A couple of weeks ago I attended a Luther College Recognition dinner honoring two faculty who were retiring. Tributes to both included former students who wrote about how this person had changed their lives. This is a story of how a faculty person’s life, my life, was changed by my Luther colleagues.
I retired from Luther College in 2018, on the small island nation of Malta. Over the next two years, I applied and was accepted for two Fulbright Scholar awards* to teach about American democracy in Romania. Nothing about the Paul Gardner who arrived at Luther College to teach American politics in 1985 would have predicted these endings.
The Endings
Did you know that 48 Romanian lei buys two tornados?
Last week I used my Romanian Banca Transilvania card for the final time. Although Rebecca and I returned from Romania in January, I wanted to keep alive one tangible link. The bank branch that issued the card in 2020 anchored one end of our Timișoara neighborhood so the card always triggered memories of our two Romanian journeys, in spring 2020 and fall 2021. Nostalgia, however, doesn’t buy ice cream. But a credit card backed by 48 lei does and was just enough for two tornados from Decorah’s Whippy Dip.
I placed the worn-out card on top of this map in a fat folder labeled Two Fulbrights in Romania. We used the map so often it refolded itself. Artifacts, memories, photos together with occasional Facebook, email and Zoom conversations with Romanian friends pointed toward a cumulation of something special. So does the hollowness in my stomach.
I’ve just finished Troubled Water, a terrific travelogue by Jens Muhling, about his one year journey around the Black Sea. At the beginning of the book, Muhling writes “Journeys seldom start where we remember them starting.” When I read that line, I thought of this picture of Rebecca and me in Romania’s eastern Carpathian Mountains. If I could get a mountain-peak view of where our Romanian Fulbright journey began, what would I discover?
The Beginnings
Muhling’s 2018 sojourn started in Russia but began decades earlier under his grandmother’s dinning room table. He heard stories about a distant relative who commanded part of Catherine the Great’s fleets in a Black Sea battle against Turkish gun boats. From that imaginative Romanian mountain top, I see that our Romanian odyssey started with an application for a Fulbright Scholar award. But it began in the summer of 1999, in Nottingham, England.
Richard dropped me off in Nottingham’s city center and said “when you finish exploring why don’t you take the bus back to our house.” I was in Nottingham to direct Luther College’s year-long program located in this north-central English city. Richard was the previous year’s director and would spend a few days showing me the ropes. I remember standing on a busy corner with a house address in one hand and a bus timetable in the other. And feeling overwhelmed. One year later, on the day before David, the next year’s director was to arrive, I walked from that city center spot to the director’s house, without map or bus schedule.
Two years later, August 2001, Mark faced me across the breakfast table at the Imperial Hotel in London. Mark was the director of Luther’s study abroad office and later that day would join another Luther group touring England. I had come to London and Ireland to spend four days scouting locations for a January 2002 three-week course study course with students. “What’s first on our agenda?,” asked Mark. I looked at him and said “I really have no idea.”
Over the next decade and a half I would learn to lead, plan and execute five January term study-away courses, in 2002, 2009, 2011, 2013, and 2015. And in the spring of 2018, in my last semester before retirement, Rebecca and I would direct Luther’s semester program in Malta.
Little Jens under his grandmother’s table could not imagine that decades later he would travel around the Black Sea. And write about it. Adult Jens looking back sees a seed beginning to take root, from his grandmother’s stories. These stories helped enlarge his vision for what he could do, for what he could be.
Luther College is full of Johnny Appleseeds
When I arrived at Luther College in 1985, I had never traveled outside the United States. Leading, planning, and executing a study abroad experience for students, let alone myself, was outside my imagination. Yet Luther College was full of Johnny Appleseeds, planting one seed after another. Richard and Mark would eventually be joined by Norma, Jim, Harland, Steve and Deborah. The latter five had done Fulbrights and their gift of Fulbright stories expanded my vision of what I might do.
My Luther-life ended in Malta. My academic-life ended in Romania.
Without Luther colleagues planting and pointing, these endings do not make sense.
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*The Fulbright Scholar program sends 400 American citizens to 130 countries each year to teach or do research. In spring 2020, I received a scholar award to teach courses on American Democracy at West University in Timisoara Romania. COVID drove us home after only 33 days and so I successfully re-applied for fall 2021.
