JLo is younger and has made millions and has loved Ben Affleck, although I might be able to out dance her now, but in a few months, I’ll be 73, a qualified geezer, not a millionaire and one who has never loved Ben, and in a few days, I’ll have been retired from teaching for 14 years. On some days those many years, from 22 to 59, seem as if they were inhabited by a doppelganger, another imposter self who I’ve met often and who’s told me stories.
For me, teaching was an immersive, obsessive way of life, one that during the school year especially was more akin to a hermetic monk’s daily program than anything ordinary. Thirty-six years of that keeps its imprint on me in my morning routine — rising between 4:30 and 5:00, reading and writing and then picking up the physical labor of the day until my point of collapse around 5. I’ve made another life for myself since then.
I no longer teach in any formal arrangement, although those habits of mind are everywhere in my relationships. Instead, for several years I tutored, worked with rescue dogs for 8 years, traveled, kept a 1/2 dozen former students who have become friends, kept 3 high school friends over 60 years, made new friends at the bookstore where I’m closing in on 10 years, ran a children’s story time there before Covid and now run 2 other groups — classic books and poetry writers. I have made drinks for a thousand customers (?), sold them books, listened to their stories, and in the course of all this, found a second home after the HS … my second act.
I never anticipated nor expected any of that. I’ve been granted 14 more years to read, to become a writer, to even write poetry. With it all before me now however, it is those friendships that mean the most — the common histories, their voices, the way their lives have pushed me to become a better man (I think). My gratitude for all that has fallen to me is immense and never far from my thoughts.
