Christmas,
1995
Dear Family and Friends,
Yes, we're finally
reduced at last to writing the generic Christmas letter. I'm doing one for my side of the Christmas
card list and Pat's doing one for her side.
Lucky you; you get mine.
The biggest piece of
news for the year that I have to pass along, as a few of you already know, is
that I FINALLY FINISHED MY PH.D.!!! I
started it in January of 1988, and finished in August, 1995. There was no great sense of exhilaration or
accomplishment--only a profound sense of relief. I've since learned from friends at the University of Minnesota that "relief" is by
far the most common reaction. I also
concluded, along the way, that the Ph.D. is far more a tribute to endurance and
perseverance than it is to intelligence.
I am reminded of W. C. Fields' comment about not wanting to belong to
any club that would admit him: if they'd
give ME a Ph.D., I'm not sure I want one!
I can certainly say that I don't FEEL any smarter.
My dissertation was two
volumes, 550 pages long (which is an unusually long dissertation). At the final oral examination, where five
faculty members interrogated me for over an hour about the dissertation, the
chair of the committee began the session by saying "we're here today to
conduct the final oral examination for Gary a.k.a. `I can't stop writing'
Engstrand." But, after the oral
exam was finished and I was excused from the room, they took about 10 minutes
to discuss the exam and then invited me back in and congratulated me on completing
a doctorate.
Anyway, at least
technically I'm now "Dr. Engstrand."
I told Elliott that I was a "doctor" and he just laughed and
said "you're just kidding me, right, Dad?" So much for delusions of grandeur. (I've had students at the University, in
meetings this fall, refer to me as "Dr. Engstrand"; I look around to
see who's sick and where the M.D. is.)
So that's that. I am now
finished--done--over--with school--no more papers, no more tests!--and can, for
the first time, read a junk novel or a biography or history without feeling
guilty (guilty because I should have been studying or writing). Sadly, no, the degree doesn't get me a raise
or a fancy new title or job; it just gives me the license to look for jobs that
I wouldn't previously be considered for because I didn't have the appropriate
piece of paper.
On other more important
fronts: I find it hard to believe I'm
the father of an 11-year-old and a 5-year-old--I'm not old enough myself for
that. Krystin and Elliott are both growing
up so fast, which is a thought I imagine occurs to virtually every parent in
the world.
Krystin is a budding
athlete--last winter and now this fall and winter she is a member of a
traveling (girls) ice hockey team, and she also plays for a Minneapolis Park Board
hockey team. This past fall, she also
played for a Park Board soccer team.
She's very good at both sports, and can't decide which she'd rather
pursue more actively. Her parents--that
is, US--have told her she can do one or the other in a big way--BUT NOT
BOTH! Between now and mid-March she has
about 45 practices and 25 games with her traveling team and with the Park Board
team; you go figure out how many times we have "hockey" written on
our calendar for this winter. (We
frankly hope that she ultimately chooses soccer--it's a lot warmer for the
spectators.)
Other than games,
Krystin's doing well in school (in 5th grade) and enjoys reading. (I'd never let her play sports if she didn't
also read quite a bit. One of her
favorite forms of amusement is going to a bookstore and browsing--and, when her
allowance permits it, buying books.)
Another activity she enjoys--and which I of all people will
encourage--is writing; Krystin's actually composed several interesting
stories. The grammar and punctuation
need a little work, but that's natural; the stories themselves are quite
interesting. Fortunately, her diabetes
remains under pretty good control, so we're optimistic that any long-term
degeneration or side effects will be offset by research advances that may take
place in the next couple of decades. The
only major problem we confront with her these days is getting the household
chores done regularly. I suspect all
parents know about that issue, too.
Meantime, both Pat and
I are up to our necks in the school. I'm
both the PTA treasurer and a member of the site-based council (an
advisory/decision-making body of teachers and parents that works with the
school to adopt and implement policy it deems appropriate). Pat's a chief fund-raiser. It seems like we have meetings about three
nights a week.
Elliott has thus far
shown NO interest in sports--although he has said he wants to skate and play
hockey this winter. My surmisal is that
he just wants to do what his older sister is doing, and that his interest may
not survive the first few pratfalls. His
great joy in life is drawing--the first thing he does when we get home from
daycare is rush to his coloring table and do pictures (of dinosaurs, dragons,
and other monsters, with an occasional tree and flowers and ants). He won't use crayons--he insists that they're
too blunt!--he has to have markers, and we've just gotten him started on
painting. One of his Xmas presents is going
to be six big jars of tempera paint; we'll see if he wants to do this in a big
way. He's an interesting
kid--thoughtful, observant, and largely self-contained. He can amuse himself for long periods with
his drawing, with his dinosaur and other toys, and with his Legos. This is VERY unlike his sister, who can
barely amuse herself for three minutes and has to be doing things with friends
90% of the time. We had to PERSUADE
Elliott to have a birthday party, for pete's sake! He could have cared less (although he had a
great time once the party day came).
My job at the University
continues, the one I took when I returned to do graduate work. For those for whom I've never explained very
well what I do: the University has a
Senate--a legislative body, just like the states and Congress (but we only have
one house, not two). The University
Senate sets academic and other policy on all kinds of matters, such as grading,
degree requirements, faculty tenure, faculty workload, grievance policies,
etc., etc. The Senate also has standing
committees that work in specific areas--educational policy, finance, etc., plus
an executive committee. My job is
serving as professional staff to the executive committee and a couple of the
standing committees--it's similar to the job that professional staff provide to
legislative committees. I've no
immediate plans to leave it, but will now start to look around. I enjoy the job, but it's not going anywhere,
and after 8 years, it's time to see what else there is to do.
Some of you know that I
wrote, last year, a detective story, which I have done almost nothing to get
published. I've now plotted out and
begun the second one, with the same detective and main characters. As you might imagine, they're set
(explicitly) at the University, with a faculty member (modeled loosely on a
good friend) reluctantly dragged into detecting strange events and
murders. I can hardly write a novel set
in Istanbul or Paris, since I've never
been there.
To tell the truth, I
had the second one mostly plotted and even started before I finished my
dissertation, but after having gone like a bat out of hell to finish writing
the dissertation, I didn't feel very much like writing ANYTHING for a few
months. But now, 4 months afterwards,
I've picked up the pen again and am getting back at it (or, to be more
accurate, I've put fingers back to the computer keyboard). I've surprised myself in that I enjoy writing
mystery fiction because all I'd ever written before this was administrative
stuff and academic papers. This is a
real change, but my circle of reviewers for the first mystery were all very
encouraging, so I'll have at a second one.
Besides, it was fun finding out about obscure poisons and talking to the
coroner's office and police officers.
I've no interest whatever in encountering a dead body in real life, but
it's kind of exciting to develop and describe a murderer! My novels, and any I may read, are about as
close to the events as I ever want to get, however.
With all these other
activities, I'm afraid my (and Pat's) bridge game has deteriorated. I still play with my long-time friend Ann
Sonnesyn in a couples group that is now almost 20 years old (Pat subs in it
once in awhile), and I still play in a small men's group that started in 1974,
but those are both infrequent. Once we
might have described ourselves as adequate and improving at the game; now I
think I'd just describe both of us as crappy and declining. All this kid and school stuff has also
wrought havoc on our social lives; it seems like we never see our friends any
more. We resolved that we have to
reverse that trend, at least! Even if we
can't be good bridge players, we need not become recluses.
Pat switched jobs this
summer. After working part-time at the
University since Elliott was born in late 1990 (most of it from home, via
computer and modem hook-up with her office and the University's central
computing systems), her position was eliminated as a result of budget
cuts. Her office gave her four months
notice, however, so she went about looking for another job (a painful process
under any circumstance). We had already
decided that Elliott needed to get out of the house and into a setting where he
had more peers with whom to interact; we thought he was becoming TOO
introverted, so Pat didn't have the reservations about having a full-time position
that she did when he was a baby.
After a number of
interviews and lots of letters and calls, she was hired by a small marketing
firm in downtown Mpls, to work in the position of what I call "chief
henchman to the pharaoh": she works
for the guy who built, owns, and runs the company, and does a wide variety of
tasks (from the pedestrian to the sophisticated). She likes the job a lot, and is getting to
know the marketing business from the ground up, and in a hurry. And they even give employees a bonus and a
salary increase that exceeds the rate of inflation--when we in the public
sector are lucky to see a raise of 1-2%, even if that!
I've never met any of
the people she works with, but I like them already: her new boss sent both of us to San Francisco in October
for a long weekend. Pat had only a
modest amount of work to do, and I had absolutely NOTHING I had to do. I've traveled on the University's money, but
of course I always had work to do; this was a new experience, traveling on
somebody else's money and having no obligations! The only other time I'd been to SF was during
the spring break of my freshman year in college, when I visited a friend going
to the University of California at Berkeley--and that was 25 years ago. So it was almost a new adventure. Trying to "cover" a place like SF
in less than 3 days is impossible, but we sure tried. We ate a lot and did a great deal of walking
and driving and generally had a good time.
(It was also the first time the two of us had traveled anywhere without
children or been away from them except for an evening since Elliott was
born. We were probably about due.)
Otherwise, life has
been dull normal. Hope you have a
wonderful holiday season and a rewarding New Year!
