Life, it happens

At one time, I envisaged hitting this point in life as a retired tenured professor with scads of publications, citations, and students struggling to outdo the “old man”. You know the sort of guy whose work is always cited, appears in abstracts, and who has his portrait hung in the “Department’s” faculty lounge. Admittedly, he has a bit of a problem with his favorite brand of Spanish Sherry at the departmental get-togethers, but he’s not too abusive.

But as petty officer John O’Toole informed me many decades ago:

Luck is what you stumble upon in life. Providence is what God plans for you, and planning is how you thread your way between the two without getting crushed.” 

Zoom!

At some point, I got crushed, and never finished the phud. To some extent, life was taken off the sort of pause graduate school puts you in, and it was all live action again. Life was in a sort of freeze frame, and then all of a sudden, zoom, it was moving full speed ahead.

Cut and Sew

I was fortunate to land in an operating room. Life working in an OR has a sort of day-to-day sameness, but in the context of continual change. The environment is by design spare, clean, and stays the same from one day to another. Yet every day is different with unique cases, special needs, and the occasional drama of big personalities playing out in the light green painted corridors or staff lounge. Doctor Blake has a favored retractor and it’s not available. So, Dr. Blake has a major meltdown over the patients open abdomen. My friends Rob and Marilyn are trying to get it flash autoclaved, the anesthesiologist is trying to talk Dr. Blake off the wall and I am recounting sponges and sutures for the second time trying to stay clear of the issue. things are about to go nuclear if the OR supervisor pops her head into the room.

Professional

Now we fast-forward some years, and I am working as an applied anthropologist. No journal articles, revues for tenure, or faculty parties. I have a carefully concealed adjunct professorship at a small college that gives me an outlet for my academic aspirations, but otherwise it’s documentation projects, public programs, and running the tiny “Heritage Center” in the industrial and very “ethnic” neighborhood adjacent to two major Ivy League schools.

I have a boss who hates me, and a community advisory board composed of members from five different ethnic groups. That last was imposed on me by the spiteful boss. His calculation was that they’d never agree and hamstring me. In a sort of anthropological Judo move, though, I have them working with me on projects that have common threads. He’s royally pissed when a project on gardening, The Hidden Countryside, gets picked up by the Smithsonian Institution.

Loading

Bang. The drop hatch on the fishbellied trailer slams down, and we begin loading the next part of the trailer. I’m in the last week of being a Teamster. Next week I will go to the training program for new supervisors. It turns out that after training I’ll be returned to the same area where I worked. It takes Ethan, Josh, and the others a week or two to realize that I wasn’t replaced with my evil twin, and we settle into moving a sea of packages efficiently in a building we all call The House of Pain.

Two trailers away, Ethan starts up one of the offbeat work songs we’ve made up about the manager. I’ve sent an email to the other anthropologist working on the night shift. We joke that we’re on the island of mis-matched toys. It’s a long way from getting laid off as a government employee to loading parcels.

Cut!

I’m shooting a short documentary on haying with an old friend. We met during the time I was working for the Smithsonian. During my years at the Department of the Interior, we kept in touch, and now I work in the same community he lives in, running the local access television station. I patched together a life between working at United Parcel Service, a small business doing marine woodcarving, and freelancing with the television station. Life was chaotic, but good. I had interesting work, lots of time at home with my kids, and the money was not bad.

Today

Ideal Lives are a pipe dream.

O’Toole was right. Planning, dancing between the raindrops, luck, and perseverance are what are important. It doesn’t have a silk lining. You get it, and then do a tune-up to modify, adjust, and Jimmy it into something that’ll do. In the process, you sometimes get surprised that it turned out to be interesting, educational, profitable, and enjoyable.

Onwards!