How Green Was My Mountain

I suppose that if the only knowledge someone had of me came from reading this blog, it’s possible they would think I’m forever gazing into the rearview mirror. Now it’s true that while driving, I make it a practice always to be aware of my surroundings, fore and aft – you never know when an unanticipated lane change might be necessary. But in the larger, more metaphorical sense, I’d like to think I don’t spend any more time looking back over my shoulder than most people.

I won’t deny that it can be very enjoyable, if only in the same way that stretching a sore muscle or wiggling a loose tooth is… faintly painful, but simultaneously satisfying somehow. And since I have a real love for understanding the way things fit together, I puzzle over the meaning of what’s gone before. And since I’m insufferably annoying, I write about it. Which taken altogether leads to a high proportion of backwards-facing blog posts.

I really wasn’t looking for yet another one; they can be the trickiest kind to write, because understanding the past and making it both comprehensible and even potentially interesting to someone who wasn’t there is a tall order (I stumbled across a post recently in which a guy gave a complete review of all his fantasy sports teams, which was perhaps mildly gratifying to the guys who were ahead of him in the league, but not, I thought, a winning strategy for drawing in long-term readership). But as seems to be so often the case, circumstances pushed me where I wasn’t planning to go.

By the way, here’s MS Word’s take on that previous sentence: “If the marked words are an incomplete thought, consider developing this thought into a complete sentence by adding a subject or a verb or combining this text with another sentence.”

The first event, a couple of weeks ago, was the 13^th anniversary of starting my current job. Granted, I’ve shifted jobs within the company, and the company itself was absorbed by a Gigantically Extensive multinational corporation, but still it’s considered my corporate anniversary (as it turns out, the 13^th anniversary is “congratulatory email from your manager”).

I suppose in some ways it’s kind of a lukewarm achievement, but it’s pretty astonishing when you consider the 13 years previous to my start date, when I was teaching part-time and filling in with other part-time odd jobs (and I’m not choosing the word “odd” casually) and never went a whole year with exactly the same “mix” of workplaces. Then when my wife graduated from seminary and we moved to Vermont, I decided it was also time to graduate from perpetually semi-employed Adjunct Instructor to a Real Job.

As I was reflecting on that milestone, I was also reading a book by Chris Bohjalian that was set in Vermont – having discovered his writing because he was writing for the newspaper when we moved there. So I found myself in sort of a Green Mountain State of Mind, which I suppose is kind of like a New York State of Mind, except with cows and trees and plaid flannel instead of Billy Joel.

While I had a perfectly satisfying time living in Vermont, I was not seized by any agonies when we were asked to move back to Upstate New York, so I was a tiny bit surprised when I reflected on my New England sojourn and realized how pivotal – and I mean that fairly literally, in the turning point/change of direction sense – that time had been for me. Consider the following developments in the space of just less than 6 years there:

• ~ Most obviously, both my job and my career. For the first time, I had a regular 9-to-5 type full-time permanent job. In other words, it was the first time my job didn’t come with an expiration date. And once you’ve lived the semester-to-semester lifestyle, the “normal” kind represents an enormous weight off your shoulders. As a nice bonus, I discovered that I enjoyed my new career and I was also pretty good at it, not to mention that the word “salary” has a lovely ring to it.
• ~ It was also my transition back to Parsonage World, being the spouse of a minister with all that entails. Let me be quick to say that being married to the pastor doesn’t make me special in any way – it certainly doesn’t mean that anything I say or do should be treated as having come down from the mountaintop on stone tablets – but it does make me a lot more visible. I live in the knowledge that if I do something wrong or offend anyone or generally screw up, it can have a negative effect on her ability to do her job in a way that could never be true the other way around. As such, it was kind of a rocky transition for me because I became very self-conscious about the image I was projecting to others, and despite my experience growing up in a parsonage, it was a couple of years before I stopped taking myself quite so seriously and was able to really be myself (not that me trying extra-hard to be on my best behavior is entirely a bad idea).
• ~ It was the time period when my children were born, meaning not only the blessing of their addition to the family, but also the adjustment from being a couple to being… well, a family. I suppose that sounds condescending to couples with no children, but my point is really that it sounds and smells and tastes and feels so different. I’m only speaking for me: I knew in my heart that while I loved being the two of us, there would always be a hole in my heart until there were more. I may not know much about the will of God, but I have always been convinced that I was meant to be a dad – not making any judgments about my skill for same – and in Vermont I finally got to do it.
• ~ It was my return from The Exile. You see, if you don’t count college, for the first 32 years of my life, I lived in 5 different homes, and if you drew a line to connect them, it would be about 50 miles from end to end. The Capital District of New York State is in a lot of ways as much a part of me as my hair color (ok, what my hair color used to be; I don’t know what all’s going on up there right now) or my extremely long & narrow feet. Even my college was still in New York -- Western New York, but close enough that I could feel in my bones that I was just visiting and I could go home any time I needed to.
• So when my wife chose a seminary in Ohio, it must have been sheer naiveté for me to think the adjustment would be simple. “A fish out of water” may be a cliché, but like almost all clichés, it got that way by being so true: from the moment I arrived in Dayton, I felt out of my element – no, I was out of my element -- and was quickly emotionally (and nearly physically) gasping for air. It wasn’t that I didn’t like Dayton, but it never for a moment felt like home.
• Vermont isn’t upstate New York, and native Vermonters would often half-jokingly remind us that you’re not a real Vermonter till you’ve got six generations in the ground, but it’s geographically and topographically and culturally close enough that when we moved there I felt like I’d been thrown back into the water and could breathe again.
• I understood much, much later that it was just as much a case of having been uprooted from my church home in New York, not really finding one for over a year in Ohio, and then getting a new start in Vermont, that accounted for my V-shaped trajectory… but in either case, whether Vermont was the cause of my recovery/rebirth or just the innocent bystander, it was certainly where and when it happened.

The churches of Vermont have now been officially separated from the churches of New York, so the likelihood that I’ll ever live there again is pretty close to zero. Somehow I kinda feel like I’ve already lived there for a lifetime anyway.