by Dave Tomar
Nothing big, really. Two pages on “a controversial issue.” I love “pick your own” papers. If I’m feeling randy, I tend to reward the customer’s faith in my discretion by making the controversial issue something like “the use of sock garters in professional sports” or “Hall versus Oates.” But my primary goal was to write this one in under twenty minutes, so I would throw together the standard fare about abortion.
After that, I had a two-page assignment with the following directions: “University Level / Clear Conclusion / Professional language / No repetition.” The subject was listed as “not specified.” I hadn’t decided yet, but I would probably write about the high price of shower caps these days.
When I was a kid, I had the same recurring night terror for years and most especially in the early summer. In my dream, I would know it was summer, but I would get up to the sound of my alarm anyway, I would put on my clothes, and I would eat a cranky breakfast. I would catch the bus to school, and everybody would seem fine with all of this. I would quietly ride to school, and then suddenly, as I sat in the classroom waiting for the start of the school day, I would look out the window and remember the meaning of summer.
“What are we doing here?!” I would inquire madly. “It’s summer. We don’t have to be here!” And nobody would say or do a thing, and there we would be, stuck in an endless loop of schoolwork, homework, and busywork with no end in sight. Then I’d wake up. “Thank goodness,” I would say to myself, “it was only a dream.”
But was it? Or was it a prognostication?
I’d taken longer to graduate than anybody in history. It was absurd. I was in my thirties, my hairline was receding, and I was regularly passing myself off as a kid in school. I felt like Dylan from Beverly Hills, 90210.
Morning after morning, I was waking up to these pedantic little nonsense assignments about how business ethics are a key to success in the business world (knowing this was bullshit), about how one of the best ways to create better classroom results is to promote more individualized learning strategies (recognizing that education was increasingly standardized), about how there needs to be a more meaningful push for a sustainable way of life in America (knowing full well that only a breakdown in civil order could facilitate this change). Basically, it was all theory and no exercise.
I was stuck here just like I was at the industrial cleaning supply company. Even writing papers had become a menial, formulaic task. It was as rote and thoughtless as anything. Still exhausting as a way of making a living, but plodding and predictable like one never-ending day at the hubcapping plant or the chewing gum factory. This was how I reached that point; this was how I got to that place where my head went on vacation and my fingers just wrote. This was how my closest friends had come to know me, with my hands connected to the keyboard and my head turned slightly toward the people in the room, conversing and typing at once.
I always wished I had been born a musician like Tom W. What he does blows my mind. Performs, moves, sings, sneers, punches, and kicks the piano all in seamless coordination, all parts of the body doing different things at once.
My curse is that I was born with this same skill, but I can only apply it to something that you do in the privacy of your home rather than in front of thousands of drunk, leering, panty-throwing domestic types.
So the intellectual luster had left this work. The artistic excitement was getting harder to summon all the time. I didn’t care what my output looked like. It only mattered that I completed it. I had reached the limits of what my profession could teach me. I had started to feel more and more like a guy who only read the inside jacket of the book, the back cover of the DVD, the little blurb in TV Guide. You get the idea.
I had never left school. What the hell was I still doing here? What the hell was I afraid of that I hadn’t taken any greater a leap than this? And how the fuck was I thirty? I’d been stuck here for a long time, engaging in theoretical exercise, wading ankle-deep in ideas but never swimming in them.
And then, here, in this suspended state, I started to notice things. A blemish on my hip. What the fuck is that? I never had one of those before. Then a new tuft of hair in a place that I couldn’t style, like my shoulder or my lower back. My god! That sprouted overnight! When did I become a Chia Pet?
I was getting older. I was getting looser around the middle, thinner up top, tougher to look at, just generally not what I pictured myself to be.
And it wasn’t just looks. I was getting more sentimental too. As Bree and I planned the details of our wedding, the very thought of it would overcome me with a new kind of sensation, a euphoric rush of emotion so overwhelming that it just had to come out of my eyeballs. Until I was in my late twenties, I don’t think I could have cried even if you had run over my foot with a Zamboni.
But now, everything set me off so that I welled up with tears. Adult contemporary pop songs about true love; commercials about how good wireless roaming plans bring families together; episodes of The Golden Girls where the ladies boldly faced the terrifying realities of aging.
I was hopelessly nostalgic for my youth, and in a way that seemed totally inconsistent with how I remembered feeling about things all the way back then. I wasn’t just nostalgic for the smell of cold weather on NFL Sundays, or the houses that I’d once lived in, or the friends I’d once had.
I was getting nostalgic for things that had sucked, like doing suicide sprints in wrestling practice, like missing an elementary school field trip because of the chicken pox, like old breakups. I wasn’t nostalgic for the girl, mind you, but the actual breakup. I was having weird sentimentality for all the kinds of feelings that I could remember, including heartbreak and misery. I had no sense of longing to go back to this time. There was just a realization that I was getting older and that all the things I’d lost with age couldn’t be gotten back.
Bree threw a party for me on my thirtieth birthday.
Fifty of my friends were there. They all brought me bottles of Scotch and blunts. They lit the candles on my cookie cake and sang a loud, drunken, raucous “Happy Birthday to You.” Someone shouted, “Make a wish.”
I couldn’t think of anything that I wanted, at least nothing that I thought I needed to wish for. I loved my friends. I loved my family. I was standing beside the woman I was going to marry. I was my own boss. I called no man “sir.” I was living the sweet life.
I said, getting a little choked up, “I can’t think of a thing. I’ve got everything I need right here.”
One of my friends shouted, “Pussy!”
I guess I deserved that.
I had never pictured this guy at thirty: happily coupled, fully socialized, and at least personally, if not professionally, content. I had never pictured that.
But then, I had never pictured myself at thirty… at all. In episode 5F18 of The Simpsons, Marge, in one of her many moments of tempered marital discontent, asks Homer, “When we got married, is this how you thought we’d be spending our Saturdays? Driving out to the boondocks to trade in a refrigerator motor?”
Homer replies, “Eh, I never thought I’d live this long.”
I know this feeling. I was pretty sure I was destined to flame out young. Of course, relatively speaking, it’s not too late for that. But still, looking at myself in the mirror, I can’t help feeling that I’ve already exceeded the life expectancy of twenty-year-old me, who was pretty sure he’d have choked to death on his own vomit well before thirty.
When I started writing papers for a living, I never pictured a future. I never pictured having to earn the lifelong respect of my wife, having to look my children in the eyes and explain how I made a living, having to decide how to educate them.
I never pictured any of this. It wasn’t for lack of inspiration. I thought I’d be great at something. But I also figured that I might simply be dead. I don’t know why. Call it youthful nihilism, or a sense that it probably wouldn’t matter a whole lot either way, but that’s what I thought. So as I wrote papers for the lea
ders of an American future in which I anticipated playing no part, and as I considered that future for a generation of children to which I intended to contribute no seed, I thought nothing of the years ahead.
To me, they were as unlikely as the idea of making an honest living.
It was a selfish way to live. Not simply hoarding knowledge and making it no benefit to civilization, but also assuming from a young age that I’d take this knowledge to the grave. What the hell good was I to anybody or anything? Not that I was suicidal or even morbid. I loved life. I treasured every moment. But I also figured that this attitude would be the death of me. No respect for the future. No sense of consequence. No plan.
No regrets…
And now, not only was I not dead but I was happy, healthy, and housebroken. A few years ago, owning a paper towel holder would have seemed out of my reach. Now I had a cheese board and table runners and a credenza. I had different glasses for different types of beverages. Bree and I would go antiquing in the spring and apple picking in the fall. We avoided eating anything with trans fats in it and took fish oil capsules daily for the omega-3 fatty acids. I was a few bad sweaters and a Rod Stewart record away from being the perfect model of domesticity.
And then there was my work. Why was I still in school? For so long, school had been my archnemesis: my Moby Dick, my Professor Moriarty, my Sideshow Bob. Could it be, then, that I needed it? There was no denying it. I had come to depend on it over the better part of a decade, even though as a younger man I’d dreamed of being freed from it. I had found a sick, dysfunctional symbiosis with school, like fungus spreading out over the decay it created. School’s shortcomings allowed me to do what I did.
And what of school? Did it need me? How many of its shortcomings had I helped to obscure? And how many of these did I have the power to expose? Could it be that school needed me, that our purposes were somehow intertwined?
I don’t mean this in an arrogant way. Over the years, I had stopped being angry. I was just working now. This was what I did for a living. I had nothing to do with school. It had nothing to do with me. Professionally speaking, I was just a lone wolf set on survival. Nothing to see here. I went about my business quietly, without the resentment of my youth, with the patience of maturity, with fairness to my clientele, diligently, determinedly intent on making the work pay until I found a way to depart amicably.
But I was a petty bandit sneaking through the halls of the universities, committing misdemeanors left and right. And from this position of concealment, tiptoeing from one class to another, from one major to another, from one degree to another, from one university to another, from one country to another, I could see the same thing everywhere.
Brochures may be designed to hide university shortcomings from parents. Statistical smoke screens can be cast to hide the declining value of a higher education from the buying public. Promises soon to be broken about awaiting opportunities may be sold to next year’s graduates. But nothing is done to patch up the cracks that I have gotten to see as I have moved about invisibly.
I admit it. I was in there to steal shit. But if you skulk in and out long enough and see enough of the same things, you realize that our greatest national resource—the young people who make up tomorrow’s workers, professionals, and leaders—is being deprived of everything it needs to flourish. And as with so many of the challenges before America, greed is a major cause. A crime of that magnitude can be humbling even to the petty bandit.
Around this time, I wrote a paper on Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” a parable that I had read many times. This turned out to be a particularly valuable reading.
The professor’s instructions were as follows: “Describe and explain what you would consider to be, for yourself, an ideal education. This paper can be in first person, since it is mostly based on your opinion. The entire paper is based on Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’… No internet sources can be used. Need work cited. One of the sources needs to be the actual ‘The Allegory of the Cave’ “
Right. No Internet sources. Schmuck.
Anyway, I got down to business and wrote the paper. Basically, Plato’s allegory describes a bunch of people who are born chained to the ground in the back of a cave, with shackles binding them at the arms and neck. They can’t see anything but a fire in front of them and a wall just beyond the mouth of the cave. The fire casts shadows on the wall, so that they have only a vague sense of life beyond the cave and an indefinable awareness of the shadowy figures that pass by without restraints. As Plato tells, “To them… the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.”
In Plato’s allegory, one man is freed from bondage and struck by a revelation that he at once fears and knows he must share with the others in the cave. Plato describes the experience.
At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive some one saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision.1
I was particularly moved by the idea of a “more real existence.” Something new was becoming apparent to me. As usual, my assignment seemed to accidentally comment on the life I was living. To do anything short of sharing everything I’d learned moving among the shadowy objects began to strike me as irresponsible.
The time had come, the age in my life had arrived when I might finally do something responsible. What kind of future did I want for myself, for my family, for those around me whom I loved with all my heart? I no longer wanted to be a part of the destruction. I wanted to stand up to it. I wanted to shine an exploding white light into the cave.
I was beginning to look forward to a day when I could be done with this way of working, with immersing myself so constantly in thoughts, ideas, theories, studies, and arguments that I couldn’t find a second to reflect on them all. I began to think that someday I could put all these things together and make of myself some singularly unified Renaissance man. That day could never come so long as I was in the trenches.
How much could I learn of self-betterment, of the human condition, of the struggle between good and evil, when I persisted in living amorally, as an unfeeling siphon pumping productivity from the muck? How could I read history’s great thinkers and assess history’s great villains; how could I come to understand the reasons men suffer and kill one another; how could I come to learn of all the ways that we can right a wrongheaded ship and continue to respond only with hostile opportunism? How could I learn so much of virtue when I had none of my own? How could I ever shine a light on anybody else when I remained chained down in a cave of my own design?
Maybe these questions should have been obvious to me from the beginning. But they weren’t. And now they were cascading before me.
I had to be done with it, and now I knew it. I remembered quitting my old job at the industrial cleaning supply company and how nobody had really cared. The lack of closure had haunted me. There are so many things that one thinks and never gets to say out loud. And these things persist, and get louder and larger, and become part of some much grander treatise that the brain thinks it needs to deliver in order to find peace.
But all of this is, of course, totally secondary to the unending pressure just to get by. Now that I had finally gotten to a place of paying the bills and living in relative comfort, I had a wedding to pay for, and then maybe a house and some kids and a large automobile and all that other stuff.
Even at this late stage in the game, even with everything I had learned up to this point, the way out was no clearer. Every day would be this intense, nauseating maze of assignments, and every night would be this uneasy pool of sleepless sweat.
So I worked, in spite of a mounting certainty that this work was
now out of step with whatever it was I hoped to be as a man.
I called my parents, and I apologized to them. I told them I was sorry for being a generally rotten kid, a spiteful teenager, and a financial liability as a young adult. I apologized for my anger and told them that I wasn’t angry anymore, that I was actually optimistic and hopeful. I told them that I was a man, that I intended to start a family of my own, and that I appreciated everything they had done for me.
My mother thanked me, but she didn’t let me get by on just that.
“You’d better mean it,” she said.
And after that, I knew I had to come clean. Reconciliation felt good. But I had always loved my parents. I had a lot longer way to go with schools. And I started to think that they might be interested in knowing some of the things that I knew. I decided it would make a tremendous commencement speech.
I decided to tell them the things that I had come to know, with the hope that it could help all of us. Of course, the last word on this is far from spoken. More questions than answers lurk in the pages of this book. At this stage—which the optimistic franchise might characterize as a rebuilding season—it could be no other way.
Suffice it to say, we all have a lot to learn.
Acknowledgments
Much credit belongs to the incredible people around me who have supported and encouraged me, both through the process of writing this book and through the course of a career that has not always appeared to be headed anywhere.
Thanks to those who provided me with pertinent news stories, feature articles, and Web links throughout the process. You were instrumental in helping me formulate the arguments driving this book: Adam Dembowitz, Lauren Dembowitz, David Pinzur, Avi Lebovic, Hilary Stiebel, Matthew Tanzer, Jamie Brotz, Michelle Neff, Nicholas Schorn, and Mary Bronfenbrenner. An additional thanks to Ms. Bronfenbrenner and her class for their ongoing support and dialogue.