Topic 152: On Losing One's Grip

Carol:

Get A Grip on It!

 I fit a lot of different statistical niches. I am a baby boomer, which is anyone born between 1946-1962 --28% of the American population. In the 1980’s I became part of a growing group who were labeled “the sandwich generation,” i.e. middle-aged women caring simultaneously for dependent children and aging parents.  Not that the notion was new, just the label.  I had shared a bedroom with my grandmother for several years when I was in grade school, and both grandmothers lived with us for a time. They had done the same for their own mothers.

My mother moved to Prescott twice. The first time was with my father.  The 5000 foot altitude seemed to sap my Dad’s strength. The change in Dad’s health was symptomatic of lung cancer, the diagnosis sending them back to the lower altitude. My mother returned to Prescott in 1990, an 80-year-old widow living by herself for the first time. Over the next nine years until her death, she aged from an independent, happy Grandma who hopped on my husband’s motorcycle for a ride around the neighborhood to a frail, house-bound invalid who needed full-time assistance. Every Sunday I relieved her care-giver, cooked a meal at her house and helped with her most intimate personal care. Just as she had done for her mother.

I earned a new label in 2002, “empty nester.” There is even a term called “empty nest syndrome” to describe a general feeling of malaise or loneliness when children leave home. Oh great, I had felt guilty in the 80’s when I dropped my kids off at day-care, guilty in the 90’s when I was cranky with my aging mother, and now I could feel guilty about not experiencing “empty nest syndrome.” I kind of liked spreading out into the abandoned bedrooms, setting up my own office and having an allocated “guest bedroom.” Still, what do baby boomers do when they reach a significant life passage? They buy a book, or…. they write a book. That’s how I ended up with Lauren Schaffer’s book 133 Ways to Avoid Going Cuckoo When the Kids Fly the Nest: A Parent’s Guide for Surviving Empty Nest Syndrome, a light and humorous approach as opposed to a deep and psychological analysis.

Last May, I reached two statistical milestones at about the same time. I became a baby boomer retiree in a town with 53% of the population over the age of 45. Prescott has been continually ranked by Money magazine as a top-20 retirement destination, and I feel like I am finally reaping all of the benefits a retirement-oriented community provides: free entertainment on the square, senior discounts, great classes for seniors at the college. The other milestone was actually attained by my daughter when she became part of a growing number of 20-somethings called the “boomerang generation” when she returned to her childhood home and childhood bedroom to begin the job search.

I’m trying to finish this essay while my daughter is staring at the back of my head. I know she is wondering why it always takes me so long to get my essays done. But, she isn’t nagging me because Bella is asleep in her lap and Megan doesn’t want to disturb the baby. Our house is looking like it did back in the 80’s when I was part of that sandwich generation, strewn with toys and blocked with baby gates. I think I have gotten a pretty good grip on my new situation, but in the meantime I’m thinking about writing a book called Raising the Perfect Grandpuppy: A Guidebook for Baby Boomer Retirees Who Lost Their Empty Nests.

Megan:

Something about that poster has always irritated me. "Hang In There" seems like such a trite statement for what is clearly a life-threatening situation.

I tried making a list of things of which one might lose one’s grip . Reality, Sanity, Time, The Dog’s Leash etc. Then the expression sort of lost meaning for me, so I looked it up. According to an idiom dictionary I found, it means to lose control of a situation. It occurs to me that, with the exception of the leash, the term is often applied incorrectly. After all, one can neither have nor lose control of things like reality or time. One can only lose the ability to act like one is in control.

When one is unemployed, one might feel like one has no grip at all. (One also might think the use of the pronoun “one” is pretentious, awkward and easily abused.) When I didn’t get that job a couple of weeks ago, I was mostly disappointed because it meant I probably wouldn’t be able to stay here in Prescott.  It’s funny how things change, because staying in Prescott used to be my biggest fear… but I’ve gotten involved in the community. I joined a softball team, I got a puppy, and I have a lot of friends here. I would like to stay.

But then I think of the adventure of moving to a new place and starting over again. I can talk myself in circles and not get anywhere. Literally, I’m just sitting in a chair, arguing with myself in an essay, and NOT applying for jobs.

I actually did apply for a different kind of job the other day. A community outreach position for a local non-profit organization. As a librarian, there are certain skills very specialized to the profession (like cataloguing and classifying), but the public service and information management skills are very transferable to other careers. I have resisted the idea of looking outside of libraries because I thought it would be a waste of the time, energy and money spent on gaining my Masters Degree, but that seems now to be a very close-minded approach.

Or maybe I’m just at the point in the cycle where I’m frustrated with the process. That seems to happen every few months. I’ve got a lot of other stuff going on – good fun things, which might not be as productive as finding a job, but that add meaning and purpose to my life. I’ve been spending time with my family, going to my cousin’s 5 year old’s T-Ball game and her 3 year old’s dance class (both of which were hilariously chaotic). Today I’m going to hang out with my aunt and see my grandmother. And I’ve got a puppy to train. 

Photo courtesy of my neighbor Jim.

Topic 133: Dream Adventures

Carol:

Our House is a Very, Very Fine House

I’m not by nature an adrenaline junkie—that’s the term, right? I don’t go for those X-sports like bungie jumping from the Brooklyn Bridge or flying on a zip cord through the canopy of a Brazilian rainforest.  Once Marc signed up for an X-Treme Day Tour in Costa Rica; he came back to the hotel exhilarated but stinking from his soak in a volcanic mud bath. I had opted to stay behind and read Bel Canto on the hotel balcony.  When I imagine a dream adventure, it is almost always about traveling somewhere distant, isolated and beautiful where I can have Un-ventures .
 
After my year of study abroad in France, I would often dream about returning someday to rent a little apartment overlooking the Cote D’Azur, maybe in Antibes.  I had seen a woman there once, standing on the small balcony of just such a place, enjoying the breeze on her face and watching the people below stroll along the stone promenade above the rocky shore. The image of her white shirt and sun-tanned face next to the faded turquoise shutters of the balcony door is still vivid in my mind after 40 years. I wanted to be that woman…in that place. I still do.

The Antibes Dream

 My imagination adjusted to the reality of getting married, having a job and moving to southern California. I started dreaming about having a cabin somewhere in Mexico.  I was a fan of Jack Smith’s columns in the LA Times, and he would often write about his ongoing, frustrating but comical experiences building a little beach house in Baja California.  He eventually turned it into God and Mr. Gomez, a 1974 book that Marc gave me as a gift, signed by the author after a lengthy wait. Jack Smith’s detailed catalogue of mishaps and delays did not deflate my dream of my own little beach casita with turquoise shutters.
 

When we actually traveled to Baja California in 1986, on several occasions we pulled our old motorhome into isolated beaches along the Sea of Cortez The only other signs of life were  the sand crab trails leading down to the water and  the sound of lowing cattle behind a sand dune. Just watching the fish jump out of the water and listening to the waves was enough to make me feel content. 
 
After years of 10 years of living within easy distance of the Pacific Ocean, we moved inland to the Arizona high desert.  We bought a small plane and started taking trips down to the Bahia San Carlos on the opposite side of the Sea of Cortez. Although we found an affordable hotel with its own protected beach, I still dreamed about having our own tiny little house away from the tourist areas where the condos were bunched together and noisy.  I took a little peek at the real estate ads this morning. Apparently, the Mexican government designated  the Sea of Cortez and the “Mayan Riveria”  to become  “the axis on which the country’s tourist development would hinge… and will consolidate the Sea of Cortez as a world-class tourist destination” (Source: Mi Casa-Su Casa Realty Group). So much for my dream of a little retirement casita in Mexico.
 

The Mexico Dream

I haven’t totally given up on the idea of my dream adventure.  With my husband inching towards retirement, building our own little get-away home sounds even more appealing. And, I have found the perfect place already.  A small house, durable materials, low-maintenance yard, privacy wall. Now if we can just find exactly the right piece of property, nothing large mind you.

The Retirement Reality

  
Sources:
Image of Antibes Bord de Mer
Image of Bahia San Carlos. Ocean View Realty.

Megan:

In my more dramatic moments, I tell people that the reason I quit the job in the prison was because I felt like the evil was seeping into me.
 

I had that idea – that the “evil was seeping in” -- a few different times while I worked there – and it sort of became an excuse in my mind for some of the ways I found to cope with the stress. Anyone who has worked in that sort of environment – high stress and dangerous – whether it is a prison, or the military, or juvenile detention, or law enforcement – there comes a point where you think the only people who understand are the people you work with. And the only way to cope with too much stress, too much danger, is to act too much in other ways – too much drinking, too much exercise (never my problem) too much anger, too much sleep. 

I mentioned to one of my library officers about my fear, but she was offended by the idea. “If you feel this way after 3 years, what does that mean for me? I’ve been here 10.” And there were others who had been there for 20 or 30 years, had spent the majority of their lives in prison, on purpose, doing a job that no one appreciates and no one understands.

But, unlike me,  they had lives outside of work, spouses and interests unrelated. In social situations, they were used to lying about their jobs  -- claiming to be an electrician, or the accurate but vague “civil servant.”   I could say, “I’m a librarian.” But I had the feeling that there was an unspoken just in there – I’m JUST a librarian. So, I always followed it with the qualifier, “at the prison” because it was novel, because it was interesting, and because I felt like I was owed some sort of recognition for working in such a miserable environment.

But what I didn’t mention was that it was my dream job. That because my supervisors didn’t have the same clearances that I did, they rarely came into the prison. That I was on my own, in charge by myself, isolated yes, but this was MY LIBRARY and to this day, the idea that I have been replaced grates on me. By the end, I was so ready to leave, so exhausted and used up and sick of it all. But even now, nearly 10 months later, I still have dreams about MY LIBRARY --  the way I did when I began working there.

A couple times in the past few weeks I have a thought – it’s the end of the financial year, I hope they remember to…  don’t forget the… what are the stats like? Has attendence increased or decreased? Is it inappropriate to ask that them to send me a copy of the end of year report? I’m unemployed now, but despite the "evil," I did some good there – made quantifiable, justifiable progress. I want to know if it held up. I want to know how it’s going. And sometimes, even though I wake up in Arizona, with Milo curled into my back, I still have a moment while still half asleep and I’m planning the day – planning what needs to be done in MY LIBRARY .

Topic 122: Repenting at Leisure

Carol:

What Leisure?

The above expression actually comes from a William Congreve play The Old Bachelor (1693) “Thus grief still treads upon the heels of pleasure: Married in haste, we may repent at leisure.”  But, if you google “repenting at leisure,” you will find that almost anything can be plugged in with it :  invest in haste, move in haste, hire in haste, retire in haste, even tweet in haste.
 

Well, I am not a particularly spontaneous person, so doing anything in haste isn’t my style. I am a tortoise, not a hare.  Although I  wouldn’t mind having  a bit of whimsical unpredictability in my life, I am generally  happy with the results of being “slow and steady” in my choices. Take for instance, retirement.
 

For about three years, my college experimented with the “phased retirement” concept.  Faculty who met certain criteria (length of employment, recommendation by a supervisor) could apply for a maximum three years’ phased retirement contract that allowed us to work half-time but still receive all of the benefits of full-time employees. The idea behind  such plans is that the employer benefits from retaining the expertise of seasoned employees, and the employee benefits by being able to ease out of full-time careers and transition more smoothly into retirement.
 

At the time, I was so burned out that I would have quit working completely if the phased retirement option had not been available.  I took advantage of the whole three years and left my job feeling like I had done some of my best teaching during my final year. I allocated myself Tuesday as my day off; no matter what meeting came up, what project, if it landed on a Tuesday, I was unavailable. Then, I began to play in other activities gradually. By the third year of my contract, I was ready to fully retire. That was also the year the experimental option was discontinued by the College because it wasn’t economically feasible to pay benefits for half-time employees.
 

If this essay sounds hurried, it is. I am glad—feel lucky—that I could retire at the age of 62. Mostly I choose how to spend my day, and today I choose to work at the College. I will spend my morning grading writing portfolios with my long-time English Dept. colleagues and the afternoon at my mythology class. I was going to use all that as an excuse to opt out of T122 because, like I said, I don’t really like to do anything in haste.

But, I have to have something for Megan to hang a cartoon on.

Megan:

Repenting at Leisure (in Prison)

Before I realized the actual beginning of the proverb, I thought it was “Act in haste” so of course, that brought to mind the prison and how it is a place designed for  “repenting at leisure.”

Most of the guys in my prison, or at least the ones who were in for murder, had committed their crimes on impulse but some were the result of days or weeks of planning. Some killed with their fists or their feet or improvised weapons from materials nearby. I know of at least 3 who each strangled a woman with the scarf she was wearing and that is why the officers wear clip on ties and the use of dental floss is forbidden.  Others used illegally obtained guns. One poured gasoline through the letter box in the front door of his ex-missus and tossed a match in after. Some of the crimes were motivated by hurt and jealousy – crimes of passion; or perverse opportunity, or gangland revenge over perceived disrespect or drug deals gone wrong. Some were motivated by racism and hate.

I’ve mentioned before that I didn’t spend much time exploring their crimes unless they worked for me, or if they’d caught my interest for another reason. But as a member of staff with regular prisoner contact , I was expected to contribute observations about their behavior to their files, and in doing so I learned their crimes.

If a prisoner wants to progress from a high-security prison to a lower one, he must follow a sentence plan which is designed by the Offender Management department, and reviewed on a semi-annual basis. In addition to staying drug-free, out of trouble and employed, the prisoners are set a series of other targets to achieve including taking a series of reducing re-offending classes. These classes are a key part of the “rehabilitation” process and are supposed to promote Enhanced Thinking Skills, anger management and victim empathy.

That latter requires that the prisoners discuss at length the circumstances surrounding their offense, their motivation and their thoughts and feelings about it now. Their interviews take meticulous notes and the information is accessible to any member of staff who may need to be aware of the contents or contribute to the files.

For prisoners who are appealing against their conviction or their sentence, it is not in their interest to discuss the crime with the staff, even though this perceived lack of cooperation may stall their progression through the system for years.  And unless they took some sort of plea agreement, most of the guys start out on appeal. This is probably why it takes a few years for the new prisoners to settle down into the routine of prison life.

Whatever their circumstances, those guys have plenty of time to think about how they got to prison. During the day, every measure is taken to occupy their time, to educate them or to elicit some kind of productive and purposeful activity, but still they spend at least 14 hours locked alone in a 6X10 concrete and steel box. For first timers, adjusting to this isolation is difficult. And for some, especially the mentally ill, coming to terms with their crimes can have a devastating effect. They lose their hair, double their body weight or halve it. They may harm themselves for attention, stop bathing, refuse medication, or stop communicating all together. 

But others take a more proactive approach. They read, learn a trade, earn some qualifications and mentor other prisoners. Their goal, in the words of one such prisoner, is to “be something other than older, when [they] get out.”

Topic 118: Conservation of Social Resources

Carol:

Clutter-Mania   

Generally, I love working in my office, which has undergone a complete renovation since I retired. Fresh paint, new bookshelf,  desk and now a new computer. The room is small, but the space would function perfectly well except for one problem. I have become the conservator of not only the boxes of historical memorabilia handed down from my mother and grandmother, but also the boxes of social records of a women’s group I belong to. Conservation is about time and space, both of which I don’t have a lot of.
 

I knew I was in clutter trouble a few weeks ago when I was downloading photos from my camera. I couldn’t find  the charger for the camera’s rechargeable batteries. Yesterday morning, I found the charger but by then I had misplaced the camera. I only found the charger  because I was hunting for the book and notes I needed for the mythology class I take on Thursday afternoons.  I finally found the mythology stuff which I had put in a file box right next to my desk for “easy access.” My organizational system was clearly breaking down.
 

Megan tells me it’s because good organization is based on “intuition.” What does “intuition” have to do with organizing, I asked Megan--  the only person I know who alphabetized the books in her room when she was a kid (a natural-born librarian if I ever met one).  She explained that my kitchen is NOT set up intuitively, and that’s why Marc never knows where things are and never puts things back in the right place. I got huffy.  My kitchen is organized in zones: all the prep materials (cookbooks, measuring and mixing equipment)  to the left of the sink , all of the dishes, glasses, cutlery to the right of the sink closest to the dishwasher, spices and mixing spoons next to the stove. And, I NEST everything to maximize shelf space, which is a good example of conservation of kitchen resources.  It’s not my fault if people—i.e. Marc—haven’t caught on to the system
 

Okay,  I got so frustrated looking for my camera and my mythology books that all I could think about during the class itself  was that I needed to come home and totally re-organize my office. There I was watching a DVD of a professor talking about Mesopotamian flood stories, and my mind was drifting off to plan   how I could NEST my photo boxes in the closet to get more space. By the time he was talking about Aztec and Chinese flood stories, I was mentally mapping out “social resource” zones for the closet, one area for the file boxes from the women’s group, a separate bookshelf dedicated to my family history materials.  If there had been 15 more minutes on that DVD, I would have created a whole new file system for my personal correspondence and retirement benefits.
 

By the time I arrived home from my mythology class, I was ready to get upstairs and whip that space into shape. I had just enough time before dinner to shift all the contents of the closet into our upstairs hall and loft. By the time dinner was over, I had just enough energy to walk upstairs and move the file boxes from the couch to the floor so that I could watch TV. 
 

I’m feeling a lot of pressure right now. I had to get in my morning walk, my morning coffee talk with the neighbors, and now my morning daily theme. When I “deconstructed” my office, I thought I would have the rest of the day to implement my organizational plan (the zones, the nests, the filing system) . But, I forgot….I promised my temporarily-out-of-work-otherwise-known-as-she-who-must-be-obeyed –daughter that I would go to the movies today. Organization is all about intuition—I intuit that if I break my promise, I will be in big trouble. 

Megan:

Conservation of Social Resources

Social support provides a major reservoir for resources outside those endowed to the self (e.g. high self-esteem, sense of mastery).

When we pulled this topic from the little basket we have designated to hold the scraps of paper upon which the topics have been printed, my mother groaned and I cheered. “I don’t know what this means,” she said, “I don’t know what I’m going to say.” I guess it was the fact that the tables were turned for once, but I gleefully shouted, “I’m gonna write about how my friends don’t have time to hang out with me!”

And then I got sad for a moment.

And then I perked up again, because that’s not true anymore. But I should preface this by mentioning that in England, I met almost all of my friends through my job at the prison. We spent the day working together and then we went out to the pub after work and talked about work, or the people from work. I had an extremely active (if somewhat repetitive) social life. When I moved back here, I wasn’t prepared for the toll work, marriage and parenthood had taken on my childhood friends in terms of the free time they had available to spend with me. It was sort of a blow to realize that they had not just been sitting around for the 10 years I was gone, hoping and praying for my eventual return.

Anyway, after a few months, I adjusted to my new place in the world, and we’ve come to a sort of satisfactory arrangement. Instead of spending 12 hours together at a time, we have coffee, or lunch. We have children’s birthday parties. We have roller derby, and tonight, my friends’ friend’s band is playing in a local bar.

I have been looking forward to this all week, which means that it will not go well. I will spend more time getting ready than I will at the event.  It will be too loud to talk, so my friend and I will stand next to each other and watch the band and text our observations to each other. Observations like, “Your friend’s band sucks” to which she might respond that my parents were never married. (They were married. Twice!) I will wonder if anyone notices how amazing I look (even without the makeup with the extra coverage) and then I will remember that nothing good ever comes of meeting someone in a bar. Especially a bar called Hooligans.  Then it will be time to go, because my friend has to go to Phoenix in the morning and I have to go to a first birthday party.  But before we say goodnight, we’ll make plans to meet soon for coffee or dinner or roller derby.

The quote at the opening of this “essay” is from an abstract of a study with the same name as the topic. I couldn’t access the full-text of the article because it cost $25. That seemed like too much money to spend to read a jargon-filled study about social relationships, especially because I can guess the results. Having friends is important. Young people spend a lot of time establishing friendships they hope to maintain through the rest of their lives, once they are too busy working, being married and having families to devote much time to making new ones.  It probably concludes that those resources “endowed to the self,” such as self-esteem, are also supported by those external social resources (friends).  That seems logical to me, but if you want to know for sure, take your $25 and follow the link below.
 

Sources:
Stevan E. Hobfoll, John Freedy, Carol Lane, and Pamela Geller. "Conservation of Social Resources: Social Support Resource Theory" Journal of Social and Personal Relationships November 1990 7: 465-478, doi:10.1177/0265407590074004 http://spr.sagepub.com/content/7/4/465.abstract

Topic 62: Working Over-Time

Carol:

Table Talk

Now that I’m retired I don’t have time for everything I used to do when I had a full-time job and children in school. My morning routine--walking the dog, drinking coffee with the neighbors, and writing my daily theme essay-- pretty well gets me to Noon.  The rest of the day I’m working over-time on the family history book that has obsessed me for three years.

This morning, coffee is at my house and since I have never had a job that paid for over-time, I  decided to ask the neighbors about Topic 62. When I’m stuck for a topic, these folks are as good as Google.  This particular morning we are sitting around the table at my house, 7 people and 2 dogs who think they’re people.  Five of the seven are retired, and our ages and job experiences run the gamut, but to simplify we are former or current nurse, teachers, office manager, lawyer, librarian, and machinist. 

Our usual table talk is punctuated by side conversations, interruptions to hand out dog treats, and much meandering  from topic to topic. Today is no different,

Do you have any good stories about working over-time? 

Marilyn: “Over-time? Teachers always work overtime, but they
                  never get paid for it. “
Carol:     “Yeah, but some teachers have it easier than others. 
                 It used to really irk me that math teachers never had work to take
                home and I never went home without a stack of papers to grade.” 

Jim: “You know the answer to that—you should have become a Math teacher. By the way, did you know your husband  spotted a religious predator this morning….a bird of prey.”

Everybody:  forced smiles and exaggerated groans, prompting the loud beating
                of dog tails from underneath the table.
Mary:  I never got paid for over-time either and I had to go in once a month and
            work all weekend when we did inventory. It didn’t start out that way, but
           somebody stole over $50,000 in inventory, so we had had to do it every
            month. It was tedious, hard work.
  .
Megan:  side conversation with Mary about how much easier inventory is now
          with bar codes and RFID sensors.

                

HITCO in the early years

Jim:   One Sunday we came in to work [at HITCO] on the attachment ring for a submarine sonar dome. All the parts were laid out on a huge table--  imagine something like gigantic spokes of a bicycle wheel.   
 
Cell phone rings: Peggy leaves the room
 
Jim continues:    I was in management, on a salary. I didn’t get paid over-time. We were on government contracts, so we had deadlines to meet. One thing about my boss, though. I could ask for a day or two break to go fishing, and if the schedule was clear, he’d give me the okay to take off.

Google Note: "HITCO has maintained its Los Angeles base while playing a key role in the development of the nation’s aerospace, defense and composite materials industries."        

Marilyn:  I really should go. I have lots to do today (see, all retired people are too
          busy to relax).

Carol:  Megan, quick, you need to take a picture before everybody leaves. Get
        your cell phone.

Mary (a widow whose husband Sal worked for Miller’ Brewing Co): 
      Miller’s used to close down the plant and give everybody time off
       the week between Christmas and New Year’s.  Everybody except Sal
        because he was the head of Building and Maintenance.  I would go
        with him; at the end of the day,   I walked the miles of hallways to
        turn off the lights. People just don’t have a clue what goes on inside a
       factory.

Carol: Megan, take another picture. Let’s see if we can get Coda to stick her
        head up over the table.

Megan: Mom, you need to start taking your own pictures.

Peggy, Jim, Mary, Marilyn: Time to go, lots to do today.

Retired people, they are always working over-time but they never get paid.

Table Talk, December 2010.

                
Source: HITCO.com

Megan:

Under-worked and over-paid

When I was first hired to work at the prison, it was a part-time job – 25 hours a week. In the UK, a workweek is 37 hours.  The other 12 hours I was a member of the Adult Stock and Promotion Team, which managed the collections for the entire county – over 35 libraries. My specific responsibilities were to select and order DVD’s for the county and to supervise the collections on 3 mobile libraries.

Shortly after I started, a draft specification on the management of prison libraries was released by the Home Office, which recommended an extension of professional librarians’ duties and an increase in their hours. My ASAP manager felt that 12 hours was the minimum I could work and be useful to the team, so instead of reducing my hours, I worked over-time. I was hired late in the financial year, which meant there was plenty of money in the budget to cover an extra 8 hours a week. The plan was to hire me an assistant the following spring, as my managers did not want me to burn out by working too much.

For reasons I never quite understood, the extra hours put me into a different, enhanced salary bracket and I made more money each month than I could come close to spending even though I was new to the country and constantly buying household items and professional clothes. I managed to save enough to fly myself to New York City for a week – the first time I had ever paid for my own vacation. I was extremely proud of myself, and certain that I was an adult and would never have to borrow money from anyone ever again. So… naive.

Shortly after that vacation to NYC, the end of the financial year came and I had a meeting with my managers within the prison and out about hiring an assistant. I convinced them that the prison would benefit from a continuity of service if I was the only librarian, although that would mean taking me full-time and giving up my place on the ASAP team.

I was full of great ideas for the prison (reading groups, creative writing classes, literary journals) that I planned to implement now that I could devote my full attention. Some of the ideas worked, some didn’t, as is always the case. I did manage to double library attendance and quadruple the reference queries – but I wasn’t prepared for the isolation I felt working away from the team.

I also wasn’t prepared for the decrease in my monthly paycheck. My car ate what little savings I had left after that vacation, when the driver’s side window fell off the tracks and dropped down inside the door. Then the car was sideswiped in a hit and run, the wing mirrors were kicked off and someone stole the radio antennae. That’s what happens when you live next to a pub. Anyway, after constantly having to repair my car, I was back to borrowing money from my parents.    Even after I became a Chartered Librarian and reached the height of the pay scale, I never made as much money as I did in those first 6 months. I never want to work over-time again – it’s just so not worth it when the money runs out.

Topic 2: Face Forward!

Carol:

About Face Forward

I knew that I would eventually experience “brain freeze” with some of the topics taken from a 1927 book on essay-writing, but I had hoped it would be later than Day #2 of our Daily Theme writing experiment. We even cheated, drawing three different topics before we decided that “Face Forward” had the most potential. Yeah, right! Why am I struggling so with this topic?

Well, one reason may be that I have been doing a fairly intensive “about face” for several months. As a newly retired person, I have been working on a family history project that I began two years ago but knew I couldn’t finish until I retired and could become completely absorbed in it. I have spent almost 4 hours a day pouring through family letters, photographs and genealogical records collected from generations of family members and spanning 300 years. Truth be told, it is sometimes more than four hours; I easily get lost in the past and forget what time it is. What have I learned from facing backward? My family history represents all of the threads of the American experience: immigrants from England and Denmark who settled in New York and New Jersey; Mayflower descendants with gravestones in old Connecticut and Massachusetts cemeteries; German families migrating to Mifflin and Somerset Counties in Pennsylvania; slave owners farming in Tennessee and the Carolinas; hardy pioneers moving to 19th century Texas and early 20th century southern California. Most of the obituaries mark the passing of people who worked hard: shop-keepers and teachers, railroad workers and ministers. They were the trail blazers and hearthkeepers we 21st century family members can learn from as we “face forward” to make our own family history stories.

So, why else am I struggling with the topic? Looking at life “face forward” on a personal level is learning how to create a meaningful retirement after working hard and happy for 34 years as a teacher. Yesterday at a medical appointment, I found myself staring at the line for “employer.” It was a small space, but I squeezed in “retired from Yavapai College.” I could have put “none” or “retired” or even “retired teacher,” but it was like I wanted that receptionist to know I had worked for Yavapai College, my primary community for 24 years Sometimes I mentally follow the patterns that mark any school year, learning the students’ names, the start-up employee meetings we often dreaded, sharing ideas about new writing assignments. But, I am surprised at how little I actually miss those academic rhythms as I learn to create new ones as a retiree. Just as I can get lost in the family stories of my American roots, I now get lost in a book without thinking, “I should be grading papers.” I am now a reader, not a teacher of literature, and I am a writer, not a teacher of writing.

As I finish Topic #2 and get ready to face (forward) the day, Granite Mountain is in full alpen glow, Milo is leaping and whining downstairs in anticipation of The Daily Walk. I am excited What am I going to learn today? And so ends my My Daily Theme about Face Forward.



Megan: Recently I visited a friend who returned to me all the letters I had written her over the past decade. I was excited to read them again, and see what my thoughts and ideas were however many years ago, but it’s turned out that revisiting them just makes me uncomfortable. I have similar issues when I re-read old journals. My biggest problems at the time, now seem small and insignificant – not compared to my problems now, but compared to what I’ve seen in the world. I was hoping to mine these letters and journals for The Book I Intend To Write, but instead they just remind me of a time when the world seemed smaller, and my spectrum of emotion was much more dramatic.

I’ve been thinking about the different paths people follow through life. There’s the planned and the unplanned. There are stepping stones and pot-holes. There’s prison or freedom, England or America. This was never going to be my life – and there came a point where staying put seemed like the easy option. I was going to give up on the person I was meant to be – that I meant to be – before I started working in the prison. Giving up my job and leaving England after 7 years was the first time I’ve had to make a choice between what I wanted and what was good for me. But rereading those letters reminds me that I’m still not the person I meant to be.

When I look back and read what I had planned for my life, it is easy to feel frustrated that I am nearly 29, unemployed and living with my parents. I have moments of regret, moments of ‘I could have made it work ‘and been able to stay in England. I could have made 15 billion changes and then maybe I would have been happy. This train of thought is dangerous with all it’s what ifs and maybes and then I start to wonder if I made a Big Mistake.

So, instead of dwelling on the past, I’m trying to adjust my attitude. Instead of feeling like a failure, I am grateful that I get to spend so much time with my family. Instead of losing my confidence every time I get turned down for a job, I remind myself that I’d rather be a writer anyway.