place. Only people who were born here, grew up, had children and got old. People for whom this place was not a memory or a nostalgia but their very existence, their entire world. Without it, there would be nothing. There would also be tourists, but, having lived here, I felt very little connection with those flying in for a week from Germany or another western European country to hang out in Yerevan, see Garni and buy a carpet to remember the trip. Even though I was now somewhat among their class, I almost resented them for their irreverent attitudes for what, to me, was a place to be revered. I went back outside and found my excited route had turned into a bit of a slog. The day was getting on. It was hot and, really, I didn’t have much of a reason to walk by this store, or that apartment. The people I remembered weren’t there and, perhaps, being changed, neither was I.  

 

That night was the first I was unable to sleep. I was both jet-lagged and anxious. That afternoon, I had found little in the new Yerevan to occupy myself with. There were a billion new cafés and lots of new places to eat, but very little to distract the solo traveler and I’d already once returned to all these memories five years ago. Returning to them now felt almost redundant. Some places were still open, like Art Bridge bookstore, others like Rock Bar, had closed. Either way, I did nothing but stand at the door and look on. There was no difference. If it had been open, I wouldn’t have gone in. If Reza had been with me, we wouldn’t have gone in, or, if we had, we wouldn’t have stayed long. The changes went beyond mere closures and ravages of time: I was too different as a person.  

 

While I lay there trying to sleep that first night, my growing feelings of superfluity condensed and soured into a sense of misdirection. Here was this world I had once inhabited, but it was now little more than a stage set to wander through for a day. Meanwhile, my family, my kids, one of whom was old enough to clearly miss me, were waiting for me on the other side of the world. What business did I have being here when my little girl was waiting for her dad to come home and read to her? When my son was on the verge of taking his first steps? And my wife was having to double her workload to compensate for my absence. Perhaps these thoughts kept me up, but there was something also familiar, something that was not quite indistinguishable from the landscape itself. It was the loneliness I had felt when I initially came here, 14 years ago as a volunteer. This place, through a kind of long estrangement from America, had become my home. It had taken over two years, but I had adapted. Now, however, I had finally recreated my home in America, and it was as if I’d returned to the same unknown place I’d found myself in back when I first arrived in 2008; missing everything. The only difference was, that time, I knew I couldn’t go back for 27 months and this time, 10 days. Yet, I only had one setting for loneliness in Armenia. It was tuned to two years of anticipation, two years of adjusting, looking out the window in the evening, walking through the valleys in autumn, watching the snow fall on the mountains in the winter, listening to the snow melt in the rivers; in short, living here and adjusting to its rhythms. And while I tried to sleep, I had to continually remind myself, I wouldn’t be gone this long. My children wouldn’t have to wait this long to see their dad, but, in the back of my mind, there was that memory of looking out over the landscape and thinking “two years, two years, two years”. I hadn’t realized, in my acceptance of Armenia how thoroughly I had buried this memory, this long, slow feeling of adjustment, but, under the relationships and love for the mountains, the people, the passes, the quiet villages with their Ladas laden with vegetables and grandmothers sweeping the dust, the feeling remained. It was understanding that a place like this is not easily known and, it would seem, I had ceased to know it. The only thing to do would be to remain another two years and learn it again. My heart felt squeezed at the thought. 

 

Luckily, I had a job to do. And in preparing for and facilitating the training, I found a way to reconnect and to find value and purpose in my return. It was a bit like my early days in the Peace Corps, when I had still been in pre-service training. Each day was structured and full and it was hard to have much time to sneak away and cultivate homesickness. The primary difference was, this time, it was much easier to call home. Fourteen years ago, internet was still primarily in the capital and getting a bunch of credit on one’s phone was the only way to call outside the country. I only made these calls about once a week and they were always brief and almost always to my mom because calling my friends was too hard—I couldn’t tell them anything that would make sense to them. Now I was able to make these calls for free, at any time, with video. To see my kids was at once a balm, and a kind of agony. My daughter would hold the phone and tell me about her day, but she’d also ask me to read things which I couldn’t make out over the phone and, once, she even tried to wrestle with me in the way we do where she likes to jump on me. She jumped over the phone, and I tried to mimic my typical reaction to being jumped on, but we were both keenly aware of my corporeal absence. We were both aware of the extreme shortcomings of our connection and that I couldn’t very well be in two places at once. So, when I hung up and found myself zooming back from the site of my longing on the other side of the world, I often felt more alone than I had before calling and, perhaps, this is why, I continued being unable to sleep. 

 

Maybe adrenaline kept me going. Somehow, I was able to teach all day and lie awake all night. For the first three nights, I didn’t sleep more than an hour or two and, yet, I was somehow able to be coherent during the day. I think that this could be indicative of how anxious I was. Generally, when I don’t sleep for even a single night, I’m zombified all the next day, but in this new situation, it was almost like I didn’t need sleep or, at least, not for more than an hour or two. 

 

Gradually, I built up a routine around the day’s lessons and, my third night, after visiting my old host family, I slept well. I assumed that my wakefulness had perhaps been nothing more than jetlag and that, at last, I had reset my circadian rhythm, but, on the last day of my lessons, I once again found myself unable to sleep—so, I don’t think jetlag had ever been the primarily culprit. I was now anxious about finishing what I came to do and having days between now and my departure. While I had been working, I was fine, but when I began to think that I would have nearly another week just to wander around, I was tormented by the idea that I would have nothing to do but shift around until I could finally return to my family. This, too mirrored my time in the Peace Corps. After pre-service training—which had been full of activity and language classes—we moved to our permanent sites and suddenly, we had a lot more free time in which to contemplate the changes to our lives and what they meant. In these initial months in our permanent sites, we had most of the drop-outs or early terminations. That initial unguided period was the hardest to adjust to; it was too easy to indulge in homesickness when the structure suddenly dropped away. It was also difficult, at that point, what the passage of two years would even look like. It seemed like each day (all 730 of them) would be spent watching the clock tic. Thank god we met people, found things to do and stopped watching the clocks, but, in the early days, such a change was almost impossible to imagine. 

 

…

 

Back in Yerevan for my first day off after the training, I slept from around 3-10am and began to accept that, while I was here, I wouldn’t be sleeping soundly, consistently or at the right time. But, as long as I slept at some point I didn’t really care. 

 

I went out into the bright afternoon to return to the new skatepark which I was still quite amazed by, having found it just the night before. The park was a boon because it gave me an excuse to exercise and to mentally ground myself a little. It was also something I was good at doing alone. Wandering around, as I had previously done, had less interest for me. I think this is perhaps when I was younger and living in Armenia, I was still looking for something. I was restless and, therefore, every bend in the road, no matter how remote, offered the possibility of discovery. Now—what could I say?— I had found what I wanted. I was still curious, but curiosity was not enough to send out me exploring for the day in 95 degree weather, especially in a place I already knew fairly well. Primarily, what I wanted was to get on the internet and see if my wife and kids had sent any updates. My daughter’s recent foray into using face paints, for example, was much more of interest to me than architecture or even that hefty and lonely moon that kept sinking into the sky every evening. 

 

It was too hot to skate very long and I set out on a time-killing course through the city, eating here, getting a coffee there, sitting on a bench for a while, going to look at remembered buildings, etc. It was a beautiful day and there was plenty of sun and shade and I was glad for the scenery even if I was slightly distracted in my appreciation.  

 

I went to look at a few carpets, reasoning that it might be a while before I returned and wanted something valuable, permanent, and beautiful to serve as a keepsake of my career in Armenia. I greatly enjoyed visiting the cool rooms off the heavily touristed area around Republic Square and the chance to tell the carpet sellers my story. As always, I was glad to be an Armenian-speaking non-Armenian in these touristy places where English or Russian were more in use. Some good conversations can result that way. And, indeed, one carpet seller and I talked about the carpet museum in Shushi (in Karabakh, now part of Azerbaijan) that I had once had the pleasure to visit and wondered what had become of it. Was it intact, only now with different labels in a different language over the carpets proclaiming a different history and make? Or did the place get reduced to rubble in the effort to take the town. Were those beautiful carpets circulating somewhere on the gray market or is there nothing left of them?

 

When I had visited Shushi, it had seemed as Armenian as anywhere else and now, in just a few years’ time, it’s been taken by Azerbaijan (again). I find it unsettling to think of the hotel where we stayed, the typical stores we stopped into to get water or snacks and the people we chatted with waiting for the marshutka to take us back to Stepanakert. These were all so definitively Armenian even while they may have had a backdrop of a few ruined mosques and a cemetery in the weeds without crosses. I can see how this produces an existential anxiety in Armenians. No one knows the value of land and country like those who have watched it ebb and flow. In the States, for example, it’s unthinkable that Mexico should suddenly claim San Diego and all that’s there should become part of another world. Enough of this sort of thing, and even the center, the cultural heart of the country, would come to feel impermanent and traditions would have to expand enough to cover the loss so that something could remain. 

 

Our visit to the carpet museum in Shushi five years earlier, had been somewhat unremarkable. A somewhat cranky old woman dropped her hoe and opened the locked door for us. When she began to show us the exhibits, however, she began to brighten, it was obvious she enjoyed having a role in relation to this rich history. The main thing I remember is that she complained a lot about the rich in the area saying they were responsible for the woes of the area. I wonder if she still holds them accountable.

 

While I was discussing this with the carpet seller, tourists kept coming in and poking around in their touristy way. My host kept having to attend to their naïve questions in English. I tried not to grumble at their expectation that English would be spoken. There was no sign that said such. “At least learn enough Armenian to ask if English is spoken,” I thought. But then I remembered my layover in Frankfurt and how I had been just speaking English to people when I’d gotten myself into a predicament at the train station. I really couldn’t hold anything against these people. They were just as out-of-their element, if not more so, than I’d been. They knew very little about Armenia and probably less about carpets. Hell, I didn’t know anything about carpets either. However, when we’re foreign, I think we tend to rank ourselves in terms of foreignness. Because I’d lived here before and spoke enough of the language to discuss carpets, I felt my ranking was higher and, therefore, my presence was justified, or more justified than these tourists’ presence. Which, of course, led me back to think about the carpet museum in Shushi. I’m sure each party felt their presence more justified than the other. I decided this was a pretty problematic way of thinking and felt like a jerk for thinking anything about the tourists. Let them come. They would probably spend a lot more money than I was.

 

I left the carpet shop to wander around a bit more; I wasn’t in a hurry to get to Yeghegenadzor. I had more than two full days to be there and very little to do. I figured, for now, I’d stay on in Yerevan poking around at the newness of the city. So many things had been added, cleaned up and refined since I’d first come here. It wasn’t a personable as the rest of the country, but it was distracting as a mall is distracting. There was a lot to potentially buy, even if I wasn’t planning on buying anything. 

    

Later that day, I witnessed something strange. I was waiting at the marshutka stop to go down to Yeghegnadzor. As usual, we were waiting for the van to fill up before leaving and most everyone was milling around. The marshutka stop was just as it had been 12 years prior and, I was surprised that one of the drivers remembered me. When I’d arrived, he’d come up to me and asked, “now where are you wandering to?” I didn’t know him, so I wasn’t sure how to answer then he said. “Aren’t you that guy who wanders all over the place? I remember you.” Indeed I am. Well, I was. Having now both visited and guided I find I don’t feel much compunction to keep wandering. I’m primarily interested in seeing people. Places do nothing to relieve my loneliness and longing for my family, if anything, a beautiful place only makes me wish more keenly that my family were with me to see it. I used to be known for a characteristic I didn’t really exhibit anymore. Given that I’ve been much the same person since my early high school years, I don’t have this feeling too often and I wasn’t sure what to do with it. For example was it a positive or a negative thing that I was no longer very interested in rambling all over the countryside? Had I learned something or exhausted something?

 

Still, I was happy to be welcomed before even reaching Yeghegnadzor. Already, I was back on familiar ground. At this, the furthest reach of Yeghegnadzor, people remembered me. What would it be like to return? Yeghegnadzor, after all, was the place where I’d lived in Armenia. The rest of the country was made up of places I’d passed through, some longer than others. Perhaps returning to Yeghegnadzor would provide a more fecund soil for reflection. Maybe I’d find something there that hadn’t been as obvious elsewhere in Armenia. 

 

While I was standing around, musing thus, one of the quietly sleeping dogs at the marshutka stop suddenly began snarling, he went from being sound asleep to having his hackles completely up and teeth barred. It was almost as if he had a nightmare, for he didn’t seem to have an obvious reason for this behavior then, curiously, I saw the subject of his ire. He wasn’t just snarling, he as snarling at one very particular person, a man coming down the street with a great deal of sores on his body, though he wasn’t some diseased beggar. He looked like anyone else, he just had a lot of those sores you sometimes see on people’s elbows and on the backs of their hands. I once had a mild case of something like this; it’s probably some kind of fungal infection. 

 

As the man approached, the dog grew more livid. As he passed, the man cursed and feinted at the dog. The dog growled and snapped at the air. He was small, but livid, nearly rabid acting, like this man’s very presence drove him mad. This bizarre pageant continued as the man went down the street, but after he’d left the area, the dog settled down again. A little boy even went over to pet him. I heard someone say. “They can tell about people.” Or something like that. Then, while the boy was still petting the dog, the hackles rose again and the growl returned like a quiet motor gradually growing louder. The dog barked and began to snap at the air again. The boy jumped back and made kicking motions toward the dog, but, once again, it wasn’t the boy. The man with the sores had returned and the whole thing happened again until the man was out of sight and once again, the dog lay down, passive as can be. The strange thing about this situation was that when the man first appeared, the dog had been around the corner. From my vantage, looking in from the street. I could see both of them, but there had been no way the dog could’ve seen the man. He smelled him. The question was, what did that man smell like to that dog and what did the man do to get that smell? Again, it seemed to go back to that justification of presence. For the dog, this man did not belong here but who could say why?

 

I got to Yeghegnadzor late that afternoon. The last time I had come—five years ago—I had been flooded with the excitement of the tour guide. Here was the place I’d lived for two years, the place I’d been talking about for the last seven since I’d come back to America and, at long last, I was here again, both to indulge in my memory and to show it—in living color—to my wife. Walking up to the town, I had been almost giddy with nostalgia. It was an ordinary autumn day. The dry leaves rustled in the chill breeze. Curbside fires loosed a kind of atmospheric smoke into the air and I strained to see what lie ahead. Almost immediately, people began to recognize me and call my name. On the street, a youth stopped me, from a window, my former neighbor yelled down. I’m not exaggerating when I say it felt a bit like a parade—probably the closest I’ll get to being in one, anyway. Everything that followed for the next few days, was just confirmation of the beauty of that initial moment. One day, we went down to the Ottoman-style bridge (I’m not sure who was in charge when it was built, but there’s an Arabic script dedication on one of the headstones). Another, down to the waterfall I’d found one lonely afternoon when I’d lived here as a volunteer. And every evening, we had to have at least two dinners, torn as we were between invitations. We left a few days later, happy, but feeling like we could’ve stayed another day. 

 

Upon this return, I noticed I didn’t feel as though it had been five years since the last time. It felt more like I’d just left. While some things had certainly changed, there was a familiarity which pervaded everything. I felt a bit like when I first arrived back in 2008: thankful for this beautiful place, but elsewhere in my thoughts. Distracted.

 

I checked into my hotel—a beautiful place that I had picked at random via Google—and went out for a little stroll as dusk came on. Alone, with the wind roaring down from the hills and the dust dimming the light, I couldn’t but help feel quite melancholy as I passed the once familiar places. This time, no one called out, no one greeted me; This place, that had given me so much, to which I had also given a great deal, was the same but for the people, who had grown. I reflected that, when I’d lived here, most of the kids I’d played with and taught how to skateboard had been between 5-10 years old. This was 14 years ago; they would all be grown up now. Probably moved on. Mandatory conscription would put most of the boys in their two-year army stints. 

 

I stopped into a new bakery where I could see women hard at work preparing lavash. Never have I been in greater company in Armenia than when in the presence of such preparations. The sitting women, sweating greatly by the heat of the tandoor (Armenian: tonir) ovens, smile, chat and roll out the dough. It is as if they still recognize the richness of their task. They themselves are rich to have so much dough to prepare and they are doing a rich thing by baking for the community. I stopped in for a chat and bought a fresh sheet of dry lavash which was crackly, smoky and warm. I walked up to my old apartment building holding this huge sheet of bread, trying not to let crumbs fall everywhere (to be eating bread—or really anything—on the go like this is a curious thing in Armenia, as elsewhere in countries where time is not the most valuable commodity, people generally eat seated and in the company of others—no one walks around eating). 

 

The moon was nearly full and the storks were everywhere in their telephone pole nests with their young. I tried to appreciate the atmosphere, but I could only think, “this is to be shared: this lavash, this moon, these storks, this dusty wind, this evening lassitude. It’s all somewhat useless to the man who is alone and, further, is missing someone. What can I make of these things beyond wishes to share them?” Perhaps I was getting carried away with my melancholy, but, remember, this was a place that was suffused with my longing. When I’d first come, I’d left my known world behind and gradually, gradually, I’d come to feel at home here. So much so that, when I left after two years, I found that I’d inadvertently created a second home, or at least a storage space for so many memories. Only now did I see that, after my last visit, the place had retreated to its former emotional distance. Once again, I was here with everything I loved back where I had come from. I was alone and the place felt opaque, even unknowable. My stay was only to be a few days, but it stretched out in front of me nearly as long as it did when I’d first come. Two years, two days, what difference when you float just over the surface and just under everyone’s notice? 

 

Just as I was thinking this, I came to the old World War II memorial and met a young woman giving her young child a drink from the fountain. She looked up at me. I greeted her. 

 

“Do you remember me?” She asked. 

 

“I’m afraid I don’t” I responded. Happy to have been recognized again, nearly at the height of my melancholy. I reflected that, in the old days, I wouldn’t have been recognized. No one knew me.   

 

“You were my teacher. You teach well.” She said both sentences together, like they were natural cognates. 

 

“Thank you.” I replied. “Is this your son?” She said that he was and that he was three. I told her my daughter was also three and that I had a one-year-old son. “I miss them.” I told her for no reason other than that I wanted to say it out loud on this windy evening, in this isolated place. 

 

“Yes,” she said, bringing her son down from the drinking fountain. “To be with your kids is the best.”

 

This is something I’d been hearing in Armenia for a very long time. In the years past, I’d been scolded for taking too long to have kids. People had asked me over and over at both 25 and 34 when I was going to settle down and have kids. They repeatedly told me it was the best thing in the world. But I was young; I was seeing the world and happy to have little responsibility. Now of course, this notion that family takes precedent and that children are the most important thing in the world is not only obvious, but beautiful. I realized as I walked away from my former student, wishing her a good night, that I’d finally learned the lesson that Armenia wanted to teach me from day one: create your own Armenia and live there, settle down where you are comfortable and cultivate happiness with your children, your family, around you. When I’d first arrived, I missed my country, family and friends, but I was restless. I wanted to see the world and make connections to it. After two years, I succeeded in doing this so well that I thought of Armenia as my home, or at least another home and, upon returning to the States, I spent years trying to connect to other countries in the same way: Argentina, Paraguay, Thailand, but each time, the experience was different, not quite as captivating. When I returned to Armenia after a seven-year absence, I felt like I as coming home again and perhaps projecting this feeling, I was received in the same way. But my Armenian friends continued to chide me for not having kids. Now I was engaged. I was getting closer they were happy to note, but I was here again, possibly confused, for staying here would not help me create a home, unless I planned to stay here. Of course, my Armenian friends would’ve been ecstatic if I had decided to stay and raise a family here, but they knew better than I did that my home was where I was born, as it was for them. 

 

So now here I am again. I’ve learned the lesson. Learned it well in fact. My entire life is with my family. Without them, I have little reason to go out into the world. Perhaps it was only that I had to come back here one last time to tell everyone that I’ve finally understood what they’ve been saying all along: “You were right; thank you. I wish the highest happiness to you and your families. Now it’s time for me, too, to return home.”

 

In this realization, more than any before, I have understood Armenia. For now, there is nothing else to find here. I will always be grateful for what all I have learned and perhaps I will return in the future to learn something else from this land and people which continues to teach in a straight-forward and non-prevaricated way. 

 

To underscore this, the next day, I went back to many of the places where I used to roam and contemplate the speeding clouds. I went down to the bridge, past the university where I used to work, out to see a family who used to feed me; in each situation, I felt I had little to add to the immense collection of impressions I already had. They were happy motions, without profound implications. I sank back into this leisure time and appreciated it as the break it was. There it was, this place, which has once been the essence of the everyday had, through time and distance, returned to wonderful inscrutability. After I had learned my lesson, I became--perhaps for the very first time in Armenia--a tourist. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Legs Want What They Want

 “I don’t think you fly today.” When I close my eyes, I can still hear the Kazakh immigrations agent informing us that we’d neglected to get an extra stamp from the regional police office before departing and, as a result, we were going to have to miss our flight. We’d already slept in the airport and exhausted all our connections in Almaty; we’d also been traveling through Central Asia for over a month in the summer and we were very tired. “I don’t think you fly today.” It was a pithy statement that managed to condense every possible disappointment we’d faced along the way. All the visas, embassies, checkpoints, etc. had ultimately brought us here. To face this somewhat sympathetic, but implacable agent. For a moment, there seemed to be nothing to do but give up.

 

And yet, somehow, they let us go. I’m not sure why, maybe they realized that excessive rules were meant to be broken or just that the consequences of breaking them weren’t really that stiff. Either way, at some point, someone with authority decided to wave us through. We gloated our way through security and joined the sad-eyed crush in the airport’s smoking lounge where we toasted mini bottles of champagne to celebrate the end of our trip and triumph over pointless bureaucracy. It was a great feeling of exhaustion and elation and though it’s been over ten years, I’m still thankful to whoever decided to let us go.

 

But the sense that bureaucracy could slam down without warning, especially while traveling, has remained with me. At ever border, outside every airport, I’ve become terrified of forgetting some crucial piece. Of missing some vital Kafkaesque step in the entering/exiting process and being turned away to watch the clock run out or to await an uncertain tomorrow. Perhaps, this fear is innate in all of us and only needs the right experience to activate it and turn it into an outright phobia. 

 

Knowing this aspect of myself, I can only blame my botched visit to Frankfurt on 12 hours of flight disorientation and maybe the dammed adventurism in my immigrant veins that constantly prods me into new experiences with a sort of “nothing ventured, nothing gained” mentality. Especially as I am now quite old enough to know that ‘venturing’ can lead to a more profound kind of loss than standing still. 

 

…

 

The flight from SFO to Frankfurt wasn’t terrible, considering it was a full flight and loaded with the sounds, smells and associated discomfitures of 100s of people in a very limited space for a substantial amount of time. They’d given me plenty to eat and when I’d roused myself from my torpor—the sort of twilight sleep one enters on overnight flights when one is seated between two other passengers with very little leg room— we’d only had an hour left of our flight. For a ten-hour flight, it had gone well enough, but I will still anxious to stretch my legs a little after being cooped up for such an unnatural period, especially as I was connecting to a five-hour flight to finish my journey. 

 

Five hours is an awful time for a layover. It’s just long enough to tempt you away from the airport, but short enough so that you have very little time to enjoy yourself wherever you intend to go. So, it’s either, slink around the airport, basically indulging in the same environment you were just in the on the plane, or fry your mind with the stress of making a mad dash into a new city with only enough time to make the round trip journey and buy a quick souvenir—if you’re the type that buys such things. Me? I buy coffee everywhere I go, which only makes things much worse. 

 

I had a coffee in the airport and perhaps that’s what hastened my terrible decision to visit Frankfurt. After the coffee, I had no other plans and I couldn’t bring myself to settle down with the Ovid I’d brought with me for the next five hours. Also, just getting off the plane and having a sip of coffee, I felt a sort of resurrection and I was anxious to make use of it. Staying in the airport seemed the coward’s way out. Not for me! I would go into the city! I all but scoffed at those waiting at gates on my way to the exit and baggage claim.

 

I probably should’ve been tipped off by the German immigration agents supercilious looks. “You’re going where? How much time do you have?” When I inquired if they thought I’d be alright they only added. “Don’t be late.” I dismissed all this as so much worry-wortism and passed from the limbo of the airport to a vibrant German mall that, was, well, much like the airport, but dirtier. There was a McDonald’s and some kind of ‘wurst’ place and the vague sewage smell such subterranean malls have.  Surprisingly, I made it to the train platform before my anxiety was triggered. Even as I left the familiarity of the airport and made my way through the mall, I didn’t balk, but, at the platform, looking over the map, listening to the roar of multiple trains arriving and departing at once, I realized this damn train had more lines than the NYC subway and I didn’t know where I was going nor what line and platform it would be on. I also didn’t have much time to figure it out. The clock was already ticking.  

 

My sole experience with Germany previous to this had been in Berlin, largely in the company of a German citizen. In Berlin, I’d heard more English on the street than German. In Frankfurt, I was already hearing a lot more German. I stood by the train ticket machine, looking dumbfounded until a man came up behind me. I stepped aside for him and asked what I needed to buy to get to the center. He suggested I get a month pass. “It’s the same price as a day pass” he argued. What the hell? I thought this place was supposed to be efficient. That didn’t make any sense. Neither did the way of buying the ticket on the machine. He shrugged and walked away. So much for his help. 

 

I approached another guy on the platform. He spoke English well; he could have been British, but, as he was speaking, his train arrived, and he darted off with apologies—which made me confirm my assumption that he was British. I don’t think an American, even from the friendly Midwest of genteel South would apologize for such an obvious thing. Thank God there’s another group out there that apologizes more than us. 

 

That was when I got the shock. Here I was, already hopelessly confused, and I hadn’t even left the airport station. This didn’t bode well. If it was like this to leave, what would it be like to return? But, again, my restless legs took hold. It was a mutiny. They refused to stay still for the next five hours or pace the airport concourse. I found another—working—ticket vending machine (or perhaps my legs did), bought the month pass and crossed the tracks to the side where I’d seen a lot more people. I got on the next train when I saw the word “Central”. It was an RE3 train. Oh, Deutschland! What the hell kind of name for a train is RE3?

                                                            The Frankfurt Train Line Map

 

About 20 minutes down the line, I casually got off at the central station with half the city. We all came streaming out of the grand European station with the arched ceilings, trapped birds, and marble lions. Each with our own purposeful expression, and many, like me, with no idea what they were doing. We darted in and out and around each other, jockeying for positions of purposefulness. Nothing like travel to give you a fresh perspective on the absurdity of modern human rhythms. 

 

Near the station, I mean right outside it, was the migrant crisis. Well, the tame side anyway. No one was risking life and limb to cross the Mediterranean or the Sahara; no one was being threatened by Kalashnikoved checkpoint guards, they were just hanging around smoking, chatting. Staying as close to their home as they could by leaning against the walls of the train station, as if, at a moment’s notice they might receive word they could return to their respective homelands and they didn’t want to waste time getting across town or perhaps they were all waiting (Quixotically or no) for their homelands to come to them via the RE3. 

 

The streets had German names, but everyone in them was from somewhere else. I hadn’t been in such a thoroughly international place in years and years. Even San Francisco seemed a Des Moines by comparison. One place, I swear, was a Uyghur pizza place and it was busy! Everything was. On a Tuesday afternoon, every café table was filled with clients from Bosnia, Afghanistan and Lebanon (judging by the signs I’d seen around the neighborhood). There were Germans, too, but even the proverbial dudes on the corner drinking beer were speaking another language. 

 

Interesting place, but by the time I got down to the river (only about five blocks away from the train station), I figured, it was late enough and that I should start heading back. I was dizzy from the heat and carrying too much stuff. I still had a damn Target bag in my hand filled with plane snacks for god’s sake. What business did such a transit passenger have doing anything of meaning here in what was, so obviously, just a stop-over location?  I also felt—how can I put this?—disinterested seems the only word. I had no particular interest in this place. And it was proving to be of rather more a complicated level of enjoyment than I had anticipated. Also, every yell, every call from a child that came echoing through that warren of streets (and there were many) reminded me of home and my kids. What were they doing now? This question boomeranged back to me. What was I doing? I reflected by the water a moment and realized I honestly didn’t know, so I went back to the train station. 

 

The earlier crowds swarming in and out of trains seemed to have doubled in the short time I’d wandered around. Oh yeah. Duh. Rush hour by now. Well, no matter. I’ll go back to the track I got off at. Hmm. No RE3 train. No mention of the airport. No matter, I’ll check out some other tracks. Here’s one. Hmmm; looks like this is the one but it’s not leaving for another half an hour. Is that right? I thought German trains left every 2 and ¾ minutes. I should probably get out of here before half an hour passes. Almost six now. Flight leaves at 9. Still have to go through immigration and security. And right there, in the middle of those considerations I heard that chilling voice, summoned from the Almaty airport of my reckless youth: “I think you might not fly today.” The voice intoned and, despite the heat, I began to shiver. The consequences of missing my flight were too myriad and devastating to contemplate. I steeled myself and dashed down the line of platforms with all the other silly heedless people. 

 

“Excuse me,” I said to a woman waiting, sweaty and a little flushed by now, “Spreken zee English?” She nodded. “Airport?” I asked pointing to the train like Tarzan in the act of naming something. I half expected the woman to say. “No honey, that’s a train, not an airport.” But she simply nodded. I got on. But, after a minute or two, I suddenly had a thought. I turned to another woman (the first had gone) and made the same inquiry about English. “Yes?” she replied hesitantly, like I was asking for her phone number or something. Not that I blame her; I must’ve looked pretty disheveled by this point and anxiety, I think, produces a pheromone that people instinctively avoid. I held up my month pass. “Can I use this pass on this train?” She frowned. “No. That’s only for local transport.” “Well,” I tried, “could I make it to the airport without being checked?” The airport was, after all, the first stop listed. She gave this question the answer it deserved and simply shrugged. Well, the answer the question really deserved was “how the hell should I know!” But, well, you know these Germans. So polite. 

 

So, I jumped from that train and ran, lunged, ran-lunged, through the crowd to another train. The RE2 which mentioned the airport on its itinerary. Of course, I was terrified that I might wind up at the wrong airport. Was there more than one? Why didn’t I check before? Also, what if this was some kind of behemoth local train that would stop at every blade of grass between here and the airport? Once I made a decision and left the central train station, I wouldn’t have time to turn back and start again.  

 

It’s important to note that I hadn’t brushed my teeth in over 12 hours—or was it 24?—and that I was, by now, soaked with that bad pheromone anxiety sweat. I also had the battered Target back in my hand and a huge backpack on.  

 

Considering this, it’s a wonder no one grimaced when I coughed out the panicky question. “Airport!?” to the entire RE2 car. “Airport!?” I repeated, exclamation and all, looking at the guy closest to me. He nodded. Just to be sure, I went up a car and asked someone else. They nodded. I walked through the train. I couldn’t sit still. I was way too pumped up from having nothing but a cup of coffee that morning, an airplane oatmeal and gallons of adrenaline pouring from my brain down my spine. I began to calm down slightly when I saw other people with luggage on the train. I sat down, but, almost as soon as I did, I was assailed with another fear, why weren’t we leaving? I’d already been on the train a few minutes. I went over and pleaded to someone else, a business man by the look. “What time do we leave?” I had now entirely dispensed with a formality of asking if anyone spoke English, merely locking my crazed eyes on anyone and belching out panicky questions. “A half hour ago” was the reply and, from somewhere else, a chuckled response. “There’s a delay.” 

 

What! A delay! On a German train! Of course! Of course, but then, on the opposite platform, the RE3 just arriving! The same train I’d taken in and the one I knew to only take about 20 minutes. I turned back to the guy who’d mentioned the delay. “Do you think that one would be faster?” Again, the guy shrugged when he should have said ‘how the hell should I know?’ 

 

I jumped from one train and ran to the other. More suitcases. I grinned, nodded, and mouthed “airport” at the people, as if we were in some kind of club together. They stared back, probably thinking ‘do not engage, do not engage.’ I was really starting to lose it. I relaxed for about 5 seconds, before the anxiety returned with the crippling force of a migraine. Which train would leave first? Were either of them going to leave? The departure time was 5:42 and I watched as the clock passed 42, 43, 44, and at 48 past (!), my anxiety practically streaming out of my eyes, I noticed a bunch of people abandoning the opposite train (the one I’d previously been on). I watched them helplessly for a moment before finding some poor bastard to latch on to. 

 

“What’s happening” I shouted from the door of the RE3—too reluctant to step off for fear it should depart as soon as I did. “Delay?” I asked. He shrugged and thought this would suffice. But for me, nothing would suffice. “Are the trains delayed? Is there another way to get to the airport?” I looked down the platform and noticed, to my abject horror, none of the trains were moving. 

 

The man answered, but he was walking along. I couldn’t hear, but he seemed to indicate there was another way. I jumped off the train—the third one now—and followed him. 

 

“What about a taxi?” I asked, clinging to him like a persistent beggar, trying to ferret out my last hope for reaching the airport on time. 

 

“No way,” He answered, shaking his head as he walked, “it’s rush hour, it’ll take forever with the traffic. There’s the -- train or the -- line, but ----.” I was losing a lot of what he was saying as we moved through the crowd toward what looked like a subway station entrance. I ran ahead of him. At this point, totally heedless of where I was going. My mind reeling. How did I allow this to happen? Just a few hours ago, I was in the boring airport, now I was abandoning myself to unknown subway stations, just running around like a crazy person without a scrap of a plan. It was like a nightmare. So many options, and yet none of them going anywhere. 

 

Down on the platform, was a subway train filled with people. I turned back to the man behind me. “Does that go to the airport?” I asked. I regret that when he answered in the affirmative, I’m not sure I even thanked him before dashing onto the train. 

 

The bodies were packed in pretty well, but I used my gargantuan backpack to carve out a place for myself at the doors. I was the archetypal sweaty jerk with the backpack but, of course, when we’re the sweaty jerk with the backpack, we seldom care. It’s only an inconvenience when you’re the guy, minding your own business, having the awful thing thrust at you.  

 

As I pushed aside other passengers, I caught a man’s eyes and made my desperate inquiry. “Airport!!?” “Yes; it does.” He said politely. “I’m getting off at the stop before. I can show you.” “Danke” I replied feebly. I didn’t entirely expect the train to depart. I assumed this, too was about to be delayed. But then, mercifully, the momentum I’d been searching for had finally found me and the train glided away from the station. 

 

At each stop, as the train pulled away from yet another platform, I felt myself become less frantic. And I even relaxed enough to talk to my Samaritan a little. I asked where he was from. Told him I’d come from California and was going to Armenia. As the train chugged along, I reflected that he was the only one who got to see me as a human. Everyone else only saw me rushing up to and away from them, which doesn’t leave a human impression but rather the ghost of one. To go into a city and spend most of the time being a frantic ghost—what a strange thing to have done, not only to the people of Frankfurt, but to myself.  

 

At one station the train emptied out—and for a moment I felt a catch in my throat, “why was everyone getting off?” but then the Samaritan told me that this was the stop for the stadium and that Coldplay was in town. It was then that I knew I had nothing to fear. If something as mundane as a Coldplay concert was happening, there could be no fear of missing flights and further delays and, thankfully, I was right. We pulled out of the station and at the next, I said goodbye to my Samaritan. 

 

“Dankeshun” I said, as he went for the doors. I may have unconsciously put my hand over my heart to intensify my sentiment. 

 

“The next time,” he said from the platform, “perhaps I’ll need your help in California.”

 

“I hope so.” I told him. It was all I had time for before the doors closed and we pulled out; next stop, The Airport. And it was if, all at once, I realized the chance to meet this person and feel this relief was almost reason enough to have come. Almost. 

The Hole of Progress

  

This might not be too clear, I’m writing from the bottom of a hole, my perception is limited by the soaring dirt walls on either side of me; the sky overhead is a bit vague and uncertain. It’s easy to doubt it’s sky at all; it could just as easily be facsimile: painted clouds on a cerulean board.

 

I started digging this hole back in October. There was an administrative position in my alma mater’s English department and I thought, “Well, it’s full-time and it’s down the street. There’d be benefits and a steady schedule. It’s something worth thinking about.” I tend to be pretty spontaneous with decisions and stuff like that and within a day or so, I emailed a former instructor, figuring he’d have some advice and maybe some insight, considering it was his institution. He wrote back pretty quick, I’m going to paraphrase a bit:

 

“Nice to hear from you! My advice is to apply to everything, but I would suggest scheduling a meeting with your boss. You’ve been at the college four years now. Ask about the possibility of a full-time position there. They might be willing to create something.”

 

I took him up on both ideas. I applied to the admin. job (and never heard anything back) and scheduled a meeting with the Dean of Arts and Humanities where I currently work. He missed the message in the first email and I had to write him again. 

 

“Sorry if it wasn’t clear, but is it possible to schedule a meeting to discuss career possibilities?”

 

I felt like such a toady writing something like that. Perhaps I was asking for something that I hadn’t earned, but, of course, there’s the American value about speaking up and valuing yourself. Besides, the Dean was a nice guy. I figured if I was making an ass of myself, he’d tell me.  

 

I met with him on Zoom a day later and made a case for a full-time position, framing it as though I were asking for more advice. He repeated what my former instructor had said, ‘apply to everything, even admin.’ But he added, ‘I’ve been thinking about putting in for a split Adult Ed. and English full-time position; I’ll talk to the director of Adult Ed.’ 

 

The full-time position potential was exciting, but a long-shot. I knew the English department had put in for full-time positions in the past and they’d been denied by the higher-ups. In my four years, I’d only seen one go through and that was for classes in the prison in Crescent City—I assumed there was different funding for that. Hence the approval.

 

And yet, I was hopeful. The previous summer I’d been informed that the president wanted to visit my class. I’d stressed out about the visit, but it had gone pretty well. He’d sat in the corner nodding quite a bit, which was something, given it was the first time I’d taught poetry. Later that week, he visited my English composition class as well.  There must’ve been something to appreciate if he’d visited two, right? Ultimately, the president would be the one to approve any new full-time position requests. Perhaps he’d appreciated (or heard about) my work forging a connection with the local high schools and creating a path between non-credit and credit classes. Maybe he’d see this position as a way to honor and continue that work. After all, it had benefitted the college as well as the students and I’d made some pretty good connections outside the purview of most associate faculty.

 

Just before the holiday break two things happened. One the president invited me to present on my experience teaching overseas to his Rotary Club and, two, the full-time position was approved. It was hard not to feel that this was auspicious. At once, there was an opportunity for a full-time position and a sort of presidential nod. If he’d thought me a lousy teacher, it seemed unlikely he’d invite me to speak to the Rotary club. Right?

 

I woke up before dawn one morning at the end of the holiday break, gulped some coffee and started the ride, in the dark, down the highway to Eureka. There weren’t too many cars out yet and the dawn had been forestalled by the cloudy weather that had come down the mountains to meet the ocean. The sun couldn’t quite break through and glowed dully behind the mountains like backlighting. 

 

Arriving in Eureka, I had the sudden realization that I must’ve gotten the time wrong. It must’ve been for 7pm, not 7am; what kind of group met at 7am on a weekday? I’d woken up early and come out for nothing and I’d have to come back at 7pm, once again in the damn dark. 

 

The café’s posted hours said they opened at 7:30, but the door was open and there was someone inside, seemingly standing in line. I slipped in the propped open door and approached the counter with the awkward mien of someone not entirely awake and uncertain if a place is open. 

 

“’Rotary Club?’ Oh yeah,” The barista informed me. “We open early so they can have their meeting. They’re in that room.”

 

That early in the morning, it was a surreal experience. No one was masked—to be fair they were drinking coffee—but since I wasn’t, I kept my mask on and couldn’t help but to feel that this looked offensive. We began with the pledge of allegiance—which I haven’t said since I was in high school—standing there, trying to remember the words, I felt like I was parodying it. I wasn’t even sure I had the right hand up and in the right place, but I was too uncomfortable to look down and check. Then there was a prayer. And throughout the whole thing, I’m standing there, drawing stares or seemingly drawing stares from the club’s members. Who the hell was this pinko in their midst who seemed uncertain how to do the pledge and only partially bowed his head during the prayer. In our secular nation, it’s bewildering to be confronted with both patriotism and religion at such an early hour. These are things with proscribed responses and not using these responses with alacrity has seditious overtones and yet, well, they’re profoundly personal. We have varied relationships to God and country—our freedom allows us to express these and yet, well, in certain situations, it’s expected that one will fall in line. My appreciation for this country lies in things like my gratitude for pedestrian rights of way and the lack of a social contract that would force me to behave a certain way. But those things aren’t part of the pledge. To me, the pledge is about relevant as a druid chant on the equinox. I stood there, half-awake, saying those weighty words, trying not to think about the problems that had resulted from their varied interpretation. The announcement of a prayer was just bewildering. 

 

When I looked up from the prayer—perhaps a little too late in trying to look reverent— the meeting had begun with news. So-and-so in the hospital, wants everyone to pray, fire department sponsoring a toy donation drive, etc. Being the only person in the room with a mask, I felt I had a gag on. The damn thing kept creeping up into my eyes as I swallowed nervously. I was continually reaching up to tug it back down and, when I did this, it seemed the motion always caught someone’s attention. 

 

The president, who’d invited me, wasn’t in attendance and was meeting virtually. Without a familiar face and with the necessity of sitting through the beginning of the meeting my presentation seemed non sequitur, like I’d presentation-bombed this group with something radical and uncalled for. “The Peace Corps? Cultural Relativism? What is this shit?” It’d been a while since I’d stood in front of group of unmasked people. I struggled to make the lessons of life in Armenia interesting or relevant. I struggled to explain why the experience gave me my own sort of pledge of allegiance. Who knows what the Rotary Club got out of it, but they were polite and clapped and asked questions at the end. I hung around a second at the end, but it was apparent everyone was off to work. The room emptied out pretty quick. 

 

And yet, it felt like a success, no one had been wowed, but I’d gone in and done what had to be done and made it as interesting as I could. One guy had stuck around to ask me a few more questions and to chat a little. The president had now seen me “instruct” three very different rooms of people. Perhaps this presentation and my triumph over strangeness would count for something in consideration of the full-time position. 

 

This was back when all kinds of things seemed possible. 

 

Running with the advice I’d gotten to ‘apply for everything’ I’d spent the entire break working on applications. I’d met with a colleague to revise my CV. I’d sent my cover letter and teaching philosophy statement to a friend—also an English teacher—to review. Applying for teaching positions is a probing and exhaustive effort. It’s a bit like going to the dentist because you sit with yourself, mull over your thoughts, but while one part of you is perfectly at rest, another part is being strained to the limit. Instead of your teeth, it’s your experience, your value as an educator that’s being taxed. You are writing a letter of interest that responds to a college’s mission and values statements. You are writing a teaching philosophy that considers the course sequence of the college to which you are applying, and you are answering specific diversity questions that take into account the demographics of the institution’s area. Do most students speak Korean or Spanish as a first language? How does that factor into how you’d teach ESL 212 which focuses on authentic writing to prepare for English 101, which has course learning outcomes which focus on communication in meaningful context. Each application is like a separate research project. If you don’t show that you’ve dug deep into this institution and considered how your skills could be a fit for colleagues, students, program and institution than, well, let’s just say when you don’t get an interview, they don’t even bother to notify you.

 

So, day after day during the break, I sat in a café researching institutions and doing things like making audio recordings responding to specific questions about teaching at the institution on top of the CV, letter of interest, teaching philosophy, diversity statement and responses to specific questions. But, hell, I was happy that there were any positions at all, Covid had all but wiped out the possibility of any full-time work. I checked Higher Ed Jobs about once a day, and I hadn’t seen anything that wasn’t ‘adjunct’ in a couple of years and, suddenly, here were five positions, full-time and in places that I’d like to live. Usually when these positions come up there were in suburban New Jersey or Dallas. No offense to either, but I know no one who lives within 100 miles of either and, with two small children, well, it felt important that we only contemplate moves to places where we’d feel somewhat familiar and where we knew someone within half a day’s drive.  

 

But, well, I never expected to hear back from any of these places. I’d been applying to positions for about five years and in all that time, I’d gotten a single interview that was over almost as soon as it began. I hadn’t realized there was a format to answering interview questions for colleges. Until that interview, I’d always given honest answers, considering my experience which had been well-suited to the discussion-like format of the interviews. This had been enough for part-time, volunteer and fellowship positions, but I’d learned that full-time was an entirely different league where they gave you a battery of scripted questions—sometimes in advance, sometimes not—you prepared a teaching demonstration and none of this was discussed. The panel, after they gave the questions, said nothing, just made notes. So, to be successful, one had to have one’s lines down very well: you were expected to monologue meaningfully on your experience. 

 

I didn’t expect to hear from the other places I’d applied to, but I did hope to get an interview for the Adult Ed. / English position that I couldn’t help but to feel I’d had a hand in creating at the college where I worked. After the announcement about this position had gone out, a few people had even contacted me. “This was made for you!” they told me. “Well,” I couldn’t help but to think, “in a way, it was made by me.” 

 

I didn’t let this talk get to me, though; I didn’t want to take anything for granted. Yes, I’d been the only faculty member working in both departments. Yes, I’d done a lot to bring these departments together. Yes, this was all following recent legislation that the college wanted to show they were conforming to. And yes, I had numbers to demonstrate my success. Still, that didn’t mean I had any right to the position. I still had to prove this and luckily, in late February, I was told I’d be given a chance to do this. I’d gotten an interview.  

 

Happy as I was, I felt slightly conflicted about the interview. This was a career-level job. It would essentially cement my family to this place. There were pros and cons. We’d been trying to buy a house for years, unsuccessfully; the housing crisis in coastal California was about as pronounced as it got. Even with a better-paying job, I wasn’t sure we could afford a house with increasing prices. I’d also spent 2008-2016 moving to a new country every two years. I had grown accustomed to a more sedentary lifestyle since having kids, but being sedentary in the moment vs. being sedentary for the next twenty years or so were very, very different things. Although I knew we were fairly stable, I always felt the possibility that we could move if something came along. With a tenure-track full-time job, there’d be no reason to leave if I got it. We’d grow old here. But, of course, I’d be turning 39 in a month, I was already growing old.  

 

And there were the other jobs I’d applied to in places like Seattle, Portland and Santa Rosa. All of which felt like places I’d rather live in and places my wife also wouldn’t hate. She might not want to move, but, given the option between suburban New Jersey and Seattle, well, convincing her might be a little easier. What if I landed the job here and then got an interview for Seattle. Would I spend my life asking, “what if?”

 

But I couldn’t anticipate getting interviews for any of these positions. And I had an interview for this position. I also had a bit of home court advantage, so, I reasoned, it would be worth it to throw everything I had into this position. Maybe years down the road it would mean something else. But, for now, it was enough. Besides, we’d come to think of this place as home. My wife and both my kids were born here. Yes, it was expensive and the competition for non-descript, two-bedroom homes was at the level of over half a million dollars cash, but, people had been telling us for years that it was always possible some old hippy would want to sell to a young family regardless of price. Just because nothing of the kind had yet occurred didn’t mean it was impossible and maybe, with my salary doubling if I got the job, I could expand the search a little, too. 

 

The interview was scheduled for the first week of March, before spring break. If I passed muster, I’d move on to the second interview to be scheduled later. I got the questions in advance and spent an entire morning in the café writing essay-length responses to them and then printing these out and pouring over them, highlighting the most relevant parts of the responses and reading them out loud. I ended up with pages of highlighted text and about 300 ideas and concepts rattling around in my head. 

 

The problem was the only opening they had for an interview was right after my Monday morning class. I’m not sure if that was on purpose or what, but I’ve since realized that most interviews are scheduled for Monday morning, so there must be some logic in it. Mondays, I’m always a little slow to get started and right after class, I’m usually a little worn out and, well, brain-dead. I’ve noticed that it’s the time of the day when I’m most likely to stare blankly at the screen in front of me. 

 

But I continued practicing the questions right up until the day of the interview. Before class that fated Monday, I had an extra cup of coffee and felt like I was ready enough when the spinning Zoom wheel: “please wait for your host to begin the meeting” suddenly broke and six faces appeared before me, expectant, indifferent and, even, bored. Zoom. How can you tell what anyone is thinking on Zoom? And how can you talk when you don’t know what your audience is thinking?

 

What I’ve since learned to do is to focus on the most receptive face and ignore the others. In most interviews, one face is more ebullient than the others. When this face smiles and imperceptibly nods at your answers, you gain confidence, leading, hopefully, to more smiling and nodding. The challenge becomes: ‘please this face’ and this is a hell of a lot easier than explaining every conceivable facet of your experience in a 45–90-minute monologue. I was a radio station DJ as an undergraduate and the means of communication in each situation is comparable. It’s easy to talk yourself into a corner and it’s awkward to reset yourself when you do. In something as subjective as this type of interview, especially for a teacher—where communication is the lion’s share of what you do—I can’t imagine that talking yourself into a corner wouldn’t count against you. So, in a way, you’re being marked on oratory skills, as well as content knowledge.

 

That first interview, I felt encouraged. I saw a nodding face and I focused on sharing my knowledge and experience in a way that would make it nod and maybe even smile. Certain subjects seemed to cause the face consternation; I changed them in favor of those that brought the nods back. The other blank faces, some of them belonging to colleagues I never felt I’d been able to make an impression on for whatever the reason, were, frankly, terrifying, enough that just a glance at them confused my message. But the nodding face brought me back on track and worked up my passion. That’s the best advice I can give if you have a Zoom interview: find the most genial face, talk to it and ignore the others. 

 

I found out within a day or two that I had been selected for the second round of interviews to follow spring break, again on a Monday, but in two parts so that the first part would come before my class, early in the morning and second part would follow my class. This interview would also have questions which would not be given beforehand and a teaching presentation, thankfully not a teaching demonstration. It was a relief that I didn’t have to treat the faces on the Zoom interview panel as participants in a “mock lesson” but rather only had to present an assignment sequence to them. Looking back, I wonder if perhaps this would be one of the reasons I didn’t get the position.

 

Before the break, I created the presentation, bringing in student numbers, student learning objectives, authentic responses to assignments and language from assignments. It was like being audited on my instruction and I had to show all my receipts of students’ achievement. I went back and forth on the presentation. Having no questions to prepare for, I trimmed the presentation, added to it, trimmed it some more and finally just said, “all right, let’s just leave it for a while.” But I frankly had no idea how much information to give. I could justify every aspect of the sequence, but did I need to?

 

I needed a break, from all the strain of maintaining classes, preparing applications, readying for interviews, and watching blank faces on Zoom. We took a trip to Seattle to visit friends. I’d also applied to two schools up there, and, well, you never knew, maybe I’d still hear from one of those. If I did, it’d be nice to have recently taken a look around up there.

 

We came back five days later, full of vegan donuts and the cool humid air that soughs the pines of the Pacific Northwest. In a way, coming back confirmed my decision to focus on the interview for my college. I was happy to be home and realized that a move to Seattle might be a bit of a crazy idea, even if I had once preferred crazy ideas, I was less inclined to take them up now. Since having kids, my life had contracted around my family. I no longer cared much about the entertainment options that would’ve drawn me to a larger city. It was enough just to find some time to read and have a cup of coffee without interruption. 

 

I spent another couple of mornings after we’d returned looking over the presentation and reviewing a mammoth list of potential interview questions, but I found it hard to focus on so many ‘potential’ questions. Once I’d spent more than 15 minutes on an answer, I thought “well, who knows if they’re even going to ask this? I can’t spend too much time thinking about this.” I’d move onto the next question, but then I’d feel like the previous answer had been somehow incomplete. 

 

Mikey came up for a quick visit at the end of the week and we went bike camping Saturday night. I thought this would be just what I’d need to relax a little before the interview, but the cold and marauding raccoons had kept me up most of the night and the next night, Sunday, the night before the interview, I started to feel anxious. 

 

Since my daughter was born a few years ago, I’ve had anxiety-induced bouts of insomnia. It began, I think, with worrying about the new life I’d brought into the world; a life that was part of mine, but that was, improbably, sleeping in a bouncy chair on the floor (it was the only place she’d sleep; I should add that another factor was probably that she didn’t sleep much anyway, so I’d gotten somewhat accustomed to waking up at odd hours and my circadian rhythm became more like a circadian beat which varied greatly depending on the song being played.) My worry would wake me up in the night and I’d have to check and make sure she was still breathing, even if it meant waking her up. Even if I didn’t wake her up, after being flooded with the adrenalin of parental worry, I’d have a hard time falling back asleep.  

 

I must’ve gotten accustomed to the insomnia because it would periodically reemerge, even after my daughter had outgrown the possibility of SIDS and had become a healthy young child who could easily remove an errant blanket or pillow from her face in her sleep. It was usually the same scenario, I’d wake up after about two hours of sleep and starting mulling over some problem that would, in the dark, seem much, much worse than it had looked by the light of day. I know it’s cliché, but damn if the most mundane things don’t look terrifying when you think about them lying down. As the problem assumed titanic proportions, I’d become more awake and, within 10 minutes, I’d find myself wide awake. Reading could distract me, but it couldn’t bring sleep back and I’d watch the hours pass by until, usually about an hour before I had to wake up, I’d finally fall asleep.

 

Often, the problem that would begin to coalesce when I woke in the middle of the night was only that of sleep itself. I’d immediately think “shit, I’m awake; I should be asleep. I need rest!” and this thought would be enough to drive sleep away for the rest of the night, especially because due to all the interruptions of a toddler and an infant (we’d since had another kid), my circadian beat had become more of a circadian murmur. No matter how little sleep I got, when something woke me up, I never felt that teenage desire for just one more minute. When I was up, I was up like a dog who goes from whimpering in his sleep to bolting out of the door after a squirrel. 

 

So, Sunday night, after not sleeping much the night before on the camping trip, when I woke up after about an hour, I knew what I was in for. Lying awake, when I had any thought, any thought at all, I imagined a stop sign—trying to block the possibility of thought. I lay there thinking about stop signs until about 2 am, when I finally had to go to the living room to read and change my environment. It felt like a great achievement when I feel asleep about two and half hours before I had to get up. I hadn’t gotten a lot of sleep, but I’d beat the insomnia and managed not to stay up all night; that’s what I’d been most afraid of. It’s the worst when you’re still awake and your alarm goes off. At least I’d gotten a transition.  

 

However, this meant I’d only had about five or six hours of sleep combined in the last two nights. My thoughts were sluggish, even in conversation with my wife before I went off to work and my interviews, I was stumbling over my words. 

 

The first part of the interview was just a conversation with the VP of Instruction—it was pretty informal and, when she revealed the only question she really had was “well, why do you want the job?” I loosened up quite a bit; perhaps this would go alright. 

 

After class, I went back to the familiar Zoom room, seeing the familiar faces. The questions would come first and then the presentation portion. Again, I focused on the nodding head in the grid of otherwise unresponsive heads, but, when I started giving answers, instead of eliciting nods, I seemed to be gradually raising the eyebrows and even turning down the corners of the mouth on the face I was focused on. ‘Dammit, change focus, answer this question with a different experience, with another lesson,’ my mind screamed while I talked and smiled, but no, the face had become frozen in a mask of perplexity. I shuddered to think what the other faces were doing, probably all but frowning and tsk-tsking at my ignorance. 

 

The worst thing that happens when an interview doesn’t go well is that you begin to feel like you’re wasting everyone’s time. You’ve bombed. They’ve all made up their minds already, but, improbably, you’ve got 45 minutes left of talking to do. Once this thought presents itself, you lose heart, you babble with a big fake smile. Two decades of experience teaching leaks out your ears and you become a random person stopped on the street and asked a complex and specific question that you feel you must attempt to answer while having no knowledge of the subject. You become, effectively, a bullshitter, and everyone knows it.   

 

I may have gotten a few theoretical punches in, but the bulk of the Q and A consisted of such bullshitting alternated with rambling. Once I was knocked down, the lack of sleep, made it difficult to get back up again. Then, horribly, that expressionless grid of faces announced they were giving me five minutes to prepare my presentation after the questions were done. I had to turn off my screen and be utterly alone with myself after the half-answered questions and stuttering replies. It was terrible, I couldn’t see my presentation—which I had open on the desktop— I only saw my own miserable face reflected back in the screen and then, one by one, the boxes came to life again, the expectant faces had returned. I took a deep breath and began again. There was a lot of information on the screen; too much, it turned out. 

 

The next two weeks were agonizing. When I’d finished the first interview, I hadn’t even thought about the results, but I’d swiftly been invited to the second round. Now that things hadn’t gone well, but without an answer or an objective assessment of the interview, I was riddled with superstition, seeing portents and prognostications in everything. Everything in the universe strained toward a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ orientation and each of these, for me, were related to whether I’d gotten the job. The most agonizing thing was that I knew that immediately following the interview, the decision had been made, if not formally at least in the minds of the interview panel, but I’d have to wait weeks before I’d hear it. 

 

From one hour to the next, I’d convince myself that I’d either bombed the interview or had done alright. According to the moment, these both seemed like totally probable results. Yet, an ominous silence was growing and, at times, while I tried to go through my daily routine, it seemed to almost rise up and choke everything around me until I felt like calling HR and pleading with them just to tell me something and rid me of the terrible suspense made all the more terrible because it was false suspense; I knew the answer in my heart, but then, I’d see a leaf fall off a tree in a certain way and think “well, perhaps I’m wrong—maybe it wasn’t as bad as all that. That leaf is pointing to letter ‘H’ on the sidewalk. In Armenian, ‘yes’ is ‘ha’. Therefore, blah, blah blah.” It was both ridiculous and agonizing, like something out of Kafka.  

 

In this nightmare, however, there was a flicker of hope. The day after the second interview, when I was feeling absolutely horrible, I missed a call from a college in Seattle. “Could I call back to schedule an interview?” The message asked. It was only the second interview I’d ever had with an institution that I’d had no previous contact with. My sense of dread dissipated a little, but, still, I knew now there were no guarantees and I felt it was ridiculous to throw over the position I’d been so close to in favor of such an unknown where I stood much less of a chance. But, it was something that offered affirmation and a second chance when I so desperately needed it. 

 

I couldn’t focus at work. I checked my email twice an hour, at a minimum. I didn’t have reception on my phone in the office where I worked, so I made an excuse to step outside every chance I could. Again, the silence swelled and grew portentous and burdensome until it began to feel as though I were constantly soaked by a cold rain one from which I could neither extricate myself nor become inured to as one sometimes does in a cold drizzle. The not knowing about something that would so clearly alter the course of my life, was maddening, and it wasn’t so much not knowing, as the incessant guessing my mind wouldn’t stop doing. Every day, after 5pm, when there would be no response, I’d sink into a blank torpor, only to begin again when anxiety woke me up at 5 am. 

 

After a week, I did contact HR. I tried to be tactful. They told me an answer would be coming soon. Probably early this week. Probably. No one knew anything concretely. Why all the mystery? Why couldn’t they just say a time when I would know? Why couldn’t the process be more transparent and predictable? Why did I feel like I’d given up my rights to any agency in life after I’d subjected myself to the scrutiny of an interview? 

 

All day Monday and all day Tuesday, I checked my phone and email like a teenager who has just offered a declaration of love over voicemail and awaits a reply. It was a sickeningly familiar feeling, but one with new stakes and a much less mercurial judgement. In the back of my mind, when rejected for dates in high school, I’d always acknowledged that each person had personal tastes and that a rejection didn’t necessarily comment on my character. I knew I’d rejected people who had been perfectly good human beings it’s just that there wasn’t a spark as I saw it. No matter how much I liked someone, I understood that if the feeling wasn’t reciprocated, it wasn’t because I was imperfect, but while I tried to tell myself the same about the interview, well, it was an interview, and they were experts. If I didn’t get the job, it was because I wasn’t good enough. Period. No amount of consoling would convince me otherwise. 

 

And that’s the awful thing; they’ll try to console you anyway. They tell you their applicant pool was exceptionally strong, that they had a lot of applicants and that they were, frankly, surprised by the exceptional quality of all the candidates, that you were a strong contender, but all this is worthless palaver. The message is clear. We chose the best. You weren’t the best. Our judgement was sound and unbiased and objective. You, objectively, were not the best candidate, making you less than ideal. Try to reason out of that. You can’t. It’s like when a court has made a decision. It can be overturned, but the language on job applications asks “have you ever been convicted?”. Regardless of what was overturned later, you were convicted; you are marked; you are changed. Again with the Kafka. 

 

Wednesday afternoon and still no word. My class ended at 12:20 and my tutoring session in the library started at 2:00. I finished sending messages out to the students and preparing for next week (as best as I could with my seriously compromised attention) when I started across campus to the library. Still nothing on my phone when I walked back into the service area. 

 

At the door of the library, I thought… was it? Was that the Dean? He’d been on the interview panel. I didn’t know if I should make eye contact. He was talking to someone. I would have to walk right under his nose, but I was uncertain, not wanting to interrupt, I gave a half-hearted wave and nod, about to slip into the doors. God, my heart speeds up just thinking about it. 

 

“Jonny,” the dean turned from his conversation, and I saw it on his face right away. You’d think after all the waiting there’d be some modicum of relief, but it still come as stomach-bottoming out disappointment. In the moment, you’d gladly return to the agony of not knowing, if only for another moment of staving the irreversible moment off. But, even after his face has said it all, he most give it words. 

 

“I’m sorry, man. The pool of applicants was …” But all I hear is ‘I’m sorry’ echoing on and on. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” We are done. This is all there is to the message. There’s no going back. I go back over the history: October (meeting about positions), November (position approved), December (work on application) and on through, what is this, April? Jesus. Just let the ground swallow me. I have deluded myself. I have flown too high. 

 

I try to be bright in my response “hey, no big deal,” but this is such bullshit, that I change mid-sentence to just saying “thanks”. It’s the only honest thing I can say that doesn’t end with me wringing my hands. 

 

Thankfully, our engagement was very brief, and it was busy in the tutoring center. I worked with a student on a Spanish assignment, which almost never happened. But, still, what was I doing here? I wasn’t first pick. Was I even second? Did I belong here?

 

I guess this is an especially poignant question because teachers, in their position of authority on a subject, often doubt themselves, especially as the application of that knowledge isn’t objectively clear and relies, to a large extent, on the individual student’s engagement. What is a good teacher to one, might not be to another. I don’t build homes that stand the test of time. I don’t complete surgeries that restore the patient’s health; I don’t create software that does aggregates information in a useful way. I profess to explain writing and language and to offer supported practice with new concepts in a way that leads to understanding and a personally valuable practice. Hell yes, I doubt that I am good at that. Every day I doubt that I am good at something so difficult to quantify, especially when I hear my colleagues talking about how difficult it is to quantify it. Then I really wonder about what I am doing. So, when a panel of tenured English faculty, the position I aspire to, declare that I’m not their first pick, well, there’s some tacit acknowledgment that, by extension, I’m not very good at this at all. 

 

…

 

For a few days, I avoided eye contact with people. Not only people I didn’t know well, but even my wife. Somehow when anyone addressed me, my instinct was to turn away, as if I was constantly expecting more bad news; another rejection, perhaps. And all this turning away, made me feel resentful, as if the people I were conversing with were somehow getting me to turn away on purpose, as if they were commanding me to avert my gaze. I felt sick with bitterness but lacking anyone to heap it on, I choked on it and seethed with it.  

 

And each night, I’d wake up around 2 or 3. Maybe it would be my infant son crying, but most of the time, I’d just find myself inexplicably awake, looking around the dark room thinking “it’s over; you ruined it; you botched it. You can’t get it back.” At least before the interviews, there’d still been some kind of hope, but I couldn’t expect that the committee would call me out of the blue and say they’d made a mistake. There was no going back.

 

Throughout this, if you remember, there was the interview for the school in Seattle. I may have missed my opportunity here, but I had a shot at once elsewhere. The interview wasn’t scheduled until the end of April, so I had plenty of time to prepare. I tried not to feel to hopeful, but it was nice to have something to look forward to.

 

And then, in early April, I got an email with “congratulations” in the subject heading from Santa Rosa Junior College; I’d been accepted for an interview there as well. A week or so later, Portland Community College sent me a similar email. After years of myriad applications and no response, my fortunes changed. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to stay where I was anyway. I’d long been wanting to relocate, to move closer to a large airport to make travel back to see my family easier and while I’d become comfortable where I lived, I found myself feeling excited over the prospect of moving to a big city with more amenities. A library that was open on Sundays, for example, museums. I knew from experience how challenging these interviews were and that they all had multiple stages, but I’d really hedged my bets. With three of them, how could I lose? For a while, my failure seemed insignificant, a step along the way to a greater success. 

 

Throughout April, I purged myself of the botched interview with new interview preparation. I researched programs, created mock classes to present, completed “interview homework”—one college had assigned homework in addition to the teaching demonstration—I revisited everything I’d done for the first interview and tried to do it better. But, despite having gone through all the preparation, once already, I wasn’t able to cull any valuable lessons from it because each institution was so different and, predictably, their interviews were similarly different. 

 

The stock response candidates give when they don’t get the job is that it was a “learning experience”. They explain that going through the whole process revealed certain things about the way it worked. Well, either I was incredibly dense or this was fragrantly untrue. As far as I could see, there was no single way to do this and be successful. The panel would be made up of people and, people being people, responded differently to different things, regardless of the rubric in front of them. For example, Portland Community College mentioned their emphasis in creativity in the interview, seeming to encourage a creative response, while one of the Seattle colleges, had a large and well-regarded international studies program as well as refugee students, so, a varied demographic the needed addressing. So, instead of drawing from any particular lesson from my failed attempt, I spent all my time crafting specific responses for each school.   

 

…

 

The night before the first interview, plagued with memories from the last interview, I couldn’t sleep, but I managed to get about five hours in. The interview was on my birthday and I thought this might help me to feel a little more confident about it. If there was ever a day for narcissism, it was one’s birthday and interviews, more or less, invite narcissism. Also, I figured a good interview could be a gift to myself. My wife and I planned to go out to eat after the late-afternoon interview and, in the meantime, I spent the day reading and rereading the notecards I’d written, pacing around, writing the notecards over again in better handwriting and then writing the primary points from them again. 

Just before the interview, my wife took the kids to the park and I went skating to clear my mind of all the nervous energy I’d been accumulating throughout the day. I skated for maybe 20 minutes, but couldn’t stop checking the time; I finally decided it was close enough to the time to begin and bounded back into the house, air punching and jumping up and down like an athlete before some big time trial. I’m embarrassed to recount this, but after the recent failure, I felt incredibly anxious of botching an answer early in the interview, and I knew how important it was to start the meeting with a grin and an effortless correct answer. The physical warm-up helped me to feel a little calmer, even if it did look incredibly stupid. Luckily, no one was home. 

 

I logged into Zoom. The spinning wheel turned benignly on the screen. “ESL Full-Time Preliminary Interviews 1 hr. Check Audio.” The time for the interview arrived and still the wheel spun. A minute passed. 5:01 I took a deep breath. 5:02. I smiled. Told myself it would be fine and then the wheel paused and six faces rose up on the screen. They introduced themselves. Gave me a moment to introduce myself and then, the scripted questions began. 

 

I’d seen these questions beforehand, so I had been able to, more-or-less memorize fairly elaborate responses. But they didn’t come out wooden or list-like. I found myself recounting them. Telling what my experiences had been. The interview panel became a group of like-minded colleagues. There were no follow-up questions or commentary, so it was just the prepared questions and my responses, but somehow I felt like I’d created a sense of dialogue with my responses. I felt good about this, it was encouraging. There was also that lone smiling and nodding head in my view that I was able to focus on and speak to. I was encouraged and supported. I elaborated my responses. I made my points clearly and when it was over and I said good bye and thank you to the faces I’d just poured myself out to, I jumped up and yelled. I’d done it! It had gone well! My self-confidence had been restored. I wasn’t an imposter; I knew my stuff! I ran out the door to my birthday dinner, beaming, thrilled to face the future again. 

 

I won’t detail the second season of rise and fall that followed, needless to say, it was much like the first. I went through three more preliminary interviews, two teaching demonstrations, a finalist interview and, in the end, was awarded no job. I had labored intensely from October to May and, in the end, I was no better off. Nothing I’d done could be used again, none of the interviews would qualify me for another position. No group of superiors had noted my accomplishments and contribution. Or, if they had, it hadn’t mattered. 

 

I got the final “Sorry, really competitive pool of applicants” call during finals week and what is usually the most jubilant and exciting time of year for me collapsed into a week-long rumination on my failures. Was it enough that I’d been considered at all? Or had my CV and application materials merely belied something that I wasn’t able to live up to in person? The only thing I’d taken from the experience was the realization that applying and interviewing—if I wanted a full-time position in higher ed –would have to become part of my job. I’d have to cultivate an understanding of it the way I’d cultivated an understanding of my subject knowledge and then cultivated a way of explaining what I knew to students in a way they would benefit from and make personal After this fashion, I’d have to cultivate a way to talk about my own experience with these things. I thought I was able to do this already, but, it seemed there was more to it. 

 

I don’t feel any more familiar or comfortable with the process than I did back in March when I had the first interview. I can’t say I’ve appreciated the experience because there was so much back and forth in it, so much celebrating what I knew to be my best work and best portrayal of my abilities in an awkward and staid situation, followed by what felt to be a very situational and subjective dismissal of this. This would send me in a tailspin of self-doubt that I’d have to pull myself out of before the next interview and, again, I’d ride a wave of self-confidence until I was shot down. 

 

The question after things like this is usually “would you do it all again?” In this case, the question is altered slightly to “are you going to do it all again? Put yourself through all the ups and downs, all the suspense, the blows to your self-confidence?” Well, it seems the only way to justify all the work I’ve done so far is to keep doing it, to keep applying, interviewing and hope for the chance alignment of institutional need with my unique experience. There’s little else to do but feel sorry for myself, and the summer is simply not the time for such behavior. It helps greatly to have kids who consistently remind you that you’re perhaps taking the whole thing a bit too seriously anyway. After all, if Kafka taught us anything, it’s that this hole is self-imposed and entirely imagined and the only way to avoid living in it is to stop digging. Once again, I lie awake at night, imagining stop signs and, for now, it seems to be working.