Almost home ...

Another September.  You can feel the wind changing, smell the leaves starting to dry out.  The academic cycle starts anew and this year, I am sadly aware that my time within the Grove is drawing to a close.

Soon, too soon, the trees will weave that uncanny robe of yellows and browns, oranges and scarlet, with smoky green peeking out as the supporting warp threads.

And before I know it, it will be time to say goodbye.  

 I will have served my students and my university for 34 chronological years.  I arrived on campus in August of 1980, as a youthful, frisch gebackener Doktor from Toronto.  This silver-haired chap with the slight limp and stooped posture now searches with quiet unease for that robust, energetic young Ph.D. with the jet black hair  ... and Walther von der Vogelweide whispers in my ear: 

Owê war sint verswunden alliu mîniu jâr
Alas, where have all my years vanished?

ist mir mîn leben getroumet oder ist ez wâr.

Has my life been merely a dream or is it real?

The learners still excite me and the classroom still gives me life, but I grow weary more quickly now.  The residual glow of teaching evaporates faster than it used to, and I find myself getting lost in deeper, more fundamental thoughts of self and family.

There is a life for me beyond a career.  And there are young lives struggling to find a career, as long as I insist on clinging to a familiar position at the university.  At 64, I am still discussing video game theory with 20-somethings.  And that is surely just wrong.

Time to make way for someone closer in age to the learners, someone who has more credibility.

Have I affected teaching and learning at Brock?  Have I helped learners transform their world view?  Perhaps, perhaps not ... but once I have retired, will it really matter?  I meet younger colleagues on campus who express surprise: "Oh, you're still here!  I thought you had retired!" 

Some put great store in the word "legacy" and all that they believe it to purport.  With dignity and pride, I stand by my belief that legacy is like so many footprints in water.  When I do retire and it happens to be a Friday, I fully expect that on Monday, some young wag will venture, "Barry who?"  And that is how it must be.

I have done my job, and done it well; but I have been paid to do that job, and been paid well.

Draw a line under those columns.  There is nothing owing in either column of the ledger. 

I will take a final bow, gracefully, and with dignity. 

Time to go home.
I can feel it.  It is right.

Slowing it down ...

I am engaging with gradual disengagement as a way of coping with my eventual retirement from active employment.

When I awaken that first morning after I walk away from Brock for the last time, I do not want to be flooded with a sense of loss or feel a sudden vast void in my life.

 I want to choose how and when I gradually give up activities, on my terms and on my schedule, with fond lingering memories gently stirred in the process, with intentional, deliberate surrender because it is time.

Gradually stepping back from the whirr of one's daily activity, gradually slowing down the frantic pace of living, easing into semi-ease ...

My fascination with fountain pens, inks and fine papers is I am certain an antecedent of my disengagement from the modern hurly-burly. This mania is well known amongst my intimates.  Indeed, it is often the subject of gentle jibing:  "Barry was late this morning because he was inking his pens!" [followed by sympathetic "awww!  isn't that cute?" kinds of noises]

In a world in which speed and efficiency are privileged, practices that I myself prize in professional circumstances, my use of fountain pen and ink helps me to slow down my thoughts as I commit them to paper, forces me to think about what I shall write, and even more important, reminds me that the selection of the words themselves and the interplay -- sound and shape --amongst them is the creation of beauty, an act that ought never to be taken lightly.

Recently I have resumed a habit that, like pen and ink, is a deliberate act re-discovering small pleasures in activities that have been flattened by the routine and need for speed of modern daily life.

I have returned to wet shaving, with brush, mug and double-edged safety razor.  And I love it.

What a pleasure to find that there is a counter-culture out there that, like me, delights in elevating an act of daily routine to one of slow ritualistic enjoyment.

So What?

My best advice to recent Brock graduates ...

Keep asking THAT question ....

So what, indeed?

When did I become useless?

I will turn 64 on my next birthday, just 2 weeks away.  As is required, I have given plenty of notice that I shall retire from full-time employment on my 66th birthday, in two years from now. There are but 6 weeks remaining in my current administrative position. In July, I shall return to my responsibilities as an Associate Professor of Digital Humanities and Communication Studies.

Since I arrived at Brock in August of 1980, fresh Ph.D. in hand, I have served the students of the university, and the university itself.

So when did I become superfluous to the Academy?  At what point did "senior colleague" tip over into "senior citizen," with its attendant cultural associations of over the hill, past prime, slow, helpless, in the way, a bother -- useless to my department and to my colleagues?

The signs have been creeping in all around me.  But it wasn't until I was talking to other senior colleagues did those individual signs start to fall into place and I began to see an unpleasant picture of my Grove, my Academe.

"I feel irrelevant in my own department" was the declaration of a colleague that resonated with frightening clarity within my being.  It was spoken by a man whom I respect as an academic, as a teacher, and as a colleague for his achievements and his wisdom, as well as his humour and sensible advice.  We sat in my office, discussing his struggle with the idea of retirement after 41 years of dedicated, selfless, and often unacknowledged service to our university.  He is a 3M Teaching Fellow, recognized as one of the best university teachers in Canada.  Yet he was voicing aloud the same misgivings I myself had been feeling for at least a year now.   

I have observed that, as I grow older, I have become more sensitive to behaviours and vocabulary choices of people around me.  I think of it as my mature life experience automatically filtering and routing stimuli to my brain for processing through a lens vibrantly polished by 64 years of application.

I am acutely aware of that sensitivity, so I find myself frequently second guessing my reactions --

Aren't you just over-reacting?  Would they really cut you out of the discussions intentionally?
Are you sure that was a dig and not an attempt at humour?  Did your suggestion really require a response?

But with increasing and alarming frequency, I find that I cannot help but conclude that I am in fact misreading neither the words nor the actions, that in fact there is a dismissive attitude towards older colleagues that is evident within segments of the university.  I get the unmistakable impression that I have passed my "best before" date and have already been consigned to the compost heap.

Confronting those involved invariably results in a hurried apology, "I'm sorry, in my haste to get [name task] done, I just went ahead.  You should have been consulted."  And with that wee bandage affixed, healing and forgiveness will no doubt follow, and off the person goes until the next time.

There are days when I rise up against this attitudinal shift, when I rail and feel feisty enough to push back.

But lately, I have been noticing that there are more days when I  feel that the swell is too great to crest, and my fatigue draws me down silently, beneath the dark rolling wave of indignity.