Hola desde el hotel y Main Street Bloomsburg,
It’s Friday night and the end of the week where I have felt like I was on a rollercoaster. The role health has played in my life has been significant, and while that can be argued for any human, from day-one, a premature delivery and a birth weight of 17 ounces has affected my very being in multiple ways. What is still amazing is whether that miraculous start, and survival is still creating consequences. I am not sure if things I face now as a septuagenarian are related to my beginning or if I am merely just getting older. Monday started with multiple doctors’ appointments to manage various issues affecting almost every aspect of who I am. While that is due in part to my travel and needing to manage things in person (most doctors are not licensed to do telemedicine across state lines), so getting everything managed at one time is optimal. The other thing realized in keeping my address and administrative life here is a simple, but important fact: my doctors know me and my unique circumstances, my modified body. That reality was readily apparent this past week as my PCP questioned some things. She is incredibly thorough, and while her concern led to a stressful few days as I waited for the additional testing, the very thought she was so attentive was comforting.
As with earlier this year, returning to Bloomsburg was and is sort of mixed bag. The familiarity can be helpful, but the simple reality that I technically no longer live here is readily apparent on a variety of levels. I have found myself wondering if I should still be working, and imagining what I would have done in the year and a bit longer if I was still in the classroom. Some of my retired colleagues say they never looked back, but I guess I am different. I wonder how much of it was my mantra that being a professor was not what I did, but it was who I was, and still am to some degree. The reality of identity seems to be a bit complicated, or am I merely making it such? I am unsure. More people still refer to me as Dr. Martin than Michael, and even that at times confuses me. Which moniker, which name is more comfortable and why? Another reality is schedules, and certainly people have lives that have continued just fine without me; there’s nothing surprising about that. No one is indispensable, and that is something I have told others for a long time. Higher education is no different; it is a business. The starkness of that truism was profoundly evident in the post-COVID, which on the Bloomsburg campus was exponentially more pronounced by the integration of three campuses (previously other universities in the PASSHE). Even today, running into some former colleagues, I often hear from them “I am jealous.” However, of what? Of no schedule per se, of no daily responsibilities to a classroom, department, students? I realize things I miss more than things I did not enjoy. I understand the profound opportunity and privilege I had to be in a classroom with amazing people.
More appointments today, but also some good news, although tempered. My balance is squared away again, for the time being. The crystals in my right inner ear will always be problematic; and reoccurring vertigo is the pragmatic issue. Getting things back (literally) in balance this time was especially problematic, necessitating at a follow up visit. This is the first full week in almost a year that I have not feel shaky or out of balance. I am hoping to get some work done that has not been possible over the next weeks. The only thing left to manage for the moment is the cataracts that have gotten much worse in the last year. And having Lasik in the past does create some complication, but my ophthalmologist is well aware and already taken that into account. As typical, I have been reading about the procedure and how it might affect me. It seems pretty routine and improving my eyesight will be a good long-term strategy. When I had Lasik done almost 20 years ago, it made a profound difference for me.
I am continually astounded by the xenophobic attitudes of the American public from the person on the street to those who have elected to our national offices. Since it was announced that Bad Bunny, who is Puerto Rican, which is an American Territory, would be performing at the Super Bowl, the ridiculous response to his SNL spot or MTG’s wanting to pass a law before he performs border on the line of absurdity. Even though I can trace some of my family linage back to shortly after the Revolutionary War, there are many in the family who immigrated and spoke another language (e.g. Norwegian, Irish, Spanish). Certainly, their desire to speak English was probably significant, but if you consider the reality of Puerto Rico as a territory, their Hispanic culture is their reality, their identity. Expecting Bad Bunny to only speak English, particularly when his music is indigenous is ludicrous. However, MTG falls into that category regularly. Throughout the decade-plus I have been writing, I have noted on numerous occasions that visiting other cultures, listening to other languages, and experiencing new places and peoples has been one of the most significant things I have done to understand both myself as well as the other. It was while first hopping through the snow in Garmisch, sitting on a train from the Spanish border to Paris, listening to Danish that early morning at the main train station in København, or experiencing a demonstration in Rome listening to the Italian chants, I realized what education really entailed. It was taking in a lecture on Luther as the first socialist at Karl Marx Universitat, being examined at Checkpoint Charley by East German guards, or sharing the reality that I could write to an East German seminary to student, but he could not write back that taught me the differences governments created for its citizens, and the blessings the diversity of America offered. When I worked on a doctoral degree, it was teaching a writing class of all foreign engineering students that to this day was one of the most profound teaching experiences I would have (and I visited one of those students just this past July); traveling with a colleague to offer students the opportunity to experience Eastern or Central Europe, studying Polish in my 60s, hosting exchange students or immersing myself in Moscow after being blessed to have a Russian student share her life for a year and hosting her parents in my home are some of the most transformative things in my life.
Fearing the other, closing ourselves off to the rest of the world out of anger or arrogance is not what made America a great nation. The change we are experiencing over the 40+ years I have found myself traveling to other countries is sad; it is frightening. Even this past summer, my experiences in travel to Denmark, to Poland, and to Spain enriched my life yet again. The globalization of our world has consequence, and those consequences are complex, but our similarities far outweigh our differences. Fearing the differences are not who we have been; it is not who we should be. ¡Que viva el otro! Démosle la bienvenida al otro. Seremos mucho mejores.
Thanks for reading (and listening).
The Other (Dr. Martin/Michael)
thewritingprofessor55 