There Is Hope

As I write, I'm keeping half an ear on the live youtube presentation of our grandniece's college graduation. She attended the same agricultural college that I did, she in Design and I in Medieval Studies. Unlike her Precious Auntie, our niece is a good student.

I made up for it in grad school, but I was such a punk in undergrad and still feel the shame. Eventually I managed a 3.1 gpa, but this was despite lots of dropped classes, incompletes galore...I was too shy to ask professors to read my final term paper, so I just didn't do it and my major advisor had to assemble a team at the last minute. They did not like my paper. It took me another year to clean up the mess and get a diploma.

My recollection of graduation day was the humidity. They had watered the lawn the night before, and that is where people were assembled. The early heat that day turned the lawn into a steamy mess and I thought I would faint. Also, if you see photos of me and my dad, you can see that I have bitten my fingers to the quick.  What a mess I made.

On the way home from the graduation ceremony my parents and I swung by my professor's house to pick up the final paper in question. As I recall I got a C-. And I also recall that the ride back to where I lived was one truly miserable hour. I disappointed my parents. I disappointed myself. I don't recall that we ate a meal together to mark the occasion. They returned me to my apartment, which was an end-of-the-quarter catastrophe.

Over the next year I did eventually finish my degree, studying hard. I recall that I had to resubmit my final paper on Sverri Sigurdsen. And that I had to hire a grad student to help me with the computer. I'd drive the hour to school, let myself into my advisor's office, and work with the grad student to format my paper. First we'd dial up the mainframe, using the modem (calling the phone number and then placing the phone handset into the rubber holes that snugly fit around it). Then we'd call up the file and use nroff (a text editing program) to mark up the paper. When I later learned html, it made perfect sense to me because this was also how nroff worked, requiring that you turn on and then turn off formatting commands with text commands. It got so hot in the summer in that college town, and the portable holding my advisor's office would heat up mightily.

Still, we got it done. Then I had to write papers about Dietrich Bonhoffer for my religion class, and then finally I had five more units to come up with. For that I went to a community college and took American History, and met a musician who introduced me to another musician, and that led me to mrguy years later, and here we are.

Later, when I needed to go to grad school, I had purpose and drive and interest, and it was a whole different ball of wax. My family gladly attended my graduation, and when I finished, I finished. For this reason I say that there is hope.

A Final Note: I guess I should say that my mom was later proud of me (that's after my undergrad years and before the dementia, when she started calling me a fat sexpot!). She liked to tell everyone that I was her baby, and to tell people where I worked. And even though she and my dad didn't approve of my being a musician, she liked telling me every time she heard me on the radio or saw the guy I sang with on tv. And I was lucky enough to be profiled on my community college library program website, and to be invited back most years to talk about my journey from being a lapsed Medievalist / waitress / bass player to working at the forklift factory. When the Nasa astronaut kicked off the commencement address today by talking about the five principles his father shared with him that he lived by, those all resonated with me as the things I have shared when I have given my own commencement address. 

Happy Friends Brunch!

Sometimes you just gotta. You gotta make it happen. And when it does, it's lovely.

We had a great brunch this weekend, with my good friends from library school and our mentor. For the purpose of this post, we will call them Mentoria, Beauty and Snugglebunny.

It was so delightful. I went to Grocery Outlet (nee Canned Food Warehouse), which usually has a fine selection of breakfast items, and found only Mandalorian-themed waffles. They cracked me up, so that’s what we had. I made apricot compote, applesauce with allspice and strawberries, and glammed up the table, which I *really* enjoy doing. That last part where I find things in the garden to make arrangements with is my favorite part of the setup. Mrguy, as always, made the house shine.

It was so good to be with my people. Mentoria is just that. She was my cataloging teacher in my first semester of library tech school. She took me under her wing, helped guide the essays that got me into grad school, and told me about scholarships that I didn’t know about otherwise. Once in grad school, she was our professor in the class where I met Sleeping Beauty and Snugglebunny. They married a few years after we all met. Our cohort, in general, was really tight. They supported me in so many ways, as I, who had no experience in the field floundered about, but eventually found my way with a lot of their hand holding. I look back and realize how lucky we were. I have stayed in touch with Mentoria, who occasionally has come for lunch at work. Beauty and Snugs not so much, but I’m so glad to reconnect. 

I have missed them.

So during lunch we traded home made preserves and talked about families, and also shared stories of oddly familiar family situations with siblings. Who knew? And afterward I felt so darned relaxed. It’s a wonder what being with people who understand and accept you will do.

Our sweet boy cat was quite the entertainer, and he quickly claimed his spot after we cleared the table :)

One Pound of Bees

800 years ago, when leathery wings flapped in the sky, I was a Medieval Studies undergrad at an agricultural college. Why? That's what I was into. I didn't even really care where I went to college, except that I needed to get away from my parents and my boyfriend. So I went to the college that smelled like alfalfa (bonus) and contained the fewest people who were like me (not a bonus).

Once I got to the point in my studies where I actually had to write research papers, I combined things that I liked (say, entomology and history) with things that my advisor said I should write about (Norway. I went to college on a Norwegian scholarship). That really led me in some fun directions.

The college itself was at the age in which its 75 years of physical library collections going back to the late 1800s still fit in the library, and I spent many happy hours in the bowels of that library reviewing decades worth of beekeeping journals for a paper on beekeeping and bee-based remedies in the Middle Ages. So fun. I made oxymel (Medieval Persian honey-and-lemon cure-all which we are still using to this day). And I made something (can't recall) that required actual bees. Was it perhaps the poultice for baldness in the beard that called for ground up bees and the excrement of shrew mice? Either of these ingredients could be easily obtained on campus but I only pursued one of them.

I called up the Bee Biology department, and talked to the professor who had given the gripping lecture on bees earlier that quarter to my entomology class. He asked me a stumper of a question: "How many bees do you need?" "I dunno. A pound?" So on a very rainy day I rode my bike out to Bee Biology and met up with the apiologist. He went to his freezer and pulled out a baggie with one pound of frozen bees in it. I guess that's how you dispatch bees. Poor little fellas. I remember toasting the bees on a baking sheet in the oven at our dorm, then grinding them using a hammer and a Dr. Scholl's sandal (who has equipment when they're a sophomore?). We presented our papers at an end-of-quarter open house, and I recall wearing some of my Medieval reenactment clothes. And when I came home for the semester the bees came with me. It seemed wasteful and disrespectful not to do something with them.

Occasionally over the next few years my mom would complain about the bees that lived in a danish cookie tin in her chest freezer. She'd open the tin from time to time thinking that there was something delicious inside, only to find dead bees. At some point we decided the bees needed to go. 

Thank you, bees, for your service.