Retirement, Take Eight: Just Visiting

During the past year of retirement, I have been teaching one class online, but other than that, I have been work-free, which is to say my time has been my own. The exception to this was my role in the recent hosting of a visiting professor from Vietnam. The good news was that since I had done this for the seven previous years, I had a routine of a sort, a schedule for the nine weeks: the trips to and from the airport, the campus and bibliographic orientations, her weekly meetings with the resident directors, the brewery tour. I also had a sense of what I was likely to  do and to hear: yes, on campus it is difficult to tell the instructors from the students. Yes, American coffee is comparatively watery, and a coffee break at work does last only fifteen minutes or so. Yes (again), the weather is cold but it will get warmer and by the time you leave to go home in May, we will not even be wearing sweatshirts. (And all this is hard for them to believe.)

Although I knew things would not go as planned--they never do--I did not anticipate how much time it would take to address an error, a transposition that should not have happened, in the visa paperwork completed by someone else. This  resulted in a good extra ten hours of my figuring out and addressing the error since it had implications for her compensation. This was the bad news, pretty much the only major bad news.

Please keep in mind that I was doing this hosting pretty much pro bono,  If this bad news situation was stressful for me--and it was--no doubt it was also for the guest. And unnecessarily so. And even separate from that, I realized how much I had done in the past; this hosting gig was a full-time job, albeit more some weeks than others.

I knew the visit would be labor-intensive along the way, and that it certainly was. I did have a lot of help, but I also found myself wishing that I had even more help--help with the not-going-out-to-do-fun-stuff but with the daily, more routine stuff, the less-glamorous trips to the supermarket, for instance.

And I knew this as I recognized that I had been spoiled by being retired for ten months, by doing whatever the hell I wanted to do.

Don't get me wrong: I am grateful for all the help I had. And I had a lot. In fact, in many ways, my faith in humanity has been revived  every one of these last seven--now eight--springs. At certain points in the visit my faith and trust in other people is just buoyed.

Being the default  during the visit, though,  got old a couple times, especially when I was sick off and on for a couple weeks. Plus, despite disclaimers, visitors to any location sometimes have expectations. I mean, they left home for a reason. They may or may not be expected to be entertained 24/7 (or say they do not expect to be entertained), but their idea of appropriate activities may or may not include a trip to the post office or the allergist on the way to the Asian market. And sometimes it is just necessary to stop and put gas in the tank, be you at home or overseas.

There is a travel philosophy in here somewhere: life is made of small, real events, and if the tourist why-not-see-even-more-of New-York-City isn't balanced by these small typical events, then I am put in the position of organizing something that is more a trip for tourists than a modest but meaningful representative cultural experience. A cultural exchange is not just about seeing landmarks that you can already identify. There is a difference between a tourist and a traveler.

My name is not Sandy Tourism.

And since my retirement, I have taken up a different role in the work/institution universe. During the visit, another thing I realized resoundingly, almost with a THUD, had to do with the people at the school. Before the visiting professor arrived, I went on campus maybe once a week to pick up my el cheapo educational discount New York Times in the school library. Sometimes I would see a librarian or two--which I was always glad to do--but that was it, pretty much. What I didn't fully realize before the guest arrived was how much I enjoyed seeing, even in passing, many of the people I used to work with full-time. Granted, I don't know all the newbies, and sometimes, although I know someone's name, I have to ask,"Which one is he?"

But for nine weeks and change I spent a lot more time on campus.

I don't know everybody the way I used to, and that's okay. What I have more fully realized, though, more than I ever did when I was trying to detach and go on campus only once a week, is how much I enjoy having contact with the people I know and like. I cannot say I know any of them well, or even that I have friended them on Facebook (or they me). I have never seen most of them outside of work and it is unlikely I ever will.

But if the place I invested thirty-nine full-time years is on a trajectory to become a place in many ways unidentifiable to me within the next five to ten years, so be it. At least for a while, good people, work friends of a sort, will continue to be there: Paul K., Jason, Mark R., Sharon Z., Jean L., Jill H., Both Sergei's. And others. And there are some who are comparatively new: Mary N., Gloria K., Jim and Norma, Joann D., Carolyn D. Jake.

I cannot list them all.

It is always great to see them, even fleetingly. But even so, I would not go back to working full-time. (And every once in a while  I am not sure I even want to work part-time although right now I don't want to think about not  going in once in a while to get my newspapers.)

These days. as I approach the anniversary of my retirement, I realize that I have walked away. In some ways I am a visitor, too. And that is just fine.

And Then There Was A Slight Interruption...
And this is what I was doing:
http://uticaod.com/article/20160515/OPINION/160519776

Here and There

(This appeared in the Utica Observer-Dispatch in summer 2015.)

I had to look Utica up on a map before I applied for a job here. The first year I was here, a colleague who had also moved from out of state said, “The locals will never let you forget that you’re not from around here.” Well, yes and no. And not long ago I found myself saying something to a newbie faculty member at MVCC, also a transplant: “It is possible to make a life here”.

Initially I planned to stay in Utica for one year, period, but at this writing I have lived more than half my life here. I have a nice circle of friends and a job that has provided opportunities that I never would have expected that day then I looked Utica, NY up in an atlas before I sent in my application. I have paid off a mortgage. I live modestly but comfortably enough.

But I am not much of a fan of Utica until I find myself hosting  company from overseas.  Don’t get me wrong: I have always liked the gritty authenticity of the place. I like the four seasons even if it seems that the street I live on is the last one ever plowed. I don’t like the regular cloud cover, the potholes, the taxes, and what I think of as the generalized seasonal affective disorder. I am still not convinced of the promise of nanotechnology. A lot of people here seem to be related. My last name doesn’t end in a vowel.  I grew up going to New Hampshire town meetings, and I still miss those all these years later, just as I miss seeing more than one candidate for each local position on a ballot. And sometimes it seems I see the same names over and over again. But that is not all that the area is—and besides, I can choose to make my life pretty much as I like by just ignoring that local closed shop and toodling along. Sometimes being ignored can be good. And I have managed to find a way to use Utica as a point of departure when I need it to be a point of departure.

This spring MVCC is hosting our seventh visiting professor from Kien Giang Community College in the south of Vietnam.  To come to Utica for nine weeks she has left her husband and two small children. As with MVCC’s previous visiting professors, Ms. Quyen Luong says Utica is a beautiful city and Buttenschon’s Christmas Tree farm is a wonder.  She had read about diners and asked to go to one, and at Crazy Otto’s Empire Diner in Herkimer she had the biggest pancake of her life (and insisted we take her photo not only of the pancake but of her with the Spiderman figure up high so she could show it to her son, a Spiderman fan).  She has learned that turtle cheesecake contains no turtle.  In the MVCC hallway, she can’t tell the teachers from the students; they are all just big, as is pretty much….everything. She touched a locker when she visited a high school, touched a football—things she has only seen in movies. Like her predecessors, she takes a photo of many of her meals before she picks up her fork.  She played the slots at the casino, and she marveled at the Tiffany lamp she saw during the tour of Saranac Brewery.  She says, “I love it here.”

She hooted and hollered at a hockey game and was thrilled when Rich Pucine, a big American friend, gave her a Comets t-shirt which is almost big enough to be a dress. “Our team won!” she said. Regardless of the weather, everywhere she goes she wears at least three layers.

And the fifteen MVCC students who have recently traveled to Amsterdam, Paris and London will have an experience similar to hers. Even the hamburgers in McDonald’s will not taste the same as home, and that is part of the fun of the travel. I have pleaded with them to not just go shopping  or find a McDonald’s in their spare  time but to seek out authentic experiences. See the Eiffel Tower, of course, but don’t see only the Eiffel Tower.

I write this in a time of increased concern with money and numbers than in the past—test scores, shrinking budgets. Another year of do more with less—or to try not to have to do less.  But even an MVCC  colleague of mine who is a bean-counter par excellance knows that life is if not just about the money and various digits. In his spare time, he dresses up as the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz. Without going too far from home, he gets it: put yourself in a different place, wear different clothes, and TA-DAA! see things anew.

It’s not about the beans.

I don’t like New York taxes but shortly I will probably be retiring here—after all, my house is paid for, and if my property did not appreciate the way it might have had I bought the equivalent elsewhere, at least here I was able to afford a house. My buying a house was one of many surprises over the years.  I never expected to stay here, really, but here I am with a house that looks, well, very lived in.

Just as Quyen’s visit started to wind down and I started cleaning out 39 years of memos and assignments in my office, I was caught unaware one more time.  Another surprise: our very first visiting professor from Vietnam, in  2009, Mr. Nguyen Duy Khang, sent me an email and reminded me of how good this area  looks like through new—his-- eyes.  Now finishing his Ph.D. on a scholarship in Gdansk, Poland,  he and his wife will be visiting family in southern California this summer, and, in order to see his friends at MVCC and in Utica, they will be taking either a bus or a train, whichever is cheaper,  both from and back to Los Angeles for a two week visit to the place I once had never heard of.

And I am still here to welcome them.

This piece was originally published in the Utica, NY Observer-Dispatch.
Copyright Sandra A. Engel