EARNING A LIVING (2)
Continuing with my employment history, after returning to the United States I attended the University of Iowa, where, again the tuition was very low and paid by my father. Kathe and married and both of use worked. She worked under a woman called, Toots, making University of Iowa, identity card. I worked for a year part time as an orderly in the Hospital for Handicapped Children and then for a year on the children’s ward of the Psychiatric Hospital. Both were low paying jobs but I enjoyed both of them immensely. I like going to work, in fact, I enjoyed both of these jobs much more than I enjoyed going to classes at the University of Iowa Writer’s Worship where I was kind of a lost soul, producing a Master’s Thesis of short stories and getting an MA in English. But I really enjoyed my hospital work which has had a lifetime impact on me. I didn’t consider that I was being paid for doing onerous work as Kathe was with Toots and her disdain for anything not American. I liked being with the children, reading them stories and dealing with the illnesses. I was getting paid to do something that I really liked doing.
And that continued when I came to Warren Wilson College as a very young teacher. I soon found ways to teaching and devising student activities on the college’s work program in which every student was required to do manual labor three hours a day. I got a grant that let me organiz programs for sharing other cultures, 25% of the students were foreign students, in public schools and when I burned out doing that I shifted to a kind of feeling along, discussion based, not subject based, way of teaching which was not expected of me but was enjoyed so much by many students that I was allowed to do it, most of the time, unhindered. I also began taking students for extended periods, first for two months, then for four months, to India on a kind of mythical adventure tour that was also non academic. Students liked that, too, so I escaped almost all administration attempts to make me more academic.
But the point that I am trying to make is that for most of the time I was having the time of my life and for some reason getting paid to do it. It never seemed like work so there seemed to me to be a huge disconnect between what I was having fun doing and my monthly paycheck. I wasn’t one of the highest paid teachers since I was somehow managing to skate along with only a MA while gradually everyone else had a PhD. But when money was dumped into my bank account each month it always seemed that I was getting paid way more than I deserved because I was having such a good time. In addition to teaching in my own idiosyncratic and oddball way that let me learn as much from the students as they from me, to making a paid trip to India every fourth semester, to doing projects which were fun for me, I also only was doing this for eight months of the year, with four months off to write and read. And I was getting paid, getting wildly overpaid, for doing it.
And then I retired and have been retired for 15 years and for some reason the money kept flowing in, from social security, a Presbyterian pension for the five years that Warren Wilson was still a Presbyterian mission college, from a not very productive IRA account and inheritance from my parents, really from being born a US citizen rather than in some other country without all these benefits (including as much as anything, Medicare).
My income still seems a kind of miracle, completely undeserved, because all I have been doing is having a good time doing, for the most part, what I want to do.
So that’s my story. It is a story from beginning to end of undeserved good luck and good fortune. I didn’t arrange any of this consciously, I was never in charge, it just happened to me. And that includes the six places that I have been able to visit this last year. I didn’t deserved that either.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 