Mike Harrington

In 1968 there were no yellow ribbons. Or welcome home parades. Just the daily casualty count and, for me, the lingering smell of mildewed canvas and an aching sense of disconnection from the only brotherhood I had ever really known. I took off my jungle fatigues in a bus station restroom in San Francisco and stuffed them into a trash can. “Now what?” I thought.

I had enlisted at seventeen to get as far away from high school and my home town as possible. But the distance and the war had solved nothing for me. I was simply numb. So I drank and partied and just waited — for what, I knew not.

I was twenty-three when an old friend, who had just returned from Vietnam, talked me in to taking an evening philosophy class at Citrus. To my surprise, I found myself engaged from the outset. It was as if these men with the strange last names ― Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky ― had been looking over my shoulder for the past ten years: they knew about the numbness and the questions and the waiting. Their words spoke to me as if they were already written in my head. I looked forward to each class, each reading. I enrolled as a full-time student the following semester.

On the first day of classes I needed to add an English 1A class, so I quietly slipped into a seat in the back of a class that was already in session. The teacher looked like Teddy Roosevelt, and he was loud. I could smell a cigar, but from what I could see, he wasn’t smoking in class. He had drawn a circle on the chalkboard and labeled it “Earth.” There were other circles: the sun, Jupiter, the moons of Jupiter. He had his arms in the air, and he was bellowing something about Galileo turning the Truth on its head, removing mankind from the center of the universe. For a moment I thought I had stepped into an astronomy class by mistake. Then he dropped his arms and smiled across the class. “So just what is Truth, anyway?” he asked. I added the class.

His name was Dave Sundstrand. He returned my first paper with notes and comments and corrections all over it. It smelled like a cigar. But he had actually read my paper, listened to my ideas, taken an interest in what I had to say. This was different, I thought. This was good.

Dave Sundstrand became my friend, my mentor, my favorite teacher. He taught critical thinking before it was even called critical thinking. He showed his students how ideas interconnected, how art and science both tackled the great questions of existence: science, the how; art, the why. He accepted my skepticism and cynicism and taught me to laugh at myself. He turned me into a willing student.

I finished my classes at Citrus with nearly a 4.0 grade average. Two years later I graduated from Cal Poly magna cum laude and received a teaching fellowship to Purdue University, where I taught English and pursued a graduate degree in English.

My life has taken many turns since then. Now the director of facilities and construction at Citrus College, I try my best to give back a small measure of what Citrus has given to me. After all, it is the place where I stopped “waiting” and began “doing.”