Getting there is half the battle, staying there is the other half
This article was orginally published in Ellemeno on Medium.com
Photo by Mina Ivankovic on Unsplash
Who I’ve become isn’t the who I was supposed to become. There have been a lot of starts and stops, periods of full speed ahead, spells of being lost on backroads. Some of that came from willful decisions on my part, but a lot came from not being equipped early on with the right maps.
I am a second generation American, the product of four European grandparents who immigrated and raised their families here — four children, one my father, on the German side; seven children, one my mother, on the Polish side. Only one of those eleven aunts and uncles made it through college, the one being my father’s sister who did it in her seventies. A late bloomer.
My father and his sibs all graduated high school, but I’m not sure of high school graduations on my mother’s side. I believe it was only her youngest brother that did complete high school. My mother herself, in the youngest tier, didn’t graduate until she was in her 50s, after six years of night school. She got her diploma the same year I passed the qualifying exams for my PhD. I was prouder of her than I was of me.
The picture I’m drawing here is one of a family that wasn’t education focused. It was understandable for my parents’ generation because they were pushed into economic survival mode by the Great Depression. Of my four grandparents none had more than an elementary school education in their home countries. Being non-English speaking, none of them had aspirations to study in American schools, other than in taking ESL lessons.
All of the five children my parents raised did graduate high school, my younger brother through the GED process. I was the first of us and of my whole extended family to go to college (Michigan State).. My youngest sister also finished at MSU some 15 years later. The clincher for justifying the expense of college for my parents was that I was going to be a doctor, the medical kind. It was a financial investment of sorts.
You can already guess from the mention of my PhD that the MD didn’t work out. But I did try. I majored in zoology, did all the pre-med requirements, applied to medical school (the University of Chicago), got in, completed most of the first year, hated it, and dropped out. There’s an interesting story of how all that year in Chicago transpired, but I’ll tell it elsewhere.
After leaving med school, I still believed I was a scientist and worked as such, started a graduate program (University of Illinois), hated it, moved to San Francisco, taught high school biology, loved it, decided though that I really loved language more than science, applied to a graduate linguistics program (UC Berkeley), got in, moved to the East Bay, and began my studies. I had embarked on a new career path, which in the best of times had little chance of being a good financial investment. The humanities? You’re kidding? Yeah, so what! You follow your star. Damn the torpedoes. I was 26.
Skipping ahead another six years, I got that PhD. I was 32 and looking at a tight job market for university appointments in linguistics, of which there were never a lot. In the year I graduated, there were essentially none. There was, though, a bottom rung position available (UC Santa Barbara) which was starting a linguistics program.
A colleague and I were matched for a joint instructor position and we took it. Half time pay for full time work. Three exploitative years later, I gave a talk at a conference on the research I’d done for my dissertation and I bombed. I was roasted by one of the young Turks of the field and afterwards told by the department chair that there would be no chance of getting onto a tenure track. I could stay on for another four years until the UC system rules would mandate my exit.
This is where the thwarted ambition of the title comes in. I was now 35 and there was little prospect for a career in the area I had devoted nine years of study and work to. I had always felt myself to be a better teacher than researcher, but was well aware that that was the wrong balance. So be it.
This ejection from academia was not by choice. It felt like failure.
What followed was a decision to start afresh, as fresh as one can be at 35. I left California and moved (to DC), took some jobs with NGOs in the area of applied linguistics. This was a good period, satisfying, socially focused work, but work keyed to government grant funding, which is placing a bad bet for a sustainable career. Grants getting is a suckers game. They dry up. And so it proved to be. Another thwarted ambition.Two in a row. It was time for yet another change.
For this next beginning I rode the bucking bronco heralding the coming microcomputer revolution. It turns out that understanding software and how it works is proverbial child’s play if you’re a linguist. Human languages are a lot more complicated. It was here that I would spend the next 17 years in financially rewarding work, though ultimately not satisfying work.
Time to change again, this time by my choice. I went back to one of the NGOs that I had worked for previously. It meant a salary cut, but I was back where I wanted to be. Eight years later I retired. Ambition unthwarted. It was good to end with a “well done” feeling.
All in all I have absolutely no regrets for the hands I dealt myself and those I was dealt. It all came together into a being I’m happy to be. No start was a false start and no ending was without its follow-on opportunity. Doors close, doors open.
So, to summarize: this odyssey began in a house without books, steeped in the uncertainties of uprooting, scratching for food rather than for knowledge, focused on education as a path to money. I knew that as I was bouncing around my poor family didn’t understand my motivations or the realities. They could relate to the “normal” kind of doctor, not not the linguistic kind.
Nevertheless, whatever disappointments they might have had for the missing physician in the family, they didn’t begrudge me my choices. It was always, “Whatever you want to do, Jimmy.” But for the decision to become a linguist, there was forever after the question, “What is it you do again, Jimmy?”
I’m curious to know how someone like me, a book loving misfit, came to be. It’s a question that I feel lies on the other side of the door I opened by retiring. It’s what I’m still thinking my way through and just now beginning to write about.