January 19, Decisions

For Oana

Decisions (1): What kind of work and why

The year was 1981 and I had lived in Canada for about eighteen months. Lucky to find a job a week after I arrived in the country. Calgary was a boom town living up to its name. I had been hired as a drafting apprentice in a geophysical consulting company where, for $500 a month, I was taught the rudiments of the trade.

Two seasons later, Mobil Oil hired me for $1200. The working conditions were not as tolerant in the face of daily error, but the money was much better. I came close to consider myself well off. On which comforting thought my most pressing fear, that of being uncovered as a fraud, was throwing its long shadow. My basic skills were limited and my work, so slow as to hardly justify, in my own estimation, the wages I  brought home. I tried to take courses in geophysics, improve, get on on the company ladder, since opportunity was knocking at every door. At the Southern Alberta Institute for Technology, they were churning technologists off the conveyer belt, the land was swelling with capped wells, the company happy to pay for training. But the number of indistinguishable rock samples was so daunting, I had to admit neither geophysics, nor its more artistic counterpart, geology, were my calling.

The afternoons at the office gradually more difficult to get through. After lunch, and everybody ate hefty in those days, I could hardly keep my eyes open. Not unlike how I feel today, as a result of sharply different reasons. I would gladly have put my head on the drawing board and fall asleep, were it not that my desk was in the middle of a large room I shared with fifteen people.

The only way in which one could chase sleep was to chat with one's colleagues. I had a few who were glad to see me come visit under the pretext of looking for advice on my mapping. Gaby, my Hungarian friend, was close to retirement, and neither sleepy nor troubled by anxiety concerning his duties. My other conversation partner was my boss, Laszlo, another Hungarian. These men, who had come to Canada with the 1956 revolution, did not know much about communism, but a lot about what to do to avoid it.

As with all immigrants at the beginning of what is called their new life, I had already incurred some debt and begun to experience the impossibility to bringing a credit card balance to 0. My parents made quite a bit less money than I, so I helped. Gaby kept talking about university. He had a very smart approach, which consisted mainly of praising my intellectual talents. I had left Romania in the midst of my third year university studies and never thought I would go back. All advice from that corner insisted that I renounce any ambition of intellectual pursuit. The West was all about making money and such endeavors as the intellectual ones were not rewarded. Which proved quickly not to be false. I also had this misconception, many people of my whereabouts entertained, that, at 25, I was already too old for school. How was I going to pay for my studies, my livelihood? The best advice Gaby gave me came in the form of a simple calculation. He said, yes, you are 25 now, in four years you will be 29. The time would have passed anyway, and you will ask yourself, how did I spend it? You can stay here, or, you can go look for something else. Time will pass, would have passed, regardless.

The only impediment seemed to be financing my studies, therefore I applied for a student loan. Rarely have I been happier than the day when I received approval for my first year.

At the university there was also encouragement, under the figure of a vice dean admissions who gave me some credit for the years I had spent in the university back home. I was happy to start it all anew, since all was new and unusual.

I left the oil company in the fall of 1982. My colleagues made me a gift, a writing pen of course. The year after, the second important recession in the oil business kicked in, more than half of the employees were laid off, and all received nice severance packages. There where I had left simply for the joy of having been awarded a student loan.

We could say this was an important decision I took in collaboration with a whole group of people around me who all cheered me on. We could also say that it was only the semblance of a decision, that I had to go back, that no other option would have been sustainable, to use another fashionable word, in the long run for me. School, that is, the eighth floor of the University of Calgary's library, with a view of the Rockies, was the most miraculous place I had yet laid eyes on since my arrival. Shortly put, I had never experienced a library where books were accessible on the shelves, no matter how expensive, no matter how rare, to anybody and all who cared to reach out and read them. I entered this place of retreat and wonder in 1982 and only emerged, from libraries in Montreal and then back to Calgary, where I finished the writing of my dissertation, passing through Atlanta for a short stint, in 1990. To that we can add another five years of teaching and postdoctoral studies in Halifax and Kingston, and we can say that it was only in 1995, when I got my first permanent job in London Ontario, that I could consider myself done reading in university libraries, and could finally move into my own office at home.

When we refer to decisions concerning professional life, if one were to think "decision" as a choice between this and that: between a less desirable, difficult because boring, generally unfulfilling, and a more desirable, pleasant, or satisfying because more provocative, creatively speaking, way of life; then of course, my decision to practically move to the library and live almost exclusively in the presence of books, between the ages of 26 and 40, can hardly be considered a decision which made my life easier. During those years - usually considered the best years of one's life, speaking from that point of view which values youth - the financial concerns were overwhelming, and there were times when I cannot say I dealt with those worries very well. Once the kind of work consequent with life in the library materialized, difficulties became of a different nature, but never disappeared, as they seem to do in those tall tales people spin, about life changed without a blink, where decision is spurred by some revelation. Whether it is one's having been laid off a job and deciding work in front of a computer, insignificant cog contributing to the wealth of the corporation, was not their thing anyway; or one's having had an out of the body experience, or its equivalent, at the dentist or on the operating table, which brought about the discovery of that spiritual, immaterial side of the world, they had never before cared for; and the list can go on; this kind of so called decision means, rather, changing one way of life with another and not with a better one necessarily. Truly good decisions are calls built on some precedent which makes them, to more attentive analysis, a consequence of something meaningful that came before, to which the call answers, rather than a radical change of course.

In the case I described, by necessity mine since it is what I know best, "going back to school" was exactly that. It was not a change of course. Work in the oil company had been, it was one of the many things I did in order to adapt to my new country, but it could hardly last, considering that I had not seriously dreamt of being a geologist in my youth. Instead, when I came to Canada, and in spite of the two only suitcases I keep talking about in order to recall to what extent I was without material means, one could hardly call me naked like a new born when I entered this new world at 24. There was something else I carried, of which I like to speak less, simply because it was and is unusual and apparently of little use. I was in possession, in one form or another, of no less than eight languages, whose learning had taken much of my childhood and youth. It mattered little that I would, at some point, make use of those, as a matter of fact the prevailing mentality, upon my arrival and even later, was such, that I better kept to myself that kind of possession. Whether I made use of it or not, the fact remained that in some manner, it was going to determine my professional decisions and by that I mean my way of life for ever. Learning a language is not simply a matter of learning words unknown. And at some point, when done properly, this kind of knowledge can open up forms of creativity which are a secret even to that learning itself.

Let us say, that was my foundation. Many years spent in solitude, with books, because of course in my time learning was done with books, there was nothing technological, nothing communicative, nothing purposeful, beyond the beauty of the language itself, about it. Either modern languages or the so called dead ones were taught in the same way. One read the ancients, one read the moderns, it was pretty much all it took, besides time.

Of course, what people do with what I call here, their fundamental knowledge, the one that becomes almost organic, as if already part of their genetic makeup, depends very much on their character and their desire. They can transform it into something practical, live off it, accomplish it in the open. Or, they can transform it into some form of private entertainment, commonly known as a hobby. Or, they can simply forget about it completely. The last is the sad case, and it was, once again, my case, when, for so many years, I stopped painting. Until the illness which brought us together, woke me up to it again. And, since I took up the piano, I discover so many people around me who, in their childhood, played it, and have abandoned it long ago. It is a mystery why we leave behind so definitely our childhood. I understand that to be appropriate when such learning was accompanied by some form of grief, which is not uncommon. But when it was a happy kind of learning, why we abandon it, I cannot understand.

It seems to have to do with becoming a grown up and reckoning with the real life of the adult. That life is not supposed to contain such pleasures as painting and piano playing for the sake of play. If one will not become a professional at it, then better forgotten. There is no time to play. When one is an adult, one has to provide.

Against this, sometimes, the child awakens and asks to be reinstated in his or her rights.

These seem to be moments the adult translates as taking a radical decision. One looks inwards and hears a recognizable, seductive voice. There are dreams there, which have been forgotten. Often there is renewed energy to learn. But most surely, there is a desire to do better than one has done.

That is why, I do not trust those who pretend the better way of life to be the one of lesser work, lesser effort. Work and effort are not to be avoided in themselves. What matters is, what we ask of these work and effort to do. Do we ask them to make us better, more wise, more helpful, therefore more lovable? Or do we ask them to give us more of the selfsame "I" to carry around?

It looks like I will have to take much more time than I have allotted myself, right now, to answer that question. We can therefore expect, this to be continued...

Decisions (2): What the dog said: I'd rather you stay home

People who love the company of animals know this conundrum.  Even when they have found the best place where to leave their companions while they go away, the pleasures of travel and holidays are always overshadowed by worries of what may, in their absence, happen with those left behind, more often than not, not at home.

A few days ago, while following Rocky on the trail,  I remembered one of our longer, more memorable trips to Europe. Yet what came to mind were not so much the many pleasant aspects of that sojourn, but that which, at the heart of it, became the source of untold anxiety. And this, in spite of the fact that, in those days - this was the summer of 2004 -, because I was in psychotherapy, I used to pay close attention to all manner of hints people with whom I came into contact routinely sent out. Right when I should have put that kind of knowledge to work, I preferred to disregard the warning at hand and stay the course.

Before the trip, as usual, I had to take care of the animals. Alice, timid, private and content to spend days on end in the house, has never been a problem. She was going to be cared for by Greg, and could not dream of a better master. Looking for a temporary asylum for Felix was a different matter. This time around I seemed to be out of luck, all well recommended homes were full. Finally, one agreed to take the dog in for such a long time. The owner of the kennel, a big farmhouse nicely appointed from what I could see on the outside, never invited me to visit as the custom requires. Time was getting short and I, fearful precisely of what came to pass, did not ask to inspect. The recommendation I had been given concerning him was truly half-hearted, and yet I chose to rely on it entirely.

Félix (foreground) and his all-time best friend Valérie 

Strangely enough, this man, as if aware of my worry, brought the conversation himself to the topic of people who are in the habit of leaving their pets with friends or acquaintances. He advised firmly against, of course, by saying that such ill placed trust can easily lead to the death of one's pet. An outcome of such gravity had never occurred to me before, and his words on the one hand shocked me, on the other appeared gratuitously far fetched. Come to think of it, I might have told him that up to that point I had often, if not always, left my dog with friends. I considered it my privilege and chance to be able to do so. It was almost the reason why I could have any, aware of the difficulty they represent, when one wants to travel, as I did. I was, indeed, fortunate enough to count such generous people around me, who would accept to take care of my dog while I was away, no matter for how long. This, in spite of Felix's difficult to adapt, punctilious, intense character.

At this moment, however, none of those friends were able to help. In fact, we were all going to meet at a conference in Spain. As it turned out, of course, unbeknownst to us all, this was to be the last conference our group, dare I say our small community, to keep in tune with common ideals, attended as a group. It was to be, as they say, the end of an era. And I often wonder if I am alone to wax nostalgic about that loss.

Nevertheless, upon parting, I tried to tell myself, as one always does, that all was going to be all right. This chap seemed responsible enough, his front lawn manicured, his manner almost polite. I was sentimentally attached to this area around Kingston, it was here where I had started my career, at Queen's, and it was from these townships that Felix had emerged, as a stray in need of a home which turned out to be my rented apartment of 1992. I trusted my dog's summer would be a holiday in his home county. He could be described as an anxious creature at the best of times, reason why I tried to ignore and resist the desperate appeals he kept sending in my direction.

I went away, that summer, for six weeks. Colin came to join me in France, at the end of my teaching engagement. After some traveling we ended in Pamplona, for the conference which, incidentally, had to do with togetherness and the bond between animal and human beings. During these six weeks, not one evening went by without my paining for my dog. When I called the kennel, I received vaguely reassuring, ready-made reports. Yet my dreams were disquieting and, try as I may, I simply could not believe he was well.

I had bought a brand new dog cushion when I took him to his summer camp. I remember it well, it was the brightest red. When we went to take him back, the cushion made us choke with its stench. We put it in the trunk, it did not look particularly dirty or stained, yet it was obvious that odor would never leave it. At the first opportunity we threw it out. To this day I wonder about that odor. Was it pain? The novelist Marguerite Yourcenar, who was a vegetarian, thought that eating meat was indulging in the taste of suffering. Maybe suffering has a smell too? I am quite sure of that.

My dog had been with me by now for about twelve years. He was getting old, much more sensitive and particular in the attentions he required. As soon as he appeared from behind the closed gates, he did not stop to greet us but, like an amnesiac who only remembers gestures, jumped in the car, evil burning on its tail. His bones swam untangled in the dirty, oversized fur-bag his skin had become, like a homeless's tattered suit. Movements disjointed, sideways gaze, chewed off tip of the left ear. Despondent, foggy gazed and overall hurt. My dog looked like he had frayed that very death the kennel-man wished upon all those pets left in friendly homes.

Such words as he had uttered upon our acquaintance came back to me and I could not forgive myself for not having properly attended to them first.

An ominous summer it was to be. Felix grew, after the order of things, older and weaker, and required the attentions we owe to the old. A summer whose horrors I will never really know, except for the signs which my dog displayed and which I did my best to erase, in the shortest possible time. Then, a decision was born, which had only been a vague, rather ambitious thought before. It certainly took years for me to make it happen, but it was at that point that I understood I could not again, simply leave behind my animal companions for long periods of time, in order to travel.