Lately, to make ends meet, I’ve been seeking what many call “a retirement job.”
Yes, I’m collecting Social Security, but much of my work over five decades has been part-time and two-or three-jobs-at-a-time for employers who withheld nothing. I’m far more familiar with 1099s than W2s, and every April, while most American adults file for refunds, I write checks to the U.S. Treasury as high as $1,606.
What I need isn’t much, perhaps twelve hours a week. Since friends and relatives keep telling me that my knack for bullshit would make me a good tour-guide, I’ve sent inquiries to numerous historical societies and museums.
But they exist with minimal budgets and depend on history buffs able to volunteer their time and effort. I’ve collected the kind responses I’ve received with the thought that I might bullshit a grant application that would allow me to work at the John Greenleaf Whittier House and/or the New England Quilt Museum a day or two a week on some foundation’s dime.
But that will take a while. Meanwhile, I’m thinking I might return to the employment most responsible for the fix I’m in.
From 1986 through 2002, I was a circuit rider. In the 19th Century, a circuit rider was a minister, usually Methodist, who rode a horse to preach in rural towns 20 or 30 miles distant. At the end of the 20th, we were part-time faculty driving to teach on campuses often double the distance.
May sound like just another example of the “gig economy,” but it was more the model for it. As a reaction to the student unrest of the Sixties and early-Seventies, state legislatures cut budgets to public colleges during the Ford and Carter years. Colleges responded by leaving full-time faculty positions unfilled, replacing them with part-timers hired only as needed. For American businesses, including hospitals and newspapers, “outsourcing,” “streamlining,” and the proliferation of “temps” came later during the Reagan and Bush years.
More than once, in the same semester, I was in faculty meetings at two different schools with other adjuncts in both. In effect, two of us replaced two full-timers, but in four part-time positions–at lower rates and without benefits. According to our contracts, we were “contractors.”
My adjunct circuit changed from semester to semester. By the time I quit, I had taught at ten colleges ranging from Bridgewater State College (now University) in the south to New Hampshire College (now the U. of Southern N.H.) in the north and UMass-Lowell to the west.
I live off the coast of Massachusetts on Plum Island. There is no east.
Like most adjuncts, I divided my time between two and sometimes three campuses each semester. Most of my classes were Freshman Writing 101 and 102, or they had names such as Basic Writing, Fundamentals of Writing, or some other euphemism for Remedial English, itself a euphemism for Bonehead English. No matter what you call them, college freshman writing classes, as the joke goes, are “the classes everybody has to take but nobody wants to take.”
Still, I rather enjoyed them, and I was glad as well to teach a Business in American Literature class assigned in New Hampshire. When the dean offered it, I laughed aloud. “Are you sure you want a socialist teaching a capitalist course?”
“As long as it is in the literature,” she dodged.
Weeks later I met a class with a syllabus that ranged from Herman Melville to Arthur Miller. I had prepared a semester of art, but they expected lessons in The Art of the Deal, amazed that they were not there for Lee Iacocca and Donald Trump. Nevertheless, in a tour de force show of spontaneous bullshit, I won them over with an introductory class that spoofed Mark Twain’s Gilded Age. This was 1992 when it was easy to match what Twain saw to what they were seeing on the evening news.
In 2016, I was amazed that America would elect Melville’s Ahab as president–and that we are now living in another Gilded Age. Such is the lesson I hope to give again: Literature is the truth ahead of time.
Be that as it may, for a less traumatic way of life, as well as for a more certain income, I left teaching. And I must admit that when deans at three colleges began urging us to satisfy students’ “comfort zones,” I knew I needed out. At Mass Bay, I had no choice after I brought a department meeting to a screeching halt with what I thought was a rhetorical question:
Is this a college or a nursing home?
Maybe I should have raised my hand and waited to be called on rather than blurting it out, but who ever asks permission to sound an alarm?
A friend, whose sister teaches on one of the University of Maine campuses, found and sent me a listing for an adjunct position teaching writing in Orono, the flagship campus way up past Bangor. For that, I’d either become a Mainiac or take on a 200-mile commute, each way. Note to self: Always read the cover note first. She was suggesting I use it as a model. Moreover, since UMaine has two smaller campuses within an hour drive, I might see that listing again.
Those of you unfamiliar with college scheduling may be wondering why I would be doing this in the last week of August. For starters, I don’t need to start this fall or even this academic year, but I do recall last minute scrambles at Northeastern, Mass Bay, and Northern Essex. Pointing this out in my cover letter, I let them know I can make myself available on a moment’s notice–and that I know how to improvise openings because I’ve done it more than once.
When in doubt, channel George Carlin. Might not work in a science or business class, but if you’re teaching language, you can’t go wrong.
As the Orono listing reminds me, however, it was all so long ago. The high-tech, on-line requirements that were not there when I last taught 19 years ago are making me dizzy. Also, I’m asked for references, but can’t find any profs still on the rosters of any college where I taught. And my resume? Sure I can emphasize the writing, but War and Peace wouldn’t hide a teaching career coming to an end in 2002.
Putting it all aside, I was in a dentist chair when it hit me that I’m a 21st Century Rip Van Winkle. Old Rip’s snooze lasted 20 years, so even the timing is about right. Laughed aloud causing the dentist to pull some instrument of torture out of my mouth. “Sorry! Did I hurt you?”
I shook my head.
“Do you always laugh while getting a filling?”
Driving home, I was already forming a blog. Call it a consolation. Getting a teaching job may be a pipe dream, but at least I’ll get yet another installment of my haphazard memoirs. A joke, a satire, with absurd, stumbling attempts to cope with a strange new world.
Among the surprises was a seeming footnote to few emails I received in response to my query. Following the sender’s name, title, name-of-hall, name-of-school, phone and fax numbers at the very bottom was a brief parenthetical entry: (she/her).
Turns out that, for a few years now, it is considered “academic courtesy” to indicate the pronouns by which you prefer to be called–even when your first name is as feminine as Mary or masculine as Fred. George Carlin would have a field day with that, but I should probably leave it alone.
Reminds me of the most striking detail of Washington Irving’s story when Rip returns to the village and sees a poster on a tree. He assumes that the face is King George, but something seems amiss. He does a double-take, rubs his eye, and reads the name: “George Washington.” Martin Luther King liked to cite the scene as if sounding an alarm: “Old Rip slept through a revolution!”
Apparently, so have I.
But all may not be lost. One idea for a joke made me laugh while driving: List former students as references.
But now I wonder: That might be a good idea. A really good idea. Certainly innovative. And I have a few who are now friends on social media, including a Newburyport City Councilor. I’ll see what they have to say.
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Mouth of the River 