Professor O'Malley
An Interview With My Dad from November of 2015.
Three weeks after my dad died, his former student – Isamar Chavez – sent me a recording of an interview from November of 2015.
On this second anniversary of his death, I wanted to share it with you.
You can listen to the podcast version of this post — which includes the original audio, as well as a bit of commentary and context on what it means to me — here:
Professor O’Malley
Isamar tapped at Mike’s office door with just one knuckle. In almost the exact same instant, she was greeted with a fist-bump, a request to make herself comfortable, a friendly finger wagging at a copy of Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History, and a voice that said “Put some meat on ya head – check that one out!” She followed the direction of Mike’s welcome and wedged herself into a plastic chair between a towering steel bookshelf, Beckert’s opus, and a standing desk.
While Mike began narrating his navigation of, among other things, a Word Document titled “TCE216 Syllabus Winter 2015,” Isamar unfolded her laptop and gently brushed its edges. If the machine grew too hot, she could quickly pull her hands up from its surface, dangle them while it cooled, and then re-balance her forefinger’s atop the “F” and “J” keys. Her intention with any object was to leave it as it was received.
Mike paused with heavy “Uhhhhs” each time he saved the syllabus. He was eager to demonstrate that Isamar’s promptness was appreciated and that he was hurrying through what he’d been doing. When he finally closed the documents – clicking save on each twice, re-opening them, checking that his edits were still there, saving them again, closing them again – he turned from his standing desk, descended into a swiveling chair, moved a pen six inches to his left, and asked her how she was doin’. He extended his left leg and rested its weight on his heel.
Isamar pressed a red button on the upper-left corner of her laptop’s screen and shifted herself slightly to the right, then back to center: “Okay, so– How did you become a professor and why did you become a professor?”
With exaggerated meditation, Mike said, “So this is recor– this is being recorded now?”
“Yeah–”
“So, uhm, how did I become a professor and why did I become a professor?” His first “professor” sounded significantly more like he was from Boston than his second – profess-uh and then profess-ohr.
“Uhm. Well, heh…Uhm.” His cadence shifted slightly – as if he’d gotten his dribbling out of the way and he was calming his breath to shoot a free throw. “By accident. Uhmm– I didn’t have a plan, I nevah had any plans. And I think that may be good. Because I think sometimes when we make plans, we force ourselves to do things based on perceptions of who we are that we may not be anymore.”
The pauses between his phrases were getting smaller. “Like when, I don’t know, little kids say they wanna be, uh– I don’t know, firemen or something – or firefighters, or whatever – they don’t know what they’re talking about. They don’t even know any firefighters. Uhhheh– but it just seems cool. And so, uhmm, how did this all happen?” He took an extra breath here, realizing he’d circled his landing spot: “I grew up in an immigrant family. My mah– parents didn’t speak English when they got here. They spoke Gaelic. And they landed in My Fair City in 1950.”
He coughed the same sort of anxious cough that he’d jolted out as he hurried through the saving of his documents, “They were just basically young adults. My mother was seventeen. And, uhm, yaknow, I was the oldest son,” he slowed, “and uhm– I was just taught – you just work hard, you take care of the family. And career aspirations and plans – those were luxuries we really didn’t have. And so I went to school, and, yaknow, I did okay. And, the notion was – in a working-class family if you were reasonably– bright– uhmm– maybe you could be a doctor, maybe you could be a lawyer. Nobody from the working class joined the professorate. That just didn’t happen. It wasn’t even on my radar. So I went to law school. And I hated every minute of it. I never finished. Proud of that fact – I believe in the redemptive power of quitting–” he paused, locked eyes with Isamar, laughed a breath out, and went on, “And so there I was in my early 20s trying to figure out who I was. Annnnd– uhmm– I went to the Boston Public Library and I met a woman named Holly DeWies. She was a career counselor. And I told her of my travails, and she said, ‘Ohhh. Your problems are too profound for me.’ And I said, ‘Oh, jeeze! What am I going to do!?’ And she said, ‘Wellll, there are some people who may be able to help you. They run this thing called Life, Work, Direction and their thing is to help people find a convergence between what they do and who they are.’”
Directing the hand he’d been twirling through his impersonations back towards Isamar, Mike zeroed into her pupils: “And we’ll talk about a lot of this when we get to Nietzsche.” He dropped his hand from Isamar’s direction, back into the laminated particle board of his L-shaped desk, and re-entered his more careful, tale-spinning octave, “And so I went off– yaknow– and I realized later on what Carl Jung, the psychoanalyst, used to tell people when they quit their jobs, or they failed, or whatever – or they were fired, uhhh – that that was a good thing – that they had to reconstruct the narrative of their lives. So that little kid’s story about wanting to be a firefighter or whatever – or professional basketball player – that was an anachronism. So now I have to try something else, and I was open to trying different things and I went through this program with them. And they were really bright people. Uhmm– I’m still in touch with them. And they said, ‘It looks like you should be a lawyer,’ and I’m like,” Mike put his voice as high and as youthful as it could go without exploding the plane of his authority, “‘Oh no, not that!’”
Isamar simpered and tapped the letters: “a-l-m-o-s-t l-a-w-y-e-r.”
With a satisfactory huff, Mike lowered into his teacherly lilt once again, “‘Or a teacher.’ I had nevah thought about that. Never! And then I got certified to teach, and I, uhm,” he coughed twice, “I remembah doing my student teaching. I got up and the guy who was my mentor said, ‘Hey, kid, get up there and teach about the American Revolution!’ I said, ‘I haven’t prepared anyth–’ ‘Just get up there!’ Uhh, and I went up there and I just made a timeline – ‘cuz I have a pretty good memory for dates, as you know – and I explained it all to the kids, and I was telling jokes, and quoting this one and quoting that one and mentioning this book – And for the first time in my life, I had this epiphany – ‘Shit, I can get paid for having fun?’ It never dawned on me!” Thirty years removed from his initial realization, there was still a sunniness in Mike’s voice.
But something drastic – if momentary – shifted here. He moved from a tenor of playful inspiration to something almost prayerful: “It’s like your mother working in the– making the dental chairs. Yaknow, it just wears you down psychically. I worked in a meat factory – I’ve seen people have their hands cut off and everything. And I was like, ‘Wow, you can do this?’ And so I started teaching. And I loved it.”
With a small left ankle crossed over the top of her right tennis shoe, Isamar nodded again, “Mhm–”
“And I taught middle school, and high school, and community college, and at U of O [University of Oregon], and here [Oregon State University], and it just kind of…fit who I was. Uhmm, and yaknow, as I’ve mentioned to other people, one of the things that I’m afraid of is that in this age of unbelievable technological…sophistication we’re seeing a narrowing of the domains of knowledge. So the kind of fluidity I had to – kinda – go to law school, become a teacher, end up at a university, blahblahblah–” he yanked himself abruptly from the blasé-ness of resumé enunciation – “I don’t know if people can do that anymore! We’re getting channeled at some young age. Yaknow, I make fun of the students – ‘You’re 19 years old, you want to be a mechanical enginee-ah [engineer] – you don’t know your ass from a hole in the wall! Why don’t you get– why don’t you learn about the world first before you make those decisions?’ But they’re afraid – and I can understand why they’re afraid. Yaknow, they’re spending a lot of money. Uhmm, they’re in debt. Uhh, they wanna– want a career. And why not?”
He caught himself in theory rather than biography. “So! I was teaching high school and, uhmm, there was a woman working here, who I knew, who said – and she knew I knew a lot about history – she said, ‘Why don’t you come and give a lecture on the history of American education?’ It was like that high-school moment – I said, ‘Okayy,’” he shifted his weight momentarily to his left side, stretching his hamstring and calf, “So I show up and I just shoot my mouth off fah ninety minutes. And people ask questions.”
Maneuvering his hands like Magic Johnson offering a hee-hee description of the Dream Team, he continued: “And I’m doing this and I’m doing that and I’m doing that. And they – and I didn’t realize it – people were like ‘You’re pretty good at this!’ And yaknow, and then they ask me to work here. And then I work part-time here and part-time at a high school until…2005, yeah, and then they offahed [offered] me a full-time job here.”
He shifted onto the right armrest of his chair and moved, tonally, back to his more contemplative, deeper, breathier voice, “Annnd, I didn’t know. I miss high school. ‘Cuz I get to know– I get to know you – but, I get to– you’re like a high school student to me– I don’t mean that to–”
“Yeah, no, I know, heh–”
“I mean that– I mean that in a very complimentary way–”
“Okay–”
“I get to know you–”
“Uh-huh–”
“I don’t get to know most of the kids here. At the high school, I got to know everybody. Uhh– and so I miss that – so I was really torn by that, and eventually, because my, uhmmuhm, kids were growing up, I said, ‘This job is more flexible.’ Between you and me, you don’t have to work as hard as a high-school teacher,” he descended down to a whisper, “Yaknow, I can do whatever I want basically, yaknow,” he motioned to his computer, “I’m working on this,” he pointed four fingers back to Isamar, “you’re interviewing me, I have a meeting at 9:30, I gotta go over to a high school to observe a student teacher at 10:40 – I mean, it’s kinda– a lot of flexibility.”
He pushed out a cough and inhaled as quickly as he could, to continue: “Grab a bite to eat, I’ll come back, I’ll work on this paper some more. But! The point is, that’s kinda how I ended up here…Now, in two-thousanddddd-one, yeah, I don’t know if I told you this story,”
Ismar shook her head and said “Mm mm–”
“It’s kind of a funny story – I was giving a lecture over at Owen Hall on something. There was these new students coming in and they wanted me to talk. And my fathah [father], who was a big guy,” Mike extended his arms a few inches from his sides, broadening the width of his shoulders to demonstrate the mythic mass of his paternal figure, “been a heavyweight fightah [fighter],”
“Mhm–”
“He was visiting me, and he came to Owen Hall. And he could hardly fit in the cheah [chair],” he lowered his voice, as if he was his father, “fit in the cheah,”
Isamar’s nostrils pushed away the air closest to her face in a subtle but sudden laugh.
“And, uhh, he’s listening to me– he’s in the last row, and I can kinda– he’s kinda laughin’. And he comes down to me aftah I finished the talk, and he said,” Mike lapsed into a well-worn Irish accent, “‘Arrah Jesus Christ now, son. Do you get paid for this shit?’”
Isamar giggled – quiet but real. And with a half-smile and drumming, breadstick-sized fingers, Mike continued, “And I said to him, ‘It beats working for a living!’ and we’re both howling– we’re both laughing, right? And it’s because…He died of complications of asbestos because as a lay-buh-reh [laborer]– he also was a coal-minah in Wales and England and Scotland and pit-mining – the whole thing – his lungs were a mess,” he took a deep, doctor’s-office breath, “Like your mom, yaknow, I read that thing you had– you wrote. Yaknow, I can relate to that. These folks get brutalized, yaknow and, uhmm, yeah. And here I am, in a very privileged position, and that’s why, for instance, on Monday I’ll do this Adam Smith thing. And one of his conclusions that we’ve already mentioned, is that the people who do, uhmm, the division-of-lay-buh work, yaknow – like ya mothah and my fathah – uhmm, they deserve the best education because they’re going to experience what he calls, ‘a psychological mutilation,’ a torpor, a numbness caused by the division of labor. And so yeah, so, yaknow……that’s why I do this, because, yaknow, andand and why, why – I didn’t know, because, I was clueless…I was reading all the time as a kid – I always read, I don’t know why. My fathah read – maybe that’s why. I didn't realize I was preparing myself for this,” he swirled his finger around the office, “But I had no idea what this was.”
“Mhm–”
“I didn’t even know this existed.”
“Mhm–”
He shifted into his left calf muscle again, and then out of it, “I’ll tell you one othah story: When I stahted working here full-time, Cornel West was speaking up at, uhh, the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. On a Friday. And I decided I wanted to go up and see him. Anduhh, I told the dean, and I said, ‘Yaknow I’m not gonna be in on Friday – I’m gonna go to this talk by Cornel West up in Tacoma.’ And he said to me, ‘You don’t have to tell me. Your time is your own time.’ And I was like ‘What!?’ Because my parents’, and, most of my, life – othah people had told me what to do.”
“Mhm–”
“I was a worker. My parents were workers. And it was like, ‘Wow.’”
He looked at the bookshelf, and then back at Isamar, “So! That’s how…that all happened, in a nutshell. Is basically I had no idea what I was doing, I failed miserably, I experienced redemptive failure, I went and I got some help, they got me into teaching, the teaching led me to, yaknow, success in other fields, and eventually, yaknow, working my way up, yaknow–” he broke the rhythm of this thought and his tone became harsher, “I don’t know if ‘up’ is the right word because I think this has become a neoliberal awe-pah-ration [operation]. And it’s nothing more than a cohr-pa-ration [corporation], and in a way you could say I’m still working for The Man. Yaknow, yaknow, and what we’re doing to you with, yaknow, debt and everything else is unconscionable. And taxpayahs ah’nt payin’, and there's a lot of, yaknow, there’s a lot of uhm, there’s a lot of exploitation here.”
“Mhm–”
“So I’m not gonna deny that either. So…this is problematic, too. Uhm, and one of the things that happens when you ask me questions like this, is that – ultimately you can only feel – I think, anyway – a rich ambivalence about whatevah ya doin’.” He plucked his phone from his desk and held it eight inches to the right of his face, pumping it back and forth with visible contempt, “This machine – somebody got screwed ohvah making this. It was– the materials wah mined by children in Africa.”
“Mhm–”
His accent had grown more bracing as the conversation had gone on – as he’d settled into his thoughts and become angry at his own ambivalence, “We’ll see the film on Monday with people living at the factory with, yaknow, suicide prevention nets around it. And here we ahr, right?”
“Yeah–”
“And so – yeahhhhhh – so what do you do? You come up with some kind of– some kind of ex-post-facto rationalization to justify what you’re doin’. So how do I justify what I’m doing as a teacher, and someone working here? Yaknow, I try to create consciousness, yaknow, and that…buys me a little comfort.”
“Mhm–”
“Not all that much, but a little bit. And that's why, yaknow, one of the things that, yaknow, and I know you do what you do ‘cuz you get to know us and stuff, but…no one gets, nobody– everybody pays a price for whatever comfort we feel. Somebody pays a price, yaknow. So how– whaddya do?” he coughed “You work for social justice, I go ovah and I walk a picket line – on these guys who ahr striking, you go ovah and ya just carry the sign and ya say, ‘these are the people I gotta help,’ yaknow, because they make it all possible.”
“Mhm–”
“So. Yeah! So that's ehhhhh, that’s basically it.”
“Ok–”
“Anything else you wanna ask about that?”
“I think you kinda answered all the other questions, too– within it,” Isamar said, dawning a nervous grin.
“Oh really!? Okay! Alright!”
“But, uhmmm. Kind of discovered – you talked about the, the, uhmmm,” her eyes darted towards a bullet point in her laptop’s screen, “Actually, what do you do besides teaching?”
“Okay–”
“Yeah–”
“What do I do besides teaching? Well, ya gonna be shocked! Uhhhhh – I read– a lot. Yaknow, that’s a big thing fah me. I always have a book I’m reading. Uhmmm. And then, uhmmm,” he smacked his lips, “I exahcise [exercise]. And that’s how I got sick. I don’t know – and this is a may-jah [major] problem for me – I don’t know when to stop.”
“Mmm”
“And I think that’s paht [part] of the working-class mentality, yaknow, ya always gotta keep doing things. So if I run – I’ll run 10 miles, yaknow, I’ll cycle fawwty [forty] miles.”
“Wow–”
“And then – because I’m getting oldah, I notice I break down,” he shimmied his left hand over and back, almost like it was a new appendage, “So I walk picket lines, I read, uhm, I exahcise– I’m a big movie buff. There’s a whole branch of, uhmm, psychotherapy now called movie therapy.”
“Mhm–”
“That, when ya kinda gettin’ overwhelmed, just sit in a chair in the dahk and watch somebody else’s life. So yeah, movies are a big thing. I don’t travel much anymore because I’m really trying to limit my cahbon [carbon] footprint. And the worst thing you can do is fly, yaknow, so I pretty much try to stay put. And then, yaknow, I, yestahday, for instance, there was a discussion ovah at the MU – uhm, the La Raza room 208, uhm, about–”
“Racial justice?”
“Yeahhh, well this was about Israel. And uhh–”
“Oh ok–”
“It was–”
“Yeah yeah yeah–”
“There was a huge–”
“About the Black Lives Matter– yeah?”
“Yeah, that’s right,” he nodded his head and shoulders forward once, gently guiding them both away from clarification, “So I went to that.”
“Mhm–”
“And I get along – I’m in an Occupy reading group. And–”
“Mhm–”
“And, yaknow – I’m trying to stay involved–”
“Mhm–”
“But uhm, yeah, so I do othah things. Yaknow and then, of course, the big thing: I got kids–”
“Mhm–”
“And they, yaknow, occupy a lot of my time – heh – and money, and psychic energy–”
“Mhm–”
“Because there’s always something going on, yaknow – so uhmm, yeah!”
“Okay–”
He put on a wry smile, “Anything else you wanna ask from ya machine?”
“Uhmmm. Let’s see. Uhmmm. I guess, what expectations do you expect from students?”
“Yeah, that’s a great question–”
“And what should they expect from you?”
“Well,” he reached down for his most ruminative octave yet, “What I expect from them…is I want them to become autodidacts.”
“Mmm–”
“We talked about this in class. I want them to become young intellectuals. I want them to be able to think about things perspectivally. I want them to be able to develop a sense of empathy. Uhmm, and what should they expect from me? I need to be an intellectual role model. I need to come prepared I need to be enahgetic,” he was rifling through a philosophy that had guided him for two decades, “If they ahr bored in my classes, I think that’s my problem. ‘Cuz I don’t want them to be bored. And I know there’s a lot of– yaknow, we live in a culcha [culture] of entertainment. But I want people to come to class knowing that I’m prepared and that I’m gonna engage them and that I’m gonna use, yaknow, whatevah tools I need to. From a sense of humor to pushing the boundaries of, yaknow, acceptable behavior, or whatevah it takes – to kind of…engage them, because there’s one thing I will say with a certain amount of ontological certainty. And th–”
“Ontological – what does that mean again?”
“Uhmm – questions of being, like the very essence of ahr lives, right?”
“Ok–”
“Is that, uhmm, this is about as good as it gets in our culture,” he motioned four fingers between him and Isamar, “I mean, this is why – this is why I’m even pushing these, like, engineering types a little bit. Yaknow, understand the world ya live in, understand the structures, undahstand capitalism, undahstand racism, undahstand, yaknow, patriarchy. Whatevah! Yaknow, undahstand these things so you can live a more well-informed life and pahticipate intelligently in a democracy–”
“Mhm–”
“We have an election coming up. In the midterm elections of 2014, only 36 percent of folks voted. And I understand why they don’t vote, because the system isn’t working fah them. Pahticularly for the poor–”
“Lack of trust–”
“Yep – lack of trust. Uhmm – they get involved in the process and then they’re let down because there’s so much money involved in the system that politicians have to kind of,” two quick coughs, “kowtow to their, yaknow–”
“Mhm–”
“Campaign contributahs. So, yaknow, I want them to get involved. I want them to take action. I want this world to be a little better, yaknow, racially, yaknow, environmentally, yaknow, uhmm, legally. Whatever. So that’s what I want…That’s what I'm gonna do– and what you’re asking in some ways is, yaknow, what fuels me?”
“Mhm–”
“And what fuels me is, all those things I just mentioned that I wanna do in the classroom. But I wouldn’t be able to do those things if I didn’t do those othah things outside the classroom like, yaknow, being with my kids and, yaknow, oh that’s– I’m a big basketball fan, I’m a huge basketball fan–”
“Mhm–”
“Like, yaknow, basketball, and, yaknow, reading, and, yaknow, my family, and, yaknow, all that stuff. So, it’s gotta be that balance,” he shifted towards his left leg again, “And that’s a tight – yaknow that’s a tight…rope I have to walk–”
“Mhm–”
“And then, yaknow, if I overdo it I get sick. Like I did– So, uhhh, yeah. Soooo, yeah. Does that answer that question?”
“Yeah, it does.”
“Is there any othah thing you wanted to ask me?”
“Uhmmm–” she pressed a red button on the upper-left corner of her laptop’s screen.
Thanks for reading.
Here’s the podcast link again, which includes the actual audio of this interview and some of my analysis: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2212876/13137492
Hit me up if you have any questions about anything.
‘Shit, I can get paid for having fun?’