Although she was only my boss for a couple of months, thanks to an unexpected move back to Ohio, I think I learned more from her about managing people than I have from all of my previous working experiences combined. She was the best boss. She gave you the tools to succeed, and then the freedom to shape your own work experience. She did not micro-manage me, or check and double check everything I ever did. Instead, her door was always open, beckoning me and encouraging me to come talk if I wanted to. She was lavish with praise, and careful with constructive criticism. She asked after each every special occasion I might have had—just a quick, “How was your trip this weekend?” or “did you enjoy the new restaurant you tried last night?” She epitomized a good manager for me, and I hope to remember the example she provided me wherever I go in life.
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Well, it’s sort of an event, right? A work in progress? Anyway, marriage has been maybe the biggest influence shaping and modifying the human being that I am, besides maybe my childhood and higher education. I have discovered so many things about marriage, but the most important is that it is as much work as it is joy. For every moment of laughter, bliss, happiness, and shared camaraderie, there are moments of hard work, as in full-time job kind of labor. I never realized that marriage would have to be sewn and cultivated like a garden with each passing day. I don’t necessarily mean that I have to look at my husband and declare my undying love for him each day, but I have been surprised to learn that the bond itself must be tended to, and nurtured with each passing day, week and month in order to flourish and grow.
Marriage has certainly shaped me in numerous ways: it has conditioned me to be a less selfish person. It has made my childhood and my parents’ own marriage revisit me in ways both pleasant and unpleasant. Marriage has driven me to finish college, to lounge on the beaches of the French Riveria and to eat sushi. It’s exposed both my most beautiful and my ugliest self. It’s taught me that love is wearing sweatpants and watching a marathon of The Godfather while splitting a bottle of wine. It’s taught me that the sight of a man wandering around my bedroom in the morning in his military dress uniform is the most beautiful (and sexiest) thing I’ve ever seen. I’ve learned that marriage is fraught with its own perils and disappointments as well, which are my own private ghosts to wrestle with, but nonetheless teach me about the human being that I am and hope to become.
Marriage is the greatest work in progress of my lifetime. It causes me to reinvent myself every so often, and I like this. I find it a good thing.
She was an English professor at Otterbein college, and my first professor at that. I had been on a five year hiatus from school when I finally mustered every shred of courage I had and went into a classroom for the first time again. I’m not sure why I was so fearful, but the thought of a college classroom was terrifying and all-consuming. Dr. Bowman didn’t help, initially. She was a very imposing figure: the waif-thin, chain-smoking, moody and dark type. I was immediately intimidated by her intellectual prowess. She talked over my head. She called on students randomly, but seemed to have radar for specifically for those who hadn’t completed assignments or tried to blend into the wallpaper (me). But, I was always surprised by the fact that she seemed gentle with me. I think she sensed my abject terror. Whenever I answered one of her questions, she lavished modest praise and continued to probe better answers out of me. She heaped praise on my writing, while subtly correcting my incredibly rusty MLA standards. She required various one-on-one conferences throughout the quarter, and always encouraged me in my musings and reflections on whatever we happened to be reading at the time. When I survived my first quarter back at school with a bit more confidence and the sure knowledge that I would continue on at Otterbein and finish my degree, I had her to thank for my blossoming confidence. I remember when I got my final portfolio back on the last of class, anxiously flipping to the last page to read her comments. She gave me an “A” on the project and wrote me that I had a great amount of talent, and she thought that I would be an asset to the English program at Otterbein. I actually felt like I could cry. It was such a tough process for me to go back to school for reasons I can and can’t explain, and Dr. Bowman honestly made me believe in myself for the first time in a long time. I went on to take subsequent classes with her, and she ultimately directed my graduating thesis (which I got published in honor of her this year!) before she passed away from lung cancer last year. She had such a big impact on my life, and I was never able to tell her how much she meant to me before she died.
I have always been familiar with the Ronald McDonald house, but until recently I never knew what a wonderful resource it is for families in crisis. When we went home to Dayton a few weeks ago for Alexa’s second surgery, we desperately wanted somewhere to stay within walking distance of the hospital. Our first trip to Ohio for Alexa’s first surgery had been exhausting, because we were staying about 20 minutes away, and getting very little sleep staying so late at the hospital and coming back so early every day. One of our friends suggested the Ronald McDonald house to us for our second trip home. What a fantastic experience it was in every possible way. It was right across the street from the hospital, and it was free to us since we had a child staying at the hospital. It wasn’t just the convenience and the right price that made the RM house an amazing place, it was the people. They were incrediby kind to us in a time of confusion and devastation, and ready to help us with anything. When our families came into town, the RM staff gave them room keys to our room so they could stop in and rest or nap the baby. They had a full serve kitchen brimming with food that was ours for the taking. They had local volunteers come in and cook huge , hot meals every night for the guests. There was a fully stocked library and game room and playground. One afternoon, I was in a panic because I needed to wash our dwindling supply of clothes, and although I knew there was a laundry room on the premesis, I had no energy to drive out and buy detergent. A survey of the laundry room revealed there was a bountiful supply of detergents, bleach, dryer sheets…pretty much everything for a successful laundry transaction. Our room was also stocked with little extras for a family under stress—the usual toiletries plus toothpaste, toothbrushes and floss. It was a paradise of comforts away from home. I can’t even stress the difference those kindnesses made during a time I couldn’t keep myself together, let alone remember where I put my toothpaste in my carryon or worry about driving somewhere to feed myself. It made all the difference in the world to us, and I will NEVER forget it.
I’m obviously thinking a lot about her today because she had her first baby this morning. When I think about Jackie, it’s like thinking about another part of myself. I’ve known her for so long, that she blends into most of my own memories like a part of my subconscious. When I played second base in high school, she was there. When I toilet papered her house the first year I met her, she was there, laughing her ass off when I got pulled over by the cops in front of her house. When I got drunk for my 21st birthday, she took pictures. When I got my heart broken for the first time, she was at my apartment, banging on the door demanding that I get up and get dressed—it was time to move on. When I met my future husband while on vacation in Hawaii, she was the only person who took me seriously (among the many raised eyebrows) when I said, “I’m going to marry this guy!” She threw my bridal shower. She hosted my going away party when I married into the military. She’s scraped me off of the floor (literally and figuratively) more times than I care to remember. She is a person in whom I can confide things joyful, humiliating, humbling, hilarious, devastating…we have the secret language of people who have known eachother for more than half of their lives: we communicate volumes through a laugh, a sigh, a gasp, a snicker. Many times, nothing more is necessary.
Having a friend like Jackie feels like coming home: acceptance and love. My life would be so much less fulfilling and complete without her.
I came to this wonderful little non-profit, http://www.kfcb.org, through mere chance. A few years ago, after five years of working in an automotive plant, I was laid off. Because I was under union contract at the time, DaimlerChrysler was required to still pay me a certain percentage of my regular salary (in our contract, they had agreed to not lay off any workers without penalty). Since they technically still employed me, and I could not go work anywhere else since I was under contract with them, DaimlerChrysler approached me and made a unique offer: for the life of the layoff (which was going to be lengthy), I could choose any non-profit organization to work for, and I would be paid my contractual salary from Chrysler. I has incredibly excited, as I never imagined a)I would escape so easily from the factory setting, and b) that I would retain most of my salary and gain the opportunity to do meaningful work.
I browsed a local non-profit website the same day and made a fateful first phonecall to Keep Franklin County Beautiful. I met with them the same day, and contracted to work with them full time for the duration of my layoff. What a fateful decision! Working for a non-profit was a life-changing experience: it was the first time I had done work that felt more like a gift each day, rather than going to work. There were only three of us in the small office, and over the year that I worked there, we administered dozens of vital community programs on a tiny budget and a lot of creativity. We hosted community wide cleanups, created and staffed a “reuse” store where businesses could donate materials they no longer had use for (promotional misprints, office supplies, paper, art supplies) and we would then allow teachers and schools to come in and “shop” the items (in that first year, we diverted 250 tons of “trash” from the landfill through this program—all while turning it around and giving it to teachers!). We did outreach work, traveling to schools and businesses to teach environmental education. We implemented an ink cartridge recycling program in Columbus, Ohio. There were so many programs like this I lost count.
I loved every minute that I worked for KFCB, and it initiated a life change for me: after working there, I knew that I wanted to work in public service. Everything I’ve done since then has been geared toward that goal, and I have KFCB to thank. It also sparked the beginning of my passion for environmental awareness. Seeing the planet as a shared resource led me to treat it a lot differently. Knowing the resources that exist for recycling, reuse and litter prevention gave me no excuse not to change my lifestyle.
All from a twist in fate! It really leads me to believe that you can never know where life will lead you…The best things can emerge from the most unusual and unexpected circumstances.
For better or worse, my Dad is there, impacting all areas of my life, whether 20 years ago or today. When I think of the Dad of my childhood, he is the man who taught me about work ethic by getting up every day at 4 am to work a 12 hour day. He’s the man who threw me my first ball, and later coached my high school summer league, putting up with gaggles of hormonal, squabbling teenagers. He’s the man who navigated my adolescent battles with my mother, remaining my friend when I felt like she hated me. He was the one that gave us the means to take two vacations a year, and he was the guy that packed our little pop up camper and drove 24 hours at a time on our trips to reach destinations all over the east coast, midwest and south. He was the man that cooked fried potatoes on Sunday mornings, and took us to McDonald’s on any other night he was assigned cooking duties. He was the only parent who escorted me onto the field for “parents night” when I was a high school cheerleader, as my Mom had cruelly backed out after we suffered our usual mother-daughter fight earlier in the day. He was my Valentine when I was a little girl, leaving each of us three kids chocolates or a little toy on every Valentine’s day before he left for work. He used to call me pumpkin every once in a while. He was a good Dad.
When the rosy glow of childhood wears off, and you learn to know your parents as human beings, things can become much more complex. My view of my Dad has certainly taken on more realistic proportions over the years. It’s only in adulthood that I know that my Dad battled an alcohol problem his entire young adulthood until I was a baby (the second of three). I now know that he also used to hit my Mom in an occasional drunk rampage. I know that he cheated on my Mom multiple times while I was young. I know he had a penchant for starting credit card accounts without telling my Mom, and running up thousands of dollars in charges before he would inevitably get busted by my Mom, who would then have to dig the family out of financial crisis. I know he discouraged my Mom from going back to school, because he was insecure she might leave him if she developed interests outside of our house. I know my Dad often let himself be the good cop to us kids, at the expense of our relationships with our mother.
I know that seven years ago, after a long and bitter divorce with my mother, he became addicted to oxycontin after a painful hip surgery. This was in the days when doctors prescribed oxycontin and oxycodone indiscriminately, before it became a quite popular street drug and gave rise to cautious prescription. No matter now, but his addiction has cost us our relationship. He has disintegrated into a barely functioning human being, and one who functions on that level of addiction cannot function in the higher offices of father, friend or mentor.
Yes, my father is a complicated human being. I am sometimes angry with him, mostly saddened. And it impacts me in ways large and small. I think about him nearly every day. I think about the smell of fried potatoes and the feel of his arm looped through mine, escorting me across the football field. And I think about the birthdays that go by each year now that I don’t hear from him. And I think about the shell of a person back home in Ohio that is my father, and I mourn for our loss.
In an experience I can only deem as bizarre, I spent 5 long years working in an automotive factory. The impact on my emotional maturity and thoughts on equality in the workplace cannot be overstated. When I was 21 and two years into college at Indiana University, my scholarship program was droppped abruptly and without explanation. I found myself facing some hard decisions, the most significant of which was how I was going to survive intact with my crappy $7 an hour job while going to school. My dad offered me a solution in going to work a different branch of the Big 3 automaker he worked for. I could hardly say no, I was in no financial position, and the pay was insanely good with full tuition assistance to boot.
I can only say that the ensuing five years I spent in that plant took the feminist seeds of discontent burrowed in me and set them afire. The work was hard, and the environment was even harder. As a 21 year old single female, life was miserable in a factory setting. I do not exaggerate when I say that I was subjected to sexual harassment on a daily basis. Whistling, catcalls, touching and inappropriate comments were a part of daily life in an automotive plant, and those of us who went against the grain were labeled “troublemakers” or worse, “bitches” or “lesbians” (can you imagine anything so ludicrous in the twenty-first century?). The management claimed to take such things seriously by making us sit through ridiculously staged seminars and videos on a violence and harassment free workplace and yet, I learned the hard way that a no-tolerance policy was a hollow phrase. When I initiated a harassment complaint against a disgusting, sleazy man nicknamed “Bubba,” who thought it was “cute” to rub my shoulders at work everyday and slap the back of my legs as he walked by me on my job (despite my protestations and requests for him to stop), the backlash against me for complaining was unbelievable. I was ostracized by my coworkers, given the hardest lifting jobs in the plant (hauling 50 pound torque converters by hand for 8 hours a day), and worse, I was subjected to a litany of namecalling and comments by the men that I worked with, who seemed oblivious (or didn’t care) that their conduct was illegal.
While it seems like my story should have taken place fifty years ago, this happened about six years ago. It was a hard and painful lesson for me to learn that, after years of hearing about how advances in equal opportunity and harassment free workplaces have leveled the playing field for women, there are still gaping pockets of inequality that exist in U.S. workplaces. I feel that I lost a large part of my innocence and idealism in the years that I worked there. It was the first time I ever felt somehow degraded by virtue of being a woman. It was the first time that I realized corporations can present a quite polished and glittery harassment policy for the sake of PR, and then proceed to observe the laws regarding workplace harassment however they see fit. It was the first time that I realized that there are very real punishments that exist for “whistleblowers,” people who rock the status quo in the workplace. Standing up for myself taught me about more than the realities of harassment in the workplace, though. It was an eye-opening experience for me to work in such an environment, and even though I spent the last 3 years of my employment there generally disliked, talked about and misunderstood because I spoke up about sexual harassment, it was worth respecting myself.
I have been here twice, in 2001 and 2002. Hawaii is vitally important to me for various reasons, especially since I met my husband here. My husband was stationed at Hickam AFB, and I ran into him in a local beach bar. We happened to have grown up about an hour apart in Ohio and, from there, my love affair with both my husband and Hawaii has flourished. Hawaii remains one of my favorite places on earth, a lush paradise of sun, fragrant flowers and promoter of a more subdued pace in life. Hawaii retains so much of its own culture and personality (I would assume because of its geographic isolation from the contiguous 48) that it still seems like another country. The authentic local dishes are exotic (well, compared to Americana burger and fries, I guess), and Don Ho’s music is piped through the speakers at every mall, bar, restaurant, and grocery store. Plumeria trees line the streets and permeate the air with a fragrance Bath and Body Works has never adequately captured. Essentially, I think of Hawaii is a little slice of heaven, my own earthly paradise.
Well, this is my home town, so it naturally has impacted the kind of person I am. Although Toledo gets a sort of blue collar, industrial rap, I look fondly on my home town as having a lot more depth and color than it gets credit for…Some of my favorite things about Toledo are the hidden treasures. These are the things that I pine for still, living 1200 miles from home now, so I guess these would be reasons Toledo has impacted me. Some that come to mind:
a. the metropark system Toledo takes such good care of its metroparks. Although various levies have been known to fail for everything from “temporary” sales tax increases to school bonds, Toledoans never cheat the parks system (draw what inferences you will…). The metroparks are beautifully preserved, an abundant paradise for dog walking or trail running. In all of our military travels, I have yet to live in a city with a superior park system.
b. Local vegetable and farmers’ markets I still miss shopping at the Erie Street Farmers’ Market, and the fruit and veggie stand turned produce super store, Monette’s. I haven’t had produce as fresh and tasty since I lived in Toledo. I miss wandering the aisles of Monette’s, admiring the mosaic, stacked pallets of plump tomatoes and strawberries, ten shades of green in bibb lettuce, cucumbers, brussel sprout, asparagus…It was a veggie’s dream!
c. Toledo Art Museum For being 4th on the population list in a people-saturated state, the Toledo Art Museum was surprisingly rich and diverse. I don’t know how they did it, but the museum managed to consistently pull in phenomenal exhibits. It was a great way to while away a Saturday afternoon. I remember various field trips here as a child and, as is always the case, I didn’t really appreciate until I looked at the art through adult eyes. What a gem!
d. Festivals, festivals, festivals Toledo has the most wonderful neighborhood and church festivals. These are the real thing: the Irish-American festival, Hungarian festival, Greek festival, German-American festival…these are REAL ethnic festivals. The neighborhoods that host the festivals retain their authenticity, their cultural identity. This is not the stuff of faux-international festivals I’ve been to in other cities (a gyro stand does NOT make the Greek festival Greek). There are still generations-deep Irish, Hungarians and Germans serving up food and music in the neighborhoods where they were raised.
Similarly, the church festivals serve as a time of reunion: the smell of spiced meat, the lure of keg beer, and the brass of polka bands signal that it’s time to come home to your old neighborhood, and catch up with folks you haven’t seen in a few summers. The festivals of Toledo are the closest I’ve come to a feeling of community: knowing the lives and history of the people sharing a drink with you, sharing a laugh with childhood friends, and savoring REAL Hungarian dumplings or Greek pastries over good conversation.
