In what I hope is the beginning of a transition into my second-to-the-last life stage, I retired from the teaching faculty at Haverford College effective July 1, 2006. There was even a tree-planting. As I described it to my Moroccan friends (anyone know how to render "iHtiram zayd wa-flus nqs" in Arabic script?), "emeritus" translates roughly to, "more respect, less money." The money's supposedly coming from our accumulated TIAA-CREF and Vanguard IRAs, and setting all this up has occupied a great deal more time and consultation than we had anticipated. We seem to be about to start seeing some money in our checking accounts again. Friends on the shoulders of their retirement decision might want to kibbitze.As Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Haverford College, I do not expect to teach full courses (or, more importantly, to grade papers) but I do find myself kibitzing in a variety of ways: the Advisory Committee of the Corporation of Haverford College, a “working group devoted to finding contemporary ways of expressing the college’s Quaker elements” (Founders Green, January, 2007);
a Haverford Humanities Center reading group formed to discuss Thomas Pynchon's new novel "Against the Day"; and the odd job talk or gallery opening. Our apartment -- 791 College Ave, #2 -- is back in the old Isaac Sharpless house where we spent 15 happy years in apartment 1. While the 10-day move out of the 13 room 4 College Lane house in the steamy heat of late July almost killed us (the best we could say is that, at the end, we were still talking), and we were forced to leave our new six room apartment filled with boxed books and goods, we are, six months later, mostly moved in and loving the new place. I expect to use the apartment as my primary place for meeting colleagues and former students, but I also share an office in Sharpless fault with my friend and fellow emeritus, Sid Perloe, and I have a library carrel.
I find myself responding to the standard queries about how I'm keeping myself busy or with what projects I am now occupied by admitting that I'm mostly behaving the way I did while I was drawing a Haverford salary, but without the guilt: up early in the study with my blogs and Internet media resources, reflecting daily on Web-space self-expression, reading a lot of fiction and history on paper and a lot of self-promotion and social commentary on-screen.
Re myy own blogs, I have been trying to retune the parts that concern my collaborative work on the Middle East and Islam, my reflections on my own teaching and scholarship, and my hypertextual diary -- my "memex."
OHS ’61 had a 45th reunion at Toby’s place on Big Stone Lake. I promised to blog it, and what I have so far is at the “memex” website below.
Susan and I have been thinking about a typical/ideal year at this point of our lives as comprising about five months at Haverford (late Fall term to mid-Spring term), about five at Lake Ossawinnamakee (summer and early fall, plus the New Year's holiday), and two months in Morocco. In whichever venue, we want friends to be closer to the center of our lives now, so come see us at Haverford, Ossie, or Rabat.
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