“Sir, are you okay? The ambulance is on its way. Have been you drinking at all?”
The police officer’s voice was firm, but hollow; it sure didn’t seem to care about anyone’s safety.
“I’m fine officer. And no, I have not been drinking. I was trying to get to my analytical chemistry lecture.”
The officer turned away briefly and spoke into the radio on his shoulder, “Ten-four, I’ve got a vehicle-non-moving-object-collision at the corner of 17th avenue and Gateway Drive. Probable cause: geriatric negligence.” The officer turned back to Professor Dobberstein, who stood in the snow with his chin to his chest. The grey peacoat on his 83-year-old frame looked to weigh-down his narrowing shoulders and hunched back.
“Okay, sir, a tow-truck is on its way and then you’ll be free to leave. Unfortunately, I am going to have to suspend your license until you retake the graduated driver’s license test.”
Last fall, Professor Dobberstin went on his thirtieth-annual white-tail hunting trip with his son. But this time, when he peered through the scope with his left eye, he saw only black.
With vision in only one eye now, he knew for certain he wouldn’t pass the graduated driver’s test. He worried about not being able to drive himself to the university. Even more so, he worried about the inevitable reprimanding call from his son or daughter, whichever one found out first.
A fellow chemistry faculty member picked Professor Dobberstein up from the scene of teha accident. He arrived to his 11:30 a.m. analytical chemistry class eight minutes late.
“Good morning students, let’s begin today with a look at the thermodynamic implications of calorimetry.” The nearly 250 person class continued to chatter amongst themselves. His baritone voice didn’t carry the same booming resonance it did when he started teaching 32 years ago.
His fingers bent every-which-way at their knuckles, arthritic from years of chalkboard writing. But thanks to the recent ten-million dollar university renovation, chalkboards no longer existed in the lecture halls. Professors had been told it would be much easier to teach solely from Power Points projected upon a white screen in-front of the class. Professor Dobberstein fumbled with the plastic stylus and writing pad, trying to write on the Powerpoint. After a few minutes of flustered button-pushing, his writing appeared on the screen. Even so, he could barely read his own handwriting. The students snickered. His tremors seemed to be worse when he had to write with the electronic stylus in front of the class. The kids didn’t seem to mind though. They were engrossed in whatever was on their laptop screens. The only time they looked up at him was when he prefaced something with “This may be on the test.”
After the lecture, a student approached Professor Dobberstein. He assumed it would be another request to “put the lecture on a podcast” or “upload Power Points to the school’s server.”
“Professor Dobberstein, I missed the last lecture, can you email me the main points or like the lecture slides or something?” Professor Dobberstein had been taking a Senior-Citizen Computer Literacy class at the Grand Forks public library, yet email still made him uneasy. “Well, I am sorry, but I haven’t figured out how to attach things to emails so you’ll have to get the notes from a classmate.”
Without saying anything, the student turned hastily and mouthed what looked to be a four-letter word to his friend on the way out. Professor Dobberstein often worried a lot these days about how he would be remembered by his students—if he would be remembered. He couldn’t connect to them like he did back when he was only an assistant lecturer. He had tenure now, but that didn’t seem to mean much to the kids.
Professor Dobberstein loved chemistry. It was all he knew how to love. The past few years had been tough, though. He felt more sluggish in the classroom and in the laboratory. He still oversaw a lab of graduate students and post-docs, but at the weekly lab meetings he found it difficult to keep-up with everyone’s fast talk and complex projects. At one time, he was a leader in the field of electrochemistry, being published almost every month in journals as esteemed as Science and Nature. But to his disappoint, he had yet to attain an achievement he could retire on—something that would solidify his name in chemistry textbooks for years to come. Being an almost-Nobel laureate also wasn’t enough to get a building named after you on campus. And it certainly didn’t pay enough for you to make a donation for anything more than a park bench in the designated smoking area.
His wife, Delores, had passed some years ago. Now when he returned home each night, the only lady that greeted him was a Ballantine scotch, neat. When Professor Dobberstein got home the night after the accident he heard something beeping. After a few confused seconds and a glance at the oven, then the microwave, then the clock, he realized it was his cellphone. The cellphone that his kids had bought him for Christmas few years back.
His son had told him “This will help us keep in touch better, Dad! The grandkids can even text you now!” His kids and grandkids just visited a lot less, now.
He stared at the ringing phone. Was it the green button or the yellow button to answer? He must have hit the right one because he heard his son’s voice come through, “Dammit Dad, I told you, you shouldn’t be driving anymore! You could have killed someone!”
Embarrassed and demoralized Professor Dobberstein only said what would make his son happy, “Don’t worry John, I’m not going to be driving any more. Dr. Adams will be take me to school.”
“Good, Dad, because you know I can’t be coming up there to drive you around all the time. And don’t you think it’s time you start slowing down anyway?” Professor Dobberstein didn’t know what his son meant by “slowing down,” but he did know he didn’t like being told what to do by his son. Like all the other conversations for the past year, everything else was short and uninteresting for the both of them.
Since Delores’s passing, each night he sat at his table of four with only a Stouffer’s frozen dinner for company. It didn’t bother him much anymore. At least that’s what he told himself. The Crispy Chicken Parmesan was his favorite, but this night he had the Savory Salisbury Steak and Green Beans. He propped his new Dell laptop up in front of him. He bought it for his computer literacy class, but hadn’t used it much. Ms. Sheppard, the teacher of the class was a wide-eyed and overly-zealous twenty-something. She often used a high-pitched, waxing and waning, Kindergarten-teacher-voice with the class. Despite her enthusiasm she still couldn’t quite instill any interest in computers in him. He continued to go to class though because she was easy on the one eye that he still had sight in.
Last week Ms. Sheppard burst out, “Once something is on the internet, it’s there forever! It’s not like paper where things can be erased or torn to shreds and lost forever. Computers allow us to make an infinite amount of copies so we never have to worry about something getting lost.” Professor Dobberstein wasn’t sure if this was good or bad—he felt that way about all technology. He missed the days when people didn’t answer every question with a snooty, “Just Google it.”
This week, the assignment Ms. Sheppard assigned read: Use the Google search engine to find the Wikipedia (an online encyclopedia ) biography of Marlon Brando. Use the ‘copy’ and ‘paste’ functions to place the text in a Microsoft Word processing document. Then change the font to “Old Golden Days” size 24. Print on an 8.5”x11” sheet of paper and bring to class. He hated the condescending nature of the assignments, but admittedly, he had never heard of Wikipedia before and he did like Marlon Brando.
It took Professor Dobberstein nearly an hour to finish the assignment. Wikipedia pleasantly surprised him. He couldn’t believe the breadth of its information—and how anyone could be an author in an encyclopedia. For the first time, he stayed on his computer past his usual 9:00 P.M. nightcap. He read articles on everything from electron microscopy to nuclear magnetic resonance imaging. He even submitted a few corrections. It pleased him to know that whatever yuppie wrote it didn’t know chemistry as well as him. Eventually he stumbled across the biographies of some of his favorite chemists: Niels Bohr, Linus Pauling, and Ernest Rutheford. He thought about what Ms. Sheppard had said about computers and the internet. It was like all their biographies were written up there on the world-wide-web in indelible ink.
On a whim, he typed his own name in the box with the magnifying glass next to it and pressed “Go.” In a flash there was a picture of him taken when he first joined the university. He barely recognized himself. These days looking in the mirror had lost its objectivity.
He left-clicked his blue, underlined name. There it was: like the biographies of the chemistry Gods—a complete list of all his scholarly articles and achievements posted on the on Wikipedia, on the internet. He couldn’t believe the detail of it: 1968 Chemistry Teaching Assistant of the Year, 1974 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, 1985 Midwestern Chemist of the Year. There was even a brief biography that was accurate except for that he was born in Driscoll, North Dakota, not Fargo. Again, he thought of what Ms. Sheppard had said. A rare smile tightened his wearied face. He could retire now.
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