He might have been a teacher

My sister and I have just had another birthday, so I think over what I know of the autumn of our birth and my father’s travel south at that time. He drove to Baton Rouge alone to begin his first semester of graduate school at Louisiana State University. His Naval Defense Education Act fellowship would cover the family living expenses—modestly, but fully. My mother’s parents had given them a good used car and a gas card.

He convinced Mom, pregnant at 21 with twins due in October, to stay in Alton, Illinois, at his parents’ house. August and September are hot and humid along the mid-Mississippi. There was no air conditioning, and the bedroom where Mom tried to sleep was upstairs, the bathroom downstairs. There was a hospital in her own hometown, but Dad, whose anxiety was at peak, wanted her to stay near the larger hospital just down the road from his family’s house in his larger small hometown. Mom agreed to this (just as she had agreed to not to take the pill because of Dad’s fears—it was the early ’60s—about its possible side effects).

I must choose now which story to tell, and either way it is a story I learned during the long, slow, warm weeks and long evenings of the annual January respite with Mom in Tucson. I could go deeper into the desert of her experience in the days before our birth, into her isolation and how she wished to be with her own mother at that time. And how her mother would die of cancer within four years and probably knew she had it while her daughter was pregnant. How my father’s parents, who doted on us, their grandchildren, said within earshot of my mother before we were born that she didn’t seem grateful to them for putting her up.

Dad began school, in August, probably a bit less anxious because his parents, sister, wife and children-to-come were all in one place. He could turn his worries toward his graduate program, which went swimmingly and led to an offer of a faculty position at the University of Georgia. This period, where my first definite memories were formed, was only two years, and held the full extent of my father’s academic career, and this is one of the memory boxes I have opened with Mom after supper in our casita in the desert. Why all that formal education, only to leave so soon, I asked?

He thought he could teach, she said.

Two years into it, he got fed up with large classes of undergraduates who didn’t seems to care about the subject matter. He didn’t like sharing an office with another young faculty member he had been acquainted with before coming to Athens, and with other less-than-ideal aspects of the job.

He wrote a letter to his chair (Mom found the letter when she went through his boxes) listing four circumstances he found unacceptable. He had found a job with a government contractor in Kansas City, and my parents took us, and our brother and cat, and left, no discussion.

Now, from the perspective of having worked more than 20 years at the same kind of large state university where Dad taught, I see in him a young man who never really understood how things work at these places. New faculty do teach the big classes. They don’t have the best office space. They are hustling. They must build their research programs.

In the 56 years I knew my father, I never heard him express an interest in research, which is the core work of a university faculty member in the sciences. When Mom repeated his idea about teaching on an early mild evening among the saguaros, I realized that I had been hearing this all my life. Both he and Mom always said he got a Ph.D. so he could teach.

He didn’t have to understand. The world was full of assumptions in his favor: he was male, married and a father (he was deferred during Vietnam); he had a science degree, a doctoral degree in his field. He already had succeeded.

I think there was more to why he quit. It didn’t suit him temperamentally; teaching is exhausting for non-performers, for introverts, who get energy sitting (or walking) and thinking (or reading). But who talked about that, about how our inclinations matter, how not all researchers are natural teachers, how our idea of what teaching is might not be what it is at all? I didn’t have anyone to talk to about that when I thought I wanted to teach high school English, which I did for a total of one year.

But Dad did go back to teaching, in a way that suited him better, after he retired and began tutoring physics four afternoons a week at the local community college, getting plenty of students through their classes and solving all the physics problems on the MCAT and filing them for reference at the tutoring center. He only worked with two or three students at a time (or maybe just one), didn’t give exams or lecture or do it full-time. Word got out, and demand for his services grew.

I try to imagine an alternate story in which Dad understood faculty priorities and in which I grew up with a professor father in Athens, Georgia, where I could have gone to hear the B-52s and REM in their formative years. But that isn’t what was. My father worked 35 years for a Midwestern government contractor making three times what I make now, and sometimes he said he’d rather dig ditches, and I couldn’t understand that, but now I know what he means. He wanted sun and air and movement.

When he retired, he and Mom walked every morning. They traveled to Costa Rica and Puerto Rico and Tucson and watched birds. And he tutored, then he died and left all his students scrambling. It happened fast, and I can’t catch up, can’t make sense of it, and there is my own life to try to make sense of too, but it doesn’t. Only the desert and the mountains and the rivers make sense. They are my teachers. They don’t use words, not like this.