Every once in a while when I look down at the cubbyholes in my car I see this little tire pressure gauge. It isn’t anything particularly important – some pot metal (or metallic plastic) along with a glass gauge face and a stem, surprisingly better constructed than I thought it would be for the price, and better than some of the ones I’d bought that are in my spouse’s car or packed up in Texas. Much of my life is packed up in a lot of ways, but I digress.
I bought it in November of 2023 because I needed to check the pressure of my tires and I lacked a compressor that would do the work for me, places lacked a digital indicator in Kelowna, and the traditional gauge wasn’t accurate enough for my purposes. I remember when I bought it because it was around the time that the brake switch on my car went out and I had to pay to get it replaced, taking it in to be repaired on the final couple of days of the midterm break they held in the second week of that month. I’d diagnosed the problem, it was an easy fix, but I lacked the space to do the work so I took it to the dealership. I remember thinking it’d be nice to explain that to my father when I got home for the holidays. Which gets me to why I’m really writing this.
My father was great with automobiles. There was a time that he could identify what kind of car someone was driving based solely on the sound of the engine or shape of the tail lights. My grandfather had been a professional auto mechanic and a lot of my dad’s childhood was spent taking apart, cleaning, and putting back together various pieces of 1950’s and 60’s cars for him. His relationship with technology was in some ways intuitive and my assumption, growing up, was that this is just knowledge you were supposed to have. I spent a number of hours growing up sitting behind the wheel of his 240Z, pressing on the brake pedal when I was told to as he bled the brakes in one of his inveterate weekends tinkering with the car, NASCAR on in the background. I remember distinctly how when I was a child he'd sometimes be able to take off from work early and he'd be waiting, always on the edge of the parking lot of my elementary school, in that same car. During those times I didn't have to walk home. In my early teens he raced in Solo II Motocross, whipping the Z around tracks laid out via cones in parking lots of places like the Irvine Meadows Ampitheatre. We’d get taken along to these races, and inevitably we’d find things to do while he was racing because this was his thing, not ours. But at the end of each day there’d be a fun run, and he would let me ride shotgun while he whipped around the track, taking the car up to over 100mph on the straightaways.
This speed was also a hallmark of the last time I went to visit my maternal grandparents in Arizona. My folks had decided that they couldn’t pull me out of Jr. High to go for the then-traditional week-long trip and so my dad and I had stayed until the half-day before the vacation. Then we’d got into in the Z and made the eight-hour trip in closer to four. This is all to say that a lot of my memories of my father are wrapped up in the making and repair of things, for both good (building pinewood derby cars) and ill. At that time when I did something with technology that didn’t make sense to him or he thought was foolish he’d tell me I “could tear up a steel ball” and that memory, along with my assumption that you just knew things and I somehow didn’t, made me think I wasn’t particularly good at fixing things or technology in general for a long time. But this also isn’t really why I’m writing this.
I’m writing this because my intention had been to take the reading week and drive down the coast to visit my parents, just to check in, as my father was in ill health and my younger sister was worried about them. When I realized I would have to make the trip without brake lights I decided I could wait. After all, I reasoned, I was going to go down and visit them for the holidays in December. I could show him the pressure gauge, talk about my frustrations with not being able to fix the brake switch myself because I didn’t have a place to do so (which was in turn a substitute for a lot of my frustrations about academia and the position I had in it), and get the inevitable lecture on how I should go about doing so even though the switch was already fixed.
On December 3rd – the Sunday of the final week of instruction – I received a missed call from my mother asking me to call her back. I did so, immediately, and was told my father had passed away in the night.
The rest of the term was getting everything I needed to get done out of the way – I had an interview for a job I did not get on the 12th, a final I needed to give on the 14th, and the Digital Medievalist Executive Board meeting on the 15th – and getting down to Orange County after that as soon as I could. While I was there, I got to meet with the people who took care of my folks’ money, try to get the various passwords for his technology sorted, take care of the grading for the final that I still had to do, help out with the Christmas stuff as much as I could – taking down the lights on the roofline of my folks’ house has been my traditional role for the past few years -- and mostly just try to be there when I’m needed. That’s always been the way I try to show that I appreciate people. I’m the guy who tries to show they’re your friend by helping you move or doing impromptu tech support, because there’s always that bit of doubt that I’m anything but a burden.
What I didn’t do is take much time to process anything. I didn’t have time, and it was still too new. So by the time the end of the month rolled around and I was to come back up to Kelowna I was still a mess. And I have been, off and on, throughout the term. My brain isn’t here, and it shows. I’m behind on research, and service has been a crap shoot. I did negotiate a book contract for the monograph I’ve been working on and went on two more interviews for jobs I did not get. So it’s not like I’m a total waste. I can pull it together for a couple hours at a time. The one place I’ve held it together consistently is teaching, because I’m good at looking like I think something I’m teaching is the greatest subject in the world even when I could care less about the topic and my non-First Year Comp students have been great, generous, and game contributors to the class environment. But with everything else I’ve been a mess. I don’t know what to do about that – and in some ways I don’t think I should. I have not received my reappointment letter yet, despite assurances that it’s a formality, and to be honest I don’t care that much. I teared up some driving home after hearing that, because I’m conflicted and know what I want to do and what everyone else expects me to do -- and they're not the same thing. For now, though, everything is centering on getting back to Orange County and from there to Texas and my spouse. That’s where my life is.
I wouldn’t recommend doing the two-body problem, especially the two-body problem when you have no support structure, and then try to keep all the balls in the air in the face of a parent’s death. It will not happen. You’ll drop things, and if you’re like me you’ll retreat into yourself in ways that are probably not all that healthy in the long run. I don’t know what to do about that one, either. I’ve been telling myself that once I’m in Orange County I can just buckle down and get the research done for Kalamazoo, and from there I can get stuff ready for NCS. But beyond that? Beyond the book? I don’t know. I’m a bit adrift and I feel trapped.
But that’s not really what I wanted to write about, either.
What I really wanted to write about is how damn guilty I feel about not going down to my folks during reading week. I had a good reason, I still have a good reason, and I didn’t go down this term either because I had a campus visit for one of the aforementioned jobs I did not get. I feel like I wasted my last chance to see my Dad on Kelowna. And I can never fix that.
So what I want to write about, I guess, is that late-stage capitalism, the academic life, the American ideas about masculinity – all of that – they don’t matter. They don’t matter, they never mattered, and I’m about to put this on my professional site under the personal tag because I’m not sure where else to put it. I bottle up how I feel about everything on a daily basis because that is what you’re supposed to do, that’s how you keep them from getting you, and then I let it out in these multi-page screeds because ever since I was in high school that’s how I process things. And so all the mock-stocism fails and it’s a big act at best. But mostly, what I want to say is don’t take your parents for granted, especially if you’re an introvert. If you hate the phone, dread talking to people, suck it up. Make the time. Figure it out.
Decide what’s important. That’s what matters. That’s what I need to write about.
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