Change Is Hard

I started painting again tonight.  I put my brush down the day Dad was killed and haven’t picked it up since.  It will be two years tomorrow. The urge to paint again has become stronger over the months since I’ve been back in school; school has many ways to heal.  Of course with school going on I had no time to dig everything out the storage to which it had been relegated in those black days following his death. 

Tonight I got out the paper and brushes and the dried water color pallete.  I put them on my desk and walked away.  I wasn’t sure what was inside me.  Later in the evening I drew the rough outline of the villa we stayed in while we were in Tuscany last June.  Then I put it down.  I was almost afraid to find out what would happen when the paint hit the paper. 

 Little by little paint filled in the vision.  I’m no great artist, but I recognize it as the place we stayed.  I remember the warm sun, the olive groves, the rows of grapes, the view across the valley from our room.  That’s not all in this simple picture that is almost complete now.  But it’s still in my heart. 

Hey Dad, I’m painting again.  It feels good.  I miss you.  I miss Mom.  But tiny little pieces of me are coming back home.  And each little piece of me has a little piece of you and Mom too.  I’m not the same person I was.  But I think you’d recognize me, just like I recognize the impression of the villa in sun soaked Tuscany that sits drying on my desk tonight.

So this is what it must be like to be retired.  Sort of.  No school.  No job.  No responsibilities (at least today).  I don’t even know what day this is, and certainly don’t know the date.  I spent the day napping on the sofa and reading a book.  A book that had nothing to do with anything.  What a luxury! 

I am getting Christmas cards from friends of my parents and they are full of all their activities.  I think retirement is actually very unlike my day today.  The retirees I know seem to be very busy, but they also seem to really love the things they choose to do.  That’s what I want when I finally retire.

 For now I’m just retired for a day.  Is that like being queen for a day?  I guess so, minus the tiarra.  It was lovely.  But I’m ready to start doing something more. 

Tomorrow I’ll figure out what.

Today as my bus went by the Nichols Arboretum I said my customary silent hello to my folks.  (There’s a memorial to them there.)  It was an almost sunny day, warm for mid-December.  In my head I told my Mom that it would have been a good day for me to take a walk down to the river and visit them, but I didn’t have time today.  I promise next semester I’ll stop by a couple of times, but today  I needed to get ready for a class presentation.  As the bus rounded the next corner it suddenly occured to me how often I had said something similar to my mother when she was alive.  I don’t have time to visit right now, but I promise that I will soon.  Soon….maybe next month, next summer, next year, next Christmas, but not right now.  So many times I could have made the time but I didn’t. 

Tears threatened, but I concentrated on the elderly lady in the front of the bus who was rocking frantically.  I couldn’t start to cry now, I had a presentation to do today, and it’s hard to look professional with puffy eyes and a red nose.  Sometimes you just have to reach way down in your soul and pull yourself up, grab a piece of guts and hang on.  The presentation went fine.  And the tears, well, they began in earnest on the long dark ride home.

Another year done…a new one beginning…I hope it’s more fun!

I know the new year will be more fun!  I will be in school the entire year.  I sit today in the undergraduate library, having edited (again) my group’s final paper for the dreaded foundation class that deals with affinity notes and flow models and clients with obscure requests. 

Our presentation is tomorrow, so far I think I have too many minutes of stuff to talk about, but I know that I will talk too fast and so it will all work out. 

Our final paper is due Friday.  It has sections that are done.  Mine.  The rest is undone and I don’t know why.  Our group meets tonight; their goal was to have this paper done by tomorrow, I don’t see that happening when so much has not been touched.  It’s hard to work as a group when you can’t stop being a manager! 

Monday in another class a student presenter was talking about getting opinions of election data from people that are “older” and offered the possibility of getting insight from a group like the AARP.  The quote I smiled at was “those folks might be old but they still have a lot to say!”  Well.  I got my 2007 AARP card in the mail over the weekend.  I wonder if any of the other students in the class realize they have an OLD person in their midst.  And I know none of them realize how soon they too will be OLD.  It happens in a blink of an eye.

So, enough musings on the life of a student at the end of a semester at the end of a year, at the end of the old life and the beginning of the new life. 

Best wishes to all of you, thanks for your support.  I hope I see or hear from you after the holidays!

So at long last the “LONG” paper is done.  Of course this particular long paper, a detailed study of a collection meant to prove how much I have learned about collections and social systems (what IS a social system  you ask?) is shorter than the “LONGER” paper that is due one week from tonight.  That one has not been started yet.  My neck aches.  My back aches.  Even my FEET ache.  I can either read an article for a meeting I have tomorrow at noon.  Or….I can go to bed.  You get to vote.  What should I do?

As the semester nears its end, and I write and rewrite the “long” paper for a class I wonder.  Is it enough?  Should I add more?  Am I on track?  When IS enough enough?

I have several other classes to worry about, and at least two more papers to write for them.  Not much time left to worry about this one, it’s almost time to move on.  Is there enough in this paper?  Enough to get a good grade?  Or enough to pass.  Is passing enough? 

Do graduate students look at grades differently than undergraduates do?  Are we older and wiser.  Or just older?  And if we don’t have parents to take our report cards home to, do the report cards really matter?  Or are they just a tree falling in the woods with no one to hear?

Obviously it is past time for me to give up for the evening.  I think it’s enough.  I’ll read it again tomorrow night and until then hope. 

In theory there are two and a half weeks left of this semester, but in reality most of the big end of semester projects are due too soon.   Though I still think going to school is easier than working at a job I didn’t love (and in fact I told that to my group last night as we were moving our sticky notes around for the endless upteenth time during our seventeenth and eighteenth hours of working on our affinity model) I am getting fatigued.  I can’t sleep for trying to keep a list in my head of all that still needs to be done.  This morning I’ve been awake since 3 and I have come to the conclusion it’s better to just get up and get something done.  So I am printing out articles still to be read, thinking about that final reference assignment that requires me to spend too much time at the graduate reading room, planning what I’ll say this afternoon at our affinity walkthrough, and realizing deep in my heart, after attending the peer review yesterday, that my long paper for 504 which was 2/3 roughed in needs to be totally reshaped.  Oh, and there is that little 501 paper, twenty pages long, that has yet to be thought about.  And the multiple data entries still required of me for my digital library class. And I think there’s a paper due there as well.  So, if I start now and don’t sleep for the next 10 days I think I should be on top of things.

Good news from yesterday was a meeting I had with management at the Ann Arbor District Library, about 5 blocks from campus.  I am going to be doing a field experience project for them next semester.  I’ll be researching what library systems around the country are doing to provide library services for the home bound.  This is exactly the sort of thing I’d like to do in the future, so it’s a great opportunity for me to test the water and to do something that really matters for a library.  Of course it also adds ten hours of work a week to my school load, but I think I can handle it. 

Right now I am more excited about the new semester, new classes, new professors, new topics, and the great unknown than I am about finishing up the projects that are midway completed, not started at all, or possibly not even thought of yet that are due in the next two weeks

The neat thing about being a student vs. being an employee is that this stuff ENDS sometime and you get to start fresh!  At work if I were working on some project that had grown stale and unappealing I couldn’t hope that it would end one way or another in two weeks.  It had to get done, and worse than that, it probably MATTERED how well it was done!  In the world of academia there seem to be ends to our responsibilities and endless possibilities for projects of the future.  Its not real world but its more fun!

It’s Thanksgiving tomorrow.  I haven’t been to class at all this week, though that’s not as bad as it sounds, since there were no classes scheduled today.  I did miss my classes on Monday and Tuesday though, as my husband was in the hospital.  We went into emergency on Saturday afternoon, only an hour before the BIG GAME (UM/Ohio St), so rather than spending a nice Saturday afternoon watching a game and eating steak from the grill, we listened to bits and pieces of it from the attending nurses.  And not eating steak.  Turns out they admitted him for observation, and then they wouldn’t give him back to me until Tuesday!

By Tuesday I was too sick to pick him up, probably the flu.  So we sent his brother to get him from the hospital.  The brother dropped him off at our front door and declined an invitation to come into the germ invested house.  That’s just as well as I was not up to entertaining.

I was supposed to fly to Atlanta today, but I wasn’t feeling well enough last night, so we changed the ticket and I leave tomorrow morning early enough to make it to my brother’s house for dinner at noon in Alabama.  I should get to bed, but I’ve been thinking about things to be thankful for.

We spent a good part of yesterday watching the tribute to Bo being held at The Big House (UM stadium).  I am thankful that I am past the kind of intense grief for my father that I saw on BO’s youngest son’s face.  It hurt to watch him speak, so I started doing laundry and only watched parts of his talk as I walked through the living room.

I am thankful I am not working, and I’m thankful I’m in school, and I’m thankful I have a spouse and family members that support me in that decision.

I’m thankful I can kid around on the phone with my brother who is trying to make Mom’s pumpkin cake alone down in Alabama tonight, when I was supposed to be there to make it for him.  He may become a baker yet!  I am thankful that my sister and her husband will pick me up at the Atlanta airport at 7:30 in the morning and drive me the two hours to the house of feasting.  Even if I have to sit in the back seat with their dog.  I am thankful my other brother and his wife are having Thanksgiving this year, a place for us all to be together.
I am thankful for the memories of family Thanksgivings in years past.  And for Mom’s receipes.  And her voice in my ear.  I think she’s laughing with us at Paul’s attempts to replicate her cake.  This year, for the first time in two years, we can laugh too.  And for that I’m incredibly thankful.

I’m thankful for tradition that holds us together.  And I’m thankful for the new experiences we will have as we learn to redefine the holiday season based on our new reality.

Most of all I’m thankful to all the people that have held out their arms and their hearts to us as we clawed our way back up to the sunshine, especially those that stuck it out for two years when it seemed like we would never see lightness in anything ever again.

Sometimes it hasn’t seemed true, but we are truly blessed.  And I am thankful.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my Dad lately. Maybe because a truck safety nonprofit has asked me to consider becoming a board member. Maybe because it’s almost Thanksgiving which reminds me of the last time I saw him two years ago. Maybe because its all so unsettled even now.

What stories can I tell you about Dad? There are so many. The biggest thing about him is that he knew about everything. You know when you’re little and you think your Dad knows everything? Well, our Dad did! He read all sorts of books and magazines and was interested in learning everything there was to know about wherever he was and whomever he was with. He traveled all over the world and never met anyone he didn’t like and admire. He was interested in different cultures, and art, and music (even though he had a tin ear). He loved science and engineering. He loved to explore; to faraway places, or to the end of the stream down the way. He wanted to understand everything and he never stopped learning.

Whenever any of us were in a quandary about something, unsure what to do, or how to fix something, or where to go next, we’d call Dad. I remember years ago my brother called me about something he was doing on his house. I didn’t really follow what the issue was, and he finally said he thought he’d just call Dad. I wondered aloud why we always called Dad for everything, and my brother said, “because he knows everything!” And I said, “what are we going to do when we can’t call Dad anymore?” There was a long silence. It was inconceivable that there would be such a time. That time happened December 23, 2004, when a tired trucker made a simple error in judgement.

Now it’s not just Dad’s family that is lost. He worked in his community and in his church. He had friends all the way back to high school, college and his days in the Army that he kept in touch with even though he had moved and lived in several places around the country. He worked at the community food bank, and on a regional Presbyterian board that recruited ministers for rural churches. He was his own church’s handyman and fixed whatever was broken for friends, neighbors, the church and his family. Everyone is lost because a tired trucker made a simple error in judgement.

You know when you are reading a good book, or watching a great movie? You want to know how it turns out. I feel like I didn’t get a chance to see how Dad turned out. I didn’t get to see him grow old. I didn’t get to give back to him all the care and support he’d given me all my years. He was seventy-five years old, but he wasn’t anywhere near old yet. He wasn’t anywhere near done yet. He was still vibrant, and interested, and interesting, and supportive. He was still our family center. Without him we are struggling to redefine our family. There is no trunk to our family tree anymore, just the branches. We aren’t sure who we are without him. But we know we are who we are BECAUSE of him. The world has changed because a tired trucker made a simple error in judgement.

For the majority of his years he worked in industry. A lot of the time he was in charge of facilities, and that included the safety of the people that worked or visited his manufacturing plants. Manufacturing plants are inherently dangerous places and he made it his job to make them as safe as they could be. If he saw something out of line, something that could make the area unsafe, he’d get angry. There were no excuses. There was no letting down guard, or letting something go that wasn’t good enough. It had to be the best, everyone was expected to perform their best. He wouldn’t stop till a problem was solved. If it had been one of us hit from behind by a tired trucker that cold dark December morning, he wouldn’t have rested until he made a difference. Well, we’re trying to make a difference. For him. Because it wasn’t just a simple error in judgement by a tired trucker.

His name was William H. Badger. But all his friends called him Bill. That meant that everyone called him Bill, because he was a friend to everyone. If you tell his story, call him Bill, because he would have been a friend to you, a helper if you needed one, someone full of information and ideas, and above all full of stories. Stories that would make you laugh and help you understand the world. Stories that we’ll remember and pass on so that more people will know the story of Bill Badger. His story didn’t end with an error in judgement by a tired trucker.

It’s the middle of the term and there is a lot that is due from each of my four classes. Months ago, before I was a student I registered to run the Detroit 1/2 marathon. I already knew I hadn’t trained enough to run the full 26.2 miles of a marathon. But a half is “only” (inside joke) 13.1. I spent the big bucks on the entry fee, and convinced a friend to share a room in Detroit the night before. I was already into this thing for dollars, not to mention hours of training.

So, regardless of the amount of homework still undone, I had to go to Detroit Saturday afternoon, and even worse, run 13.1 miles! In the cold and wind, but thankfully not the rain. The night before the marathon as I tossed and turned in the hotel bed I dreamed. A normal pre-marathon dream would include panic as I looked for lost shoes, or searched for the starting line as the gun was going off. Or collapsed along the course and couldn’t tell anyone who I was.

But this night, the night before a 13.1 mile run which I had not trained well for, amid the concerns about the weather and the distance and my ability I dreamed about a mid-term. The dream was in color, I was writing in a green notebook. There were four questions to answer and I felt good about 3 of them. I had written them in amongst my lecture notes, on bits of notebook paper in between lecture entries. One was written on the top of one page, another answer was scrawled at the bottom of another page in a different part of the worn and tattered notebook. I couldn’t figure out an answer to question 4, and time was running out. I didn’t even understand the question. So I decided to go back and tear out the pages with my first three answers and hope I gained inspiration from them.

But I couldn’t find the first three answers that I knew I had written! I flipped the pages back and forth in increasing anxiety. I looked in my bookbag. Repeatedly. I was ripping out pages indiscriminatly. I noticed that everyone else was calmly finishing up their fourth question and I couldn’t even figure out what I had done with the first three answers! And I hadn’t started question 4! The grad assistant was collecting the tests and I didn’t have anything to turn it!

I woke up grateful that all I had to do that day was get up and run. So I wasn’t prepared. So it wasn’t important. So there were no grades. I didn’t even have to finish it! What a relief. But on the night before a big race, when normally my mind would be consumed with socks and shoes and jackets and shirts, band aids, motrin, bananas and granola bars, my mind was instead consumed with essays and grades, tests and notebooks.

It was obvious to me where my brain and heart were. I couldn’t get home soon enough to get back to that schoolwork. The race was run but it’s good to get back to work.