Fluxuation

 The friendly folks at LinkedIn will send you a nice notice from time to time, suggesting that you send along best wishes to a friend or acquaintance who has achieved some milestone or high point in their working life. That's pretty much their gig, after all, our working life. They keep track of anniversaries of employment and the like. 

But that's not really necessary for me. I know that since my son is starting his twenty-eighth year, I am starting my twenty-eighth year in the education biz. I've been married longer than that. I've lived in California longer than that. But as far as my son goes, it's pretty much a tie with teaching. To be precise, when my son was born, I was scrambling about, hoping to hear back from a prospective employer, in this case a school, that would take on an intern working on their teaching credential. I had been assured that there were plenty of positions, and I should be patient. As May turned to June, and June to July, I began to worry that even the substantial sick and vacation time that I had banked from my previous job as a warehouse manager was going to dry up and I would be left staring into the void when school started. 

As it turned out, I was fine. I got a call in early August to come down to Horace Mann Elementary for an interview. Not knowing the location of any of the elementary schools in Oakland, I went online to try and divine its place on the map. This was back in a previous century, when smart phones and Google maps were still science fiction. I found a map that gave me the basic coordinates, so I strapped my baby boy in the jogging stroller and headed off in the direction indicated. This was the day before my scheduled interview, and I wanted to be sure that I could find the place before I sat down and declared my interest in being a public school employee. 

We found it. The two of us. And then I pushed him home, one notch more relieved about my future. 

For twenty-seven years I have been making that same trip, mostly on my bicycle without my son to go to work there. As another school year peeks over the horizon, I made an exercise with my wife to try and remember the names of all the people with whom I have worked there who have gone on to do other things. Together we came up with fifty names, without resorting to class pictures or any documentation beyond anecdotal memories. 

We knew that we had left a great many names off that list. It takes a village, as they say, and the people who make up that village are in an almost constant state of flux. 

Except me. I'm headed back to greet a whole new sea of faces, young and old.