Being in remission is like air: you only appreciate it when it’s gone. After four years of not appreciating it, I’m back on Vancouver Island, where I work at the university as a cafeteria dishwasher. I’m back again at the place where I’ve been an undergrad, graduate student, teaching assistant, professor, and now dishwasher. They truly cannot keep me away. So many jobs. This dishwashing gig is a big step up after three years at the deli down the hill. I taught a few classes during the deli era, it’s true, but not enough to be full-time. Sometimes, after running a writing workshop, I would walk down for an evening of selling ham and wrestling racks of chickens from the oven. If I spotted one of my students in the aisles, I’d hide in the cooler so they wouldn’t see me aproned and covered in meat juice. How do you teach someone “the sentence” after that? You can’t — and sure as hell not character development or psychic distance. I hid from them like you hide from anything that might dissolve an already tenuous air of authority. Anyway, dishwashing pays almost as much as adjunct teaching did, which is a subject I’m not even going to tackle here. If anyone asks what I do, I tell them I work in an industrial kitchen — expediting, heavy machinery, catering. Say this on dates. Never say “dishwasher.”