EPIPHANY

When I was two, my parents enrolled me in the Sunnyside Progressive School in Queens, NY [see my autobiography for the seamy details.]  I went to school for the next twenty-one years, until, in June, 1957, I was awarded the doctorate in Philosophy by Harvard University.  After a six months hiatus for active duty in the U. S. Army, as part of my obligation to the Massachusetts National Guard, I began a teaching career that lasted exactly half a century.  Thus, when I retired in August 2008 I had been in school, one way or another, for seventy-two years.  The last months of my fifty-year career were devoted to packing up and moving to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, but when the last box was unpacked and the last book put up on the shelves of my new home office, I complained to Susie that I needed to find something to do. 

Oh, I tried.  I taught four courses in Duke University's "learning in retirement" program;  I taught a graduate seminar in UNC's Public Policy Department.  I edited my published and unpublished papers in four volumes and put them on Amazon as E-books.  I even spent a year as an unpaid professor at Bennett College trying unsuccessfully to develop a program to address the low graduation rate.  Fretfully, urgently, anxiously, I was trying to find a new job.

All the while, more or less on the side, I was running this blog.  The day before yesterday I had an epiphany -- or, as we say in this neighborhood, an eclaircissement.  THIS is my job!  Writing regularly for a blog is a job, at least for someone who thinks of himself as a writer.  All along, I have had a job.  I don't get paid for it, of course, but I have a pension, so that is not a problem.  I can stop worrying about what I am going to do in retirement.  I have been doing it for six years.

Susie is very relieved.