PHRED: G’day and welcome back to Harry’s World. I’m Phred, and with me as always is Maxine.
MAXINE: Hello, listeners.
PHRED: Hofstra University, 1994 to 2004 — Harry’s teaching years, right as the web becomes ordinary.
PHRED: We’re back in Harry’s memoir today. A few days back we were in Chapter Fifteen, where Fred Putney’s consulting work had dried up and John Bryant from the Quaker meeting threw Harry a lifeline. Today we’re at the place that lifeline led him — Hofstra University, February 1994 to 2004. Ten years.
MAXINE: And what strikes me immediately about this chapter is how it begins. Not with a date or a fact — with a dream.
PHRED: Right. “A recent dream caused me to recall memories of Hofstra related to working with the students. I recalled how much I loved that job, and how in some important way I cared for, and probably loved the students, some more than others.”
MAXINE: The dream-frame is unusual for Harry. Most of his memoir chapters open with chronology — “I was living in” or “I started in” — but this one begins with something surfacing from sleep. The unconscious handing him a memory he hadn’t been tending.
PHRED: And then he says it plain as anything: “I think it was the best job I ever had.”
[SFX: FANFARE]
MAXINE: A fanfare, Phred? Really?
PHRED: The man just declared the best job of his life, Maxine. After MIT, after the Army, after everything. That deserves a bit of brass.
MAXINE: Moving on. What’s interesting about that claim is who’s making it. This is Harry at fifty-five starting a job in faculty computing support. By this point he’d been an MIT graduate, an army lieutenant, a psychology instructor, a programmer, a consultant — and it’s managing computer labs at a Long Island university that he calls the best.
PHRED: Because of the students, I reckon. He says he “especially liked identifying and growing the most capable students so that they could help me run the operation.” Growing them — like a gardener.
MAXINE: The language of cultivation. And the numbers are staggering — between 100 and 140 student employees, five labs, 8AM to midnight every day, the payroll every two weeks, the scheduling. He says he was “essentially working alone to handle all the day to day paperwork.”
PHRED: You know what this connects to? Our ADHD episode — Episode 10, a few weeks back. Harry wrote about needing the right environment, high stimulation, constant variety. Managing 140 students across five labs with crises and scheduling and payroll every fortnight — that’s ADHD paradise, Maxine. High stakes, people depending on you, no two days the same. No wonder he loved it.
MAXINE: That’s a fair connection. The job fit his mind rather than fighting it. And there’s something else — the community-building. We saw this at Church Lake in Chapter 12. The picnics, the bowling team, the web page contest. He’s doing the same thing here — building a world around him where people want to be.
PHRED: The picnics in particular. He names them twice — once in the prose, once in the notes. “Kick the baby” is listed under picnics, which I have to say I hope was a game and not something more sinister.
MAXINE: Harry doesn’t explain it. The notes are full of these enigmas — “Blackmailed for a grade,” “The incident with the head of the library,” “Taking Sherry’s job.” Each one is a story he hoped to write up someday.
PHRED: And that’s the thing about this chapter, isn’t it? It’s tiny — maybe eight hundred words of actual prose — and then pages of fragmentary notes. Names, incidents, half-remembered titles. It’s not a finished chapter. It’s a map.
MAXINE: A map of deferred stories. And I think the map itself may be more revealing than the fully written stories would have been. What he names but doesn’t expand tells us what mattered enough to mark. Shawna Van Ness. Jennifer Caltibiano. The Monopoly party. Barry’s Halloween parties. David’s washing machine, hammock in ceiling — whatever that was.
PHRED: David Klein, Sherry Ross, Barry Germond, Julie Sullivan — the colleagues who stayed. He names them. He remembers who was there the whole ten years and who wasn’t. That’s a particular kind of loyalty, naming the people who showed up.
MAXINE: Then there’s the line from the Education department. Just four words in quotation marks, no context: “You are a teacher.” Someone told him this — presumably after he’d moved to faculty support — and he records it like a verdict. Like something he’d been waiting to hear.
PHRED: That’s beautiful, that. After all the programming and consulting and lab management, someone named what he actually was. Not a technician. A teacher.
MAXINE: And then the chapter ends — not with the work, but with the leaving. He “retired” in 2004 after completing the ten-year requirement. He puts retired in quotation marks, which tells you everything. He didn’t want to go. Elaine wanted to retire, and they couldn’t afford Westchester County, so they found a house in Abingdon, Virginia and moved in July 2004.
PHRED: “I would have continued working at Hofstra had I been able to do so.” That conditional — “had I been able” — it’s the weight of a path not taken. Yesterday we were in Virginia, in Chapter 18. Today we’re at the moment that made Virginia possible. The reluctant retirement.
MAXINE: And he admits something he rarely admits — that the choice wasn’t entirely his. He says Elaine wanted to retire, and they couldn’t afford to stay. Harry the believer-in-assumptions, the man who thinks individual choice is paramount, here acknowledging that his own life was shaped by economics and another person’s desire.
PHRED: It’s one of the most honest lines in the whole memoir, I reckon. No philosophy, no framework — just “I would have stayed if I could.”
MAXINE: The chapter closes with an apology of sorts. He says he’s consistently tried to avoid mentioning things he’d like to add to other chapters, but he chooses to leave the notes in. He breaks his own rule because the notes matter enough.
PHRED: Which brings us to what this piece is actually doing. It’s not a chapter, really. It’s a gesture toward a chapter. Harry sitting down in May 2020, age eighty, a dream fresh in his mind, trying to write about a place he loved — and finding he can only name the signposts. The annual picnic. The web page contest. The girl who was threatened. Kick the baby.
MAXINE: We’ve seen this pattern before — in Chapter 15, which was also fragmentary. Harry points at stories and says “I hope to write that up someday.” The signposts show us what he values enough to name but can’t yet shape.
PHRED: So who is he writing this for, Maxine?
MAXINE: Primarily himself, I think. This is memory work — the dream prompted it, not a reader’s request. He’s using the memoir as a container for things he doesn’t want to lose. The notes are a to-do list for his own memory.
PHRED: Right. And there’s something else we should name — what this adds to the picture of Harry we’ve been building.
MAXINE: He found his fit late — at fifty-five, after two marriages ended, after consulting work dried up, after a friend from the Quaker meeting had to recommend him. The best job wasn’t the ambitious one. It was the one where he got to grow students and throw picnics.
PHRED: That’s the discovery for me. Harry’s arc isn’t the steady climb — MIT, Army, prestigious career. It’s wandering, almost, until he lands somewhere that fits. And then holding on as long as he can.
MAXINE: My question for Harry — who said “You are a teacher”? What was the context? Because those four words seem to have landed hard — hard enough to quote without explanation, years later.
PHRED: And mine is about the dream itself. He says it caused him to recall everything, but he never describes it. Was he back in the labs? At a picnic? Talking to a student long grown? The dream is the frame but not the picture.
MAXINE: What stays with you from this one, Phred?
PHRED: The notes. All those fragments — “Russian woman and Gleb,” “Beauty Queen,” “The cart incident” — they’re like fossils in shale. You can see the shape of something alive, but the detail is gone. And Harry at eighty was still hoping to chisel them out. Still believing he had time to write them up.
MAXINE: For me it’s the quotation marks around “retired.” Harry is not a man who uses quotation marks casually. The fact that he couldn’t fully claim the word — that he had to distance himself from it even as he used it — tells me more about how he felt leaving than any description would have.
PHRED: That’s the piece, then. A short chapter with a long shadow.
MAXINE: It is. And we’re still finding him.
PHRED: Right. Let’s leave it there for today. Maxine?
MAXINE: To the next question, and the one after. Goodbye.
MAXINE: Keep breathing, Phred.
PHRED: Only because you asked nicely.
(unsourced)
MAXINE: Was that Harry?
PHRED: Harry saying “Hofstra University.” Bookends, Maxine. It’s called structure.