An Unexpected Pivot
My father spent most of his career in sales and marketing, which is why he it surprised us all when he opted to pursue an encore career as a substitute teacher for junior high and high school students.
In retrospect, it made perfect sense, what with his primary qualification being that he is an eleven year boy old trapped in a seventy-odd year old man's body.
To say he loved the work would be an understatement. A year into his career as a sub, my youngest sister stumbled across a facebook fan page created by an admiring high school student entitled, "Mr. _______ is the best sub in the universe!" It had over 250 likes.
I used to chide him that a childhood friend's father - who had become a sub at the same time as Dad, and always greeted him warmly over lunch in the faculty lounge - had a page with 240 likes, and that he'd need to up his game to remain on top.
Dad loved being a sub. His favorite past-time was hitting the local Costco, where his former students would inform him of their latest triumphs and travails: who was dating whom, who was expecting, who was going through a difficult divorce.
He recounted his shopping trips to me by phone as if they were installments in a lurid Mexican telenovela.
Frail health conspired with the enforced social isolation of the pandemic, causing my extrovert father to do without his preferred source of renewal and distraction: his students.
No longer could he wander the streets like a B-list celebrity, expecting to be hailed by former students in the main shopping area of our one-horse town.
It's hard to see him let go of an encore career he loved so dearly. It's hard to predict if the duration of the pandemic, the emergence of more lethal or vaccine-resistant variants, or Dad's waning health will permit him to resume his place at the front of the class.
Regardless of whether he returns to school, his example of exploring a field that is completely unfamiliar and leaping into it enthusiastically is a profound example of what I'd like to do when medicine has run its course for me.
Mom is fearlessness when it comes to trying new artistic endeavors for which she has no prior experience or innate aptitude. Dad pivoted to an unrelated encore career.
I've spent a lot of time seeking unconventional role models to show me how to reinvent myself during and after a medical career. Perhaps I'd have saved myself some time if I'd paid more attention to sources of inspiration closer to home.