Dear Colleagues,
I thought I better send out a note to let you all know that I won’t be coming back to work at the Academy next year. As you might know, Tam had already submitted her resignation by the end of last year and was thinking of going back to work with APS if we came back to Albuquerque after our Italian SYA gig. I was planning on returning to the Academy if we came back. That’s how we kept putting it, “If we come back.”
After we got back from our sabbaticals in Spain, we were about as settled as two rocks in a slingshot. No complaints about the school, the faculty, the administration, the kids. We just wanted to get out of the country. There may have been some connection to the last election, but who knows. Even a John Kerry win may not have been enough to settle us down.
A strange but telling little scene happened to Tam and me a couple of years ago, and it had an odd effect on me. Tam and I were on a rattletrap train going north from Lisbon to Coimbra. Our car was completely empty except for a family of lunatics, a grey-haired, weary-looking mother, a grizzled father, and a crazy-assed son of maybe twenty. The kid, shaggy and wearing raggedy clothes, was ranging up and down aisle, shouting and waving an umbrella as if it were a sword.
Once, when the train was stopped at a station, he jumped off the car and ran around the platform, antagonizing people, making one woman scream and slap his face, I think, because of something he did with the umbrella. She didn’t stop yelling for quite a while, even when he had climbed back into the car laughing. The rest of the train was filling up except for our car.
The mother and father, sitting next to each other, were arguing, more like barking and snarling, indifferent to the boy. He couldn’t settle down and was crawling over seats, sitting on seat backs. Then he went for a nearby window, lowered it while the train was zipping along, and stuck his arm out, stretching out his fingers in the wind. Then he stuck his head out. Then his butt. He stuck his butt out the window, pretty far, actually. I was watching his antics and felt a perverse desire: I hoped that while he was halfway in, halfway out, we would pass through a very narrow tunnel. He was that irritating.
As Tam and I were the only fools to remain in the car, I guessed something ugly might happen, something that everyone else on the train was expecting and avoiding. In fact, nothing happened. The loony family got off at a stop, presumably the town they live in, as if they were a trio of commuters. At the station, they waved and greeted people, and astonishly, people greeted them back, smiling happily. (Wouldn’t you like to live in that town?)
As I sat there, waiting for an eruption, thinking it might even involve us, I noticed that I was comfortable. Comfortable and happy. We were not sure what we were going to do in Coimbra, we didn’t have any reservations or plans, we couldn’t speak or understand Portuguese, we weren’t sure that the train we were on was actually heading for Coimbra, and we were seated near characters out of a slasher movie. And all that felt totally natural to me.
However much this experience could be construed as a metaphor for a normal day of teaching, it seemed even more emblematic of an adaptation I’ve formed toward traveling. I never feel happier than when I feel lost on a train in the company of lunatics.
My dad says that my brother and I are as restless as fleas on a hot rock. He says that about once a year. It’s strange that he’d compalin about it; he’s the one that kept us moving every two or three years in my youth. If he were from the south instead of the Ozarks, maybe he’d say something about a cat on a hot tin roof. I guess he’s right. If it’s true for me, it’s true for Tam too. So off we go to a school in Cairo. The money sucks, the classes are larger, we’ll be teaching five of them a day, the kids are unruly, and the weather is relieved in the spring with dust storms that stop the city. How could we say no?
Thanks for twelve good years of patience and support. We hope you’ll stay in touch with us.
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