SUNY Fredonia

Soon after we were married, my husband and I took our theatre degrees and moved to New Hampshire.  My husband found work as a custom picture framer at Rowland's Art Studio, and I waitressed at the Millstone, sold furniture at Pompanoosuc Mills, sold clothing at Serendipity, and worked as a receptionist at Concord Electric. After a couple of years, we decided we wanted careers, rather than jobs, so we moved to Fredonia to get teaching degrees at the college here.  Things were going according to plan until our first child surprised us; I decided I didn’t want to teach high school English while I had a newborn at home, so I dropped the certification part of my plan but continued taking graduate classes in English.  While I was working toward my M.A., the English department hired me as a teaching assistant, and I remember walking around campus daydreaming what life would be like as a faculty member.  I even used to imagine what it would feel like to drop my son off at the Campus Community Children’s Center—I could almost feel his little hand in mine.  When I finished my degree, the English department hired me as a part-time adjunct instructor.  Early on, I taught at night, so I never ended up dropping off any of my kids at the campus day care center.  Later, after my kids were all in school, I switched to daytime teaching.  When my oldest child was in middle school, I used to imagine what it would be like to see him walking across campus as a college freshman.  The years rolled on, and as it turned out, none of my kids ended up spending their college years at Fredonia.  But my oldest is now a grad student here, and every once in a while I see him in the parking lot or walking into the building next to mine.  After twenty-four years as a faculty member and twenty-five years as a parent, I don’t do much daydreaming about the future anymore—maybe it’s because the next stage is too hard for me to imagine or maybe it’s because life has turned out to be better than my daydreams.  But I do know that as I walked away from Fenton Hall today, at the end of another academic year,  I was counting my blessings.

Paper Mom

      After tossing and turning half the night as the wind howled and the rain hurled itself against the windows and roof, I was already awake when my old clock radio clicked on suddenly and softly at 5:00 a.m.  I stumbled out of bed, reaching for my glasses, watch, and bathrobe.  When I tapped lightly on the door to Ben's room, I heard his muffled voice say, "I'm awake."

"Dress in layers, and wear your new hiking boots," I suggested. Trying to offer some encouraging words, I added, "It probably can't get much worse than this. If you can make it through this morning with the wind and the cold rain and the heavy Sunday papers, you'll be ready for anything."

A few minutes later, we were sitting side by side on the living room, putting the papers together, rolling them, and stuffing them into the wafer thin plastic bags. I was sipping a mug of tea, and Ben was huddled on the heater while we waited for the house to warm up. About a third of the way through the stack of papers, we both realized he could never fit all the thick Sunday papers into his paper bag at once. 

"How am I going to get all these over there?" Ben wondered aloud.

"I'll drive you," I answered immediately.

A few minutes passed as we continued to roll and stuff. Then Ben said, "Do you think you could stay with me today? I could leave my list in the car and just take a few papers at a time. I wouldn't ask you to normally, but I'm not sure how I can do this myself today."

"Sure, I'd just be sitting here waiting for you to get back anyway." 

Armed with flashlights, raincoats, and two extra bags of papers, we crept out into the dark, cold morning that still felt a lot like nighttime. We discovered the rain had recently been freezing rain, and the sidewalks were icy and slippery. 

As Ben made his way from house to house, picking up speed as the sky lightened and the rain turned to drizzle, I followed in the Subaru, supplying him with papers and house numbers. He was wearing a stocking hat, and because he hasn't worn a hat since he started middle school and began worrying about messing up his carefully gelled hair, he looked like a bigger version of a much younger self to me. I felt my emotions welling up as I watched him carefully navigating the slippery sidewalks and conscientiously putting the papers where his customers had asked him to put them. Every so often he'd look back at me and grin. 

So was it the way I would have chosen to begin my Sunday morning? No. But I realized in the midst of it, there was really nowhere else I wanted to be.  

It’s been eleven years since that cold, wet Sunday morning at the beginning of my son’s year-and-a half-long stint as a paper boy. I think of it every time I walk the streets that were part of his route. I can’t say I was sorry when he gave up his route at the end of the following summer. It was a relentless job that ended up involving our whole family at one point or another. But he learned a lot about working hard, being responsible, and managing money and people. And I learned a lot about what it means to support your kids as they make their way through life.

Tea, Toast, and Razor Scooters

Sixth grade was a tough year for my son—too much tedious homework and too little joy.  I told my dad about his struggle on the phone part way through the school year, and he suggested that we offer him a reward for making it through a tough situation.  Any time he had an overwhelming amount of homework on a school night, he was supposed to mark it on the calendar, and at the end of the school year, he could trade in all of his frustration for a reward: something big, my dad said, something worth working for.   We decided on a Razor scooter, something my son had been wanting that we couldn’t afford.  There was one catch: no complaining.  Many nights that year, my son stomped down the stairs, made an angry “x” on the calendar and stomped back up, but overall, life was more peaceful.  And now, instead of remembering a bad year in school, he remembers a clever, loving grandpa.  I needed some help solving that problem, but most of the other little troubles of childhood, I could fix with tea and toast or a colorful Band-aid or a night of pizza and videos.  One of the hard things about being the parent of adult children is that now when they are sad or sick or lonely or frustrated or heartbroken, I can’t fix things—the troubles are too big or the pain too deep.  I can pray for them and encourage them.  I can listen and offer advice.  But mostly they have to get better or figure things out on their own. I realized, though, when telling this story, that when my dad found a way to help my son through his sixth grade year, he ended up helping me, too.  So maybe my days of fixing things for my kids aren't completely over either.

Sunday Dinners

When I rolled out of bed on the Sunday mornings of my childhood, I’d find my mom in the kitchen browning the meat or chopping the vegetables or making the salad for Sunday Dinner. Before we left for Sunday school, she had Swiss steak or pork roast or beef-carrots-potatoes-and-onions in the oven or on the stove or in the electric skillet. As soon as we got home from church, she would put on an apron and whip into action, and by 1:00, we’d be sitting down to a big meal. When my own kids were young, we often went to my husband’s parents’ house for Sunday Dinner. At their house, dinner was the evening meal, a big dinner that my mother-in-law had spent much of her afternoon preparing. After my husband's dad died, we started having Sunday dinner here, but it wasn’t quite the event it had been when my mom or my mother-in-law was doing the cooking—it was just another dinner, not Sunday Dinner. Then for a little while when our kids were in high school, two of my friends and I took turns hosting Sunday Dinner for all three families, but when our kids started leaving for college, that came to an end. In the last year or so, a new Sunday Dinner tradition has been quietly taking root in our family. I think it started during football season when Ben, the child who lives nearby, would come over after church to watch football and do his laundry. For years while the kids were growing up, Friday night was pizza night, but when we stopped having kids at home, we stopped ordering pizza on Friday nights. Yet we still had a fondness for pizza, so on one of those Sunday afternoons, we decided to get pizza and bread sticks during the second game. Then a couple of weeks later, we remembered how good that pizza had tasted, and I remembered how nice it was to sit and watch football instead of making dinner, so we decided to order pizza again, this time with chicken wings. Now, more often than not, we eat pizza for Sunday Dinner. And I’ve decided to stop feeling guilty that I don’t have dinner in the oven when I leave for church or that I don’t spend all of Sunday afternoon cooking a big meal. I’ve finally realized that Sunday Dinner isn’t about the food, it’s about the memories—and for us, for now, pizza works just as well as pork roast.

Endings

I’ve been feeling unsettled ever since I woke up this morning. And it’s taken me a while to figure out why. Today was the last day of classes at the college where I teach.  I should be breathing a sigh of relief, right?  But I’m not, and it’s not just because I still have exam week and many, many hours of grading ahead of me.  Tonight my daughter is coming home from college.  I should be kicking up my heels—after all, I’ve been counting down the days.  So why am I feeling little pangs of sadness?  I spent the day teaching classes, going to meetings, talking to colleagues, and saying good-bye to students.  Then I rushed home with the van so my husband could go meet my daughter at her dorm, pack up her things, and bring her home.  He’s on his way now, and I’m sitting here trying to make sense of my feelings.  This is what I’ve come up with so far:  I don’t like the ends of things.  I’m ready for a break from the breathless pace of the academic year, but I’m going to miss the students I’ve had for several semesters and may never see again.  I can’t wait for my daughter to get home, but it makes me sad to think of her moving out of the cute little dorm room she’s lived in for the past two years—it feels like the beginning of the end of her college years.  The end of the academic year also means the retirement of wonderful professors who have devoted their professional lives to sharing what they know with thousands of students over decades of teaching: my daughter’s favorite math professor, an adjunct buddy of mine who started just one semester before I did, and a dear mentor who was first my professor and then my colleague.  So yes, endings are tough for me.  They leave me feeling a little unsettled, a little nostalgic, and a little sad over the loss of what was.  But, as we know, endings often make way for beginnings—new experiences, new possibilities, new dreams.  So I will try to look back with fondness and look ahead with hope.  As for right now, I think I’ll kick up my heels a little—my girl is on her way home!

Grocery Store Blues

Odd as it might sound, one of the places that made me feel sad when each of my kids first left for college was the grocery store.  I suppose it was the connection between how much time I had spent over the years feeding each of those full-grown kids and the realization that now I wouldn’t be doing it anymore that led to the bewildering sense of loss I felt as I pushed my cart through the store.  And it didn’t get any easier with experience—each child’s absence brought on the same rush of emotion.  I would see the Kaiser rolls in the bakery that my oldest child took in his lunch for years, or I’d push my cart past the Gatorade display and think of the gallons I’d bought for my middle child, or I’d see the blue boxes of Oatmeal Squares that I’d bought every week for years for my youngest, and before I knew it, my eyes would be misting up.  This went on aisle after aisle, food after food: bags of Empire apples, Goldfish crackers, Chips Deluxe Rainbow cookies, s’more granola bars, and key lime yogurt.  And then I’d start remembering all the years of going grocery shopping with my kids, especially the younger two who used to munch their way through the aisles, starting with pizza from the Carry-Out Café and ending with donuts from the bakery. So by the time I got to the dairy aisle, I'd be sniffling a little and even wiping away a tear or two, as kindly fellow shoppers gave me curious but sympathetic looks.  Eventually, I got used to a shorter grocery list, and now I can get through a shopping trip with nary a tear!  But I have to admit, there’s a bounce in my step when one of my kids is coming home, and I get to stock up on some of their favorite foods again.

The Orange Bowl

As I was walking today, I paused to look at the Orange Bowl.  To an outsider, it might look like a run-down, maybe even abandoned, football field, but to those who live here, the Orange Bowl is the proud home of the Fredonia Hillbillies.  It sits at the bottom of the hill that leads up to what was, until recently, Wheelock Primary School.  But before Wheelock Primary School, it was the site of Fredonia High School.  Many years ago, the team name was Hilltoppers, or so we've been told, presumably because the school was on the top of West Main Hill.  When and why we became the Hillbillies, I do not know, but we wear our black and orange with pride!   The high school is now on the other side of town, but the Orange Bowl remains.  Although we don’t have a fancy synthetic turf field surrounded by a new all-purpose track, and although bleachers and press box are old and rickety, and although when it rains (which is often), the incline gets so muddy, the superintendent has been known to stand guard and give people a hand up, I love the Orange Bowl.  As I stood by the fence, my mind went back to when our family was young and we lived in a house right near the field.  On game nights, we used to walk down the street and spend a few minutes watching the Hillbillies in action from the fence while the kids ran up and down the hill.  A few years later when the kids were older, we started going to the home games; we had moved by then, but our house was still within walking distance, so on crisp fall nights, we walked through town to the Orange Bowl.  For years our kids were in the band and in the stands with their friends, and we were there, too, cheering the Hillbillies on.  But then the last Wendell graduated from Fredonia High School.  We’ve been back a time or two since, but I know fewer and fewer of the players on the field and the parents in the stands.  So I’m back to watching from the fence for a few minutes on Friday nights during football season.  And on this misty Tuesday afternoon in May when the only activity on the field is a couple of grazing groundhogs, I find myself hoping the Orange Bowl stays exactly the way it is for another generation of Hillbillies.