for Gina
My computer still remembers the wifi password here, but the people have forgotten me.
It wasn’t too long ago that I used to come to this café every morning and stay for hours to work on my classes. No one minded much and, once, when I apologized for always being here, sitting for hours over a single coffee, one of the baristas told me they liked having me there; I was kind of a fixture, part of the day’s routine. There’s some comfort in being consistent I suppose.
But then I changed jobs. I was no longer adjunct faculty with no office, doing my best to keep my classes fresh and engaging from the corner of a café. I moved over to the office side of the college. I wasn’t crazy about the idea of moving to a 9-5 schedule, but after working so many Sundays, and having to go into the café for “just a minute” and then being there for four hours, I was ready for a change. Especially as, like so many other things I do, I needed a lot more time to complete my work that other people. I was well over 40 hours a week for which, in terms of pay, is supposed to be a part-time job. Ever semester there was always so much I wanted to change about my classes to make them more effective. I like to think I was a good teacher, but this was at the cost of my family time.
The low pay wasn’t much of an issue; somehow, we made this work. I guess the kids were still babies, and we weren’t doing too much that caused us to spend money. The real difficulty lay in the time commitment. I just couldn’t seem to stick to a schedule of time off. Every time I’d declared, hand over my heart, that this Thursday or Monday, I’d make up for the extra time I’d been at the café working. I nearly always had to retract my promise to get in some emergency class support work, or something to reconfigure the lesson that I preemptively decided was problematic. And then there were the paper-grading marathons when I’d sit at the computer for 8 hours without breaking, for days on end, trying to get through all the essays, leaving way too much feedback—again, trying to be helpful.
Even when I wasn’t at work, I would be thinking about it. On the beach, on a walk, playing with my kids when they were babies, I’d be in the café in my mind.
My wife Gina hated this schedule. She never knew when I’d be home. (“When I’m finished,” I told her). She never knew when I’d suddenly have to go into work. For having a pretty prosaic job, we were living the lives of a family with an ER doc as head of household. Even the summers weren’t sacred, if I didn’t have summer classes, then I’d have a new class to prepare for the fall. And sometimes, this was the most stressful thing of all. My first semester teaching poetry, for example, I wanted to make sure I got it right; I spent 100s of hours between May and August creating and revising readings and materials, and, of course, I did the same thing while the class was going on that fall as well.
So, while I had no idea what I was doing when I applied to the office position, I gave it a shot because it was time for something new. It was also a lot easier to apply to and get than the four full-time faculty interviews I’d had been through over the previous year. And yet, the pay was comparable, and it was benefitted.
Initially, I was worried that a 9-5 would be boring, but soon the director left and, with no replacement forthcoming, I started doing a lot of the work for the department. It was just like it was when I was associate faculty. Only now, everyone recognized me; everyone saw that I was doing this “extra-mile” type work. The amount of recognition from higher-ups and peers was very gratifying, especially as, to me, the workload was lighter than it had been when I was faculty. I no longer took my work home and with a set schedule, Gina knew when I’d be home and when I wouldn’t.
I shaped the job for myself in that period, recklessly crossing the line between director and advisor on a daily basis: hiring new instructors, helping other navigate hurdles, all while working with students, promoting classes, and getting reports sent in.
Then we got a director, and, now, for weeks on end, I’ve been getting “cease and desist” emails because I’m still crossing the line back into director territory without realizing it. When I was still figuring out my job, I was absorbing so much of this work; my position has grown up around the work of trying to expand the department to offer students new opportunities. Now when I try to do things that once resulted in kudos, I get scolding emails. I get in trouble. I’ve gone from rising star to “problematic colleague” overnight.
I could ask to be retrained, and to learn my job from the beginning, but, in truth, after doing the job I loved for the last few years, I don’t know if this is what I want. It would be a very lateral move to learn what I’m already doing. I also have a feeling that the official version of this job would be much less creative (read: boring).
So, to reclaim my creative right in my work, it looks like the best option would be to go back to teaching where, while I may have not earned much money, and my schedule was erratic, at least I had control over the lessons I prepared for my students and, if nothing else, my hard work was rewarded with many of them saying “you’re a really good teacher” at the end of the semester.
…
The place where I created this problematic persona, where I became someone who works too long on simple projects and tasks, and pursues creative solutions that aren’t always in line with official channels, where I learned to enjoy my work, no longer exists.
As a junior in college, I changed my major for the third time and found myself a student of the humanities, studying language and literature. Every weeknight, Sunday, and even some Saturdays, I installed myself in a booth at Theios Diner in Lansing, Michigan to study.
At Theios, I learned to focus on my labors, and to appreciate study for study’s sake. I transformed writing assignments, to creative writing experiments. I changed the memorization of Italian verb conjugations into the entrance into another way of thinking. I learned to converse with the characters in literature rather than just reading them.
I have spent my professional life, trying my utmost to translate this process for my students.
My college experience had almost nothing to do with the campus, or the events put on by Student Activities, it all happened in that diner. And after graduating, I studied for the GRE in the smoky embrace of Theios, I applied to graduate schools and opened letters of acceptance and rejection there. I had the conversation with Mikey about the move to San Francisco and, when we left, the waitresses came to our going away party.
When they tore down Theios, I understood where Vonnegut came up with the phrase “unstuck in time”. Theios had been a kind of personal figurehead, a shrine, and a home, and then it was just gone. I was also in Surat Thani, Thailand, the other side of the world, when I received the news, only adding to the disassociative quality of it. Even when I finally returned to stand on the empty concrete pad—in Michigan, at least, they still knock things down without building anything new—there was something unreal about its absence. It was too much a part of me to be gone, or, maybe, if it was gone, then part of me was too.
And where did that put the persona I’d developed there? Perhaps it too was now ready for a demolition?
…
Two weeks ago, I was coming home from work after another day when I screwed up on something and overstepped, and I noticed they were taking down the bridge where Gina and I had gone the night we first met.
I had only just returned to town from the Peace Corps, and, not knowing anyone, and still being a few weeks out from the start of my final semester as a graduate student, I decided to read my book after work in a bar to avoid going “home” to my rented room with nothing but a sleeping bag and a few books stacked on the floor.
I was reading Prelevin’s The Sacred Book of the Werewolf; she was reading the newspaper and, although evening, it was technically still New Year’s Day. It wasn’t too hard to get a conversation going. We were the only people at the bar, and she was beautiful.
Our conversation went beyond the bar, and Gina agreed to take a walk with me. We went to the Arcata Marsh and, upon crossing the bridge I mentioned earlier, I said something about how ghosts can’t cross running water and there we stood, frozen forever in my memory two 20-somethings telling ghost stories in the middle of a weeknight, that is, until I went by and saw they were taking down the bridge.
What they don’t tell you when you’re younger, or what I guess you don’t care about, is that you’ll erect all these little personal plaques all over. You’ll stake certain memories to physical places, and that these places become especially important as you age and the memories, so many times reimagined, revisited and, thus, altered, start to fade. It is calming to stand on the bridge and say, “this was a turning point; this was a Moment.” Because the bridge still exists, the memory still inhabits the real world, in a way, and assures, or at least validates one’s place in the world.
But when they take down the bridge, the moment loses the physical sign, and shrinks entirely into the abstract, especially as so much time has passed, and I’ve remembered it—and thus altered the memory—so many times. In reality, I have very little idea what happened on that bridge and, while I still could, it was enough to stand on it and say to myself, “this is where it happened.” The place was the memory.
And then, just after I’d seen they were tearing down the bridge, the word came that the bar where we’d met that New Year’s Day eve was also closing. The bar we’d long held as the center of our relationship, our instant anniversary the moment we met there. Where our minds go when we think of being young and in love, or the magic giddiness of our early relationship. And for me, it also doubles as the place where I was able to transition from being homesick for Armenia to returning to America. The bar was like a major fissure running through the middle of my lifeline, where two moments were brought together and, the rest of my life came flooding out like so much water from the rock.
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that my kids owe their existence to that bar. The reason I’m a dad and husband now came from that instant when I set my book down next to my beer glass and asked, “So what’d you do last night?” And until last week, I was able to go back and revisit this instant in its physical form. Sure, the bar had changed a little, but my little plaque was still there, bright and polished, maybe the most significant of my entire life.
I know this is stereotypical pining for the world that was that can’t be returned to. That, to be comfortable, we have to embrace change, but I see the paradox my parents faced now: “how can one embrace that change that seems to efface one’s one existence? How can one find comfort in what seems to be actively excluding, what is made over your memories?”
Maybe the secret is that the changes are to prompt us to make new plaques, to reform ourselves and imprint moments on the present instead of revering to the ones of the past. And, yet, there are some memories so golden, and so once-in-a-lifetime, I don’t want to lose them, and I know that I couldn’t remake them if I tried. Even if I did, the old memory would live beneath it, giving significance to it, being part of it, breathing all over it. We’re all collections of these memories, and when their signifiers go away, we become less physical—I guess there’s something very intentional in that design, but I’d rather not probe that too much.
Fatalistic as they may seem, I do see the hope in these moments of effacement. They remind me of the impermanence of the present which, at times, can seem so imperturbable and inescapable. Both the buildings where we fall in love and the ones where we suffer failures will eventually be shuttered, turned into something else, and, be torn down.
So, on Monday, when I walk into work, whatever happens, it will be remade. And all my plaques will be removed to make room for my children’s plaques, and it be enough for me to read, and try to understand these, than to be continually polishing my own, and Theios, and the bar where Gina and I met, and the bridge where our ancestors looked down on us and smiled at our youthful naiveté, they will be reduced and illuminated as clusters of brain cells, that will be clouded over and fade, but nonetheless be kept in us.
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