The Bizarreness of the Beginning – and of the Ending of 19 Years on a Job

Nineteen years ago this month, my husband saw a listing in the newspaper for an opening with the school district for an occupational therapist.  I was working for a company that was sending me to various nursing homes in the area at the time and was looking for a job change.  On the phone that day, Kevin wove his way through the maze of people on the other end of the line and eventually got connected to the director of the district’s Special Education Department, a man who, when Kevin told him that his wife was an OT with experience in pediatrics, said he wanted to hire me as soon as possible.  Kevin wrote down the man’s phone number and told him that I would call him the next day, which I did, at which time we set an appointment to meet early the next morning at a Perkins restaurant before I had to report to work at the nursing home that day.

On the day of the meeting, it was raining.  Hard.  One of those torrential downpours that makes it difficult to see the road in front of you when you’re driving.  As I pulled into a parking place right in front of the restaurant about ten minutes early, I took a deep breath and told myself I was going to have to run through the rain to get inside but it didn’t matter that I would probably look like a half-drowned rat; hopefully my resume would speak for itself and I would get the job anyway.  Before I could open my car door, though, a man in a car pulled up right beside my car and looked over at me and made the “roll down your window” gesture that I was luckily old enough to know the meaning of.  I thought the man was going to ask me for directions, but it turns out it was the man I was supposed to be meeting, asking if I was me and then, when I said that I was, asking if I could just come over and sit in his car for the interview since the rain was coming down so hard.

I looked around – there were lots of cars in the parking lot and it was a public place right there out in the open – and decided to go for it.  I figured I could unleash my crazy and/or jump out and run if he ended up being a creep.  I went around to the passenger side of his car, and he leaned over and opened the door from his position in the driver’s seat.  I saw some forearm crutches leaned against the front seat from on the floor of the car and figured out the reason that he'd parked in a handicap-accessible parking spot - and why he'd asked me to get into the car with him instead of trying to navigate through the flooding parking area.  We awkwardly shook hands across the center of the seat; I handed him my resume and he tossed it up onto the dashboard without looking at it.  He asked me a few questions in a chit-chatty manner and then asked me how soon I could start.  And right there, in the car of a man I had just met, in the pouring rain, in a Perkins parking lot, I decided to embark on a new leg of my career. 

One of the many things that I learned from my dad over the years is that no job is perfect; even a great job has parts of it that aren’t great.  This job has been wonderful, though, for me and for my family.  It has allowed me to develop so many relationships with so many people, many of whom I have known for well over a decade and many of whom I have come to care about on a very personal level.  I have been inspired and have learned something almost on a daily basis; no two days have been alike, and I feel that my creativity and my knowledge base have been challenged and expanded regularly.  I have been allowed the freedom to develop my professional interests and to improve upon my strengths – and guidance through several supervisors over the years, a few of whom have become valued mentors.  The children and the families with whom I have had the opportunity to interact have each left a mark on my life in some way; so many of them have touched my heart and impacted my life that I am forever changed because of those interactions. 

And so it comes as no small challenge for me to figure out how to make the change that needs to be made at this time, how to gracefully turn off this road onto another one as I head into another phase of my career and of my life.  But an offer has been made to me that I cannot refuse, an opportunity that, for me, at this time in my life and at this point in my career, feels exactly right.  And so I am taking the plunge.

Last Friday, letter of resignation in my hand, I drove to the school district’s central office, the actual entrance of which has recently been moved from the county’s school district building to the building that was formerly owned by the city’s school district.  As part of the merging of these two entities, the entrance was moved to the building next door.  I parked near the new entrance and entered the building, where I discovered that a little more than the usual check-in process was now involved: instead of showing my employee badge and signing in at the front desk, this time I had to walk through a metal detector and submit to having the contents of my purse searched.  “State your business,” the police officer manning the door said to me in a grumbly voice.  I told him that I needed to see someone in the Human Resources Department, although, like many of the administrative offices of the district since the merger occurred last month, its official title had been changed to something that seemed so ambiguous to me that I wasn’t sure the department to which I was referring was the right one.  To get to the Office of Human Capital & Talent Management, as it was now titled, the officer told me, I should go down the hallway to the right, take a left through the doors into the breezeway, and look for the door with the sign indicating the office about it.  Clutching my letter of resignation in my hand, I took off down the hallway and pushed through the glass doors into the courtyard-like area between buildings, and the doors closed behind me with a loud metallic clank.  I walked across the concrete area to the door directly across from where I’d exited and pulled to open the door.  Locked.  Thinking that I must be trying to go in the wrong door, I walked over to the next door and tried again.  And to the next one, and to the next one.  All were locked.  Thinking that I should return to the cop at the front door and ask again for directions, I turned around and walked back to the door where I had come out.  Locked.  Shit. 

It was nearing 100 degrees, and there was no shade or breeze in that so-called “breezeway.”  Like a total weirdo, I peered into several windows of the building, thinking I would be able to get the attention of someone on the inside and get them to let me in before I died of a heat stroke out there, sadly with my letter of resignation in my sweaty hand.  There was not a single person to be seen anywhere.  “Oh, I know,” I thought, in a quasi-eureka moment: “I’ll call them and tell them I’m locked out here so someone at the front desk can let me back in.”  I dialed the number and listened to the series of rings on the other end, one after the other until more than a dozen rings had sounded with no answer, as I began to wilt on the outside and on the inside.  I was nervous about quitting; after all, I hadn’t quit a job in almost two decades – and now I was locked out.  Or in.  Whatever.  I felt like I had done something wrong.  I paced a little more, trying to figure out what to do next, and then I heard the squeak of an opening door from across the courtyard.  I ran (in heels) to catch the woman who was carrying a big stack of papers and who hadn’t noticed me at all until I shouted, “Excuse me, Miss?”  She looked at me with part confusion and part annoyance and, after I’d explained what had happened, eyed me suspiciously and said, “You aren’t supposed to be out here at all since you’re unauthorized.”  I swallowed the response that was fighting to come out and just waited her out.  “Well, since you’re out here, I guess I can let you back in the way you came,” she said.  NOW THERE’S A GENIUS IDEA, I thought, but I keep that to myself too and followed her back to the door where my little adventure had begun.  She swiped her badge and moved to the side so I could enter the building.  I went inside and turned to ask her for the actual directions – but the door had already closed and she had turned and was briskly walking in the other direction.  NO WAY was I opening that door again, especially considering how quickly it apparently closed.

I went a little ways down a hallway to the side and saw a woman coming out of one of the offices there.  When I told her I was lost and gave her the name of the office I was trying to find, she gave me different directions – these included some twists and turns that were thankfully all indoors.  After a few more minutes of walking, I looked up and realized where I was: inside the “old” county district HQ building.  Familiar turf.  I turned one more corner and saw the sign for the Made-up Office Office of Human Capital & Talent Management.  I went in, found the person I needed to see, and handed her my letter.  She thanked me and wished me a good day.  I retraced my steps down the hallway and noticed that I was about to pass by the doors that had been the entrance to the building throughout my 19 years of employment, the doors that I had walked through at least 100 times over the years and the doors through which I had come to sign the paperwork on the day I was formally hired to start in this position.  "Full circle," I thought, and, throwing caution to the wind, I swiped my badge in front of the sensor (it worked!), pushed through the door, and strode through the lobby.  As I reached up and pushed through the glass doors to leave the building on my way into the parking lot, I heard a voice calling after me, “Excuse me!  You’re not supposed to be here.”  "I guess not," I thought, and I walked to my car and drove away.

How It Feels

I didn't go into politics - or even business, for that matter - for a reason; one that, if you know me, you probably already know: I do not have a poker face.  I am not at all good at, as they say on Saturday Night Live, strategery.  I don't like office gossip or sneakiness or favorite-playing.  The way I prefer things to be in my work place is when, as my dad used to say, it is what it is - because what else would it be??

Unfortunately for me and for a whole lot of other people who live and/or work in the same school district I do, though, we have been involuntarily drawn into a situation over the past couple of years that has come to involve a lot of the undesirable aforementioned things.

As a result of the citizens of the city voting to give up their school district and the resulting imposed adoption of that system by the county school system, people in my area are talking about budgets and politics and outsourcing and other things that have regrettably become a very large part of the equation in public education.  One thing I haven't heard much talk about in meetings or in the media, though, is how it feels to have been swept into this maelstrom.

This has been the most difficult, most stressful year of my nineteen-year long career with the county school district.  I am proud of the efforts of many of my coworkers as we've entered into what can only accurately be described as a battle.  At times, I've felt sure that I want to do everything in my power to stay with the district, to continue the work I've started, and to try to control what I can in hopes of protecting my coworkers and friends - and ultimately, the students.  But, at other times, increasingly as the actual date of the change approaches, I feel as if I am in danger of going down with the ship.  Like a lot of my coworkers, my health and my personal life - and my overall happiness - have suffered a lot during this past school year because of the impending "merger" - a term, by the way, that really gets to a lot of us on the receiving end of the punches.  To merge means to join forces, to unite, or to team up, and to me that implies that an action is taking place between two roughly equal bodies, a situation which, in my opinion, this is not.  Always a fan of running metaphors, I liken what's going on here to a runner that has dropped out of a race who later asks an accomplished runner if he can train with the better runner.  One of them needs improvement; one doesn't.  One needs help; the other was fine on his own - and, in fact, is likely to be slowed down if the less skilled runner joins him on training runs, even though the faster runner may still be willing to take on the job of coaching the slower one.  It isn't a merger; it's more of an adoption.

In the district of people who did not get a vote in this decision, our leaders and our administrators are scared for their own jobs, for their livelihood actually, and it feels like there's an "every-man-for-himself" mentality that I have never before felt in this job.  Watching the process unfold in slow motion over the course of this school year has felt a bit like Chinese water torture, and in many ways I am glad to see the year come to a close, although I feel a distinct sadness at the same time that my job and this school system - both things that I have loved and have put my heart into since I was 25 years old - will certainly never be the same after end of this school year.  

Everybody knows that educators in this country generally don't make a lot of money.  They don't win Oscars or Pulitzer Prizes or get big raises or promotions or even get much recognition by their bosses or their "customers," unless, of course, a scandal of some sort is featured in the media.  The rewards we get come quietly and often only if we are looking hard for them, but most of us are lucky (and diligent) enough to see them, and we are glad to have this as our chosen career.  We realize that there is no other profession that would allow us to have such a part in shaping the minds of children in this way and to impact their future on such a personal level.  Teaching is about so much more than teaching - and I don't mean politics and jerrymandering and elbow-rubbing; it's about the power of relationships.  It's about the connection that can be made between one person and another person or between a person and a lesson, a link that can only be developed when the learner knows that the teacher cares about him or her.  When a mutual respect has formed between the teacher and the student, that's when the best kind of learning occurs.

But in an environment when educators are scared for their jobs, when school staff members know that they and/or their coworkers and friends may end up on the chopping block at any moment, when program cuts aren't a "maybe" but a "when," it's hard to be positive every day.  It's hard to focus on the lessons that need to be taught - and on the children who are the most important part of the equation.  From either side of the argument about what's fair or who deserves what from the limited funding available in the district now, one thing is for sure: teaching and learning have been hindered, and that doesn't feel good to any of us.

This is mostly a blog about grief and perspective, but I guess it's also about enduring and overcoming life's challenges, and I guess that's what has to be done in this situation as well.

World Autism Awareness Day

There are many people who played a role in my career choice many years ago, and I regularly think about the fact that I am so lucky to have found a profession that is fulfilling, challenging, and rewarding on a daily basis.

Once I decided on and then entered the Occupational Therapy program at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, though, there were still several different career paths within the field of O.T. that I could choose, based on various demographics of the patients with whom I would be working in the future - from very young to very old, by diagnostic grouping like "hand therapy" or "neuro rehab," and/or in different treatment settings such as an inpatient hospital or a school system.  In fact, the diversity of the options within my chosen field was one of the main things that drew me into Occupational Therapy initially.

During my final year as an O.T. student, I landed a part-time job working for my favorite professor, the woman who taught the pediatric-focused courses in our program.  Some of the work I did was data input, mainly typing the treatment notes that she had recorded on a mini-tape recorder and entering appointments into her schedule on a brand-new Mac Classic computer that seemed so high-tech and cool to me at the time.  I liked that work; it allowed me to learn a lot about computers and my teacher's clinical practice from the sidelines.  A second part of my job was to go to the medical library and research topics about which my instructor needed more information; through this, I learned to love research and to how to be organized in my approach to finding out what scientific studies and data said about a particular subject.

There was one more part of my job, though, and it was the part that I thought was the best: going with my instructor to clinical visits.  I primarily served as a hauler/transporter/equipment cleaner at the treatment sites, but, rather than feeling like a grunt who was limited to schlepping and scrubbing, I felt like I was a sponge, soaking up knowledge and inspiration from all around me.  Two of the children in particular who were being treated by my teacher that year ended up influencing my decision to set a goal of practicing in the field of pediatrics as an O.T.; after getting to know each of them, I was certain that my future was in working with the younger population.  

One of these kids was a boy named Johnny who had cerebral palsy that affected all four of his limbs, his trunk, and his speech.  A couple of month after I'd met him, my instructor had me sit with him while she left the room to take a phone call.  I had to focus and listen closely to make out what he was saying as he chatted away about his love of the Cardinals, St. Louis's major league baseball team.  After a couple of minutes of that, he abruptly changed the subject by asking, "What does it mean to be handicapped?"  His question took me off-guard; I spent several seconds trying to think of the best way to respond.  He beat me to the punch, though, blurting out the answer to his own question before I could say anything: "Oh, I know: it means you have to work harder to do things,"  and then he went back to talking about baseball.  I thought his answer was perfect, and I knew at the time that I would never forget this exceptional child or his profound words.

The second child was a girl named Casey who was at a different facility than Johnny.  Casey was a six year-old girl who had been diagnosed with autism.  She was verbal but had many social and other challenges that affected her ability to interact with the world in what is considered to be a "typical" manner.  Casey wasn't as touchy-feely as Johnny was; in fact, she didn't like to be touched at all, but I still found her to be very lovable and sweet.  She had some "quirks" - some habits and patterns of behavior that I found to be both interesting and endearing during the year that I knew her; one of these idiosyncrasies was that she coped with stress by pretending that she was interacting with a cat that she kept in her pocket.  Cleverly, I thought, she used this as a way to divert attention to something other than herself whenever she felt like she was being put on the spot; instead of answering a question or completing a task that she didn't feel like doing, she often emulated taking the cat out of her pocket and petting and talking to it.  

I was fascinated by this tactic; I thought the fact that she had devised such a creative strategy for gerrymandering was brilliant in many ways.  Some of the people who worked with Casey scolded her for talking about or to her pretend cat; I, in my squeaky-clean lab coat and with my very limited knowledge base and experience in the clinical world, tried to find out more about her and her world by playing with her and by asking her about the imaginary creature.  In turn, she often made better eye contact with me, and she talked and talked about things that were on her mind, all while pantomiming holding and/or petting the make-believe cat.  

Not long after my job working with Casey ended, I decided to get a kitten, and, as I looked through the want ads in the newspaper, I knew already that I wanted to name this cat Casey, after the child that first drew me into the world of autism, a condition about which I was sure I wanted to learn much, much more.  I ended up getting a male cat instead of the female I had envisioned, but I still went with the name Casey for the first pet I had as an adult, the cat that was with me as I graduated from college, found my first job, moved into my first apartment, met and later married my now-husband, and had both of my children.  

Like Johnny and his words of wisdom, I will never forget the girl named Casey, the child who drew me into one of the main fields of interest in my profession.  Today, on World Autism Awareness Day, and on many other days, I will think of her and the cat in her pocket and hope that she is somewhere doing something she enjoys.

Country Road Take Me Home

If you know me, you probably already know this about me: I have zero decorating sense.  Seriously, I live in a house with very little decoration and with several rooms with no curtains, and I've lived in this same house for more than a dozen years.

It's not that I don't like home decor or fabric or color - it's that I like so much of it that I can never decide what I want to have displayed, what I want to live with on a daily basis.  It's also a little bit that I've never liked knickknacks, things that some people might call "collectibles" but that I usually refer to as "dust-catchers."  If I have something out on display in my house, it's because it means something to me, not because a magazine or some decorator who doesn't know me suggested it or because it seemed like there was a hole on a bookshelf that needed to be filled.

That said, I know what I like in home accessories, furniture, and art when I see it.  And when I come across something in my price range that stirs up memories and/or emotions, I usually try to find a way to work that item into the scheme of our house.

Awhile back, I found out about the work of Kallie North, a photographer who lives in a small town in the Mississippi Delta.  She's from Texas but married a farmer from the Delta and settled down in the area near where I grew up.  She's a songwriter and a singer too, but it's her photography that makes me feel like she sees things in that area the way I remember them from many years ago.  

I've decided that I am going to order some of her prints to frame and display in my house; I love the way she shoots things that others probably don't notice and the way that, in her pictures, the beauty of things that probably isn't usually recognized is made clear to see.  I love the colors and the shots of crops and things that are unique to the Mississippi Delta.  The agriculture-related photos remind me of my dad, whose career was in the field of ag-marketing and consulting.  I exchanged a couple of emails with Kallie a few months ago, and she has agreed to take some photos this fall of the grain elevator where my dad worked many years ago.  I plan to display those shots and a few others of hers in the Mud Room of my house so that I can see them every time I come in the back door.

Here's a link to her photo gallery:
http://www.kallienorth.com/portfolio

"Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on Simplicity."  ~Plato

New Orleans On The Mind

My dad loved New Orleans.  He thoroughly enjoyed the food, appreciated the people, delighted in the music, and, of course, he LOVED the Street Beer!

 

Dad, making a presentation to some of his clients at a meeting

When people asked Dad what he did for a living, he said that he was “in the grain business."  During his career, he managed several grain elevators, supervised the opening of a rice processing plant, and, in 1993, joined an agricultural marketing consulting firm as a principal commodities broker.

Not long after he graduated from college and got his first job in the field, he joined the Mid-South Grain Association, a trade organization for people in the ag-marketing business.

During the course of his career in the grain business, the Mid-South Grain Association was a constant for Dad.  He served as president of the organization for several years and was secretary-treasurer for the past 18 years. He was always so appreciative of the numerous friendships he developed through the group and enjoyed organizing their semi-annual conventions, one of which was always held in February in New Orleans.

My sisters and I and our spouses tagged along several times when my parents went to the convention in New Orleans, always a fun time for all of us and a good opportunity for us to see Dad “in action” with so many people he had known professionally and personally for years and in some cases for decades.

When Dad got sick in late October, he had just begun planning for the convention the following February.  He still had to line up guest speakers, get people registered, and coordinate with the hotel where the meetings were always held, the Royal Sonesta.  He had quite a long To-do list going, and this became one of the things about which he worried while he was sick.

After Dad was admitted to the hospital, while he was in the Neuro-ICU for several days awaiting surgery, he was on several different medicines, including a massive amount of steroids to address the swelling around the tumor in his brain and a type of pain medication that we later learned resulted more in increased anxiety and talkativeness than it did in pain relief for Dad.

My mom, my sisters, and I took shifts, often in pairs, to be with him 24 hours a day, and, as I’ve mentioned, we took careful notes about everything that went on.  One of the things we wrote down was what he said, especially when it related to things about which he was concerned. 

During those long, scary nights in the ICU, he talked endlessly, often about not feeling well, having a bad headache, and being very tired, all of which made sense given what we knew about what was going on with him medically.

Just a few hours before his surgery, he seemed to finally be getting some rest, but he kept talking in his sleep, saying things like “I’m bored,” “I’ve got to know when I can run again,” and “I don’t know why I have to be here.”  He also said some things that weren’t in context, like “I’m going to the oyster bar,” and “I’m going to eat a dozen.”  In between comments, he kept repeating a number that didn’t make sense to us, and, after hearing him say that same number over and over, I decided to use my cell phone to Google it.  It turned out that the number was the telephone number to the Royal Sonesta Hotel in New Orleans.  Apparently, he had New Orleans on The Mind.

Over the course of the next several weeks, we made lots of notes of things that Dad told us to write to complete the Convention-Planning To-Do List, and then we passed it on to someone else in a leadership position with the organization.  Dad still worried about it frequently, but we tried to reassure him each time he brought it up that it was being taken care of. 

After Dad went on ahead on January 5, Mom was asked to continue taking part in the convention and with the organization, if she felt up to it.  She had worked side-by-side with Dad for all those years in planning for and putting on the convention, and she definitely knew the ropes.  Because Dad was so concerned that the convention go smoothly, Mom felt that carrying on with that task was a good way to honor his wishes and to uphold his legacy in the professional realm.  She did get the job done, coordinating the planning for the event, and, with my husband and me, attending the convention to represent Dad as he would have expected us to do. 

I’m sure that Dad was watching over us during our time in New Orleans and that, although he might have missed being there, he was proud that we honored his commitment and that the show went on.