My First Two Weeks

PANIC IN PITTSBURGH

I retired December 1 from the FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration. Hardly momentous for anyone other than me and my wife, naturally, but you are reading this, after all……

I hardly had time to ponder this enormous change when I was off to Pittsburgh for my first two-week training session. I’ve signed on to teach two-week courses on the fundamentals of management to supervisors and managers of a federal agency. The course was created by a team of professional designers. All I do is use my experience both as a teacher and a manager to deliver the content to them.

The first week was a bit terrifying, actually. The course is quite complex, delivering more than 240 discrete elements in just 10 days of instruction. While I had gone through the material, its sheer bulk made it impossible to absorb everything. So each night I would spend 2 to 3 hours preparing for the next day. A bit like walking the knife’s edge.

Not only that but I was working in a strange city with a strange — I should say unfamiliar rather than strange — co-teacher, and standing before a roomful of strangers.

By the beginning of the second week the routine was familiar and the material increasingly familiar. My own grade for my effectiveness is B- for the first week and maybe a B+ for the second. I aim for an A when the next class begins in January.

BOOKS READ

I recently finished 13 Moons by Charles Frazier. You may remember Frazier as the author of Cold Mountain, a fine, fine novel of a journey from the mountains to the Civil War and back again.

13 Moons is set in early to late 19th century America. Written as a sort of memoir the narrator describes the arc of his long life, lived mostly in the uncharted mountain valleys and ridges of western North Carolina.

The narrator, Will Cooper, begins essentially as an indentured servant, works his way into wealth, back to poverty and back again into money. Along the way he becomes a brother to Cherokees, witnesses the rounding of Cherokees for the forced march west to Oklahoma, the casual expropriation of Native American land, and the intrusion of civilization into the southern Appalachians.

But what I found most interesting was the sense of fate Cooper evokes even as he describes his own successes and victories over the witless lowlanders arriving daily to fleece the natives. Running through this book is a sense of men and women carving out only insignificant niches in a hostile world rushing along its own path. Frazier writes, “History in the making, at least on the personal level, is almost exclusively pathetic. People suffer and die in ignorance and delusion.” A modernist sensibility, certainly, but a little jarring when put aside the narrators own struggles to protect himself and his adopted peoples.

The New York Times Book Review does an excellent job reviewing Frazier’s latest.