Life at DrTom's:
Mostly Humorous Anecdotes by a Mostly Retired Cornell Professor
by
Thomas A. Gavin
Copyright 2011 Thomas A. Gavin,
All rights reserved.
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0210-9
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
DEDICATION
To Robin, who always has my back even though she is always at my side. I don’t understand how she does that physically.
PREFACE
There is a lesson to be learned in nearly everything we do. Now that I am retired, I have the time to reveal and ponder what those “morals of the story” are. Regardless of whether you are planting a garden, sitting in a bar alone, cutting firewood, observing chickadees at a bird feeder, or reading what people write on a social networking website, observing human and non-human life can be entertaining, provocative, and humorous. When you are not hard-pressed by deadlines and goals imposed from the outside, you can savor the little pleasures more and, with time, you realize that these are really the important pleasures. I now spend a great deal more time with cigar books and cookbooks and Hemingway than I do with bird books and ecology books and Darwin. Oh, how our lives can change.
I was a university professor for nearly 30 years---conservation biology, behavioral ecology, mammalogy, ornithology, ecology. It is impossible for my view of the world not to reflect what I learned from all that time spent looking at nature as a product of natural selection and the evolutionary process. Humans are basically little different than other mammals, except we carry cell phones. But observing people is easier than watching other animals, and it can be done anywhere. Fortunately, humans are not strictly nocturnal and we don’t live in a hole in the ground.
This book focuses on the idea embodied in that old expression about taking the time to smell the flowers as you go through life. The natural world is intensely rich; there are hundreds of biological stories unfolding around each of us every day. But you have to slow down and tune your senses to hear their messages. Exactly the same is true for the human story. I’m not here to advise or instruct anyone about how to slow down and savor the world more. You probably have a thousand reasons why you can not do that. However, I can share with you some experiences, most of them from the past few years. If this works out well, these anecdotes might cause you to sit outside in a forest, or in a public place with the cell phone off, just absorbing what comes at you.
This book is a collection of my recent essays, many of which originally appeared in my Life at DrTom’s blog. They have been rewritten, expanded, and shaped to focus on what life can teach us if we really observe. Watching and listening are the techniques, and the memories that result is the goal.
Chapter 1: Retired and Clueless, But Loving It
(DrTom preparing to go to work as a census enumerator)
I’m so lonely that Jehovah’s Witnesses are welcome
We live 10 miles out of Ithaca in the small village of Danby. Our house is in the woods and we can't see any of our neighbors, which are few and far between. Almost no one visits the house, the kids are grown and gone, and my wife is working almost non-stop in her office at one end of the house. The bottom line is--I'm lonely. In fact, if I was a religious man, I would have altered the Lord’s Prayer as Mark Twain did: “Give us this day our daily stranger.”
I know I am lonely because two days ago a small, beige car drove up the driveway, parked at an awkward angle, and sat there for a moment before anyone got out. I knew then exactly who they were. A nicely dressed man and a teenage girl got out of the car, and began walking piously toward me carrying something in their hands. You guessed it. They were from Jehovah's Witnesses and they had their usual copy of the Watchtower to offer me. Normally, I brush off strangers in a New York minute who come to the house trying to sell me anything. But in this case I was never so glad to see another human being. We had a pleasant talk for about 15 minutes, about everything in the world except religion. At several pauses in the conversation, the man shook my hand, but then I thought of another topic I wanted to cover. The guy must have shaken my hand at the end of what he thought was the finale of our conversation at least three times. I honestly believe that he thought I was trying to convert HIM. I realize now, they were anxious to leave.
I have taken to walking down my country road and talking to any neighbors who make the mistake of venturing outside at that moment. The letter carrier woman speeds up past our mailbox if I am in the driveway, but I know she has mail for us. The UPS guy tosses our packages from his moving truck as he passes by our garage. The electric company lady checks our meter in the dark with a flashlight. It is amazing how hard of hearing she is. She must hear me calling as I run after her little white pickup in my pajamas. And when telemarketers call, they eventually have to cut ME off.
But I think I am solving the problem. I have joined Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Xomba, Helium, SheToldMe, ISayToo, Squidoo, and Moli. I have worked my way through my old grade book going back to 1980, and invited every former student I can find to be my online friend. I belong to four social chat rooms and three stock trading message boards. We actually have two landlines (with a phone in every room except the bathroom, but I'm fixing that this weekend), a cell phone, and a fax machine and, of course, I have email, Skype, and several instant messaging accounts. If you get a busy signal, try another device. If you are in Ithaca, just drive out.
On the bright side, I have been spending a lot of time with myself, and I've gotten to know me pretty well. All things considered, I’ve known worse.
Retirement and a lapse of personal hygiene
Since Management and I started working at home (I retired, she changed jobs), we have gotten a little careless about our personal hygiene and appearance. We don't shower as often, I don't shave like I should, and we tend to wear the same clothes until they holler out "wash me!”. This slippage just happens, almost as soon as you no longer go to an office where you have to encounter co-workers, or customers, or students. I think the mechanism works like this: because I rarely shave, I almost never look in the mirror in the morning, and I don't see how frightening I appear. When I finally do look in the mirror after a few days, at first I don't recognize who I am seeing and when I realize it is me, I become horrified and then do something about it.
Of course, Robin and I have to look at each other as we pass in the hallway or meet for lunch, but we know that if we criticize the other, they will retaliate and we will both have to do something we don't want to do, like shave our legs. So we tend to remain silent about the shaggy appearance of the other, like the days when the U.S and the Soviet Union each had lots of nuclear weapons, but neither would dare
