Official First Day of Retirement

Today’s the official first day of my retirement, though try as I might I can’t get myself into any kind of emotional state — elation? dejection? hope? anxiety? freedom? emptiness? bliss? dread? — that I’m supposed to be feeling. I am cooking a honey-mustard pork tenderloin, with twice-baked potatoes, purslane and tomato salad, and opening a bottle of 2006 Rex Hill Pinot Noir. And I’ll probably have a shot of my 21-year-old Balvenie single malt Scotch. But all of that is obligatory observance to what I take to be the occasion. My heart’s really not in it.

No doubt my lack of response to this “major life change” is that I’ve been experiencing any number of “lasts” over the past six months, since I made the decision to take early retirement — everything from the last time I had to lecture on correct MLA documentation to the last department meeting to the posting of grades for my last class to the department’s retirement party for us early-retirees. Those things happened last spring, though, at the end of my final contract semester. But three months have passed until now, the last day of my last contract. And over those three months, I’ve taught an online class as an adjunct, as I have for the past more than decade, and I’ve just currently begun teaching two online fall classes as emeritus adjunct, as I intend to do for at least the next several years. So this retirement is really a semi-retirement, further lessening the import of today.

But however low-key I engage this day, there’s still a quiet buzz in the back of my brain that’s saying, more as promise than observation, future than present, “This is fucking great!”

Zucchini Rising

Last year I foolishly planted two zucchini plants in our vegetable garden. The result was a truckload of produce that try as we might — cooking, freezing, giving away — we were defeated, and by September that quadrant of the garden was littered with the bloated bodies of dark green fruit, vaguely echoing the Matthew Brady photographs of Gettysburg. Callously, I did not bury the dead, but rather allowed them to rot where they fell.

This year we subscribed to a CSA, and decided to cut back our garden by more than half, to only a few heirloom tomato plants, some pepper plants, and a couple of basil plants, things we didn’t think we’d get from the CSA (though we have). But sometime in May, as we admired our crop of weeds in the untilled vestige of the vegetable garden, we spotted a plant that looked from its leaves to be a lot like a zucchini plant. But I’d never seen a volunteer zucchini, and thought it nothing more than a look-alike weed. And in the following month, after the yellow flowers had come and gone without bearing any fruit, we assumed it was, indeed, only a weed, though we allowed it to flourish, as in its bright green and yellow plumage was a standout in the weed-bed.

Then just this last week, rummaging under the faux-zucchini leaves for red raspberries (which had also taken up residence in the deserted garden) we discovered several zucchinis, hiding beneath the green canopy, one more than ripe — yellow, a foot-plus long, four inches across — but three that were of picking size (four to six inches) and several that should be ready for harvest in the next week or two.

I’m not sure what to make of this literal windfall (groundfall?). One thing, I’ve learned that there can be volunteer zucchini. What I’m not sure of is why the first set of flowers didn’t produce any fruit, but it’s now showing up late in the season. My guess is that our weird weather this summer (cool and wet early, warm and dry recently) kept the insects from pollinating the early flowers. Or something else. What do I know? But the gift of volunteer vegetables is the reward of past effort, a second yield this year from last year’s sowing. Of course, we now face the problem of what to do with this extra produce we don’t need. At least some of it will be allowed to rot again over the winter to sink into the soil beneath the snow and maybe reappear next summer as an uninvited but still welcomed guest.

Tolerance and Experience

Tolerance, liberalism, broadmindedness — call it what you will — is not something that can be imposed from without, by law or religion, reason or emotion. It comes, rather, by experience.

*

I was fifteen or sixteen years old. I only have vague memories of the specifics, but the incident was significant in my moral development. My father, mother, sister, and I were at one of my aunt and uncle’s for dinner with a visiting uncle I had never met before (and never saw again), a general in the Pentagon. My vague memory only begins toward the end of the dinner (the dining table was in an alcove, a light green paint or wallpaper, I think) when the general (sitting at the far end of the table) began telling jokes. Racist jokes. I only recall (vaguely) two of the jokes; maybe that was all he told, or maybe that was all he told before I left the table. The first involved a black woman and a Cadillac, the second a Jew.

I wouldn’t have thought myself “tolerant” or “liberal” or “broadminded” at the time. Indeed, I grew up in something of a racist community, both city and family, though I wouldn’t have thought myself “racist” or “bigoted” or “intolerant.” That evening, though, something began to gel. I’d heard racist and bigoted jokes and remarks before, plenty of times. But something about this stranger of an uncle, assuming a friendly audience, made me angry, angry at his bigotry. My two best friends at the time were Jewish and Greek-American, and I have no doubt that my connecting the general’s jokes with my personal friends sparked my first experience of being offended.

I got up without excusing myself, went through the kitchen and out to the backyard. It must have been summer because it was still light out. After a few minutes, my mother came out to see what was wrong. Apparently it was clear, at least to her, that I was upset. I can’t recall exactly what was said, but I did tell her I’d been offended by my uncle’s jokes (he was my father’s brother, not hers). She went back inside. I have no idea what she said or what happened inside. I walked around the side of the house and got in our car, parked in the street out front. A few minutes later, my father, mother, and sister came out, and we drove home. Maybe we talked about what had happened, probably not. I’m sure there was a lot still soaking in. There was for me.

Free Range

We had a Swiss chard frittata and caprese salad (all but the eggs, cheese, and olive oil from our garden and CSA share) for dinner tonight, and the question of “free range” came up because J. had purchased a dozen free range eggs at the store this afternoon. I commented on my suspicion of the term “free range.” It conjures the image of chickens bobbing around a barnyard, pecking at grubs and insects, clucking happy thoughts, living a full life of pullet idyll. But my natural cynicism led me to think that it meant nothing more than the chickens weren’t cooped up in cages for their whole short lives, pecking at each other and praying in their limited consciousness to be axed as soon as possible, please. So J. asked me to look up what “free range” meant with our particular eggs, Sarboe Farms, and this is what I found:
First, according to the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service, the complete designation of “free range” is simple:

FREE RANGE or FREE ROAMING:
Producers must demonstrate to the Agency that the poultry has been allowed access to the outside.

So open a door a few minutes to any random outdoor space, and you’ve got your “free range” poultry, whether the chickens choose to go out or not. And here’s the “free range” facility where our eggs came from:

Don’t see many chickens freely ranging or roaming around these grounds.

Related to “free range” food is “organic.” And again it’s not as pure as the label on the package might lead one to believe. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration:

--Products labeled "100 percent organic" must contain only organically
produced materials.
--Products labeled "organic" must contain at least 95 percent organic
ingredients.
--Products that contain between 70 arid 95 percent organic ingredients
may use the phrase "made with organic ingredients" on the label and
may list up to three of the organic ingredients (e .g ., carrots) or food
groups (e .g ., vegetables) on the principal display area .
--Products with less than 70 percent organic ingredients may not use
the term organic other than to identify specific organic ingredients.

So food can be labeled “free range” and “organic” if it is allowed at least a chance to see the sunlight for a few minutes a day and contains no more than 5% inorganic chemicals (or “made with organic ingredients” if made with up to 30% inorganic materials).

We should all be comforted by our government’s regulations.

Obama the Muslim

It’s ironic that many (most?) of those 20% of Americans who believe that President Obama is Muslim and 52% who don’t know that he’s Christian are the same people who during the 2008 campaign castigated him for being a member of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity Church of Christ for 20 years, for having been married in that church, for having his daughters baptized in that church. Once again religion bridges ignorance.

"Ground Zero Mosque"

Of course, the whole flap over an Islamic mosque in lower Manhattan (actually a cultural center with a room for prayer) is silly and wholly political (redundant?). Now that those who oppose the cultural center agree that the Muslims who want to build it have a Constitutional right to do so (kind of hard to get around this tiny matter), they are now arguing that the center shouldn’t be built near “ground zero” (where, they do not say) because it would be “insensitive” to the relatives of the victims — including the Muslim victims? — of the 9/11 attacks. But isn’t arguing against the construction of the center on the basis of “insensitivity” — the conflating of the Islam religion with the Al Qaeda terrorists — “insensitive” to the billion-plus Muslims that had nothing to do with 9/11 and have condemned the attacks? All that the opposition to the center reveals is the opponents’ intellectual and emotional (and political) inability to separate the extremist Al Qaeda from mainstream Islam. If not their bare religious and ethnic bigotry.

Camp Creek

The fishing wasn’t great. In a couple of hours I missed one fish that felt pretty nice while it was on, about 15 seconds, landed (if that’s the word) a tiny brown trout (4”), and had a nice brown (12”) flip off just as I was reaching for it (a thankful near release). I lost three flies, one from a fish break-off, one from a rock (and bad knot), another from some underwater obstruction. It seemed like I spent as much time tying on tippet and flies as line and flies were in the water. There was much cursing (at myself). But when I got back to my car and began taking off my fishing gear, I realized once again why I’m out here — the peace of the singing stream, the birds I’ve never been able to identify, and even the rumble of the red Dodge Ram with the rattling empty trailer along the gravel road, raising gray dust, underscoring the stillness as it fades away up and around the hill to the north and quiet, leaving me again alone, pulling off my soggy socks, gazing off beyond the stream and across the valley. The fish lie safe in pockets behind stones and under banks.

Weenie Panini

I’ve written elsewhere that one of the pleasures of having a CSA share this summer is deciding what to make for dinner from what’s available in this week’s harvest and whatever remains from the previous week. Last night, I began with the assumption that the main vegetable we’d have would be the sweet corn that came in yesterday’s box, steamed, and lathered with the roasted garlic herbed butter I’d made last week. But what main course? One possibility was to make the sweet corn the main course, accompanied by a mixed green salad with cucumber, carrot, and tomato. But I also found some frozen “gourmet hot dogs” (oxymoron?), the last remaining item from an Omaha Steaks order three months ago. But we’re not big hot dog fans, and there weren’t any hot dog buns either. But we did have some hamburger buns, so my first idea was to grill the hot dogs, split them, and serve them on the hamburger buns. However, that seemed a rather meager disguise for what would still be a hot dog. Then it struck me that I could make a “hot dog salad” panini, a perfect companion for the corn. Here’s the resulting recipe for my “Weenie Panini”:

INGREDIENTS

4 hot dogs (“gourmet” or otherwise)
1 chili pepper (to taste/heat; I used the skinny red pepper in this week’s box — cayenne?)
2 cloves garlic
¼+ c dill pickle relish (which I made from our cucs two weeks ago)
1+ T Dijon mustard
2+ T mayo
Salt and pepper
Bread (I used hamburger buns because that’s all I had)
Mozzarella cheese (fresh)
Arugula
Tomato

METHOD

(1) This may not be necessary (the hot dogs are already cooked), but I grilled the hot dogs on my panini grill for about 5 minutes.
(2) While the hot dogs cook, pulse to a dice the chili pepper and garlic (and pickles if not already a relish) in a food processor.
(3) Cut the hot dogs into pieces, add to processor, and pulse all to a fine dice.
(4) In a medium bowl, fold the mustard and mayo (and relish if need be) into the weenie dice. Salt and pepper to taste.
(5) Spread a desired amount of the weenie dice on the bottom half of a bun. Add a clump of arugula. Add a slice of tomato. Add a slice or two of mozzarella cheese. Top with upper half of bun.
(6) Cook in a panini press for about 5 minutes on medium.

The above is what I did, based on what I had available. And it turned out surprisingly good. The weenie salad is the center of the dish, and it could obviously be used as a spread in any kind of sandwich or crostini or whatever. It’s at least a good way of disguising hot dogs if that should be your wish.

It's the Heat AND Humidity

There are people who not only endure but actually claim to prefer hot and humid weather. I know; I’ve met them. They’re insane. The old canard “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity” is a grand false duality — it’s both the heat and the humidity. They work together in a satanic climatic symphony of punishment that drains the pores and sears the skin, empties the soul of desire and the mind of sense. It’s no wonder that the medieval notion of eternal Hell is an imagined inferno of fire and brimstone; if the sauna had been invented back then, no doubt our image would be one of steaming heat and humidity, perhaps still with a pitchfork thrown in to accentuate the agony.

Several years ago I spent six weeks teaching in the mountain jungles of Belize, an experience that set the bar for my tolerance of sweltering torture. I wrote in one of my first email reports:

Heat is the operative word here. That and humidity. Both are in the 90s every day. I’ve not been able to acclimate and can’t go out for more than just a few minutes without being drenched in sweat. I take showers and change my clothes 2-3 times a day and drink at least a gallon of water a day. Oppressive, stifling, horrific are words I find myself using often.

There was a window air conditioner in my tiny apartment, but it could never get the room much below 82-85 degrees. Any afternoon you would find me sprawled naked across my bed, reading or grading papers, next to the insufficient air conditioner, a large floor fan turned to high at the foot of the bed. I had many positive experiences in Belize, but they are all warped by the omnipresent sun and steam that remains the overarching memory of my stay.

So I’m thankful today, as the temperature outside is 92 and heat index is 102, to be sitting comfortably in a relatively large house with a capable air conditioner, the temperature in the room at 76. And I don’t have to go outside, so I’m not. And we’re having gazpacho and a garden salad for dinner tonight.

Crazed Flight Attendant Hero

A new working-class hero emerged today: Steven Slater, a 38-year-old veteran flight attendant for JetBlue (also on that company’s uniform-redesign committee and its in-flight values committee) who, pushed to the breaking point by an obstinate passenger while taxying to the gate at JFK Airport (“Please remain seated until the plane is parked at the gate and the pilot has turned off the seat belt light”), snapped yesterday. Here’s the summary of the scene from The New York Times:

One passenger stood up to retrieve belongings from the overhead compartment before the crew had given permission. Mr. Slater instructed the person to remain seated. The passenger defied him. Mr. Slater reached the passenger just as the person was pulling down the luggage, which struck Mr. Slater in the head.

Mr. Slater asked for an apology. The passenger instead cursed at him. Mr. Slater got on the plane’s public-address system and cursed out the passenger for all to hear. Then, after declaring that 20 years in the airline industry was enough, he blurted out, “It’s been great!” He activated the inflatable evacuation slide at a service exit and left the world of flight attending behind.

The Daily News expands on Slater’s cursing: "To the f-----g a--hole who told me to f--k off, it's been a good 28 years. . . . I've had it. That's it." Also, he didn’t just activate the slide and jump off; he first grabbed two beers from the beverage cart, opened one, threw his two carry-on bags down before him, and made his triumphant exit. He then walked to the AirTran and took it to the employee parking lot where got in his car and drove home. One of the passengers on AirTran was quoted as saying, “I wish we could all quit our jobs like that. He seemed kind of happy about it. He was like, ‘I just quit my job.’”

And that’s why Steven Slater has almost instantly become today’s online hero. His saga has become the number one topic on Twitter. Several Facebook fan pages have popped up in support of the disgruntled flight attendant, such as the Steven Slater Legal Defense Fund. And of course there is already a Free Steven Slater t-shirt.

For the past several years I’ve fantasized a number of times, when faced with either individual students or a classroom of students who were being f-----g a—holes, of just going Slater, screaming “I’ve had it. That’s it,” and leaping onto the inflatable evacuation slide of teaching. And no doubt that is what fuels the celebrity of Steven Slater, the shared frustration that many if not most of us who work in service jobs have to put up with. Most of us, though, are able to silently endure, if only because we have to. I was fortunate enough to take a much more comfortable and amicable exit from my career with early retirement. But there is a part of me that not only understands Steven Slater’s eruptive resignation but is also envious of it. I hope he’s able to accept whatever his legal punishment is as adequate cost for self-contentment and that he’s able to move on to much bigger and better things — surely there has to be a reality show in his future.

Retirement Purgatory

This summer is quickly drawing to an end, more quickly it seems than in the past. I just posted today the schedule for next week’s (the last) assignments in my nonfiction class. The following week is the break between semesters. And then the beginning of the fall semester is the week after that. There’s nothing unusual in this transition from any late summer for the past more than ten years. But this summer has been quite odd, a purgatory in which I’m caught between full-time teaching and full-time retirement. When asked how I’m doing with retirement, I’ve typically said that it doesn’t feel like retirement because I’m doing this summer just what I’ve been doing for a number of years now, teaching one online class as an adjunct while enjoying the summer respite from a full load. But that hasn’t been exactly true, especially as the end of the summer nears. What in the past has been a respite from a full-time load, this summer is the beginning of full-time break. I will still, as an emeritus adjunct faculty, be teaching two online literature classes (both of which I’ve taught regularly for a decade), but that obviously is going to be much less demanding than a five-class-a-semester schedule, most on campus, along with office hours, committee and department meetings, professional development, etc. So as I’ve moved through this summer, I’ve been gradually progressing from the feeling of a summer no different than the past to one of impending retirement. Three months ago, retirement was sometime, somewhere, indefinitely over the horizon; now, it’s walking down the street, smiling, arms outstretched, ready to embrace me.

Reading

I thought the other day about starting a record of the books I read. I realized that I had read at least 10-12 books in the past three months, since my retirement, and was curious about my reading habits now, not as any kind of pretention but rather simply a following of what my mind was meandering through. But as I thought about it, running through the titles from mid-May to now, I realized that a simple list of books read wouldn’t at all represent my reading. For one, there have been several books which I haven’t been able or willing to make it all the way through, either being selective (in the case of collections of essays or stories) or giving up (I’ve never subscribed to the notion of seeing through to the end reading something I find dense, thin, pompous, trite, or otherwise not worth my continued attention). Then there came the problem that much of my reading does not constitute books, or even hard-copy texts. I spend a good one to two hours, usually in the morning, reading newspapers online, every day The New York Times, Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune, occasionally several others, and the online publications Salon, Truthdig, and Slate. And then there are the online magazines — The New Yorker, Smithsonian, The Nation, and occasionally assorted others. And on top of that are the online literary nonfiction sites such as Quotidiana or Brevity. Not that I read all of all of these publications/sites. But the idea of charting one’s reading history by recording the books read (as I used to do in my undergraduate days) doesn’t begin to capture the literary geography of reading in the online world. (Though I guess I’ve begun to do it, at least generally, here.)

The Duggar Family

At best I live on the margins of popular culture, probably more watching from the grandstand, and through cheap binoculars in the last row in a partially obstructed seat. So it was only today that I learned (on The Today Show, as if happens, by accident) of the Duggar Family. Apparently, the Duggars have been the subject for the past three years of a TV series on TLC (The Learning [?] Channel) called 19 Kids and Counting (17 Kids and Counting the first season, and 18 Kids and Counting last season). The parent Duggars — Jim Bob and Michelle — are devout Christians, who married in 1984, lived the first four years of their marriage on birth control, but then, because of what they took to be a birth control problem with a still-birth, decided to let their god sort things out (“We believe that each child is a special gift from God and we are thankful to Him for each one,” they write on their website), and went on to produce children the past 20 years the way other people produce tomatoes. Michelle Duggar (43) has spent almost half of her life pregnant. (Jim Bob only has to perform his stud function about once a year; it’s not clear what he does the rest of the time, though apparently he spends a lot of time at home on the TV show.) They have nine girls and ten boys, all with names beginning with the letter J (Joshua, Jana, John, Jill, Jessa, Jinger, Joseph, Joshua, Joy . . . and so on). They homeschool all of the kids and allow very little time to TV or the Internet. They use a buddy system to raise the kids, an older sibling assigned to care for a younger one. They live in Tontitown, Arkansas. And by all appearances on the TV show, everyone gets along fine, is doing well, there are no conflicts, no voices are raised, no butts are whacked.

This whole thing is obviously odd (why else would it be a reality TV show?). And if Michelle and Jim Bob want to let their family be determined by their superstition/god, so be it (though one has to wonder if that original motivation hasn’t been supplanted by the gods of their TV show, their website, their Facebook page, and their book). But why does the culture have to celebrate this gross irresponsibility? Why does The Today Show and I don’t know how many other TV “news” outlets and publications have to promote as positive what should be condemned as thoughtless self-aggrandizement and social recklessness?

Tom Jones

This just isn’t of much import, and probably not of reason for comment, but god help me, I can’t but notice that the 70-year-old Welsh heart-throb crooner Tom Jones (how many oxymorons in that phrase?) has decided after 40 years that women throwing underwear (“knickers” in the British vernacular) at him as he performs is somehow “just wrong.” Apparently, after all these years, he finds it insulting, despite over the decades his encouraging the lingerie barrage, beginning with his mopping his brow at the first instance. “It’s not unusual to be loved by anyone . . .” As he told the British Times Magazine: "It's just wrong. I'm laying my soul down here. And people start laughing."

But it may well be that the septuagenarian’s newfound modesty could have something to do with his recently released album, Praise & Blame, a spiritual album that a vice-president of Jones’s new record company, New Island, described as “some sick joke” and demanded that his company “pull back this project immediately or get my money back.” As Jones begins his promotional tour of the album, it certainly might be uncomfortable for women to be flinging panties at him as he’s singing “Lord Help the Poor and Needy,” “If I Give My Soul,” or “Burning Hell.” But if he’s still got the earlier “Mama Told Me" and “Sex Bomb” in his repertoire, the fuselage of undies could continue unabated.