Note: This article was published in Ellemeno on 3/14/23
At 78 I surprised myself looking inward to find that I still had ambition. It was ten years prior that I had decisively but reluctantly decided to leave a job which had been rewarding, but demanding of body and soul and requiring more energy than I had to spare.
My partner at the time was showing increasing signs of Parkinson’s and needing more of my focus. But the more critical reason pushing the jump into retirement was to give more priority to my equanimity and mental health. Putting my mental health above my work life was an admission that I was over and done with being a professional.
I had never achieved the promise of the PhD I had “earned” almost 40 years before. That was the reason for the reluctance to leave. Just a few more years of sticking with it and I might have had my name in lights. Those lights, by the way, being the dim bulbs lighting up the masthead of some obscure journal in linguistics.
“I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody.” It’s a refrain to remind yourself that you were meant to be somebody other than the peon you became working on the waterfront.
Publication is the typical expectation of PhD’s to make it in their field. To be honest, though, publication, which I had done some, but not enough of, had always been a grind. I never enjoyed it. It was competitive and in a way that inhibited creativity and expression, rather than fostering it. It was ultimately an exercise in realizing what I was up against. The critics would pile on and leave me wondering if my brilliant article had advanced or damaged my career prospects. Academics can often be as brutal as boxers. The introvert in me, a force that I couldn’t just tell to “go away while I climb the ladder,” is shy of the light, dim though the light may be.
Anyway I digress.
The golden years, as they’re popularly thought to be, are a time of relaxing from having to dodge all the barbs of the work world. Taking off the armor, so to speak. And it’s actually been that for me – a relief. And they’re still golden, some ten years into them.
As the expectations to achieve recognition dimmed away and the regrets for not having met them evaporated, I realized that the skills I’d acquired in becoming an academic were still alive and looking for expression. Some of those skills were built from the habit of keeping active and overworking and they were looking for some release from too much leisure.
Probably the more immediate reason was that my partner died some five years into my retirement. It wasn’t actually Parkinson’s, as it turned out; it was Lewy Body disease, a brain abnormality with an uncertain cause and no viable treatment that progressively trashes the interpretation of sensory data and later impairs cognitive and emotional functions. From the caregiver I became, I expended a lot of energy, physical and mental, and so channeled any need I had for expression and involvement all into caregiving. Anyone who has been a caregiver knows that creative approaches work best.
After Dave passed, those urges came back big time, most likely as a coping strategy to ease myself out of the grieving process. I decided to start again and bought a house on a small island in the North Atlantic off the northeast coast of Newfoundland. Iceberg Alley as it’s called.
It was at the beginning of the turbulence of the Trump presidency and that introvert in me was appalled by the prospect that my country was going to beat up on me psychically. I wanted to become a Canadian, where introverts wouldn’t feel threatened, I supposed.
I’ll write sometime later about my Canadian “adventure,” but for now I’ll skip to its end, when I had to give up the house and the aim of becoming a Canadian. It had to do with COVID and a heart attack. Details at 11:00.
So now relegated to staying an American, specifically a West Virginia American, I became a citizen journalist as my next and very likely last attempt to become a contender. I’m pretty convinced it will be my last ambitious undertaking.
I responded to an ad for contributors sent out by the Spirit of Jefferson and Farmer’s Advocate, the oldest continuously published newspaper in the state. After the appropriate vetting process, the editor and I negotiated a role for myself as a columnist. And so began the Neighborhood Watch column for the paper, something I contribute to on an irregular basis, on average, about twice a month.
I intend the column to be an antidote to the political division in the state and in my county. You probably guessed correctly with my reference to the Trump presidency that I am on the left of the political spectrum. Actually I’m on the far left. To many of my neighbors, it’s the radical left or the fucking Communists. But the point of the column is to hide all that leftishness from the readers and focus on the people, the institutions, and the activities that would make us believe, whoever we vote for, that we’re all essentially alike enough to not hate one another. Kind of Pollyannaish, probably, but necessary. Remember, it was to get away from the shit storming that I went to Canada. I shouldn’t be slinging the stuff myself.
Through this, my probable last career, I’m wondering if I’m going to finally become a contender. I have my doubts, because being a columnist on a small weekly newspaper in West Virginia is tantamount to being that Zen tree falling in the forest when no one is around. Does it make a sound? The scientific answer is no. But then maybe the scientists have it wrong. We’ll see.