Decision time

Here is a blog entry that I drafted back in January of 2013, when I was getting ready to retire from my NASA job. It includes thoughts about my 30-year career as a scientist, and it is interesting to compare what I was saying then with how my life has evolved at this point (late 2016).

Much as I prefer to read such up-beat, amusing blogs as that of my friend Bonnie Herold (tenacioustelleroftales), I'm afraid this one is going to be entirely too serious to have any amusement value.  It is about the decision to retire from my NASA job at the end of this month.

I write this while on break from the 93rd Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Society, of which I've been a member for 30-some years.  The conference is in Austin, Texas, by the way, somewhere that I've always wanted to visit. I've been able to walk around the downtown area, but not to get out and hear music. 

These conferences always wear me down, being an introvert who is so very de-energized by being in large groups of people for extended times. It's a meeting being attended by 3300 people, and at any one time there are about 25 papers being presented, in different rooms spread around the Convention Center.  The highly motivated and conscientious participants will create a custom schedule for themselves, scurrying from one room to another in order to optimize the experience based on their particular research interests.  I have found that to be somewhat frustrating, as one will frequently arrive at a presentation room only to find that you have missed the introduction of the talk you were interested in and thus keeping you guessing for the rest of it about assumptions or methods, or even finding that the talk you wanted to see has been canceled.  So I try to optimize by session rather than individual talk and try to make myself comfortable for several talks in a row.

There are so many aspects of these conferences that in the past have always worn me down, some related to the science content and others related to the networking.  In the case of the latter, it may be running into someone whom I haven't seen for a long time, only to discover that they don't remember me.  Or spending a lot of time asking myself questions like, "who will I have lunch (or dinner) with today?"  For someone who has just a little bit of social anxiety, this is tiring.

This time the experience is particularly unique, in that I intend to retire from my NASA job at the end of the month, and so this may well be the last conference I will ever go to.  And it may be the last time I will ever see certain people that I have enjoyed interacting with at various points in my career.  People such as my dissertation adviser, who is just a little older than I am, still working hard, and totally taken aback when I told him that I would be retiring soon.  He had presumed that there was some kind of conflict at work, as his first question was "What happened down there?", referring to my Huntsville location.  (I assured him that that was not the problem.)  Or former students or younger colleagues of mine for whom I feel fondness and well-wishes as they build their own careers.

And so what's going through my mind as I sit in the presentation rooms or walk the gathering areas has more to do with my decision to retire as with the moment at hand.  I am thinking about my career and whether I'm ready to let go of it.  Indeed, I'm considering whether retiring from my NASA job is really the same as quitting my career, as I can still continue through a couple of other avenues.  I could try to get a job with someone else (most likely on a contract working in the same area as I am now), and I will also have the opportunity to work for free, in an "emeritus" position or to seek opportunities to teach atmospheric science or applied math at UAH. I probably could also do some teaching at UAH if I wanted to pursue that.  So, retirement does not necessarily equate to career suicide.

A lot of the conflict in my mind has to do with my dissatisfaction with a 30-year career that simply has not met my expectations.  Looking back, the reasons for the lack of satisfaction have been fairly clear.  From my dissertation work, to the follow-up post-doc work, and then to my early NASA career work, I became absorbed and very productive in topics that I found fascinating but that came to be judged by the science community as simply not very relevant or important.  My publication record was very good, but citations of my papers by others were practically non-existent.  When I wrote proposals for funding of future work based on the past work, most of them were rejected.  So 25 years ago I took up a suggestion by my boss to do a one-year stint at NASA Headquarters in D.C. to build up my contacts and to become more familiar with the NASA mission priorities.  And that did lead me into an area of study (Doppler wind lidar) that kept me going for a number of years and brought interaction with a great group of colleagues across the country and in Europe.  However, the work was canceled due to budget constraints (twice, actually) before the instruments were ever built, and for me it led to no publications other than conference presentations.  Meanwhile, the institution I was at simply did not have the infrastructure to support the work I wanted to do (data assimilation and numerical weather prediction), and at that time it was not so easy to do that kind of work outside of those places (Goddard Space Flight Center, for example) that did have the infrastructure.

All this relative lack of success added up to frustration, discouragement, and demotivation, though there were some positive times, too. One work assignment that I enjoyed was being Mission Scientist on ATLAS-2 and -3, which were Spacelab missions to observe Earth's middle and upper atmosphere and the sun's input into it. The photos here were taken by NASA photographers during the ATLAS-2 mission. For ATLAS-1, I did not have a formal role on the mission but was the "anchor" on the NASA TV show, "Today In Space" that covered the mission. When the opportunity arose shortly after those missions, I got into management as deputy to our earth sciences chief at Marshall.  At least I could contribute to helping others do their jobs better and more easily.  I think I did well in that position, but I worked in relative anonymity with respect to the broader community, and I didn't meet my original hopes (when I was a grad student and committed to the field) of doing important research. I missed using my mathematical and numerical analysis skills, and I continually reminded myself that I did not get a Ph.D. to be a bureaucrat.

When my boss retired, he encouraged me to take the lead role and expressed great disappointment in me when I did not do so. But I felt that I simply did not have the "gift of gab" to be the strong representative and salesman for our department that he had been.  I felt like I was a good "down and in" manager, and not so good at the "up and out" stuff.  We had a key member of our group coming back from his own stint at NASA HQ who I thought would make an excellent manager, so I deferred to him.  I acted as his deputy for a while, but quit at first opportunity (when another individual expressed interest in the job), as he and I did not work together nearly as well as the previous manager.  With his blessing, I decided to try my hand again at just being a scientist.

Well, this story is dragging on, so I'll cut to the chase and say that, while I was successful in some important respects, I never again became truly a publishing research scientist.  I've recently provided badly-needed leadership for an important airborne flight project to study hurricanes (that someone else had initiated), so I take some pride in that.  I believe that it will prove in a year or two to be successful, but we haven't yet gotten to the point of being able to publish some significant science results.

I could stick around until that publication becomes viable, but I am very inclined not to do so.  My days at work are boring (my own fault -- no one else to blame!), and I often feel that they are sucking the life out of me.  I constantly wish that I didn't have to come in for 8 hours every day, looking forward to the evening and to the weekends.

So, back to the retirement decision.  I feel like I need a long break -- at least a couple of months -- in order to get things into perspective and make a final decision.  However, something deep inside tells me that the break needs to be complete -- that as long as a return to work is pending, I will not be free to explore what it means to not work at my NASA job, and thus a "final decision" still cannot be made.  Problematically, this is something like a "catch 22."  So I've concluded that I need to give it up and trust that I will be as resilient as I've always been and will be able to find my way, whether it's leaving this career behind or picking it back up in some other capacity.

Now that it’s 2016, it is interesting to look back on that decision and ask if I have any regret about it. Financially, it has worked out just fine and should continue to do so into the future. But should I have tried to improve my situation rather than quitting? That’s the big question, and it’s one that does not have a clear answer. I do enjoy having my days to myself, being able to tackle home projects as the inspiration hits me but with no pressure to do so; being able to tend to my physical fitness with virtually no time constraints; being able to do volunteer work for my church or other worthy entities as I wish and am recruited to do so; being able to surf the internet and catch up on Facebook without feelings of guilt; being able to create new beer recipes and to share the results with friends who also enjoy good beer. I look forward with pleasure to every new day, whether I have it planned full or not. How can I complain?

My Life in a Nutshell (A Quick Bio)

It has occurred to me that this quest to "write my life's story" could use a short synopsis. This is to introduce myself to my OLLI (Osher Lifelong Learning Institute) classmates, and to provide some info to those readers who don't know me very well. Other entries have provided or will provide more details and anecdotes about the various specific subjects or time periods that I mention.

I was born in October of 1950 in a hospital near Cincinnati, Ohio. I was the first child of my parents, who had married a little over a year earlier. They lived on a farm about 30 miles from that hospital, and I was in the first generation that was usually born in a hospital, rather than at home. My father was born in the house I grew up in. He took over the farm after his father died, just a few years before marrying my mom, and he lived in that house all his life.

I had two siblings. My sister Patricia (Patty, now Pat) is two years and 4 months younger than I, and my brother Chris was around seven years younger. Pat now lives with her family in Connecticut, and Chris died from pancreatic cancer in 2011. We are still very close to his widow Cindi and their three daughters. I had quite a few cousins on my mother's side (there were 19 of us); most of them lived in the Dayton/Wilmington area, so we all got to know each other. I was particularly close to cousins Diana and Brenda, who were nearest to my age, and to Steve and Phil, who lived closest and whose mother was especially close to mine. My cousins on my father's side lived in New York state, in the Syracuse area, and I saw them much less frequently.

Back to the subject of the farm, it was (is) about 160 acres, about 45 miles northeast of Cincinnati. My father's mother, widowed before I was born, lived next door. I remember that as a young child, it was a general farm, with a few cows, pigs, chickens, and field crops. Later, Dad got rid of the pigs and chickens, and he developed it into a dairy farm, with field crops for cow feed and for cash.  As I grew older, I spent many summer hours driving tractors and got lots of sunburns doing so. I also spent a lot of summer time indoors, reading books (often biographies of sports heroes) checked out from the bookmobile that came nearby once a week. 

Unlike my city cousins, whom I envied, I did not have playmates on a daily basis other than my siblings. I remember getting very attached to certain animals. I seem to have had bad luck in that regard, as pups that I adopted as "mine" invariably got hit by cars on the highway on which we lived, and my favorite pet cow died as a result of ingesting hardware.

I always got good grades in school, and science and math were particularly fun for me. It got me into a bit of trouble in elementary school, as there was a period of time when I was tortured by other classmates for being the "teacher's pet." That was also around the time I got glasses, so "four eyes" was another name I was called. I so wanted to be athletic, but was both young for my class and small for my age,

I graduated high school as class valedictorian of about 125 students. In my senior year, I had a rock / pop band in which I played guitar and sang harmonies. At one point a rumor went around that some friends and I were into illicit drugs, although I had never even laid eyes on them, much less used them at that point in time. Music has been a constant activity of mine throughout my life, and I've just about always been a participant in making music of some kind.

I went to college at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, which was the biggest city in the state at that time and was about a four-hour drive away. I started out majoring in management science, but became disillusioned when I had to take what I believe was the most boring class I ever took, called "Introduction to Operations Research." I switched my major to mathematics, as a matter of finding the path of least resistance. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, but I figured that math would be a good background no matter what.

The Vietnam War was going on, and many of my high school classmates were drafted into the army. I got a student deferment. When there was a draft lottery and I luckily got a high number, I dropped my deferment and never had to go. I have always felt some degree of guilt about that, and I appreciate the sacrifices that military people and families have made.

After college graduation, I stayed in Cleveland - first working for a publishing company, and then teaching high school math. I married a girl whom I had met at age 19, and she 16, there in Cleveland. We were 19 and 22, respectively, when we married, and it lasted for only two years (no children). I left Ohio both disappointed and excited to begin a new life as a food truck proprietor in Tucson, Arizona. I have written about that in an earlier post.

I surprised myself, from what I had had in mind for the past several years, when I decided to go back to school. Tucson had an excellent department of atmospheric sciences, and I was pleased to be accepted and to be given a research assistantship. I loved my classes and research, and I got a Masters Degree in atmospheric sciences and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics. I also met my wife-to-be, who worked at the food co-op. We moved in together and then got married a few months later. I also became a step-parent to Theresa's daughter Stacy, with whom I often butted heads but whom I grew to love very much. I felt so honored when, years later, she asked me to walk her down the aisle rather than her biological father.

Shortly after Theresa and I were married, I finished my Ph.D. and was offered a job in Huntsville, working for NASA. Just a few weeks after we arrived, our twin girls, Vanessa and Allison were born. Talk about instant family! I now had responsibility for supporting a family of five, as I was the single breadwinner at that point. Beginning with a post-doc position, I was offered a permanent civil service job less than a year later, and I remained an employee of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center for the remainder of my career, until I retired in 2013.

Collectively, we were a pretty lonely bunch when we first moved to Huntsville. I had a few work friends, Stacy quickly made some school friends, and Theresa had a friend across the backyard fence. I had heard of the Unitarian Church back in my college days, so I suggested to Theresa that we try the Huntsville one. We have been active members there for over 33 years now. We have made a lot of good friends through church and through other connections in Huntsville. This city is now our home, and I don't think we'll ever leave, unless one of is left alone and goes to live near our kids or grand-kids.

Oh, yes, grand-kids! All three of our daughters have gotten married, and two of them have had children. Stacy has just one daughter, Avery (nearly six years old). One of our twins, Allie, had twins herself, and now has 3 boys and 1 girl (ages 2, 2, 5, and 7). We are five-fold blessed! We do wish they lived closer, though - Allie is in Raleigh, and Stacy is in Birmingham. They are both Registered Nurses. Vanessa lives nearby, is a music teacher, and we often get to enjoy the company of her and her husband. Theresa teaches art to elementary and middle school students in the Madison County system, and she plans to retire at the end of next year. I'm hoping that we still have many adventures and pleasures to indulge in before it's all over!

Grandma Miller

My grandmother Avis Miller lived in the little house just down the road from us, on the adjoining farm. She called her place “Woodside Cottage,” and she had a placard saying that on top of her mailbox, and stationary that said it at the top of each page. She was a bit of a romantic (my family will be surprised to hear me say that), and she was probably the first playmate I had as a young child, besides my parents.

Her farmland, about 60 acres, was really part of our farm, because it was indeed adjoining, and my father farmed it all.  My understanding was that she received half of the production on that acreage, after expenses, and that was how she lived – that plus Social Security and a monthly payment from my dad for the purchase of his own 96 acres.  She also had her own little farm of sorts, a nice sized garden and a few chickens for eggs and occasional meat. She had a piano that she liked to play while singing hymns and on which she taught me my first bit of knowledge of reading music. She had a very strong alto or mezzo soprano voice that led the congregation in singing hymns every Sunday morning, sometimes to my embarrassment. When I was very young, she had a wood-burning kitchen stove, a hand pump on a dug well out back for water, and an outhouse. For her generation, these were just normal things. But, yes, she did have electricity. And I was still pretty young when she got running water in the house, a bathroom, and an electric stove.

My earliest memory of her is playing with a little rubber ball, tossing it into her apron as she held it spread out and letting out a “whoop” as she caught it. Then she would roll it back to me, allowing me to do it over and over. That was in her living room, which was brightly lit, with windows facing south looking out at the cherry tree that attracted so many birds, and the vegetable garden beyond. She talked about the birds and how she identified them from their calls and songs, especially the cardinal, which was the state bird and mascot of our local school. She made cake-like cookies that might be called tea biscuits that I loved, and I make them for my own grandchildren today. (They are now called “Papaw cookies.”) I use a Xerox copy of a recipe in her handwriting, on which she noted that it was handed down to her from her great-grandmother McKinney, whose maiden name (I have since learned) was Apgar. And, yes, through that branch of our family tree I am a distant cousin of the famous doctor Virginia Apgar.

Grandma never drove a car, nor even had a license as far as I know. We lived about 5 miles from the town where we did most of our routine shopping, and 15 miles from the larger town where we went less frequently for special purchases or to shop in the larger supermarket. She usually rode along, in the back seat with us kids. Memories of those times include watching with anticipation as she rummaged in her purse for mints or cough drops to give us, and eating bananas on the way home after going to the grocery store. Another, less special, memory is recounted below.

I’d like to say that my grandmother was a loving, generous, and kind person, but some of these memories I’m sharing will tell you that I do not believe that that was always true. With the perspective of time, thinking back on my own memories and stories that I heard from my parents over the years, it now seems to me that she was a bitter woman, widowed in her mid-fifties, who believed that she had been wronged by her children – one (my Aunt Emile) for marrying a Navy man and moving to upstate New York, and the other (my father) for marrying beneath him, a daughter of working class parents from eastern Kentucky ("Democrats!"). I later heard the story that she stated her refusal to attend my parents’ wedding up until the last day, and then conceded to go to the wedding and even briefly to the reception at my mother’s parents’ house, which at that time was just a couple of miles up the road from the church. 

As a very young child, I was oblivious to any tension between my mother and grandmother, but it certainly became evident during a conflict that occurred when I was about 6 years old. My sister Patty was some 2 years younger than I, and she had been sleeping in the living room next to my parents’ bedroom. My parents decided to fix up the empty bedroom upstairs for her, the larger one that had mysteriously remained unused as long as I could remember. My grandmother, who had raised her own children in that house and had moved to the smaller one down the road after my parents were married, was insisting that that room was Emile’s room, to be used by her and her family on their occasional visits. The day that the big row occurred, one of my city cousins from my mother’s side was staying with us, and I remember standing with him in the milk house, watching through the window as my father and grandmother came out of the house and walked across the lawn, with his arm around her shoulder as he spoke earnestly in her ear. She looked very upset and was gesturing forcefully. My cousin said, “Do you think she hit her?” I don’t know who he was asking about hitting whom, nor do I remember what I said in reply. Later I heard the story of what the argument was about, and that the resolution was that my parents would fix up the room for Patty, and that was that. Emile and family would be welcome to stay with us when they visited, some in our house and some in my grandmother’s.

One day, on one of our shopping trips to town, we saw a black person crossing the street. My grandmother pointed at him, laughed, and said to us kids, “What do you suppose happened to that man? Do you think he drank too much chocolate milk?” My mother turned around from the front seat and glared at her mother in-law. “We don’t teach our children to talk like that!” she said. When we got home, she continued the admonishment to never make fun of someone just because they were different from us. And she wanted us to understand that Grandma was not always a good example to follow.

Here's another illustration of how my grandmother viewed people who were different from her. When my oldest cousin, Chuck - four years older than I - was married, it was to a young Jewish woman. Grandma's comment was, "Well, at least she's not Catholic!"

My grandmother was vehemently opposed to alcohol in all forms.  She was an active member of the local chapter of the WCTU (Women’s Christian Temperance Union), and I imagined her going into a bar with an ax and smashing it up – though that never happened in her case.  It was twenty years after prohibition had been repealed, and I imagine that the group – which I don’t believe included any women younger than 60 years old – did anything more than pray together and complain to each other what society had come to. There was one incident that strongly affirmed Grandma’s views on alcohol, though, when my aunt Emile was involved in a bad car accident caused by a drunk driver, and one of my cousins, an infant at the time, had a bad head injury that caused him to be mentally and emotionally challenged for the rest of his life. She spoke of that often, and who could blame her for doing so.

As Grandma aged and I grew into a young man, I would still visit her often when I came home. When we greeted each other and I asked her how she was, her response was always, “Oh, I’m just an old woman.” In my freshman year of college, I was excited to play for her my recording of my jazz band’s first concert. It consisted of Christmas songs from the Stan Kenton Band’s arrangements. I thought she would like it, knowing how much she loved Christmas music and feeling very pleased and proud of the quality. She didn’t seem very impressed, and I left thinking, “Well, I guess that's because she doesn’t like jazz very much.” I heard later that she had called my parents afterwards, accusing them of neglect in allowing me to play “that devil’s music.”

In closing, I want to get back to a more positive memory of my grandmother. She loved poetry and wrote a bit of it herself. Her father, a teacher and carpenter, had written quite a bit of it, and I have a little booklet of his poems later published by the family. I recall her reading the Rudyard Kipling poem, “If,” to me, and I can still see her smile as she looked at me after reading the last line, “and – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!” After her death in 1976, my parents found and gave to me the following poem she had written many years earlier.

“Holding Grandma’s Hand” (for Tim)

By Avis (Thompson) Miller

I’m just a little feller, not very much past three,

Grandma and me

An’ there’s so much in this big world

That is so strange to me.

So when I go out to the barn

Or just walking ‘round

I like to skip along beside

An’ hold to Grandma’s hand.

She knows the nicest games to play

Mostly just us two,

But sometimes little sister

Can help us play them, too.

My grandma holds her apron out

And I throw in my ball,

An’ when little sister helps us

That’s the most fun of all.

I wonder when I get to be

A man as big as dad

An’ sometimes when I need a friend

An’ feel so dreadful bad

If I can just reach out my hand

An’ find her waiting there

To lead me past the dreadful thing

That gives me such a scare.

And now I am selectively passing along some of our traditions to my own grandchildren. One of my favorite things to do is to sit on the back porch and talk about the birds we hear, while we munch on Papaw cookies. Rest in peace, Grandma. You might not recognize nor even like who I have become, but you are still a part of me.