Martha

She loves birds.

We have feeders in the back, on the porch, and in winter we fill them with seed. Sometimes, then, at breakfast, she watches them out the glass door that opens off the dining room. She watches them move, flitter, dash from one side to the other.

Sometimes she will call me out from my office. “There’s a cardinal!” Whispered urgently. Commandingly. Or “A blue jay!” Sotto voce. I’ll come. I’ll look. I’ll see a flash of color. A streak of red or blue. Nothing more.

They reveal themselves to her. Their friend and protector. Not to me.


*

Conversely.

She hates the squirrel that lives out back in the neighbor’s tree, and who comes and gorges himself at the feeders. She wouldn’t mind, I think, if he were not so clearly making a pig of himself. If he only ate what he needed and then left the rest.

But that is not the way of squirrels, and he gobbles up the seed until his cheeks bulge and his stomach sways.

Thus, there is a war between them, my wife and the neighbor’s squirrel. When she sees him she yells or bangs on the window. He rears up and regards her for a moment. Then, face down and tail up, he goes back to the trough.

She opens the door and the squirrel finally dashes away (but not too fast). Sometimes she throws something after him. A stale piece of bread or something that she was going to put out for him later. It falls into the snow in the yard.

In about an hour, he’ll be back. And the whole thing—the feeding, the yelling, the tail in the air, the tossed crust—will repeat itself.

Sometimes, I think they enjoy it.


*

For many years, she was a teacher. Now she is teacher of teachers. Do not make the joke about those who can’t, teach, and those who can’t teach, teach teachers. I’ve seen people make it in her presence. They have not done it twice.

More importantly, do not say such things to those who were her students.

They might well slaughter you.

*

They adore her. I mean her students.

For twenty years now she’s been in the Department of Education at Tufts. She takes young people who are often little more than children themselves and, somehow, makes them into teachers. She equips them, I don’t know how, to deal with adolescents and parents, school boards and politicians, lesson plans and No Child Left Behind.

It has been hard on her, these last few years. The Bush administration confused excellence with obedience. Men and women who could not tolerate their teenager at home, never-the-less were certain they knew best how to manage classrooms of a hundred of them.


*

Then there is the academy itself. Martha is not, technically, a professor. She is, technically, a Lecturer. This means she cannot obtain tenure. She cannot vote in certain important assemblies. She is regarded, in ever so polite a way, as Not Quite Top Drawer. Or Dwawer, as they like to say, in the counterfeit trans-Atlantic accents of a certain class of academic.

This is because Martha is, well, a mere technician. She has actually taught in schools. She works with real students. She goes out into public schools and finds placements for student teachers.

These are lesser things.

The REAL educational academic works in theory. And abstraction. And grand insights. And, if possible, never sees a human being. Or, at least, not a student.

So . . .

So she is not tenured. Will never be tenured. And, sometimes those of her colleagues who are say things, “I think we’re seriously under-theorized here.” Meaning that her wisdom, derived from actual evidence, must not be as good as their dogma, derived from wishful thinking.

But, here’s the rub. In times of trouble, when this student is in crisis, or that funding has vanished . . . it is to Martha that they turn.


*

As I say, her students adore her. For years after they’ve left her classes, they send Christmas cards and email.

For some reason she is a particular favorite of those of her students who are minorities—the young men and women who are, as they say now “people of color.”

I’m not sure why. Maybe it is because she never manifests that evangelical and self-congratulatory tolerance of diversity, so common among Right Thinking People, so obviously synthetic, so loudly proclaimed. She is not, in other words, like one of her colleagues, a white middle-class woman with a Ph.D. and a six-figure income, who once slipped and began to lecture a black woman on what it was “really like” to be “Coloured In America”.

*

Some of my wife’s students have announced that they are adopting her. She is to be, they say, their mother.

One of these is Faith.

Faith is a tall, thin, energetic “woman of color.” She is bright and intelligent, very Southern, and her eyes glow with barely suppressed mischief. She has taken to calling Martha “Mom.” My son, David, is “Little Bro.” Recently, I’ve been promoted to “Dad.”

This leads to some interesting situations, many of them engineered by Faith herself. Recently, we took her for her birthday to a little tourist town up the coast. It’s a place with ocean views and small shops. I quite like it, but it tends to attract a—shall we say?— unadventurous crowd. Don’t get me wrong. The tourists are not evil. They are not bigoted. But they are very, very suburban.

We went into one of the shops. It had tall shelves reaching almost to the ceiling. That meant that you could hear the other customers in the place, but you might not be able to see them.

I was coming around a corner when I heard Faith yell cheerily, “Oh, Mom! Did you see this?” She was holding some piece of Mexican tinwear. “Isn’t it terrific? I’m going to have to get that.” Then, “Dad! I left my purse in the car. Would you tell me where you parked so I can get it?”

Around me I heard the amused murmurs of my fellow customers.

I told Faith I would get the purse and she could stay there, with “mom.” Next to me, a woman of my age said, smiling, “Or Dad will just end up paying for it.” I nodded. She turned the corner with me. She saw Faith.

Her smile froze like water on a windshield in February.

*

As I say, it has been hard for her, these past few years.

A bunch of reasons for that. David has gone to school and is no longer in the house, which is good and inevitable, but still …hard. And then there was the fact that I went back to school, and it proved such a disaster, and she had to watch.

Then, finally, there have been the Times. Our age. The last eight years . . . 9-11, the War in Iraq, so much more.

On some level, I don’t think she really minded the fact that Washington went Conservative during those years. She’s a liberal, but she can reach out to the other side . . . so long as it is real. So long as it, too, is idealistic. So long as it strives for some sort of good, though she may not agree on the definition of good.

But, Washington for the last eight years has been so very much not idealistic, not concerned with good … its ideology not conservative but merely hateful, a faux-conservatism that disguised blatant greed and power-lust as Family Values and Morality.

So, she has suffered.

There is still a part of her, you see, that genuinely believes in the virtue of men and women . . . despite all the evidence to the contrary.


*

I think, on some level, she remains the girl she was in the sixties. I’ve seen pictures of her then. She was oh-so-achingly young. Her hair was long and straight. She wore bright colors and jeans. She drove a VW beetle. She had the albums of Peter, Paul, and Mary. She believed . . . as God was her witness . . . that things might be made better.

I wish I had known her then. I wish I had been at the same place, been the same age . . . but, such are the cruelties of circumstance. At least I did meet her, finally, in 1979, when we were both at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. I believe she was in the very first class I ever took there.

I tried to speak to her after that first class . . . and she was off like a shot. Out the door. Across the campus. And away. I’m not sure she slowed down until she was in her apartment with the door bolted.

It took me two years to land a date.

But that’s a story for another day. When I have a lot more time.


*

We married in 1982.

For some reason, she’s stayed with me ever since. Again, I’m a little mystified as to why. Her friends are confused as well. Sometimes they ask, meaning it as a joke, “Did you have to marry him?”

We’ve also heard the same thing from some of my co-workers, but not as a joke. “How do you stand it?” asked the woman who did package ads sales at one magazine, during the Christmas party.

Then, the woman realized what she had said, and quickly tried to make it funny. “I mean, you know, not that it would be bad or anything . . .”

Except, of course, sometimes it really IS bad. I have not, as they say, been able to give her the moon and the stars. I have not always been as kind, as strong, as gentle, as …well, anything…as I should have been for her.

Yet she has remained.


*

I do not deserve her.

But that, of course, does not mean I will let her get away.

*

One last story. This one about me rather than her.

Several years ago, I was at one of the magazines for which I worked. I found myself in a conversation with a number of other editors. These included a woman of about my own age, also married, and with a bawdy sense of humor.

Listening to us, from across the room, was another woman. She was quite young, though older than her years. She had been the daughter of a Yugoslavian diplomat. She had traveled the world as a child, and worked now in the U.S., while her country split into warring parts.

Anyway, the older woman asked me about my future plans. If I intended to retire and so on. It wasn’t a serious conversation, so I made a joke of it. I said I hoped to be a decadent old bastard.

She laughed and said, “With the young mistress?”

No, I replied, if Martha found out, she’d kill me. The older woman laughed.

But, then, from the other corner of the room, came the low, musical, slightly accented voice of the Yugoslav.

“Men,” she said, “always say that when they don’t want to admit they love their wives.”

Ah…


*

She was right.

Very well.

I shall admit it here.

I do. Enormously.

More than words, here or anywhere, can even begin to say.


*

Onward and upward.









Copyright © 2009 Michael Jay Tucker

Intermezzo And Inauguration

I write this (in my head) while seated in a dentist’s chair.

The dentist in question, plus an assistant, a hygienist, and the Lady Out Front Who Does The Billing are all . . . ALL … trying to insert various instruments of mass destruction into my mouth. I think that was an oil derrick that just went in a moment ago. Hard to tell, though. Could have been an aircraft carrier.

Oh, and there’s a nasty grinding sound as the dentist does something singularly horrible to me involving two fillings and a crown.

Great stuff.

Particularly since I hadn’t meant to write it at all.


*

It’s like this: you’ll recall that I’m re-starting explosive-cargo. You’ll recall as well that I was doing a quick recap on my life and the lives of my family so everybody could catch up with events. Last week, I did my son, David. And he’s almost forgiven me for it. Not quite. But almost. And I suspect after a couple of decades in therapy, he’ll look back and laugh. It’ll be a pained, hysterical laugh, but a laugh just the same.

This week I’d originally planned to move to Martha, my beloved wife … “the idol of me life” . . . who has (for reasons beyond the comprehension of mere mortals) actually stayed married to me for … uh, er . . . 25 years now. (YIKES.)

But, then, I remembered that this is Inauguration week. And, as everybody knows, it’s a ye ole historic occasion. As I write this, Barack Obama is becoming the 44th President of the United States of America.

They say upwards to two million people are watching him take the oath. Millions of Americans more sit fascinated in front of their TV screens. Billions of others, in the every nation on the globe, follow the proceedings with breathless anticipation.

And me . . . ?

I’ve got an oil derrick in my face.

*

In some ways I don’t really mind. This was the only time I could get the appointment. And, besides, when I did make it, some months ago, I didn’t connect “January 20 the Dentist Date” with “January 20 the Most Important Historical Event In Recent American History.”

Besides, you can always catch it all on the news tonight and . . .

And . . .

And who the Halibut do I think I’m fooling?

I HATE IT.

*

The dentist has this little wheel thing on what looks like a scaled down rotary saw. He’s busy whacking away at this molar in the back that needs to be filed down to a nubbin.

And there’s this lovely smell. Sort of like … well, when you were a kid, did you ever roast a grasshopper with a magnifying glass? Sort of like that. But with the faint and delicate tang of raw rubber in a hot box.

This is the way that human teeth . . . and other things . . . smell when they burn.

If, per chance, I should kick the big one, and the gleeful heirs decide on cremation, would you remind me to hold my nose? Thanx loads.


*

I’m missing the Inauguration . . . well, at least on TV. I wouldn’t actually have gone to Washington, of course. But I am missing the live broadcast. Which saddens me.

Actually, it’s been interesting to watch the coverage of the new Presidency for the last few weeks. I’ve tuned in now and then, on those rare occasions when it hasn’t made more sense to get your news from the ‘net.

Mostly it’s been pundits telling us what to expect from the incoming Administration and/or the Inauguration. CNNers gaze at us mournfully and repeat the endless series of trials that await the new President (the economy, the war, global warming…ad infinitum), usually with the distinct overtone that Nothing Can Be Done. Fox bombastoids sneeringly pronounce Obama a new Clinton…or, at the very least, Out Of Touch With American Values. Whatever the h*ll that means.

Yet, if you looked at them closely, you detected hints of nervousness, a fearful glancing to the right and the left, an uncertainty…

Perhaps they realize, however dimly, that the upcoming Inauguration will be a Real Event, which will genuinely fascinate the American People, and which will genuinely effect us for generations to come.

It is not, in other words, one of their Manufactured Incidents, one of their little circuses designed not to reveal the news but to conceal it.

Instead, it is authentic. It is beyond their control.

And they hate it.


*

A tooth explodes. Bits and pieces of enameled shrapnel bound about my tongue. “Excellent,” says the dentist.

For this . . . for this . . . I am missing the Inauguration.

Later, I will see parts of the Inauguration on the replays. I will watch while the President Elect becomes the President in Fact. I will watch while he puts his hand on a Bible and swears to defend the Constitution. Every president does, of course, but some mean it more than others.

The thing that strikes me most is actually not the President himself but his wife, who stands next to him while the oath is administered. Her face is animated, she smiles or looks out at the crowd, holds her husband.

And this is different. How often we have seen Presidential spouses wearing what I’ve come to call “The Nancy Reagan Stare,” that look of manufactured adoration, unblinking and unreal, while the icy politician within pretends to be the dutiful helpmate.

This woman, as she stands in the cold beside the 44th president, is alive.

That intrigues me.

*

After that, I will watch the live broadcast of limos and buses making their way through the streets. I will watch them arrive at a massive reviewing stand. Dignitaries of various sorts make their way into its copious interior. In a moment, parades will begin.

The broadcaster narrating the affair will refer to these men and women as VIPs—“Vee Eye Pees”—Very Important Persons. Dems and Reps and everything in between. I have hated the term since I heard it as a child. You see, if someone is a VIP, surely that implies that someone else is not important at all.

The camera will come in for a close up on the VIPs emerging from the limos. They are little different from what you’d expect. Chiefly, there are of two sorts. First, are the Men, white haired and white skinned, the sort you find on stamps and boards of directors. They emerge blinking into the light. They wave to the crowd, not seeing the people within it.

Second, are the Women, striding purposely forward. They wear their business suits and stern expressions. They make a cult of their own toughness and their own success. More than anyone, they worship at the shrine of Our Lady of the Perpetual Career.

I wonder, do either of them glance out at the men and women who line the streets? The two million strong who watch them? Do they ever suspect . . . even dream! . . . that those uncounted multitudes might even now be judging them?

And that they might be found wanting?

*

I will watch as well while the Bushes leave the White House and board the helicopter that will take them away. There is an uncomfortable similarity to the Fall of Saigon, the Huey helicopters whisking ministers and orphans to overburdened aircraft carriers and exile.

*

Similarly, I will watch former Vice President Dick Cheney as he is wheeled into the reviewing stand. He threw his back out “moving boxes,” and so attends the event in a wheel chair.

He will sit and scowl, looking rather like Davros, creator of the Daleks in Doctor Who.

I think, on some level, he is the most interesting vice president the country has ever possessed. If I were still a historian (had not, that is, been cast from academic heaven by the holy angels of my dissertation committee), I would want to study him.

Alone among vice presidents, he was not really a politician. There was no kissing babies for him. He wouldn’t have glorified Joe The Plumber. He was a pure technocrat, interested solely in the exercise of power, and very much his President’s unelected prime minister.

At one time I thought he might be the future of the American executive—the gray man behind the scenes, the appointed and non-democratic Head Of Government—as opposed to the President, selected by ballot and hanging chads to be the (irrelevant) Head of State, allowed out now and then to proclaim that this Mission is Accomplished, that Course To Be Stayed.

That could still be the future. It will depend greatly on this new President, on the power of the Bush-era elites to smear him, and on the willingness of Americans in general to let it happen.


*


And the smearing has begun already, hasn’t it? From the Right … and the Left.

On some level, the Right is the better. It, at least, is more honest about what it’s doing. The more or less open appeals to racism (“Obama the Magic Negro”), the ubiquitous references to his middle name (“Hussein”), the whisper campaign begun during the election and continued to this day that he is a crypto-Moslem (or at least un-America) . . . all these are happening as the Tom Delay branch of the GOP seeks its return to absolute power.

(One wonders, in the end, will that form of the GOP, perhaps under a new name and as a new party, find itself meeting in sheets under a flaming cross?)

But, the Left is not to be forgiven. Already . . . already . . . one hears the fashionable disillusionment in their voices, sees the weary (and oh so trendy) cynicism in their eyes. Obama will be not liberal enough . . . not radical enough . . . not Green enough . . . not, well, fill in the blank.

This is not to say that he will actually be illiberal, or non-Green, or fill-in-the-blank. But complaint is their forte, and all that remains to them now that they have so thoroughly abandoned any attempt at actually impacting the world for the better.

*

But isn’t just politics. It is the American system.

As I sit watching the crowds and the VIPs in their glass booth, I will recall the teachers in local schools who refused to let their students view the Inauguration during class time because “education doesn’t pause for history.” As though history were not education. As though their endless and repetitive worksheets were.

But, the teachers are not alone. As I watch the Vips behind their glass staring down at the parade below them . . . and as I consider the men and women (oh so sophisticated) that I met in the academy and the world . . . I can almost hear their thoughts. How, they think, banal.

The parade begins and soon winds by them. It is an endless succession of high school marching bands, police on horses, police and firemen with bagpipes, Masons and Shriners, church groups and youth clubs . . .

How banal. How bourgeois—you can hear them thinking. What, after all, is more pathetic than a high school marching band? An assembly of asthmatic nerds tinkling on triangles? What is more prole than a policeman or a fireman with a bagpipe? The man who maintains antique conceptions of honor, and plays Amazing Grace at the funerals of friends? What is more absurd than a Shriner? A little man in a fake fez and a miniature car?

Except . . .

Except . . .

The high school band did not lead us into Iraq. The firemen and policeman clawed survivors out of the rubble after 9-11. The Shriners founded and funded the hospitals that provide free care to children when our noble elite graciously declined to give a damn.

*

The exploding tooth is finished now. The assistant is now occupied sweeping up the remains. She sticks a suction tube in my mouth and I hear the little clattering of tooth bits going down the pipe.

“There, looks great,” says the dentist.

Really?

“You see,” he continues, “sometimes you have to take everything down to the beginnings to build back up again.”

Well…

Couldn’t ask for a better metaphor, could we?

*

A few minutes later they have me bite down on some ghastly substance that falls somewhere between silly putty and fresh mud. The remains of my tooth will leave an impression and they’ll make the crown from it later.

The dentist goes off to commit some other act of toothy carnage. The hygienist gives me a moist towelette so that I can clean up later. She warns me that my lips may be dry for the rest of the day.

I rise unsteadily from the chair and wobble into the lobby. My coat waits for me on a peg in the wall. Shortly, I exit into the bitter Boston winter, crunch my way over the ice in the parking lot, and go home to watch what remains of the Inauguration.

And, as I go, I think . . . if I were the historian my dissertation committee emphatically assured me I was not, I would compare the day to another Inauguration, this one 180 years ago. I mean, of course, that of Jackson in 1829.

It may have been the most famous Inauguration in American history. Jackson, you see, was many things . . . including a racist and something of a bastard . . . but he was also a genuine populist. He invited his homespun followers into the White House. To the horror of All Right Thinking People, they came.

And, at that moment, the American landed elites who had ruled for so terribly long, began to suspect that just maybe their day was past.

*

Oh, yes, I can hear Those Who Know Best already. The academics, the pundits, the intellectuals…They are saying, no, Your Analogy Is Flawed. It Lacks Proper Grounding In Historical Methodology. You Are Under-theorized. Your interpretation is clichéd, and you, yourself, are Inane.

Probably true.

Yet . . .

And yet . .

*

Later, I will sit at home, nursing my face and watching television.

Watching the endless faces, of all colors and shapes, lining the streets.

And I will wonder.

Our elite? Does it have the wisdom, the insight, and the understanding to look at those millions in DC and be, in however small a way …

Afraid.

*


Until next time,

Onward and upward.












Copyright © 2009 Michael Jay Tucker

Dramatis Personae (#1): David

Hey, Gang,

So, it’s been a while since we last committed communicatin’, so I thought I’d bring everybody up to speed on who’s doing what where and why.

First of all, you’ll recall that I have a son by the name of David Tillman Tucker. The “Tillman” part comes from his Granddad, who is Tillman Jessie Tucker Jr. No. Really. Could I make up a thing like that?

Actually, I came within a inch being named “Tillman Jessie Tucker III,” but at the last minute my parents decided that naming me TJT III would qualify as either an advanced form of child abuse or being an Episcopalian. Which is a joke you can only understand if you also know that being Episcopalian was once a Big Thing for rich white people from Eastern States … i.e., the sort of folk who have well-muscled sphincters, trust funds, and the sort of names that are just cracker-jack full of hyphens (“Frederick Tott-Waller,” “Paul Flemhocker-Moningglory”). Names which, further more, show up a lot on war memorials to men (“the glorious fallen”) who got shot, gassed, and bombed defending democracy in the holy crusade World War I (“the war to end all wars”). Which, you’ll recall, led directly Stalin, Hitler, and World War II.

So, let that be a lesson. Never be an Episcopalian. Bad for your health.

Where was I? Oh, yes, David.

Anyway, last we met, he was in high school. He’s not any more. Which is a Very Good Thing. You see, he’s very, very bright . . . and well read . . . and a natural scholar. So, of course, most of his teachers hated his guts. Par for the course.

The best story I have about his high school years is the time he told his history teacher, “Sir, you are the only man in America who could make the Renaissance boring.” He was right. Not particularly diplomatic, but right.

Anyway, after several painful years for him, and many charming little tête-à-têtes qua knife fights between me and the Vice Principal in Charge of Discipline, he got his diploma and was off like a shot. His mother and I breathed a sigh of relief and the Vice Principal (in Charge of Discipline) retired to a small town in eastern Mass where he could try to re-grow all the hair he’d pulled out during parent conferences.


*

So, then, David had a severe attack of being a Barista. If you’re unfamiliar with the term (which means you’ve never been to Starbucks or otherwise have spent the last thirty years in a cave on Mars), a “Barista” is a person who makes coffee in cafes and coffee bars.

But there are Baristas and then there are Baristas. There are, you see, Baristas who just push the button on the automatic espresso maker and watch while the freeze-dried crystals congeal in a gelatinous mass on the bottom of the cup. I particularly like the congealing part. You can use it to fix leaks in swimming pools and radiators.

But, there’s another kind of Barista. That’s the sort who plays the ‘spresso-maker the way Yo Yo Ma gets chummy with his cello. That’s the kind that David was. He worked in high class restaurants where I can’t pronounce, much less afford half the things on the menu. He also got his Barista training from an international consultant from Denmark and when it was all over he could do things that super-Baristas do. Like, for instance, they trace intricate designs in cappuccino foam. David’s signature design was a little tree. Looked sort of deciduous but one can never tell about the odd pine slipping in when you’re not looking.

In fact, David came in fourth in a National Barista Competition. You didn’t know there was such a thing, did you? But, yes, they exist (again, could I make that up?) and scores of Baristas converge upon convention centers and produce rival coffee drinks for hard-eyed judges. Think “Best In Show” but with caffeine.

And, yes, it’s as scary as it sounds.

*

But, then, after a couple of years, David decided that there was only so much you could do with cappuccino foam. So, he went off to Art School and is now doing things with painting, wood-work, metal, videos, carpentry, “conceptional art,” and lots of other stuff that probably violate at least three laws of physics. Not to mention zoning ordinances about excessive intelligence in confined spaces. He also does things like write about aesthetics, art and social theory, obscure Middle European philosophers, important movie directors, modern vs. contemporary art, etc., etc., and (of course) etc.

Sometimes I think about sending a few snaps of his works to his old Vice Principal (in Charge of Discipline). The man who was so sure that David Would Fail. But, then, I think, No, I don’t want to make his head explode. Attractive as that concept is.

*

Okay, but you may be asking yourself, “Self, how is an art students supposed to make money in this life? I mean, really, Self, aren’t you being pretty d*man impractical about this?”

The answer, strangely enough, is not necessarily. Some art students actually do go on to become artists and (surprise surprise) even make money at it. Why not? It’s a business (forgive me) like any other, and a smart operator can do okay.

Besides which, even the art students who don’t become artists tend to go on to other things. They funnel up into graduate schools and professions that require a combination of technical and aesthetic skills—quite literally everything from computer graphics to chemistry. In David’s case, that’s probably going to be architecture . . . but, then again, maybe not. It all depends on the time and tides in his affairs.

Besides, he’s got a backup plan.. Over the past few years he’s developed a taste for bicycling. Moreover, he’s become a certified bike mechanic. In fact, he’s managing a co-op bike shop at Harvard University—specifically, Quad Bikes. He and the others there do bike repairs, and rebuild and sell used bikes.

It’s kind of scary, really. I go and visit the shop and watch him upend bikes, pull this and fasten that, straighten something else, and, voila, what had before been a tangle of pipes and wires is actually usable.

As I say, scary. You see, the mechanical gene bounced right over the top of me. I can barely tie my shoes, much less fix something. Yet, he makes it look easy.

Also intimidating is that he has a bit of business sense. I meet him for dinner or lunch and he tells me cheerfully about how he’s doing the profit and loss statements, and how Quick Books behaves in this or that circumstances, and how he’s meeting with the co-op board of directors to talk about next year’s income.

Again, it bounced over me. My family—my mother, my father—they have those kind of skills. But me? No. Not in the least. I mean, I can’t get my check book to balance . . . or find it, for that matter. I think it’s on the kitchen table, somewhere. Probably under that stack of bills and the fruit basket. Hard to tell.

Ah well . . .

*

So, anyway, he’s a bike maven and a bike mechanic. He’s even got followers—that is, people who will want him, and him alone, to do the repairs on their ten speeds and mountain bikes. I suppose every good mechanic does, but, still, it intrigues me. Harvard students and staff members, tenured faculty and deans, appear at his door and politely request his attentions.

I suspect that, if he wished, he could even make biking and the business of biking his career. He could work in shops, or own one, pretty much anywhere in the country, and do rather well at it. He could make an excellent income—something to be valued in this curious day, when we have been so lovingly bequeathed a devastated economy by the Bush administration, and when oil prices flutter up and down (but usually up) like a hummingbird in a hurricane at the least rumor of international strife.

*

Though, even if he doesn’t go into the bike trade in the long run, there’s still a short-run advantage in it . . . for me.

You see, he brings us great stories from the shop.

My favorite of his most recent reports goes as follows: It seems that one day a customer came into the shop. I like to envision the man as a self-important faculty member, or an obnoxious administrator. He wanted his bike tuned and prepared for the summer months. He left it and departed.

David then began to look at it. He put it up on a rack and discovered . . . hello! . . . that someone had taken a bolt cutter and carefully, expertly nicked one of the supports of the front wheel. It had been done in such a way as to make it almost undetectable. Yet, if the rider had gone over a curb or hit a pothole, the wheel would have bent double . . .”tacoed,” was the expression my son used. That would have doubtlessly thrown the rider over the handlebars, which would have almost certainly injured him quite seriously, and might even have killed him.

My son called the owner and explained the situation. The man came to the shop and examined the bike. “Probably just some kids fooling around,” he said, and left.

But, of course, it was no such thing. Whoever had sabotaged the bike had known precisely where to make the cut. And they had had access to the bike itself, which would have been difficult given that the man kept it off the street.

So, David was left to wonder . . . who hated that man so much? Who hated the man, AND was close enough to him to have access to the bike?

A co-worker? A student? A member of his own family? His wife or his child?

The man, I gather, has not been in David’s shop again since.

And . . .

You gotta admit. It’s a great opening for a mystery novel.

*

Maybe that’s my next career, now that the academic thing didn’t work out. Maybe I’ll write whodunits. I’ll write mystery novels with a bike theme. I’ll make David the (thinly) disguised protagonist. The stories will all involve the Butler doing nefarious things to Lord Smythblater’s ten speed behind the carriage house. Or, gangs of international bike perverts stealing antique three wheelers for use in Schwinn porn. (Horrors.)

I’ve even got a title for the series.

David Tucker: Bike Detective.

*

Okay, it’s a dumb idea. For one thing, David would kill me. For another, well, wouldn’t want to offend all those bike perverts out there. You never can tell when one of them is going to audit your taxes or something. (“About this deduction for axle grease . . .”)

Still . . .

Do you suppose … just by chance… perhaps…

I could get my former dissertation members interested in biking?

*

Just kidding.


*

Anyway, so that’s David. Next week, we do … the Spouse!

Stay tuned and …

Onward and upward.

My (not so) Brilliant Career

Well, I’m back.

I’m almost embarrassed to resume this blog/ezine. I’ve been away so long. I don’t know how many of you are still out there. Or, for that matter, among those who remain, how many of you care to continue reading my turgid little missives.

Like I say, I’m embarrassed. More, I’m ashamed. At one time, I had over 2000 subscribers, and God only knows what the pass-along readership was. I even did a couple of self-published books (Xlibris) that were collections of the columns. But I let it all go away.

Why?

A bunch of reasons. I got busy. I lost my job. I had a little bout of Depression—not deep, fortunately, but enough to make things difficult. Then, too, when I tried to switch the ezine version of Xcargo to a blog, it just wasn’t the same. In a ‘zine, you have a certain intimacy with your readers. Those of you out there would write me back. I knew your names and your email addresses. It’s not quite like that with a blog.

But, also . . . a bigger reason.

I went back to school.

It was the biggest mistake of my life.


*

I’ll tell you my story in bits and pieces. Maybe, as time goes on, I’ll give you a complete accounting of my adventures in the academy. I’ll call it “My (not so) Brilliant Career.”

But, today, let me just give you the quickest overview.

It began just about eight years ago. I had lost my job as a trade press editor. I was at, in some ways, the peak of my career. I was an editor-in-chief of an online publication dealing with e-business and middleware (a kind of software that resides between applications and things like databases. It was the buzz word of the day, and a Very Big Thing).

But, I found myself utterly unable to connect with my work. That was partly because of the little bout of Depression. But mostly it was because I just didn’t believe in what I was writing and editing. I remember, once, having to quote an esteemed expert who announced that business was really all about bookkeeping, and that mere sales only got in the way.

And, then, finally, there was a bit of a power struggle going on in the company. The publisher brought in a new vice president of content. I think she may not have cared for underlings who were not of her own selection. And, so, I was gone.


*

So, there I was . . . jobless . . . and strangely unmoved by the fact. I did some freelance. I sent our resumes. But nothing came of it.

Then, my parents (bless them!) suggested Why Don’t You Go Back To School and Become A Professor? My wife agreed. Everyone knew that my real skill was in writing, not editing computer texts. And, besides, I’m fascinated by history, and I’m a good teacher, strangely enough.

So, I did. I got admitted to the Master’s Program in History at Northeastern University.

And, you know, it was wonderful. For two years, I had the time of my life. My professors were encouraging. Some of them have become my friends.

I wrote a Master’s thesis—which I then turned into a book and got published. It was called “ ‘And then they loved him,’ Seward Collins and the Chimera of an American Fascism.” I’ll tell you all about it some other time.

So, there I was, with a new-minted Masters, a scholarly book, and a passion for the subject matter.

Therefore, with a bit of effort, I got myself admitted to the Ph.D. program in history at . . . a school I won’t name. Suffice to say that it was at a University located roughly between Boston and Western Massachusetts.

And then . . .

I found myself in hell.

*

What follows is my perception of my time at the University I shall not name. The people there doubtless have quite another version of events.

But, here is mine.

*

I once wrote a (very bad) horror novel in which the main character is murdered and then awakens in something like Hades. He is buried under dead and rotting bodies. He cannot move, he cannot see, he cannot breathe . . . though his lungs scream for air. He lies there for what seems like centuries until an earthquake—actually, a “corpse-quake”—frees him.

It was sort of like that.

I’m not quite sure what I did to offend the faculty, but offend them I certainly did. After the first year, in which I got As in every class and no one objected to my dissertation proposal, I was suddenly anathema in the second year. The same material, which, before, had been acceptable and even praised, was now “trivial” and “meaningless.”

When I actually started writing the dissertation, things got—if possible—worse. I would send my committee a chapter, and they would not respond for weeks . . . or months. Once they did not even acknowledge that I’d sent them material for two months.

And when they did respond, it was with a thousand, thousand objections. Every line of text was insufficient. Every word wasn’t right.

And the objections? They did not seem to me to be constructive. They seemed to me to be insulting. “So WHAT?” “Stop IT!” “FOCUS!”

*

Finally, after two years…and after six or seven rewrites (I’ve lost count) . . . my committee members sent me a note saying simply that they would no longer work with me.

I was not, they said, a scholar.

*

Should I defend myself? Should I say that if I’m not a scholar then why was it that my book on Seward Collins was well reviewed? And that I have published articles in scholarly journals? And that my own committee members had no objections to my work until the second year of my time at their University?

Or, better still, should I ask . . . if I’m not a scholar and my work demonstrates “no scholarship” . . . then why was it that when I posted the first chapter of my dissertation to an academic news-group and asked for comments, no one said that it was “unscholarly”? They had concerns, yes, but no one said it was not a work of scholarship.

Perhaps I should do all these things. And, indeed, I will write a complaint to the University. I’ll ask these questions and point out these facts. But, come, let us confess, nothing will come of it. The administration will make a few noises, but it must support its professors if it is to function. That is the reality of college life.

I could sue them. I have explored that possibility. But, that, too, is problematic. I have discovered that historically the courts rule in the favor of schools at the expense of graduate students.

Besides . . .


*

Maybe they’re right. Maybe I’m not a “scholar.” At least, not as they define the word.

On some level, I admit that I’m not cut out to be an academic. I love history, yes, and I am a good teacher . . . but these characteristics do not make me a “scholar.” Not their sort, I mean.

You see, there are scholars and then there are scholars. And, the art of being their sort of scholar is very much like that of being a fashionista. It is the business of knowing who’s in and who’s out.

Their sort of scholar is an expert at knowing which professors are trendy to footnote, knowing which theories are fashionable and even know which WORDs are considered outré.

(Once I used the term “elite,” and was taken quite over the coals for it. Genuine scholars do not, I was told, use that expression. Yet, the reality is that we are divided between the rulers and the ruled . . . and only the most willfully blind would ignore that. The most willfully blind, or those who are in fact among the elite and therefore defend their position by pretending it does not exist.)

But, the point is that I’m not built for their world. Oh, I can study, research, know the secondary literature, give papers and defend them. But, I have never been and never will be fashionable. I do not revel in the conflict of theory vs. theory, the combat of dueling departments, the furies and personal animosities of the academic life.

I love only the romance of history . . . the simple narratives of men and women who lived it . . . their experiences and lives, their pains and pleasures, their joy and grief, and, in short, their stories.

*

So what shall I do?

Well, I will not abandon the academy just because it has chosen to abandon me. I will continue to study and publish and print. I have, after all, three Master’s degrees now, two in history and an MFA in writing. My committee may deprive me of my Ph.D., but not of my learning.

And, I will teach. I am already employed as a member of adjunct faculty at Northeastern University and Cambridge College. I like to teach. I like my students.

Strangely, this too makes me unfit to be my committee’s kind of scholar. You see, scholars of their sort are not much interested in teaching. They regard their classes as an unfortunate distraction and their students as intruders. They would much rather conduct their research. Or, rather, have their graduate students do the research, and then they write their monographs in the cork-walled privacy of their offices.

And that is not a bad thing. Society needs such people . . . even if there is something odd about the fact that they are employed as educators, yet have little interest in education.

But, this gives me an advantage. I will seek out teaching positions. They will not. They will not compete with me.


*

And I will write. I will write not only academic papers, but also popular material. I will take history, when I can, to people who are not academics . . . who, like me, love the stories of history. Perhaps, people like you.

This, by the way, most of all makes me unfit to be my committee’s sort of scholar. Simply put, that sort of scholar would never deign to write for someone like you . . . a mere layman, whose opinions are not learned, and whose intelligence is doubtful. You have no critical intelligence, no solid background, no acceptable interpretative apparatus. You are (poor soul) Undertheorized and do not maintain the Standards We Hold Dear.

You are, therefore, not worth talking to. Not like themselves. Who are so wise and informed.

That is, of course, in their own humble opinion.

*

So, I will write. I will teach

And I will return to you . . . if you’ll have me . . . you who were the readers of the old explosive-cargo, and who I hope will be the readers of the new.

Forgive me for being away so long.

*

Next week, I’ll start again. Next week, I promise, I’ll try to be funny. I’ve much to tell you about my life over the last few years, and much of it is pleasant and laughable. Much of it I enjoyed enormously. My son graduated from high school and went to college. We have a new puppy. We have had adventures.

Next week I will be cheery.

But, right now, I must take a moment to be grim.

For, you see, I was half in love with the academy. But, my love was unrequited. Indeed, it was rejected. And, like all those who are cast out, I must, for a time, wrestle with the passions . . .

Of the lover scorned.

*

Until next time . . .

Onward and upward.














Copyright © 2009 Michael Jay Tucker