Categories
Places of My Life

Why do I want to live in a city that has a full time Historic Preservation Coordinator?

This is where I lived most happily for the most part for most of the last ten years.

Have you ever heard of the “Secret City” Oak Ridge, Tennessee?  I had barely heard of it myself before I pursued a job opening there after my first very unhappy period of retirement (2006-11).  Most of what I knew about it came from what I could read on the highway signs along Interstate 40 which may have included “passing” mentions of the town’s nickname and the Manhattan Project.  I may have looked it up in Wikipedia before the job interview; it’s introduced there thusly:

Oak Ridge was established in 1942 as a production site for the Manhattan Project—the massive American, British, and Canadian operation that developed the atomic bomb. Being the site of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Y-12 National Security Complex, scientific and technological development still plays a crucial role in the city’s economy and culture in general.

That last sentence was what brought me there for a job but what I learned beyond that about this place, succinctly summarized in the first sentence, is a big part of why I wanted to stay and why I want to live in a city that has a Historic Preservation Coordinator or, as in the case of Oak Ridge, an official city historian.

Oak Ridge was instrumental in the United States win over Nazi Germany but when the U.S. government purchased nearly 90 square miles of mostly rural farmland, narrow valleys separated by ridged and rolling hills, in 1942, it did not appear on any map even though, by the end of WWII, it was the fifth-largest city in the state! In addition to being the new headquarters of the Manhattan Project after it was moved from its point of origin in the original Manhattan (New York City), it became the place of employment of nearly 100,000 people and the place of residence of 75,000 people, including Project employees and their families.

Oak Ridge today carries on the legacy of those fateful years so long ago. Several highly-secured nuclear research facilities still exist in the community and the city is home to a wealth of historic sites that tell the remarkable story of the Manhattan Project and the dawn of the atomic age.

Oak Ridge is now one of three sites of the recently established Manhattan Project National Historical Park.  I fortuitously retired right before the park officially opened and unfortunately had to leave before many of the real historic sites, along with new museums to augment them, would officially reopen. 

Manhattan Project National Historical Park

Categories
Family

The Road to Kalamazoo for Daughter #2

Daughter #2, the youngest at age 30 and previously most settled by virtue of how long it took her to get accepted to medical school, will start her potentially more winding road than her sister’s upon completion of her program in 2023.  While #1 was Mini-Me during her youth, #2 was The Devil Child and sometimes also The Velcro Child during the same period of her development. 

From the time of her birth at 2:13 AM her personality and behaviors were hard for me to deal with.  The child refused to fall asleep at night and didn’t even nap in the swing or the car like most other babies.  I distinctly remember the vacation from hell when we left the hotel at 2:30 AM because when she saw me in the same room she thought it was party time!  On another trip she finally fell asleep in the car five minutes before we reached our destination but at least there were other people in the car to keep her entertained. On the one occasion where she fell asleep in the swing we had to take a picture as proof that it had really happened!  Velcro incident, though probably not unique to us, was when she clung to me when I tried to leave her at school and later when I tried to leave her at home with a nanny so I could go to work.

I guess it was fortunate for all of us that when we moved across country it was to a lower cost state so I could afford to stay home and continue to entertain her there while being even more at her beck and call.  This included ferrying her to her favorite fast-food drive-thru restaurants, my mandatory presence watching her favorite reality TV shows and advising her daily on what to do with nearly every minute of her free time, including what to eat during her study breaks!  The ties finally began to loosen when she learned to drive.  I found an hourly part time job just to get out of the house and away from the Devil/Velcro Child.  Our relationship finally and mercifully and surprisingly improved during her college application process. We took short trips to check out schools.  She requested only minimal advice from me on her essays.

The Velcro bonds loosened a bit when she went back across country for college. I helped furnish her dorm room to her exquisitely limited though broadly vague specifications.  The main exercise of her long-distance diabolical cling remained in our circular discussions around a new set of decisions she wanted me to help her make. By the time she graduated I think she really knew what she was going to do most of the time but maybe Satan just wanted to show that he hadn’t released control of our relationship quite yet!

The official last straw came when in her devilish indecisiveness she tried to talk us into letting her stay in college a year longer than necessary because she couldn’t decide which subject she wanted to get her degree in and then tried to blame me for telling her to start with an undeclared major!  As it was, she got an additional semester and degrees in two subjects.  That’s how long she kept me confused!

Devil Child’s degrees in Psychology and Neuroscience basically were preparatory for med school, at least in her mind.  We told both our kids a couple of things re their educations: (1) We would only pay for Bachelor’s degrees and for anything beyond that they were on their own and (2) they should get a job when they completed those degrees before deciding if they wanted or needed additional schooling to continue in what they thought would be their chosen professions.  The latter advice grew out of our painful and unhappy experiences after finding ourselves stuck in the jobs we’d trained for but didn’t really like doing!

So, wishing I could fast forward from college graduation to medical school acceptance, here’s the way it slowly went down.  After finding herself for a very short time in a job where she wasn’t happy, #2 made a lot of progress towards deciding she might really want to be a doctor.  She worked for a dermatologist to many stars she couldn’t tell me about in an office on Rodeo Drive, studied a lot for the MCAT, made some new friends and submitted her first applications for med school.  The result of that last effort was a series of painful rejections but, bless her heart, she didn’t give up and went back to work (for a different dermatologist who treated some of her grandma’s – my mom’s – friends), made some better friends, got her first boyfriend and some coaching to improve her interview performance. 

She also decided that she didn’t really have to go to a top tier medical school, which is probably why the second round of applications was moderately more successful than the first.  She had more interviews but only one acceptance:  The Homer Stryker School of Medicine of Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo!

  • She doesn’t look like the devil, does she?
  • My daughers really do like each other!

Categories
Family

The Road to Kalamazoo for Daughter #1

Daughter #1, the eldest at age 31 is currently the most settled by virtue of (1) her pre-pandemic marriage to longtime boyfriend (though shorter time fiancé) in October 2019 and (2) their purchase this year of a home in Portage, a suburb and “bedroom community” on the south side of Kalamazoo.  Prior to this recent full attainment of adulthood, I (and some other family members) thought of her as a Mini-Me.  I guess our main commonalties were our shared love of and interest in (American) history, the close relationship enjoyed and/or endured with our mothers, and our general straight arrow Girl Scout based behaviors and attitudes displayed and developed over our formative adolescent years.

She met her hubby, whom I have affectionally referred to as The Evil Genius since about halfway into their relationship of approximately 10 years now.  They were both digging up stuff, in an archaeological manner, in St. Louis. His parents and her parents both were living in East Tennessee at the time – his in Chattanooga, hers in Oak Ridge. This was a fortuitous coincidence, especially in light of the many interim stops they had separately and together before their current happy incarnation as Michiganders. I bestowed the title of Evil Genius on my now son-in-law (SIL) based mostly and initially on his appearance. 

Mini-Me
The Happy Couple joined in the Smoky Mountains
Evil Genius

As the years passed after he met my wonderful daughter, SIL evolved into a bit of an evil genius intellectually, too.  To paraphrase part of his mom’s wedding toast, his parents wondered what he would do with his anthropology degree, which again was coincidentally the same degree Mini-Me obtained in nearly the same year.  (Another amazing coincidence between them was that both had been uprooted from their childhood homes as high school juniors.)

After their “meet cute” on a dirty dig site, their career interests started to diverge.  He got a second bachelor’s degree in Psychology from a private university in Peoria, IL, while she got her Master’s Degree in Archaeology from a public university near where they lived in Bloomington/Normal IL. Like her mom, Mini-Me settled on her career choice sooner rather than later.

After she got her second degree, he decided to pursue his third degree, this time in Human Factors (sounds to me like a good field of study for a budding Evil Genius) at a public research university in Dayton, OH.  Over the three years he was working on getting his Masters (which he got for free through acceptance in a PhD program, a degree level neither of them wanted to achieve), they put a lot of miles on their vehicles traveling back and forth between Dayton and Mini-Me’s professional though short-term and/or itinerant positions in Virginia and back again in St. Louis, among other places.

They finally ended up, together, in Kalamazoo in 2019. He had a summer internship there the year before that took longer than it should have to turn into a real permanent job.  Both families, and this was post-engagement, were overjoyed! Now the Evil Genius analyzes and evaluates competitor products, usability studies and anthropometric data to provide dimension guidelines to the cross-functional industrial design and studio engineering teams. Sounds evil to me!

Mini-Me, was happy, too, though it was tempered a bit since it then became incumbent upon her to find an equally good and equally permanent job there. That took a while though not too long a while, in the grand scheme of things and certainly not within the timeline of their relationship.  Just prior to the wedding, she was hired under contract to work in the archives and records department of Kellogg’s of Battle Creek. 

They told her at the time she’d been hired because she already had some management experience and that she also had the requisite education and experience to replace their company archivist when she retired.  The latter was really the carrot by which she was drawn in and the icing on the cake (do you love my food metaphors?) was that the archivist did actually retire!

This is how I learned the location

This came from my daughter. One of her duties is to digitize all of this historic moving media, even in foreign languages. I’m hoping she can help me do the same with my dad’s old home movies!

Categories
Family

What’s in Michigan?

The answer is pretty simple and straightforward.  That’s where my kids are!

Not only are they in the same state but, by some weird wonderful kismet type of thing, they are both in the same city!  Details on how they each got there to follow.

Not only that, but they each individually came up with the same brilliant idea that I should move to where they both are, at least for the time being, in Kalamazoo.

How did my two very different adult daughters both end up in the same place at the same time just when I needed both of them the most?

By two very different and almost equally long and winding roads, of course!  I will spare you some of the nitty gritty details of all the stops and momentous events along the way and just hit the high points for each.

Categories
Family

What happened to Mom? Where’d she go?

I may be leaving behind someday soon this standard concrete suburb close to a beach and a big city and trading it in for the smallest of the four cities in Michigan that employs a full time Historic Preservation Coordinator!

Of course, what happened to Mom and why I would think about moving to Michigan are each long stories of their very own.  Suffice to say I returned to the uneventful scene of my youth just in time to become deeply mired in the extremely eventful demise of my mother!

I’ll try to spare you all the excruciatingly painful and emotionally confusing details of what went down with Mom and how she went down, nearly to the bottom, pretty darn quickly at the almost end.  And, believe it or not, Covid had almost nothing to do with it!  And, even more incredibly, she’s still there now, six months later!

Mom had a stroke and a fall (not sure which came first) in early June. This was followed by a week-long hospital stay until they kicked her over to a Transitional Care Unit (TCU) for rehab where she was supposed to receive daily therapy. After a week there, during which no progress was anywhere near possible, I had to made the difficult decision, following the hospitalist’s earlier recommendation, to consign my mother to hospice care.  The easiest and safest way to accomplish this, given the unknowns about if or when she would or even could come home, was to move her to a facility where she could be properly cared for.  She’s been there ever since, probably continuing to go slowly downhill though no one, including her caregivers at a nearby board and are home and hospice team, can really tell for sure. Her periods of wakefulness now are less sporadic than they were at the beginning but it seems that whoever visits can count on her to consistently not seem to know where she is and most of the time to talk about people who are long dead.

Additional details and more of the story of Mom and me will most likely be the subject of later posts.  I see a lot of Facebook posts that advise us to appreciate our mothers while they’re still here.  It seems, however, they don’t consider a situation like mine – my mother is sort of still here and at the same time sort of gone.  So, besides trying (but not too hard now) to figure out why my marriage ended I could also try to figure what I want my relationship with Mom (and maybe later my ex) to look now.

Categories
divorce

My Divorce Saga has FINALLY ended

Unofficial timeline November 2019-November 2021

Official timeline June 2020 (he filed)-September 2021 (court approved)

I might need to update my About page again!

It started, from my perspective when my now finally ex-husband, without warning, hired a lawyer.  From his perspective it had started from a (false – as many of his were) assumption that I had decided to be the “first to file” after a pre-Thanksgiving get-together with my GFFs (Girlfriends Forever aka “The Bubbles” from how they finagled to get together during the pandemic) the year before. Apparently, he got tired of waiting for me to proceed with what he’d really wanted to do! 

Then, to add insult to injury, the coward called me, expecting only to leave a message informing me of his dastardly deed.  Too bad for him, I answered the phone thus forcing him to stammer and hem and haw through his weak and mainly false assessment of my state of mind and confess to starting down the path to his third divorce!  The conversation ended with him meekly informing me that the paperwork, which he expected I would immediately accept with no questions asked, was on its way by snail mail.

The Idiot!  After thirty years, he should have known better than to expect me to go quietly, on his terms and without seeking advice and guidance from someone who was better prepared than I to protect my interests.  That turned out to be, not surprisingly, a lady lawyer.  And he couldn’t understand why it was taking me so long to just fold up my tent, accept his offer, and go home to my mother, where I, conveniently for him, happened to already be. 

Then … COVID. Saga may be continued in a later post if I’m still having trouble processing it or if I need to vent or if I decide to continue to stalk him or … ?

Categories
Update

My starting over is starting over again

A lot has happened in the last four months since I told you about myself and why I’m starting over.

About (Created May 2021, Updated September 2021) – Starting Over (hbsuefred.com)

I’m still getting a divorce but the end is now in sight!

I’m still living in the same house where I grew up but now I’m living here alone!

I may be leaving behind someday soon this standard concrete suburb close to a beach and a big city and trading it in for the smallest of the four cities in Michigan that employ a full time Historic Preservation Coordinator!

These are just the placeholder headlines with details to follow.  Have I piqued anyone’s interest here?

Categories
Uncategorized

Saying Hello Part 2

Because I forgot half the assignment the first time

I forgot to include the part where I look to the future of my blog, so here’s that part.

Why am I blogging publicly instead of keeping a diary?

The easy answer to that question is that I don’t give a darn who might happen to read my “innermost” thoughts here. Anyone who writes a blog is really writing for anybody other than themselves. Come to think of it, isn’t blogging the antithesis of the traditional purpose of a personal diary? 

There’s also a chance I may attempt to publish parts of my “personal story” in some other format. This will include the posts tagged Places of My Life from my first published blog plus some edited and condensed versions of vignettes I drafted in my memoir classes.

What topics will I write about?

I will continue to write my personal life stories.  I hope to split them into two or three or more sections or pages based on what I see as the distinctive phases of my life so far. 

At my current age of 65, I can see a defining line at the denouement of my youthful experiences with my graduation from college. 

Young adulthood will encompass exploration of the big wide wonderful and scary real world when I went out and lived my own life and, to quote a movie that was popular at the time, Urban Cowboy, “all that that entails.”

I’d say I had to become a responsible adult when I found myself “knocked up” at the then very geriatric (for that sort of thing) age of nearly thirty-five.  This is probably the longest uninterrupted and least interesting or enlightening part of my life’s journey.  It might also be the most rewarding from my current perspective since it yielded at its conclusion my two daughters.

Who do I want my blog to connect with?

This is the modern social media version of the perennial authors’ question: Who is my intended audience? I want this blog, and maybe my possible book, to appeal to non-traditional non-stereotypical women of all ages.  I describe these ladies as superwomen who are able to at least handle if not master the dual practices of having a career (or at least a job) and having a family (or at least a personal life), usually at the same time. 

Coincidentally (or maybe not so much since we are at the beginning of a new year), I just finished, this week, a free online 7-Day Book Writing Challenge.  That course, and this exercise, both reference a manifesto:  a statement of what one believes, written to help others or oneself. 

Wikipedia expands the description of a manifesto by adding that it usually accepts a previously published opinion or promotes a new idea with prescriptive notions for carrying out changes the author believes should be made. It almost feels like this definition was written with my skillset in mind.  I don’t have many totally original ideas but believe strongly in expounding on and supplementing the ideas of experiences of others with my own thoughts, opinions and IRL events.

What do I hope to accomplish if I successfully blog throughout the next year?

I want a bunch of people to really like me!  But really, I want to like myself as the woman I am now.  Outside of my blog, which will be a look back at things that happened and therefore cannot be changed, I hope to confirm to myself and other women that we do not need men to define us, for good or ill. 

I will share episodes – real things that happened to me, as I remember them with as much specificity as I can muster on my thoughts and emotions at the time.  The time and place and context in which they happened are pivotal, IMO, to understanding my behaviors and reactions then which may or may not be realistic or relatable to the working woman of today.

In return I hope to receive feedback from especially Western women who may have had similar experiences, in the same time period or not, or may have learned from themselves or myself or others, how to thrive as their own authentic selves wherever they may be and at whatever point – past, present, or future – they occupy in the arc of modern life in the 21st century. 

Are we in general and as individuals moving forward or backwards? Or is the net result of movements in both directions just a wash for today’s women, as it may be for me right now?

How many times can I or will I have to or be able to start over to get there, the place I think I want to be now or very soon as I draw closer to the end of my life?  Will this continue to be an open-ended and uncomfortable pursuit, like Scarlett O’Hara’s dream on an overfull angry stomach. Will I ever get there?  Did she?

There may never be a definitive answer but I hope to continue the search, exchanging ideas, thoughts, opinions, memories and wishes along the way.

Categories
Uncategorized

Saying Hello Again – My New First Post

Since I have somehow opened a new blog in just the third (of 3) sections of the very first module of Blogging for Beginners – WordPress.com Courses (wpcourses.com) it seems somehow appropriate that I should, right here on said blog titled Starting Over From Scratch, draft a new introduction for myself and possibly for this new blog as well.

The lesson tells me that performing this exercise will help me focus my own ideas for my blog.  I feel, based on my thoughts so far, along with what I had on my old blog, it may really do that.  This means there may actually be hope for me to become a real live, full-fledged, semiprofessional blogger yet!

Revisiting what I said when I first started blogging

I started my blog “My Self Evident Truths…valid arguments against may be considered” https://hbsuefred.wordpress.com/  to communicate with the world outside of my own successively shrinking (in local metropolitan area size and population) localities.  I started that blog then to communicate with the other parts of world, or so I thought at the time.

Revisiting what I’ve accomplished since I first started blogging

So much and hardly anything at all!  Really, though, I do take some personal pride in many of the things I at least started during this time.  I think much of that is attributable to where I was living for most of it.

Oak Ridge, TN (2014 – 2019

  • ORICL (Oak Ridge Institute for Continued Learning)
    • A perfect blend of those who love to learn with those who love to teach
    • I spent most of my time here
      • History Curriculum Chair
      • Trip Planning Committee
      • Memoir Writing and Genealogy Classes
  • Explore Oak Ridge – Convention and Visitors Bureau
  • ADFAC (Aid To Distressed Families of Appalachian Counties
    • Affordable Housing Committee
    • Development Committee
  • Board of Housing and Code Appeals
  • Community Mediation Services
  • Tennessee Promise Mentor
  • Heritage and Preservation Association Museum Docent
  • American Museum of Science and Energy
  • City Council Candidate
  • Anderson County Democratic Party
  • League of Women Voters Recording Secretary
  • Friends of ORNL (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)
  • Friends of Oak Ridge Public Library Volunteer
  • Four or five book clubs

What I’d like to do – So much and hardly anything at all (again)!

  1. Finalize my divorce
  2. Keep up with books for discussions in four or five book clubs
  3. Maintain connections with friends old and new, near and far
  4. Keep my mom safe and sound.
    1. Try not to kill her for however long we cohabit my childhood home
  5. Continue writing and trying to make it look at least semiprofessional
    1. New Blog
    1. Old Memoir
Categories
Places of My Life

Places of My Life

"The Hard Way Every Time"
By Jim Croce - 1973 Album "I've Got A Name"
 Yeah, I've had my share of broken dreams
 And more than a couple of falls
 And in chasin' what I thought were moonbeams
 I have run into a couple of walls
 But in looking back at the places I've been
 The changes that I've left behind
 I just look at myself to find
 I've learned the hard way every time
 'Cause I've had my share of good intentions
 And I've made my share of mistakes
 And I've learned at times it's best to bend
 'Cause if you don't well those are the breaks
 Should have listened to all the things I was told
 But I was young and too proud at the time
 Now I look at myself to find
 I learn the hard way ev'ry time
 But in looking back at the lessons I've learned
 And the mountains I wanted to climb
 I just look at myself to find
 I've learned the hard way ev'ry time

Over the last few years I have written some vignettes for a series of memoir classes. Out of the process of figuring out what I want to leave behind for my daughters to learn about me, why I am the way I am today and why I raised them the way I did, I discovered that many of my memories are tied to the places in which they occurred, be they real or imagined.

By The Beatles – 1965 Album “Rubber Soul”