John Oyler: a Christmas letter
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Writing a weekly column is an interesting experience, primarily because of the absence of immediate feedback. My family and close friends do comment frequently, but the majority of my audience is remote and unknown to me. Occasionally, someone I know will remark on something I’ve written or some complete stranger will announce, “I recognize you from your picture. You’re the guy who writes that column in the paper. I enjoy it!”
Nonetheless, I sense a bond with all of our unknown readers and have, for the past few years, set aside this one week to write a Christmas letter to you as my way of showing my gratitude to you for allowing me to communicate with you regularly.
Let’s pretend this is a typical Christmas form letter you have found folded in a card you just received in the mail:
Season’s greetings to you from the extended Oyler family! It has been a busy and exciting year for all of us, and especially for me. We hope 2019 has treated you and your family well.
This was my first full year of retirement, and it was a bittersweet experience. I was happy for the opportunity to stay in bed on snowy January mornings while my ex-colleagues fought the weather and traffic to get into school on time. On the other hand, I greatly miss the satisfaction of working with young people and helping them make the transition from student to engineer.
A major high point of the year was being asked to give the Landis Lecture in late April. This is a prestigious honor that has been granted to world-class structural engineers in the past; this time they decided to lower the standards in recognition of my retirement.
Later that month was another red-letter day — my retirement banquet. It was held in the Banquet Hall in Soldiers & Sailors Memorial and turned out to be a grand reunion of students from my 26-year career at Pitt. It provided the opportunity for an impressive parade of students and faculty friends to say lots of nice things about me.
Time spent with my three children and their wonderful families is especially rewarding; I am immensely proud of all of them. Elizabeth, John and Sara each are able to balance successful professional careers and effective parenting.
Having brunch with my high school friends twice a month is always a treat, especially now that my brother, Joe, has “aged up” and joined us. Our gatherings are dominated by nostalgia, political disagreement and medical updates.
My other regular get-together with elderly cronies is our Book Review Club, which continues to find new and interesting things to read and discuss. My favorite this year was “Overstory,” Richard Powers’ masterful sermon on the synergistic relationship between the human race and trees.
Every walk in our woods is a highlight for me. Trillium and Mayflowers in the spring, pileated woodpeckers in the summer, sugar maple leaves in the fall, a calm morning after an overnight snowfall has left an inch of snow on every twig — each of these is an incomparable experience.
I am grateful to Trib Total Media for publishing this column and to each of you who takes the time to read my columns. I do indeed wish you a Merry Christmas.