calling out well

I'm one of those weird ones who shows up; I can't remember calling out sick in sixteen years of teaching, and the only unplanned absence I can recall is one involving a delayed flight from another country.

Although I try to be, I'm not invariably punctual, and I remember early mornings in my adjunct days, with courses on two campuses and then evening tutoring ahead of me, when I'd arrive past civilization's ten-minute mark for occasional 8:00 a.m. and 8:40 a.m. sections, but I also remember teaching full days after the worst of a stomach virus came and went in the middle of the night along with other days when mere papergrading or insomnia was what limited my sleeping the night before.

One winter day in January or so of 2005, in freezing temperatures on my walk to a first 8:00 or 9:00 a.m. section from my 21st and Race "junior" one-bedroom, my anxiety and fatigue combined with anticipation of a full day of teaching and then evening tutoring to a more significant degree than usual. After making good progress for the first three-quarters of my walk to work, at the busy intersection of 30th and Market, I began to have the sensation that I could barely step forward, that I better find a newspaper box or sturdy pole and lean against it. The feeling was intense enough that I had to stop at the 30th Street Station U.S. Post Office, so I could warm up and try to overcome a dizziness and disorientation that would not abate. I was only the equivalent of a few city blocks from my classroom, but I felt desperate enough then to hail a taxi for the remaining distance.

I think that winter was when I first recognized that I better do anything in my power to reduce my teaching and tutoring load although I think the fact that I "escaped" that situation for my current one is due more to varying degrees of good and bad luck than anything else. I don't feel that it was necessarily any extra personal resolve that lifted me into the "lecturing" class, but I've tried to make the most of the current predicament (which really just means more lit and less comp, and some time for walking, reading, parenting, and writing). Alas, at other times, I miss my adjunct days in Philly, being in the city I belong to, and having one stimulating day after another full of unusual people in public spaces. I've noticed this before, though, that I have nostalgia for times in my life that were not necessarily or invariably the best of times for me.

Since driving down south, nothing so significant or severe has interfered with my ability to get to a classroom and teach once there, but for a fifty-minute class a few years ago, I taught with my daughter standing with me at the front of the room, because, as best I can recall, some kind of emergency had shut down the daycare, and that happened quickly in the middle of the day, and there didn't appear to be any other option. Around two years old, she stood and was quiet the whole time. It seemed like that class went okay.

But this post from The Professor Is In, is about more than the occasional miss or unusual circumstance. She is reminding us that's it's okay to quit academia outright, that it doesn't work out for everyone and even the seemingly successful among us are not necessarily the happiest of campers.

Leaving adjunct work seems to fit Migrant Intellectual well, and I hope he and his family can continue to make his new ventures work. He is writing and making music and raising children; maybe this is the variegated and full life we all deserve, and I only hope he can sustain it. I'm so thankful for his including me in his "Dodging a Seventy-Five Cent Toll" blog that I wanted to honor the spirit of the post and share with you some of the feeling from that winter almost eight years ago when I had six classes and tutoring and was a little unsure if I'd be able to survive it all, despite the fact that such a workload had become my routine for the five previous teaching seasons. Somehow, I made it through the doubt and jelly legs and by spring quarter had pretty much shaken it off. Now I'm just grateful that I'm no longer teaching six classes while also tutoring so many evenings each week.

The post also reminded me of my father's thoughts about taking days off. He'd say that more people should be calling out well, not sick, as in realizing it's those of us who can't stay away that have the more significant illness.

In his Great Drives cameo, where he's introduced by Maria Conchita Alonso as the poet Jay Roberts, he notes that "staying in those offices all day" could be what drives folks crazy. In the video, alongside Florida's northern section of the old coastal highway A1A, he appears happy and at peace, and a viewer would never know he was living paycheck to paycheck and working 30 hours a week in a convenience store of a gas station to support himself at this stage of life. But he was writing poetry and walking on the beach and appreciating what he saw as provided for him by a higher power above. At the same time, his lack of health coverage then was a contributing factor to what brought him to an early ending, so I apologize if it sounds like I'm romanticizing the impoverished cashier-poet's life.

But nonetheless, J. Roberts of sunny Ponte Vedra had a strong sense that there was some other world out there that too many of us were missing in our chase after steady bucks and plastic toys and shiny electronics and American lifestyles and all that is most famously Faulknerly of the glands, and not the heart. I suppose Jay Jay Bob, aka Joseph Robert Kudera, thought much like Dr. Robert Baum, whose words I'll once more quote in closing:

Once we heal, we can create the conditions for abundance not austerity.
Once we listen to each other, we can think like educators, not legislators.
From abundance, we will meet our student-centered missions.
From community, we will grow as life-learners.
From renewal, we will solve this problem and look back saying, I wish we’d arrived here sooner.
This feels right.
This applies the best of what we do.
This is the best of who we are.

pelicans rearrange

I got some good feedback on the unpublished, "My Old Man," and that got me back into the general area of "remembering Dad"--something I'm sure that many of us are prone to engage in--and so, I ordered a new copy of Joe Kudera's two minutes of VHS fame. I should say I purchased a "like new" copy, for under five dollars total, which when it came, did play in my old VCR just fine.

So the poet Joseph Robert Kudera is depicted as a very calm and happy person, and although the poetry is in no danger of ever finding itself confined within the walls of an anthology or textbook edition, his words sound somewhat spiritual, somewhat philosophical, and well, just encouraging if you are trying to find a way to flee your own office environment or find your peace by the shore. You can hear him briefly in the beginning and briefly at the end, and then also, for a couple minutes, just after the St. Augustine segment.

It looks like dozens of small libraries around the country have the VHS tape available for lending, and I just stumbled upon Tower's offer of a brand new copy at $18.98. In these hard times, I'd advise against purchasing new unless you recognize that the wisdom of Jay Roberts (or the aged beauty of A1A's coastal region?) is worth that much.

Yiyi has enjoyed watching "Grandpa" although as soon as the first man in the program appeared, she smiled and said, "It's Grandpa!" But I've since informed her that not every filmed male Floridian in the 60 minute PBS show would be her grandfather.

She particularly likes the pelicans that are filmed as Joe reads his poems off the screen and then walks with Maria Conchita Alonso onto the deck.

Please pardon me while I frag: the green and brown shoes from our meeting in England, 1989; blue sweater; some blonde and white hair fighting it out for last follicle standing; a laid off, downsized, or otherwise unemployed guy who looks rested and at peace, at least for the two-minute segment.

It's almost amazing how affordable studio apartments by the ocean were in 1996--not many places, perhaps, but Joseph still found one for under $500 in northern Florida. And then he found a job at the Gate Station where the public-television people found him.

my father the italian

Mistaking Mark SaFranko for Italian reminded me of my childhood, where for a while there, I thought we were Italian on my father's side. I think this related to all the spaghetti, ravioli, Italian sausage, and meatballs with caesar dressing on the salad along with the many trips to Pagano's for pizza, which if I'm not mistaken was located across from where the R&S Strauss is at 48th and Chestnut. (I believe I could be off a block or two here.) I also remember a white and purple storefront. And then there may have been acquaintances thinking "Kudera" was Italian and perhaps I misunderstood these overheard conversations with my Dad. Or I never really thought we were Italian, or I wasn't even old enough to know this kind of thing could be considered, or I invented this thought years later, after I already knew we weren't Italian but liked this kind of story, or the way I could add it as an interesting section to the memoir (which in fact I would have to write and if written one day will include some sections from his diaries of memories of his father, which in fact, I encouraged him to write).

What are we?

With my father, when we were to head to South Philly, The Triangle Bar was where we would get our pasta. I believe this could have been connected to the affordability of the spirits. There was another place he'd take us to, one I associate with the Whitehorse (or Blackhorse?) Pike and spaghetti. But I'm wandering into weedy memories now.

OK. Mark SaFranko and Joseph Kudera. Two Jersey kids born about 10 years apart who dreamed of writing all their lives and got a lot of it down on paper or screen while raising kids, hell, money to pay the bills, and more. Catholic School? AA? Childhood poverty? I'm not exactly sure of how much there is in common here.

Enough.