retirement speech
Ten years ago I retired from full-time employment in higher education and became three-quarters time at Texas Tech as a spousal hire. In four years in Lubbock I was very successful but actually more successful in making friends and playing music than in academic or professional pursuits; nevertheless I enjoyed my different jobs and kept one of them over ten years even after I moved to New Mexico in 2016. Today we are preparing to move back to Illinois and I look back over this entire ten years and even my entire working career in academia fondly.
First I want to thank Texas Tech itself, as I know that my secret to longevity with this university was never letting them know how truly radical I am. I would advise Texas Tech to forget football since you're never going to beat the big boys like Oklahoma State and UT, but keep it up with basketball because it doesn't ruin boys' health and lives, and it's really exciting when you make it to the top. I want to thank the Writing Center itself, because some of these ten years have been rocky. Even now my old computer that has word is losing its space bar and it's just in general time to let go, even though the reason for my departure is that Tech won't pay me if I'm in Illinois, as opposed to New Mexico. And finally, I want to thank all the good friends I've made in Lubbock and since, who have made my time in the southwest very pleasant.
Working with young people in higher education is its own reward, because with everything you teach them, you can be pretty sure they will remember it and use it in the future. It's a win-win situation in that, if teaching is successful, both of you come out better people, and that's why now i look back on a life of successful interactions where everyone has come out better off. This is what I'm grateful for and this wouldn't have happened if I had, for example, gone into house building.
Thank you all for coming and I hope to see you on zoom, in Illinois, or perhaps where you are now on my possible travels through the area. We are probably moving around June 1 but I will most certainly be coming back at some point, and will try to get through Lubbock en route if I can. I miss the pretty campus, the atmosphere but most of all the friends I've made who are still there. I feel the same about New Mexico - my time here was good and I will miss it.
retirement
Ten years ago, when I left southern Illinois to live in Texas, I had my first retirement party. At 58, I quit eighteen years of teaching at Southern Illinois to be kind of a spousal hire; I taught three-quarters time at Texas Tech, started writing more seriously, and played a lot of really hot bluegrass music.
My wife had accepted a job as chair of a department of Texas Tech, and the university never quite fulfilled its promise of a PhD program in Sociology; in fact, her chair experience almost killed her, so four years later we moved to New Mexico, where she was able to ride a horse and we thought we could raise our remaining children in a remote mountain town.
That worked well for a while, especially through the pandemic, because the kids thought it was a huge deal to go into this tiny town; it was like going to the city for them. But now, for a variety of reasons, it is not so good, and one is that they are special and they are high-school age. So we are moving back to Illinois.
My official retirement party is on a Texas Tech zoom on Tuesday. I have continued working for Tech, although not three-quarters time, for ten years. It has been a successful arrangement, in that I love Tech, and I learned a lot from the experience, and kept current on academic issues. For the time I've been in New Mexico, mostly I was a writing tutor for Tech's Writing Center, but I also did some substitute teaching down in Alamogordo and developed my writing even more. Nevertheless it's Tech I am presently retiring from; the subbing is long gone. I'm ready to say I'm happily retired.
But when I finally published my novel last March, I got serious about marketing, and learned that I could work to increase my readership through various methods. Now I am fully absorbed in this process. I'm becoming better known as a short-story writer and am slowly widening my audience. How else can you do it?
I will enjoy my zoom on Tuesday as I made a number of close friends in Lubbock and I still feel like part of the wider Tech family. I guess Tech considers New Mexico to be a western province of Texas so my living in New Mexico isn't a problem for them, but once I move to Illinois I'm out of here, and have to fend for myself. But I say that withouut bitterness because I had a good time at Tech and they can make whatever rules they want. Also, I'm no longer as dependent on the income as I used to be.
Of my working life, thirty years of it was ESL directly, ending when I left Lubbock to come out here. The six I've been out here have been teaching, but not ESL. OK I was tired of ESL anyway, I could say, but in a sense I'm retiring from the entire higher education scene, and I'm both proud to be a part of it, and, happy to be free. Consider this a mortar board (?) thrown in the air.
