Identity Theft

By: sheelagh

Identity Theft

I never meant to become a ‘retired’ person, but signing the papers and leaving a full-time, tenured job at the age of 66 signals ‘retirement’ in most human resources manuals. In my mind, I was simply going on permanent, unpaid sabbatical. Alas, at the end of the designated hour of official conversation and paper signing, the Human Resources official smudged my self-image with the cheery reminder to get a new photo id with ‘retiree’ printed on it. Was she serious? I love the ten-year old photo of my lesser-lined face and love my identity even more. No thank you. You call it retirement, I’ll hang on to the notion of extended sabbatical for a while.
It occurred to me that the trade-off for this extended sabbatical would be permanent loss of a salary, group life insurance, and, more importantly, unquantifiable benefits like colleagues, support systems, and the great joy that comes from being around undergraduates. But surely I’ll still have a title, an identity, to share with the world. Given the various taxonomies available, I’ll gladly hold on to an identity in the tenured faculty category. Giving up an administrative identity is fairly easy, but a faculty identity? The identity that people associate with intelligence, wit, teaching and the good life? The identity that proudly indicates yes I did suffer through writing a dissertation, chapters, articles, and student evaluations? Who was I if I wasn’t the sum total of my teaching and administrative achievements over the decades?
I had been granted vice provost and professor emerita status before hitting the retirement button. Clearly, anyone with a title that contains a Latin word must be important. How many people know their Latin well enough to know what emeritus/emerita means? Surfing the web to verify the distinguished nature of emerita status, I discovered that emerita also signifies the genus of the sand crab, hermit crab, mole crab and barnacle. A hermit crab? What shell would I wear after taking leave of the administrative and professorial shells? Can J. Alfred Prufrock be far behind?

Being neither wealthy nor tired, I don’t think I fit the retirement category. Dictionary synonyms like ‘withdrawal’ or ‘stepping down’ don’t capture what I think I’m doing. I’m not withdrawing from battle or addictions. Stepping down? Stepping down sounds precariously similar to stumbling or falling down. Suddenly I see myself stepping down from the shelf of high productivity smack into the refuse bin. With one move, my decades long, fully-employed Humpty Dumpty self can be shredded into thousands of pieces and spit out. Some clever soul may suggest a new use for the reconfigured product. All I can see is a bold sticker on the back bumper of my car. Hold on to your identity: Refuse to be Refuse.
In my quest for identity affirmation, I enter ‘retired’ into answer.com. The first virtual response is ‘did you mean retired beanie babies?’ Well, no, I didn’t. It had never occurred to me that stuffed animals retire. Diverted momentarily from my personal quest, I pursued the research. Much to my surprise, the web search for retired beanie babies produced 50,500 references in twenty-six seconds. On what tropical beach or local storage vault will I find boxes crammed with old beanie babies patiently napping, waiting for social security checks? There were even references to counterfeit beanie babies. I bet counterfeit beanie babies go to some dreadful limbo or purgatory, never finding their ways to retirement. And where do the emerita beanie babies hang out during retirement?
I’m not so crazy about the allegedly softer, kinder words currently being substituted for retirement - reinventing, recreating, recalibrating, recycling, rewiring, rebooting – too many ‘re’s, too many images of ‘just one more time. Identity quest unfulfilled, the ‘re’s accompanied me to my official retirement party. At the event, I did my best to stave off a retirement roast by telling some of the juicy stories first. The party was in the Phipps Mansion, the place of so many DU board meetings, retreats, faculty discussions and celebrations. People sat on the piano bench, the love seats and at café-style tables for four. The seating arrangements, low lights, and unrehearsed flow of events transformed the stately room into a salon – an intimate space where lively people exchanged ideas.
In this warm environment, I could not help telling the tale of backing into and flattening the signature lamppost outside the Phipps Mansion just before a board meeting, then slipping into the meeting as if nothing mattered but the agenda at hand. The staff had discovered the fallen lamppost, and scurried around looking for the potential criminal. I finally confessed to the staff once the meeting and luncheon were over. I reminisced about the professors’ cork flip into the salsa bowl contest in Winter Park, and described picking up trash behind the Greek houses before an important event. I gave robust thanks to all the people who really did the hard work, acknowledged the power of smart and kind people, bowed and said mea culpa three times for all the e-mails that should never have been sent. I was both humble and wise, looking forward with great modesty to hearing others talk of my accomplishments and legacy.
Academics, by nature, are storytellers, so nostalgia and laughter trickled through the room as the tales unfolded. But academics are also truthtellers, so one never knows for sure which direction the words will take. Anecdotes, tributes, reflections, and Rorschach-type responses dominated. Perhaps the final speakers would deliver a clue to the identity I was to carry into the future. One of the more clever senior administrators stood by her chair, smiled slyly and said “We all know Sheila does not suffer wimps gladly or ever. Thankfully, she believed in me. When I was overwhelmed, she taught me to suck it up and walk it off, whatever it was. So I did, and it worked.”
It is true that I never met an excuse I believed or a reason sufficient for not forging ahead, but I thought it was fools I didn’t suffer gladly. It is equally true that a more evolved person wouldn’t be categorizing people as wimps and fools, much less distinguishing between the two types, but that’s another story for another time. The accomplished academic administrator who spoke those words is a truth-teller, and she does not suffer wimps gladly either.
The final speaker would be the beloved poet-provost with whom I had worked for a decade. From my favorite wordsmith would come the culminating commentary on my career. He and I hadn’t worked officially with one another for the past several years, and I hadn’t seen him since before I taught in Bologna, Italy for a quarter. However, he knew me better than most people did. We had wrestled with curriculum revision, athletics, Greek Life, an Honor Code, and all issues pertinent to undergraduate life. The muses worked gladly with him when he spoke.
“Sheila Wright is Luigi Galvani. I’ve seen her walk into a room of deeply serious professionals, trapped in the gravitas of their profound thoughts, and with a smile and caustic comment cause the dead frogs to start twitching. And, she’d continue, allowing time for sporadic spontaneous jerking and twitching, forcing the dead back to life and into animated conversation. Oh, it wasn’t always pretty, and in fact, was often outrageous. But she exploded our campus into something better than it was before she came. Sheila is our Luigi and many of us love her for that.” So spoke the beloved poet-provost.
How had he ever made this connection, culled this identification? Luigi Galvani is the physicist/physician from Bologna Italy who realized he could make the muscles of a dead frog twitch when he touched them with a spark from an electric generator. In the spring of 2007, my last quarter dedicated to full-time university teaching, I co-directed a program and taught in Bologna, Italy. Most March, April and May days in Bologna I would wander through Piazza Maggiore towards Galvani’s monument on via Marconi. Under the seemingly observant eye of the tall sculpture of Galvani, I would sip espresso in the early morning or savor gelato in the late afternoon. Most often, it was espresso in the morning, pumping energy into my body for the three-hour class to come.
I walked the streets Galvani had walked, visited the old medical school and ancient dissection lab. The bank that was once Galvani’s home has a medallion with his face and a tribute to him in both Italian and Latin. He was a renowned physician of
obstetrics, even better known for his work in bioelectricity. I never did enough research or learned enough Italian to find a causal relationship between twitching of frogs legs and monitoring pregnancies. For myriad, unexplainable reasons I was drawn to this scientist.
I envisioned Mary Shelley studying Professor Galvani’s works from her reading list one summer long ago, and felt the shock of Frankenstein emerging in her. I even wondered if Galvani’s work led to the electric prods so effective in moving livestock and hogs back in Colorado.
I had lived and taught in Bologna, and serendipitously found a resting spot under Galvani’s gaze. Never once did I identify myself with Luigi Galvani or his laboratory. Never once did I write friends back home about my private hours on via Marconi with Luigi Galvani. But somehow, unbeknownst to me, a colleague in Denver was reading about Luigi Galvani and identifying me with him.
Maybe we don’t choose our identities, they choose us. I’ll cherish the Galvani metaphor and continue to live by it. Perhaps I’ll identify myself as Galvani emerita. After all, jolting a few people into action, shocking family and friends, and galvanizing positive energy could be the ultimate way to move into this new phase of my life – whatever it is named.