Page 486 of 524

The Last Day of School


Twenty years of teaching came to an end today. It was my last day at work. The school year is over. The hallways deserted. Students and teachers alike have fled for another year. In roughly eleven weeks my colleagues will reassemble in the cafeteria for the start of the 2007/08 year and I will not be among them. I can’t say that it bothers me all that much. Teaching hasn’t been fun for several years now and frankly I feel more than a little conflicted about my role in helping churn out the cogs of tomorrow. There is more to life than one’s occupation but anymore it seems that our lives take a back seat to work. 

So, the desk is cleared out, file cabinets emptied and boxes carted to the car. Twenty years now occupies three small totes and five file boxes in my garage and nearly half of that is going to a friend of mine who also teaches. I turned in my keys and parking tag. Sometime next week I will be deleted from the email system.

Destiny is a funny thing.  A widow on the board once remarked that the universe doesn’t give a rat’s ass about any of us and that believing that we deserve reimbursement or a reward for what we have been through is naive. The universe is not fair and we are nothing more than the cogs that make it up. In my opinion this only partly true. The universe is not fair but it is only a thing, a shell, not unlike the membrane that surrounds and protects the living organism within. I have never believed that I was owed anything really for the past several years. I have always believed that there was happiness and life waiting on the other side however.

Today was the last day of school but the beginning of the journey to what it is I am meant to do next.

Bad Scare


I found my daughter with a jump rope wrapped around her neck Saturday evening. Rob,  Jordan and I were enjoying a late supper in the dining room and Katy was supposedly watching television in the living room. I had heard her cough minutes before but dismissed it as she had been stuffy and still coughing a bit from a cold. It was the silence that followed in those minutes that jump-started the feeling that something was not right and sent me to check. I found her sitting on the couch in tears and terror. She had wrapped the rope around her neck several times and attempted to tie it, thank God she cannot tie her shoes yet, and was attempting to free herself but was only managing to pull the rope tighter. It is interesting how detached and task -oriented you become when faced with a crisis. I realized quickly I couldn’t untie the tangles and began to unloop instead. By the time Rob got to us I had her free but for the coils of rope that were caught in her curls. He quickly undid those and put the rope up on a shelf in the entryway to the house as I assessed her neck and soothed her.

She had frightened herself quite badly but at that moment I was still too concerned with checking for any burns or bruising and making certain that she was breathing properly which isn’t an easy thing to ascertain in a crying preschooler. It wasn’t until later when I had her in bed and asleep that the full impact of the event hit me, and I was more than glad to curl up on the same couch with Rob and receive my strokes and reassurance.

The nest morning she was fine and the fright over though hopefully the lesson learned is not forgotten. The fright is not so much gone for me. Since her father died, I have been…. well….over-protective…but understandably so, I think. I do need to learn to let her take those steps towards independence without always fearing the worst, and it is moments like Saturday evening which make that much harder. I can’t really protect her from anything. I know that. But hopefully I will be near enough to provide whatever rescue and snuggles that I can.

Sunny and Pleasantly Warm


The weather report on the Calgary newspaper site the other day was predicting “sunny and pleasantly warm” for the weekend here. The meteorologists on the local TV in Iowa don’t use terms like that. They will say “warm” or “mild” or “typical”, but nothing that evokes the images that “pleasantly warm” does. For instance, a glass of wine or two induces a “pleasantly warm” feeling as does slow kissing or the anticipation of it. It is “pleasantly warm” sitting in a sunshine filled room on a chilly winter day. As it turns out, the Calgary paper was correct. The weather here is warm and very pleasant. Different from Iowa due to the distinct lack of moisture in the air, but humidity is not something to be mourned in my opinion though it doesn’t seem to effect the mosquito population in the least. And as a quick aside, the mosquitoes in Alberta are not insignificant in size.

We arrived at the Edmonton Airport and crossed the border with minimum fanfare. Actually, no fanfare at all, it was rather routine. I guess, in the words of those so much wiser than myself at the widda board, I was being a bit of a drama queen about it all. Well, maybe not though given the total autonomy custom officials at the borders appear to wield. The recent TB fiasco certainly has highlighted the problem with granting discretionary powers to some people. A certain amount of one’s ability to make decisions independent of supervision is based upon a basic knowledge of the rules upon which decisions should be made, but a lot more of one’s discretion amounts to little more than common sense, a commodity in short supply regardless of the profession or innate intelligence.

To paraphrase both my daughter, Katy, and Rob’s younger daughter, Jordan, things look the same and different at the same time. The countryside is flat farmland for the most part. The trees are not like Iowa’s though. As Jordan observed, Iowa’s trees are wild and gnarled in shape. There is a uniformity to the wooded areas here, a symmetry to their shape even. Triangular or rounded, depending on the type and very, very green.

The house where we will live is nestled on a quiet street out in the “boonies”. It reminds me a little of Renesselar, Indiana, where my aunt and uncle lived back in the early 70’s. Except there are more houses. Still there is a feeling that nothing needs to be done soon, or even in the near future, that feels good though more than a bit alien to me.

Fort Saskatchewan is the nearest city. The main part has this old fashioned feel to it with older homes in leafy neighborhoods but as you head towards Edmonton it gives way to the typical sprawl of vegetation bare enclaves with clone homes and neighborhoods in progress with monstrous homes in various stages of completion.

The part of Edmonton that we spent time in Saturday is known as Old Strathcona. A city in its own right at one time it merged with the capital over time but still tries to maintain its own identity. We ate lunch at a vegetarian cafe, Cafe Mosaics. Although tiny and warm, but not in a pleasant way, the food was good and the clientele young and reminiscent of my college days. I am always a little surprised to see that very little about being that young seems to change. After lunch we took a walk to the Canadian version of Barnes and Noble to hit the Starbucks. An interesting thing I noted is though I saw a Starbucks nearly everywhere we went and sometimes more than one to a street, I was nothing but delighted. I am a chai addict. But, when I saw my first McDonald’s followed quickly by a Taco Bell, I was as disappointed as an anthropologist discovering that the natives she was studying have cable in their little grass huts. I guess we all have are little bits of corruption that we accept as normal simply because they have corrupted us.

I ran into more Canada speak. Washrooms. You should ask for the washroom if you need to use the restroom or bathroom. Or the W.C. Which lead me to wonder why such terms were chosen in the first place. The primary reasons for needing these facilities is not washing, resting or bathing, and you wouldn’t want to drink the water in there, but as Rob says, piss room or shit room are probably too vulgar to be standard parts of the language.

Even the dark clouds and on/off rain in the late afternoon couldn’t dampen the sunny and pleasantly warm feeling of the day. Maybe it is the newness or maybe just that we are finally here and able to all be together in a place with more permanence, but there is as much a homey feeling to this new life in this “new world” as anywhere I have ever been. Meteorologists in Calgary have a way with words, I think.