One of the less-than-shining moments of my academic career was when I stood up in a faculty meeting at the College of Idaho and accused my colleagues of having it too easy. I was in my first semester teaching there. I was teaching four sections of English Composition and a journalism class, and spending my nights grading essays. I was also on a number of faculty committees, due to lack of seniority. New assistant professors got stuck with committee assignments, where they got to endlessly draft rewrites of the faculty handbook, write committee position papers, and keep the minutes of the committees they found themselves on.

Perhaps I was overwhelmed by committee work, or by the stacks of essays I was correcting, or by the line of students that formed outside of my office every afternoon, demanding serious attention and care. On the one hand I was listening to my advisees tell stories of family illness, grief, financial disaster, divorce, death, and incest. On the other I was listening to colleagues moan about how overworked they were.

So I stood up in a late-November faculty meeting and said, “We’re spending a lot of time talking about working too hard, but I put myself through grad school working on a cement crew, and you people [I used the phrase you people] don’t work nearly as hard as the people who built the buildings you teach in. I’m teaching an overload and correcting eighty essays a week, and I feel like I’m in the best job I’ve ever had. Part of it is that I like the work, but part of it is that compared to being a cement worker, it’s not that much work.”

There was dead silence for a moment, and then people resumed complaining. I had committed one of those acts that is never acknowledged in polite company, no matter how bad its odor. After the meeting, the dean of the faculty came up to me and said, “Thank you for saying that. But you’re never going to get tenure.”

________

You cannot plan the future when you’ve been told it’s not going to happen. You also cannot depend on getting a job you’ve trained for, or assume you’ll get vaccinated on schedule, or think that your quick trip to Samarra will allow you to skip your meeting with Death, even if you’ve been told that he’s searching for you somewhere else. Looking at the 90,000 or so words I’ve put in this journal so far, you can’t even be sure you won’t write a book, if some future Daniel Defoe decides to turn your words into a Journal of the Plague Year.

Geneticists have computed the odds of you being you, and me being me, starting from one of our distant ancestors in the Pre-Cambrian, and they say that our existence in any form is statistically impossible. Theoretical physicists tell us that to plan the future is to alter it, often in ways that we can’t plan for. Other theoretical physicists tell us that we occupy one of an infinite number of universes, the endless writhing branches of a continuously bifurcating reality. Anyone we can imagine being, and a bunch of someones we can’t imagine being, we are, somewhere and sometime.

In the universe where I was hired by the College of Idaho—after hearing from colleagues, people on the grounds crew, cafeteria workers and even the college president that I wasn’t going to get tenure—I ended up getting tenure. I was even promoted to full professor after fifteen years.

In all, I spent twenty-six years on the College of Idaho faculty, but the last ten of those years were as the College’s writer-at-large, a position that didn’t come with a salary. During yet another institutional financial crisis, I had traded that expensive full professorship for a relatively cheap decade of medical insurance for Julie and me. It was more than worth it for all concerned, but yet more evidence that neither the College nor I was in a universe where tenure meant what it was supposed to mean.

Julie started editing for a company that produced sales literature for Hewlett-Packard, and I started teaching in a low-residency MFA program. We moved to our house in Sawtooth Valley. It has been our home universe ever since.

________

New Year’s Day, 2021: As we were getting ready for a Zoom call with friends in Illinois, Julie turned to me and said, “This time last year we weren’t thinking about a pandemic. This time last year we didn’t Zoom our friends, we got on a plane and visited them. We went out to dinner in Chicago. We walked in the lakefront park and stood under the Bean and looked at the picture of Dorian Gray in the Art Institute.”

This time last year we were looking forward to a jubilee year, which would be marked by my seventieth birthday, Julie’s fiftieth, and our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. I was going to be reading in London on my birthday, but the other two occasions were going to be crowded celebrations at our house.

But the future we—and the rest of the country—thought we had this time last year is now a desert of expectation. The pandemic has put us all in a new place, and every day that it goes on carries us further from the old place.

That doesn’t mean that Julie and I and the country don’t have a future. It just means that if a year ago we had tried to predict anything, we would have been a little wrong in February, a lot wrong by April, and completely wrong by now.

That’s why, if you were today expecting me to provide a list of predictions for the New Year, you will be disappointed. I’m not going to tell you that every Idaho seventy-year-old will be vaccinated by May, or that Donald Trump will be crowned Emperor for Life by June, or that four Supreme Court justices will resign by July. I won’t say that in August the stock market will crash or that China will invade Taiwan and that Shanghai and Taipei will be destroyed by nuclear weapons. I’m not going to tell you that 2021 will see an accident at a Russian bioweapons facility reduce the human population by fifty-eight percent. I won’t predict our country will be in a civil war, or that seven U.S. senators, three of them from western states, will be hanged for treason. I won’t even tell you that the College of Idaho will go bankrupt due to a permanent shut-off of foreign student visas and CTE lawsuits from brain-damaged football players.

According to some theories of physics, all these things will happen sometime, somewhere. It’s a scary multiverse.

________ 

Sometimes the unknowable isn’t all bad news. Julie and I, walking into a College of Idaho classroom in 1989, couldn’t have known that we would spend happy decades together. It was her first class as a student, and my first class as a professor.

Even if I had believed it was ethical to fall in love with a student and marry her, I would have said to myself, “If you do that, you’re never going to get tenure.”

Julie and I have tried to figure out how we ended up together, and the best we can come up with is that hitting adolescence in vast non-civilized spaces (she on a ranch in the Eastern Oregon desert, me in Sawtooth Valley) deprived us of the kind of socialization that we needed to become normal, non-alienated, fully-tenured human beings. We both had a language invented over years of talking to ourselves, but neither of us expected to find another native speaker.

We both recognized socialization as a kind of covert violence that we had never experienced. (My father was a trapper. Julie’s father was a rancher. We knew what up-close violence looked like and knew when it was necessary for existence and when it wasn’t. Socialization, when we figured out what it was, looked like a totally unnecessary detour to the slaughterhouse.)

At any rate, the decades have flown by—as they do when you’re having fun—and I’m still in love, and Julie says she is too.

Julie has become a better cook, and she was a good one to begin with. I’ve become a better person. Shows what good cooking can do for you.

________

This year I’ve been emailing friends New Year’s greetings, wishing them, as a kind of mantra, good news from unexpected directions all year long. I’ve been sincere but non-specific, as I don’t know what unexpected good news would mean to them.

But the other day I got some good news from out of the blue that was wonderfully specific. Jeremy Garber, an employee at Powell’s, the great independent bookstore in Portland, put my A Hundred Little Pieces on the End of the World on a Lit Hub list: Best Under-the-Radar Books of 2020.

I’ve never met Jeremy, but I call him friend.

Lit Hub is a national book-focused website with hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and Hundred Pieces’ ranking on Amazon jumped from down in the millions to up in the thirty-thousands. That may not sound like much, but it’s a great leap in a universe where 2,200,000 books are published each year.

Also, we went skiing New Year’s Day on Banner Summit, and a slope that had been terrible skiing a few days before had received a five-inch layer of powder. The subsurface crust had softened up, and the snow was so good that you didn’t even have to think to turn. We exhausted ourselves and the dog, climbing up and skiing down again and again, and got back to the car tired and happy. We were with our friends Liesl and Michael and Sean. Everybody remembered how to ski. Everybody was still in good enough shape to ski. It felt good for Julie and me to start the year off in the presence of other human beings.

On the suddenly reasonable assumption that what you throw out into your world comes right back at you, I’m wishing everyone reading these words even better news, from far more unexpected directions, for the entire upcoming year, and the year after, if you can stand it.

_________

The day I received tenure at the College of Idaho I became certain that I would die in the harness. I would teach long beyond my safe-to-consume date, and my students, used to waiting for long pauses while I collected what was left of my wits, would discover that my draped-over-the-lectern pose was due to death, not fatigue. It would not be a bad way to go, I decided. I loved teaching and I loved the College and couldn’t think of a better way to get old.

That imagined future didn’t happen. My imagination has gotten richer and deeper since then, and I’ve thought of even better futures. One thing I’ve stopped doing, though, is thinking the future has any relationship to the present. You can’t count on anything happening until it happens.

If you want to make the gods laugh, goes the old saying, tell them your plans. But that assumes a certain malice on the part of the gods, and further assumes that you always plan what’s best for you. In the presence of endlessly bifurcating realities, that’s impossible. Also, the gods—even the tiny quantum gods in charge of delivering us one future out of many—might be more benign than we give them credit for, and they might gift you with nice surprises from unexpected directions, and they might appreciate a little gratitude once in a while.

Good things can happen, and many good things are my 2021 wish for you, me, Julie, my former you people colleagues, everyone else within reading distance, and especially Jeremy who works at Powell’s in Portland, who liked my book well enough to recommend it for a kind of tenure. If you see him there and you’ve been vaccinated, give him a hug for me.