Your Working Life is Just a Dream

Row, row, row your boat…

… It was all a dream, I used to read Word Up! magazine...

In a famous televised conversation between comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell and journalist Bill Moyers, they discuss how different myths apply to different phases of life.

BILL MOYERS: So, there are myths for older age, and myths for children.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: There are myths for older age, and myths for children. I had a friend, Heinrich Zimmer, a very great Indologist and a very great friend of mine. And he was lecturing at Columbia on the Hindu idea of all life is as a dream, it is as a bubble, it is maya. The word “maya” comes from the Sanskrit root maha, which means “to measure forth.” It’s the kind of measuring forth of an illusion that a hypnotist, or a magician, can achieve. And that’s all that life is. So after his lecture to these young women, one of the young women came up to him and said, “Doctor Zimmer, that was wonderful, a wonderful lecture on Indian philosophy! But,” she said, “maya-I don’t get it — it doesn’t speak to me.” “Oh,” he said, “it’s not for you yet, darling.” And so it is. And when you do get older, on in years, and everyone you’ve known and originally lived for has passed away, and the world is passing away, the maya myth comes in. But for young people the world is something to be met, and dealt with, and loved, and learned from, and fought with, and so another mythology.

In the past few years my partner’s mother has died, a friend from college passed, my ex-roommate’s husband also died, as have three uncles of mine, more than a few parents of close friends, as well as some former co-workers.

I’ve entered the maya stage of life where the “life is but a dream” part of the Row Row Row Your Boat song has become more understandable.

As in a dream, details have grown fuzzy particularly about my long teaching career.

I long ago stopped remembering the distinctions between all the separate classes I’ve ever taught. Who was in what class what year in what room when? I dunno. I have taught so many kids I can’t always differentiate the school years as something distinct from each other. Sometimes the kids themselves merge into one same person. Kids I tutor today remind me of kids I taught twenty years ago, and sometimes I merge them in my mind.

All my teaching experience and educator memories have become a smear of time.

In order to write some of these Substacks, I’ve had to consult journals and scrapbooks and even planned coffee dates with former colleagues and ex-principals in order to confirm my memories. But this forgetfulness is not unordinary. Most of the history of our lives slips into a blurry oblivion even in today’s record-keeping obsessed world.

The truth is much of our lives will be unremembered.

As prominent and substantial as our professional lives feel, they ultimately, simply fade in the direct sunlight of time like the color on cheap school construction paper.

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I lunched with a former colleague the other day, Ms. Watanabe.

Although I am only in my forties, she’s in her seventies. We lunch like an old couple often selecting establishments with cushy booths and senior deals that can be applied to her half of the check.

It fills me with so much joy to hang out with her. She is still as generous as she was when I worked across the hallway from her at A. Elementary, and she offered me that template for how to make bunny-eared Easter baskets for my preschoolers. The other day she gifted me her season tickets to the ballet.

When I picked her up for our lunch date, she was walking slow, using a cane because her knees had been giving her some trouble. But we have time for her slow movements. There’s nowhere pressing to be. Our lunches no longer are regulated to a 50-minute time limit as they were at A. Elementary. There are no longer students waiting for us to pick them up off the playground.

I especially enjoy when we eat midday during what are typical school hours, while our former colleagues are still at work. We ask to hear the lunch specials and we discuss the possibilities of where our appetite will take us. She’ll point out her favorites. The other day she found a packaging staple in her coleslaw! I laughed. We complained to the waitress, who comped her meal. We won’t be going back to that eatery.

We chat. We gossip about former colleagues we have bumped into. We’ll talk about their vacations and their illnesses. Mr. Hiser’s husband’s heart surgery. Mr. Riddall’s trip to Cuba and Argentina, to Iguazu Falls. Memories of Ms. Capadocia, Ms. McNellis, Mr. Bradley, Ms. Labrow, Ms. Isomoto, the Fukushimas, our shared students and their parents. How their lives all turned out.

The other day she mentioned to me that a former preschool teacher we worked with, Ms. Yasuhara, had died.

By chance, through the grapevine, she had learned that Lily passed. She used Ms. Yasuhara’s first name as if she was some entirely different person. Ms. Watanabe had run into a shared acquaintance who happened to mention that Ms. Yasuhara had just died, like that very week.

Ms. Watanabe was shocked the information came to her so casually. What had begun as chitter chatter had turned into a morbid revelation.

But that didn’t immobilize Ms. Watanabe. She went straight to work. She had been a preschool teacher in our big city school district after all. This meant she was resourceful. We preschool teachers mold contraptions out of clothespins and paperclips, we get crowds of restless children into working order simply by clapping our hands or singing a song, we’ve turn trash into tools and hellions into schoolboys.

Ms. Watanabe remembered attending Ms. Yasuhara’s father’s funeral a long, long time ago. She called up that mortuary in Little Tokyo inquiring if maybe her friend’s funeral might be scheduled at the very same place. It was. Her instincts were right. Ms. Watanabe has always been like that, a true public school teacher, getting the money, the resources, the information she needed when she needed them by following her instincts.

She was able to attend her friend and colleague’s funeral. 

As she told me the story, I sat across from her at a diner. She reminisced about when her other colleague Ms. Isomoto died in 2003 and now about Ms. Yasuhara’s passing. They had all been preschool teachers together, a trio of colleagues, lunchmates, an entire grade level of Japanese women amongst mainly Spanish-speaking little children and their parents. They had worked with each other for years.

“I’m the last one. My friends have died, Richard,” she teared up in lunchtime sadness. “I know, Ms. Watanabe. I know,” I said.

I said I knew because I have had friends die, but what I didn’t know was what it meant to be the last. What does it mean to be the last one alive of a group?

We don’t all die at the same time. Our cliques, our groups, our squads leave each other piece meal, one by one, usually.

That’s the mythology of older folk that Campbell was speaking of. The people who knew you as well as you, yourself, while we are all alive together we hold up this interpreted reality.

Together we re-enforce this dream we are having, these memories, this simulation. As each one of us departs, one by one, there are fewer and fewer people to validate those memories, the illusions that make up the dream of our life.

When I converse with former colleagues now it’s like we are trying to put a puzzle together but we don’t have all the pieces because those that hold the missing parts have departed. There are entire coworkers we recall but can’t name like the teacher who brought her African parrot to school every day until someone complained about its molting feathers, the Irish woman reading coach who had had enough of her job and cussed out everyone at a training, the janitor who was secretly shacking up the 3^rd grade teacher, the teacher who always wore uncomfortable stilettos and a black choker to school, the teacher who was a surrogate mother and awkwardly confused the staff about whether we should throw her a baby shower or not.

What’s her name? What’s his name? Do you remember? Don’t you remember?

As Joseph Campbell promised, it’s been an illusion this entire time.

How did this big, bustling, noisy school filled with so much bombast and density, made up of concrete and steel, asphalt, rebar, and fences, holding so many thousands of people, big and small, how did it become so ephemeral and blurry?

Ever listen to a group of older folks talk and hear how they repeat the same stories over and over? They have to.

The story of their lives is like a balloon they all must help keep in the air bouncing because if I drops, it pops and disappears forever. As people pass you have less and less help keeping the balloon in the air.

Today there are fewer and fewer of us who taught together than ever. When the remnants of us gather in small groups, we remind each other that we were once together in this big, loud, bustling public school; a place as material and real and moving as a steel locomotive, always chugging forward, never arriving, unbothered by who joined or left the ride.

It was real. It happened. Right?