13, 15, 20, and 33

On August 13^th, Melissa and I had been married for 33 years. And as of today, August 15^th, I’ve officially been employed at Friends University for 20 years (as the accopanying notification, given me this week, declares). Despite my occasional obsession with actuarial tables, I’m not a numerologist, and I have no idea how I might discover some mystical significance from those two dates and two anniversaries. But they seem to combine in my mind in ways important to me, nonetheless.

This has been a summer of challenges for me, health-wise (and since we’re talking about healthcare in America, money-wise too). It’s made me reflect rather intensely (probably too intensely, as both my wife and my cardiologist have frequently reminded me) on what I’ve accomplished and what I may yet accomplish—as a teacher, scholar, writer, citizen, father, husband, and human being—in however many years or decades I have left. Melissa and I have had plenty of ups and downs over the years, but I really do believe the ups, especially over the past few years, have outnumbered the downs. We’ve also been blessed when it comes to our four daughters—they all seem to genuinely like each other, and actually spend with and support and root for each another as they all, with varying degrees of success (though none have yet run up against any actually insurmountable obstacles; another blessing) navigate adult life. Mostly, whatever the financial struggles we over-educated, artsy, politically-radical-yet-culturally-bourgeois, suburban denizens of the (to steal from John Cleese) lower-upper-middle-class are facing, I think we’ve navigated past the worst of them, and things really will, probably, continue to get better (relatively speaking, of course).

As for my work as a college professor, I was lucky enough to find a job at a small liberal arts college that, while hardly a Swarthmore or a Pomona, seems situated well enough and lead wisely enough to be able to weather the demographic and administrative challenges facing it. As one of my colleagues said without a trace of irony at our recent faulty retreat, we folks teaching at Friends University are genuinely lucky people. Assuming I keep up my part of the bargain, and adapt as necessary to continue to teach those students whom arrive at this institution and want (or are required, as we faculty in our not-remotely-infinite judgment decide) to gain at least a little civic knowledge, to learn at least a little bit about the history and nature and functions of America’s political ideas and institutions, then I think that luck will hold out, and I’ll be able to do good work here for another decade or more. I have some ideas about pivoting, in the years to come, the major I’m in charge of—History & Politics— in the direction of something that more directly incorporates my long efforts to teach sustainability with what it means to participate responsibly in civic life; maybe those ideas will bear fruit, or maybe not. Either way, I can’t think of a better place to try.

As for being a Wichitan and a Kansan for two decades, I can’t separate that from my hopes to actually put my 20 years of observations together into a book, which is the whole point of my “Wichita and the Mittelpolitan” project, after all. (I note, upon linking to that introductory comment, that I’ve passed the then-years-in-the-future date which I stuck to it, so as to keep it at the top of the Substack. Obviously I must have figured out a way to maintain that even as the calendar has rolled on to 2026 and beyond. Good for me!) Sometime last summer, it occurred to me that framing my thoughts about mid-sized cities around a history of the past 20 years of Wichita as I have observed it might really work as a book. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that incorporating other first-person observations, through interviewing people that I’ve gotten to know over the past two decades and who can share thoughts about this city and its politics, its music, its businesses, its culture, its art and artists, its partisan contests, its demographic changes (or lack thereof), its government, its religion, its bureaucratic infighting, its natural and agricultural environment, and much more, would be even better.

I am, in the end, a political theorist, someone who wants to think through things on a level which exists between fundamental philosophy and motivating ideologies; I still believe in the insight I had 13 years ago, that Wichita doesn’t fit the dominant urban metropolitan model, but neither does it fit the rural micropolitan one either, and I think that there can be a theoretical language which can inform and provide insight to the way all the disparate topics above operate in the Air Capital of the World, right here in Kansas. I’ve gone back through many of the thousands of words I’ve written which touches on this insight in one way or another over the years, and started to organize them; maybe, in the final third of whatever amount of time I will, in the end, have enjoyed on this planet—years that will almost certainly be spent in this frustrating, struggling, but also (to me anyway) always delighting mid-sized city—I’ll finally be able to find the time and discipline to put together my (and others’) thoughts about it all.

Well, that’s about it. And wow, I kept all this navel-gazing under 1000 words. Pretty good for me! Maybe all that time writing Insight Kansas columns has paid off.