Monthly Archives: July 2014

     About a week ago, I retired from a fantastic teaching job after nearly two decades so that I could write. And because my loving, and much-loved husband got a job across the country. A job he needed, wanted and deserved.
      And because I was tired.
      And frankly, because I was afraid. Afraid I wouldn’t be able to keep up the pace and do it with love and style. Afraid that my cancer wasn’t going to stay in the past, was sending me signals through chromogranin blood and 24 hour urine collection tests that I took regularly and that I didn’t understand but sure saw going up. That I’d be dealing with “it” once again, and I’d miss too much, too many hours of planning lessons worth learning, giving relevant feedback, and connecting with love and meaning to my dear students and their families.
To those of you who scoff at my description of 8th grade kids as dear, I say, throw away that prejudice. Junior High age children haven’t changed a bit. They are as lovely and strong and confused and thirsty for answers as they’ve always been. They are gorgeous and deserving of love, respect, and guidance. They are us when we were twelve, thirteen. Filled with energy, depression, fear, joy, and self-indulgent superiority. Us. Then. They need us, and if we love them, they even want us around—old people who care and are willing to suspend the easy judgments that flow and have always flowed, like a mean, mean river around us, separating us, generation by generation—now that we are so experienced and “wise.”
And because, forgive me, my intestinal health was much compromised by my earlier surgeries and my condition, and I hate, hate, hated having to run out of class, interrupting the art class next door, putting my wondrous friend/fellow teacher Heide on notice that I was already gone, could she please watch my class as well as her own.
It seemed enough.
This meant leaving California. The San Bernardino Mountains. The Rim of the World. An amazing community—a gorgeous resort I was more than privileged to live in. A real home. Friends to die for (and I would!). Church. School. Family.
My daughter, son-in-law, and four grandchildren, all of whom love me as dearly as I love them.
Am I crazy, selfish, cold-hearted? What? I pray it’s none of that.
I was an unlikely nomad in childhood, spent hundreds of hours in cars moving from one place to another. Lived with a lot of people. Only had one house my mother owned, and that for just a few years. I more than loved that place on Winslow. It was haven, heaven, heart. But I learned to move on. When I was young, I learned that.
Hated it, but learned it. Change is as inevitable as death and taxes. There’s no getting around it for most of us. I know we can all site examples of people we know who never changed their address, and maybe they were even lucky enough to die before their loved ones, but those people are few and far between. For most of us, we either keep going or we lose more than we had.
I won’t lose the love of my home in California, my community, my students, their families, the pines, or the spectacular rocky cliffs. They will always be right here. My daughter sometimes doubts that we will survive this. She counts the likely number of times we will be together again before I die. I wish I could explain. I’m trying to now. I’ve lost mother, father, step-father, brother, mother-in-law- so many. But I’m not alone, nor empty. Perhaps I am fuller, feeling each of them taking up such a large part of my heart. They, those who loved me, and everyone else, every place else, stay with me. And I will stay with them.
If they wish it.
Mahalo, and greetings from Wisconsin, USA. May your path be as valuable to your heart as mine has been to me.