Schooling

I have never finished college.   I attended a community college with the purpose of becoming an occupational therapist because it looked promising when I was going through the course catalog.  Yes, I think I will be one of those even though I don’t know what one of those actually is.

In a role playing exercise in front of the class, I was the therapist dealing with an uncooperative patient and had to use my newly learned skills to get the patient to agree to a therapy session.  The patient was another student who either secretly hated me or was pursuing an acting degree.  She was good.  Me?  Not so much.  After the exercise the professor pulled me aside and told me that I should think about this course of study as “it might not be suited to you.”

What??????

She did me a huge favor.

I left for a semester and went back to get an associate’s degree in business.  I paid for every cent of tuition, every book and every supply until I reached the one year mark in my job for a utility company and could take advantage of their tuition assistance program.  Do companies still have those perks?  Oh please be so. 

My college experience was very different than what my kids have had which is what made me so determined that they would get the chance to go away to school and finish with a bachelor’s degree.

If you were to ask me my one regret in life it would be that I don’t have one of those.  I pine for it.  Dream of it.   Hope that when we finish paying tuition for the kids that it will be my turn.

I read a decorating blog whose author announced last month that she was going back to school for an interior design degree.  A few weeks into it she decided it wasn’t for her.   As someone who quit a job after a week when I knew it wasn’t a good fit, I get it.  What I didn’t get was the number of comments knocking the pursuit of a degree…..almost to the point of mocking.

A few years ago when one of Mark’s students got their PhD. we went to the ceremony.  As one of the graduates walked across the stage, a kid in the balcony stood up and shouted, “GO GRANDMA!!!”

That will be me one day and I will weep right there on the stage.

Perspective

I’ve been on the new job for nearly a month and it’s about what I expected.  Long stretches of dullness, aching legs and feet, flurries of activity, credit card machines not working, thirty boxes of inventory coming in one day.

A day in the life of a shopgirl.

When I went on an interview this summer for an office job I knew that I could not do that.  I knew I’m the kind of girl that needs to keep moving during the day and putting me in a chair behind a desk would be like eight hours of time-out. 

When you never know who will walk through the door, the potential to meet somebody interesting is present on every shift.  Today we had a lovely woman in from Joplin, Missouri.

That Joplin.

We asked her how the town is doing.  How rebuilding was coming along.  She told us of a friend who got picked up three different times by that tornado and landed upside down inside a car.  Not only did she live……she remembers the entire thing.  That you can see clear down blocks where businesses used to be and there is absolutely nothing.  That the hospital will not be rebuilt in the same place because it was too close to the other one in town and they cannot risk another tornado taking out both.   That while one hospital was destroyed the other one had dozens of severely injured patients coming in with no electricity and a week before they had running water again.  That in her lifetime she will never see her town resemble anything close to what it was.

That on any day she is a combination of sad, lucky and grateful.

On this day, I was happy to be a shopgirl once again.  To hear customers stories, to be reminded that it’s all fleeting, to know that despite what one wears attitude always makes the girl.

Madam Speaker

When the kids were in grade school, I was asked by the PTA to be in charge of the all-school reading program.  I said I would but only if I could change everything about it.

Prior to taking it over, the reading program was a contest between classes to see who could read the most minutes over the course of a week.  The winning class would get a pizza party.  There were two problems with this.

#1.  Kids cheated so their class would win.  I know it’s a damning accusation but it was true.

#2.  I don’t believe reading is a contest.

I started an all-school book club with activities in the lunchroom every day geared to all age groups.  The first year we did Charlotte’s Web.  Swoon.  By week’s end we had set up a mini county fair on the first floor with blue ribbon pies, quilts and dioramas that the 3rd graders made.

I knocked it out of the park.

After that success, the PTA asked me if I would be the chair of programs for the following year.  I knew that doing this would require me to get up in front of an audience each time to introduce the guest and I couldn’t do it.  Couldn’t stand up in front of others and talk like a normal person.

I declined but said I’d consider being the treasurer as I was a loan officer in my before kids life and could manage a budget.  This is one of the hardest jobs to fill and they must have been high-fiving each other when I offered to take it without even being asked.

It wasn’t the most well thought out decision.

#1.  People would show up at my place of employment looking for a PTA payout and get pissy when I couldn’t give them their money because I didn’t carry the checkbook with me.   To my job.  Where I was being paid to work not run an ATM.

#2.  It’s a two year gig.  After being treasurer for a year you become VP of Finance which is a mentoring position for the new treasurer.  TWO years of regular PTA meetings followed by PTA board meetings.

#3.  I had to give a budget report each month.

I’d shot myself in the foot but good.

Every meeting I’d get up in front of an audience in the cafeteria and give a shaky voiced report on the status of the money.  While I rarely strayed from my printed report, once in awhile I’d wing it and look out at an audience who seemed to be showing outright pity over my anxiety.  I would try to calm myself and regroup but usually ended up gagging on some wayward spit.

For the last two weeks, we have watched both the Republican and Democratic conventions and geez…………..where do these women come from?  These powerful, eloquent women who can speak to thousands of people in a convention center and millions of people at home and never skip a beat.  Never have a crack in their voice that induces sympathy.  Never continually rub their forehead as anxiety induced pain roars through their bodies.  Never have armpit stained dresses or beads of sweat on their newly waxed mustaches.

They came from somewhere but it sure wasn’t the PTA I was in.  That produced somebody like me who exhibited all of the above when speaking in front of thirty people and that was after a bathroom run due to a case of The Nervous Poop.

The Super Bowl

Labor Day weekend may be about celebrating the American worker, but in my part of the world it’s about the Sparks Flea Market.

Sparks Kansas.

Yep, it’s in the middle of nowhere.

Last year we took Will and he thought it was all kinds of fun.  This year we took Maggie and Nate.  Prior to leaving, Nate told the siblings, “Kids, this is your mother’s Super Bowl, now don’t do anything to spoil it.”

Yeah kids, don’t make me get out a can of whoop-ass.

The siblings got along.  They bought stuff, they survived ridiculously hot temps, they ate corn dogs and sat in a tub that a farm boy cut in half and made into a loveseat.

 The Farm Boy is not married.  He’s never even dated which led to some awkward silence on our part.  If I knew a guy who was that talented I’d snap him up in a heartbeat, but I didn’t say that out loud as you never know the sketchiness of the kind of guy who would tell complete strangers that he’s never dated.

We came home with an old trellis, a rusty blue tool box, a green oar, a bowling pin, birdhouse, some locker baskets and a shelf made from an old piece of luggage.

And just before we left, we ran back to buy one more thing from the farm boy.  That’s when we discovered that he may have some issues with gas. 

 

Go Tell It On The Mountain

The first time I ever saw a protest was in the sixties when we were piled in the family station wagon headed to see our grandparents.  It was a civil rights protest that we passed and it made The Queen Mum really nervous.  Dad said they were standing out there to make a point and weren’t interested in bothering anybody.

A few years ago, our church organized a walk to join a protest in Kansas City against the Iraq War.  I told The Big Daddy that we needed to put our money where our mouth was when it came to this and so the whole family went.  He and I might have been more effective protestors had we not both been suffering from A Massive Hangover.  As I was walking with a friend, she told me she was suffering from the same affliction, and that church of ours wasted their best intentions on some of their slacker parishioners who thought the prep was to get shit-faced the the night before.

When the Westboro Baptist Church showed up at the kids high school with their “God Hates Fags” posters, every man, woman and child within twenty miles came to that protest to drown them out and send crazy packing.

Last week in New York City, two dozen women protested their right to go topless.  One woman said that her dog has six nipples that anybody can see, but if she were to show her two she’d be arrested.

But your dog isn’t picking the kids up from school, making a deposit at the bank or digging in the freezer case at the Winn-Dixie for the Green Giant Sweet Kernel Corn that’s two for one.

My years of living make me believe that if we all gave peace a chance we’d be better off.  And while I appreciate the right to protest and wouldn’t hesitate to do it if I believed in the cause, I’d rather passer-bys just be looking at my sign.

Open House

Twenty years ago when we moved to Kansas we rented a townhouse.  Coming from the D.C./Maryland area, the idea of actually buying a home was absurd.  It didn’t take long for us to figure out that here in the heartland, home ownership was a real possibility.

The Big Daddy was all about scouting out a new homestead, and so we’d map out the Sunday open houses, pack up the kids and snoop in other people’s lives.

We argued a lot in these open houses.  The Big Daddy, enamored with the bells and whistles, and me not so much.  I’m not hauling groceries up a flight of stairs to a kitchen that some idiot put on the second floor.  Another time we were in a house with gold-flocked wallpaper on the entire first floor and when I said I’d seen enough he told me I was being too negative.  When we got to the backyard with the above-ground swimming pool coated in algae, we both barfed a little in our mouth.

On the way home from one of our shopping trips we passed an Open House sign in a neighborhood we weren’t familiar with.  We stopped anyhow and oh, how we could see ourselves living in those digs with the wide open downstairs “great room” that the kids were already running around in.

We likeyed that place.

When we inquired about the price it was $450,000.00.  Hmmmm…….that’s several hundred thousand dollars more than we intended to spend.

The realtor nodded knowingly and wished us well as she pointed us and our sweaty kids to the proper exit.

She stood in the doorway and watched us pull away in our Oldsmobile Firenza, and I bet it was the faux wood paneling on the side of our station wagon that was a dead giveaway that we had stumbled into the wrong neighborhood.