Due to an Earlier Incident - Softcover

DUE TO AN EARLIER INCIDENT is the true story, with embellishments (and outright fabrications), of a middle-aged man (the author, but exaggerated), who, on a holiday in New York City, finds himself heading uptown on the IRT Broadway-Seventh Avenue line. He is going to the opera. He is wearing a cape. (Not really with the cape.) Somewhere between Times Square-42nd Street and 66th Street-Lincoln Center, the middle-aged man looks up and notices an ad for an alternative teacher certification program called the New York City Teaching Fellows. This is where his troubles begin. He gets accepted to the program, moves to New York, and for the next four years has a fairly harrowing (but often funny, sometimes sad, mostly bittersweet) experience teaching English Language Arts at an officially-designated “school in need of improvement,” located uptown in Inwood, located way uptown in Inwood... DUE TO AN EARLIER INCIDENT is a teacher’s memoir (sort of), but it’s also a search for lost time (and a cri de coeur, fantasia of the midlife crisis, and/or Bildungsroman of a late bloomer—but with jokes), so it doesn't stay on task. The narrative is interrupted with flashbacks to the author’s childhood and young adulthood in Birmingham, Alabama, where he grew up sensitive and slightly southern-gothic; flashbacks to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he embarrasses himself at graduate school and then winds up working at a series of funny, sad, and bittersweet (but only occasionally harrowing) youth centers; and [SPOILER ALERT] flash-forwards to the author/middle-aged man/late bloomer crawling back to Milwaukee after getting his ass kicked in New York City—mostly defeated, but in spite of everything/because of everything happy, sort of, to have had the experience.