Professors Emeriti.

I was at a loss today. By order of the fire marshall, my building was off limits. I don't work well at home, so I spent most of the day in my faculty club. There's an internet connection right next to a really comfy chair right next to the coffee urn. Students never, ever enter the faculty club unless escorted by a faculty member. Even with an escort they look and act as if they were on the receiving end of a colonoscope and they tend to rush out of the building when their business is concluded. It's a quiet, pleasant place.

The faculty club at my previous institution was a dismal, dreary place that catered mostly to obscenely old alumni. The food was unsalted and mushy. Faculty were tormented by alumni's complaints about their violations of the dining room dress code (jacket and tie). Women were not traditionally welcome, except as escorts, so there was no fixed dress code for female faculty. (There was a seperate, small door on the side of the building that, up until the mid-70s, was the entrance to be used by women.) My first dining experience there resulted in food poisoning. I would never have returned except that my department chair loved the place and scheduled all our departmental events there. So I am surprised that I enjoy and maintain my club membership now. I can't say that I get my money's worth out of it, but it's nice knowing that I always have a place to go. The club chef is almost excellent. The staff will help me with almost anything I need, from xeroxing to concert tickets to hunting down a corkscrew.

At around 11 am, the lounge began to fill up with professors emeriti waiting for the luncheon room to open. I love these guys. There's a gang of them, maybe 25 men, all in their 70s and 80s. For the most part they are widowed. Many of them live in the same retirement community. They all exhibit various infirmities of extreme age. They refer to me as a sweet young thing, even though I am well advanced into middle age and almost as grey as they are. They tell stories of another age, another kind of academia. I know that most of them were probably the worst kind of colleagues, racist, sexist and bigoted, but now they are just harmless old fogies.

These daily lunches are the center of their lives. It requires more than a little effort for some of these men to get to campus every morning, eat lunch with their colleagues and return home again. Today, one gentleman came in and declared, when asked about his health, that he was having some difficulty with orientation. His compatriots nodded sympathetically. He then declared that he needed to make a phone call. Approaching the phone, he seemed a bit nervous, and with good reason. He had forgotten how to dial outside of the university exchange. After several tries, he reached his party, and asked for another phone number that he had left at home. I could hear the party at the other end of the line impatiently repeat the phone number over and over again. First, the professor couldn't lay his hands on pen and paper to jot down the number. Then he just couldn't get the number at all. "Five?" he asked. "No, nine," was the response. "Five?" "No, nine." "Five?"

After about five minutes of this exchange, the number had been accurately copied down and he terminated the call. I watched him walk very slowly, with a gait suggesting Parkinson's disease, across the room to sit next to a friend. His friend asked him about his research. To my great delight, he launched into a complicated monologue on theoretical physics. It was a miraculous transformation and a joy to watch.

I haven't yet decided what I will do when it is time to retire. I tell people that I will move to Pensacola and lie on the beach, and that my only goal will be to eat enough fried seafood to reach a minimum body weight of 300 pounds before I die. But it would be nice to be one of those professors emeriti at the big round table in the luncheon room, too.