It was like someone had turned all every light.  

You might look at what I posted in part one, my life was pretty glamorous.  I’m 23 and in the White House.  I’m 25 and meeting Zbigniew Brzezinski.  I’m studying in this famous university and then at this Eurocrat training ground, but at the same time, I’m kind of falling apart.  

And none of this was satisfying.  The outside was really glamorous but the inside was really empty.  I saw a lot of fame by association.  Someone said that Washington is like Hollywood for ugly people and this is very true.  I think in Hollywood, the currency is fame but in DC, the currency was power.  How close were you to power?

Socializing in Washington too, was very difficult.  Many nights out, not all, but many nights out, were more networking nights than nights actually spent having fun.  Don’t get me wrong that there weren’t fun nights or nights that weren’t like that.  But a lot of the time, it was all about networking and figuring out who worked for who and who could get you to where you wanted to be.

I wondered a lot though, where exactly did these people want to be?  Did they want to be president or a senator or someone powerful??  What happened when they got to the power?  What happened after that?  Would that just satisfy them?  What was the end there?

Maybe a lot of people didn’t think the way I did.  Maybe they didn’t think about what happened once you got to the top of the mountain.  What then?  A swift downfall or getting to even greater heights?

I found the same to be true in my experiences with New York.  In New York, the currency is money and proximity to this high society that still exists there.  When I worked in business journalism in New York, a lot of the people in that office I worked aspired to be a finance bro, a weird thing to aspire to but ok.  Interesting.  There were so many of these smug little 26 year olds waiting to be called up the big leagues, the highs of finance bro-dom, where they got to slip in their subtle class markers.  Oh you summer on the Vineyard?  We summer in Nantucket?  You rent a place?  We have a place out there.  

Me on the other hand, had always heard stories about finance bros who decided to become farmers or bakers or do something odd like that.  Or seemingly odd to them.  I saw myself more in that mold than anything else.

As soon as I got into teaching, the feeling was different.  People came from all walks to life.  I taught taxi drivers, factory workers, people who worked at Starbucks.  I also taught famous people, relatives of famous people and even a prince.  An actual prince.  More on him later.  What I loved was there was always the possibility that someone interesting would walk into the place.  And more often than not, they did.  

No one though was chasing power.  Nobody cared who had the power and who didn’t.  People walked into the classroom with different ideas, different purposes.  I’ve taught people who were motivated, dedicated and diligent.  I’ve also taught people who would rather die than do whatever simple task they are being asked to complete.  They come with their own issues as well because you are dealing with people and people are not simple.  They come with their own set of contradictions and complexities.

For the longest time, I got the feeling that I had taken “the easy” way out.  People did “real” jobs and I was there in this ridiculous situation, surrounded by at time people who felt like they were overflowing blenders with no tops on them.  I was teaching, running activities, teaching at the community college and for two years, going to school.  Was putting together an “awesome slide deck for the deal team” really harder than what I did?  Could a person in that industry really navigate things as well as I was able to???  I came to the realization that that was really not true.  

Boston to me was a refuge.  It did not cross my mind for one second that I was moving to the center of American education or this place that attracts the world’s greatest minds.  Not even for one minute.  It was the “easy” place that I could handle because I was so “oversensitive” and “not tough” enough for New York.  Now I realize what a load of crap that is.

I fell in love with Boston gradually.  At first I noticed how funny and weird the little traditions were here, how every man, woman, child and statue in this city dons a beard when any of the teams are in the playoffs of their respective leagues.  Then I started going to the marathon.  Then I got into going to Wachusett Mountain and I realized that it might not be major league skiing but it’s fun and accessible and one of the few places left that you can ski for some kind of an economical price.  

I also realized one day that I had completely the wrong impression of Boston.  I did think this was a place where you had exclusive clubs and doors just closed to everyone, but again, nothing could have been further from the truth.  You were here and they were happy about that.  I have never heard a single person here say that I’m not really from here because I moved here as an adult.  

As soon as I landed in the ESL industry, I realized one thing.  It is one dysfunctional industry.  The other thing I realized was that I could play that to my advantage, if I played my cards right.

In my favorite movie, The Princess Bride, Wesley, after he has become The Dread Pirate Roberts, tells the origin story of how he became the Dread Pirate Roberts.  Westley was on a ship that got taken over by the Dread Pirate Roberts and he gets to talking with him.  It turned out that that Dread Pirate Roberts was not even the real guy.  Westley talked about how the Dread Pirate Roberts kept talking about how would tell him “good work today.  Most likely kill you in the morning.”  

No one threatened to kill me but the job was sort of like that.  Ok I’ll keep you on for two more weeks.  Good work today.  Might fire you tomorrow.

In every other job, I had an orientation and at least some time to figure out the job.  There, I was thrown into the classroom with very little time to prepare or even figure out what I was doing.  The woman who ran the school at the time told me she could employ me for two weeks at the most.  For a year, it was “good job this week.  You’ll most likely be gone by next week.” 

I still remember almost every student in that first class I ever taught.  There was Houda, whose son was a dentist, Ola and Rosanna.  And there was an actual priest in the class.  A PRIEST.  Father Egidio Dos Santos.  Father Egidio, the saint.  I was an atheist at the time, so this was… something.  

I’m not going to lie.  That first couple of months, that was rough.  Never mind learning how to teach but learning how to deal with people who were in acute states of stress.  Of course your first experience abroad is going to be stressful.  

Then there was the school.  Where to even begin?  The internet in the school never worked.  It stopped working one day because the router was stolen.  The copy machine never worked.  The printers were never hooked up.  I have absolutely no idea how I ever got anything done there.  Zero.  Because it was utter chaos non stop.  It just never ended.  

My coworkers were also an interesting mix between free spirits, model/actresses, people who fled corporate America and people who were extremely over educated.  I quietly worked for a year, sort of honing my teaching and really trying not to attract any attention to myself, lest Dread Pirate Roberts were to just pull the trigger, metaphorically.    

The classroom at times could be extremely stressful, but somewhere in there though I realized that I didn’t mind the stress.  It felt like I was doing something.  It felt like I was seeing improvement in the students.  They were interesting to observe with their odd ways in the classroom.  And a lot of the time, those people were just legitimately hilarious. 

The first summer there, the school was invaded by this army of aliens.  And by that I mean young kids, teenagers.  I was 33, going on 34 during this time period, so they all looked like children to me.  I had a lot of them in my classes and again, I had absolutely no clue how to deal with them.  I learned too, along the way, that some groups of people are going to be great and some, well, not so great.  

There were too many funny moments to catalogue that first year.  One that sticks out in my mind was when one of the teens went into a tirade about how there’s no movie theater in her town and no greater a fate had ever befallen a human being.  Disease??? Famine??? Cake walk.  But no multiplex??? How can we all go on??? 

Somewhere in the middle of this, one of her classmates turned to her and goes “do you have electricity in your town?”  It was the first of many moments in the classroom where I had to choose between being a human and being a teacher.  As a teacher, I had to control the space and maintain control over the students.  As a human being, this was so off the wall hilarious that I couldn’t keep it anymore.  I felt like I stopped occasionally laughing to teach them something.  

The students were just these little vortexes of personality.  One student named Hamza put so much care and attention into his outfit and clothing choices that I almost thought he was going to walk down a runway after class.  Did he ever come to class with like a pen or something????? That would ruin the aesthetic too much.  I loved Hamza though.  He was a sweet kid who had been thrown into a situation that he really didn’t understand.    

There were students I didn’t get along with, people who just didn’t want to be there but the memory of these people seem to have disappeared along the way.  Nostalgia has taken over but I know for a fact that I had a lot of frustrating moments that first year.  

There were real periods in my life that I had nostalgia for and as I look back, the time between 2010 and 2013 in the school were like that.  Nostalgia in my life had frequently manifested itself as remembrance of a time that would never exist again.  Now it manifests itself as I look back at a time that needed to happen, was fundamental to what was to follow it.  Stepping stones to a new and entirely unexpected existence.  

Happy times. Fragments of a captured life:

It was time to build a life in Boston.  I had no idea at all how to do that but again, I was going to try.  I lived in my parent’s basement for a while and then I found an apartment in an area called Allston on Kelton street.  

Now part of this is going to be an outright love letter to Allston.  Recently, a BU student who looks like a badly drawn alpaca, bragged on X or twitter or whatever Space Karen is calling it now that he called ICE on the workers at Allston car wash.  He said he did this as a service to the community he lives in.  Huh???  People in Allston look out for each other.  People might come from different backgrounds in Allston, but everyone works hard and is kind to their neighbors.  People from all walks of life live there and most of all, you respect the people in your neighborhood who work hard and keep the place going.  The badly drawn alpaca is from England too.  We threw tea into the harbor to get the British to leave.  I think the alpaca might want to keep this in mind.

Allston was my place, from the word go.  My apartment in Allston also needs its own memoir.  300 square feet.  A studio with a wall in the middle.  I nicknamed it Chez Kelton, with all of its majesty.  You walked into the apartment and there was a small foyer that went into the living room.  Then the bedroom, but truly, truly, you could switch those rooms and there would be no difference.  If you turned the other way, there was a hallway that led into a kitchen that I almost never used and the bathroom that really was just a redone hallway.  The bathroom had this kind of old fashioned charm to it, with the claw footed tub. And it was home to the infamous nonfunctional shower.  I saw the apartment when it was full of stuff and I didn’t realize that there were almost no outlets in the apartment including in the kitchen.  There was one outlet in the bathroom that was in the worst possible spot and has exposed wires.  There was no air conditioning in the apartment and somewhere, someone would crank up the heat to the same temperature as the surface of the sun.  

I found this place through Craig’s List.  It was cheaper than the other apartments I saw.  After I had rented the apartment, I googled the rental company and it was one huge complaint after another after another.  

Oh and then we have the other villain of the piece, the green line.  Even before I lived here, I had ridden the green line.  One day, before I even lived in Boston, I was in Park street station and one green line got really close to another green line train and I didn’t understand how this was possible.  No way two New York City subway trains were getting that close to each other.  No way.

Every morning I would trudge up over to Warren street and get on the train.  Every day, it was the same hellish experience of trying to find a place to stand.  Eventually I started sitting on the stairs.  When I first saw someone do this, I thought they were insane.  Then I started doing it.  At the time my rent in Allston was $1100 a month, highway robbery even then, but nowhere near the level of highway robbery practiced there now.  I couldn’t understand though why the rent was so cheap.  When I took my first step onto the green line, I understood why the rent was so cheap.  Oh, did I ever understand.    

Allston/Brookline unibeing pictures:

The legendary green line and it’s inhabitants:

I read so many books on that train.  I mean it has to be in the hundreds and I always carried around extra books.  They were also books on every conceivable topic.  I read the history of fifteen century England, the sinking of the titanic, how Chinese food got so popular in the United States and how Bill Blass and his ilk outdid the French fashion designers at the Battle of Versailles.  I read the biographies of Diane Von Furstenberg, Grace Coddington, Prince Philip and Consuelo Vanderbilt.  I think I read every Bill Bryson book that was out there.  Interestingly, in 2015, when we had the apocalyptic snow fall, I read a book about the history of vaccines.  Right when I stuck on the green line for some interminable amount of time, I busied myself by reading about smallpox and how a vaccine had rid the world of it.  Fitting, I guess.  I mean not to pat myself on the back here, but I couldn’t even begin to list every book I read in that 8 year period.  All I know is that it kept me sane when I took the green line in the morning.  And I love to read.  

What is so incredibly weird is the fact that I cannot put it into words how much I loved this apartment.  There’s this great series on Netflix called “Pretend it’s a City” starring professional curmudgeon Fran Lebowitz.  Fran talks about some of the apartments she had in New York and she described having a complicated relationship with a lot of them.  Chez Kelton was the first apartment I had this extremely complicated relationship with.  On the one hand, the location was unbeatable.  On the other hand, well….  Broken shower, lack of outlets, temperature resembling the surface of the sun.  All the good things…. 

I really wonder why I love this place so much.  It probably has to do with it being connected to a time in my life that I never thought would happen.  When my job in New York ended in 2009, I figured I’d get another crap job in an office and live sort of this mid existence but this was so much more than I ever could have expected.  Living in Kelton street symbolized that.  A fresh start, a disconnection from the old life, the old experiences.  I made the intentional decision to completely disconnect from anyone I knew in New York.  I also completely gave up on trying to connect with the family in Poland.  I just didn’t want to do that anymore.  If they wanted to talk to me, they could come and find me.  And to be honest, no one really ever did and that was completely fine.  

Allston symbolized the impossible for me.  In my mind, it was impossible to start over, especially at the advanced age of 32.  I mean I was 32.  Ready for the nursing home.  At 32, everyone was safely married and taking care of babies and young children and here I was, hopelessly behind everyone else, per usual.  Maybe also though, those voices weren’t there anymore.  

I realized pretty quickly that my problem before, especially when I lived in DC, was the fact that I was just around people who were the same age as me, from the same social class, doing the same job.  I got thrown into that school and there were people who were younger than me, people who were older than me, people who did an insane variety of jobs.  I taught a 12 year old whose feet didn’t even touch the ground when he sat in the class and an 85 year old woman who had lost her father in the Spanish civil war.  One day I realized that a bunch of the students were airline pilots and I started asking them all of these questions I had always had about aviation.  What does it mean when the plane shakes?  Should I be worried?  What do the pilots do on long haul flights?  How many pilots normally fly when the flight is over 6 hours?  The pilots graciously answered my questions.  

I learned a lot about other cultures too, but a real inside view.  I learned so much about Brazil and the ethnic makeup of the country.  I taught Japanese-Brazilians, Brazilians with last names like Schmidt, Brazilians with Polish names, Brazilians with every kind of name.   A great friend of mine still, a guy who told our class with great exasperation in his voice that his birthday is on Christmas Eve, who last name is Travitzki, told me that he has a very unique name in Brazil.  I said no, he doesn’t.  Some Brazilian immigration official in 1900 or there about wrote his great grandfather’s name down incorrectly when he entered the country.  His last name had been Trawytski, originally.  I also taught the widest swath of them when it came to professions.  I taught everyone from house cleaners to doctors and lawyers.  I didn’t just get to know other cultures but people of different ages, social backgrounds and professions.

Anyone, and I mean, ANYONE could walk into that school at any time and oh did they ever.  Maybe the haze of nostalgia clouds my memories of this time and I did complain a lot about one student or another who was just terrible in the class, but I don’t want this to be an entry about that.

At one point, one of the students made this hilarious video where the students took over and started imitating me, with my weird way of sitting and unique mannerisms.  At the end, the student goes — and this is fall down.  He did this comedic fall in front of everyone.  It was soooooooooo funny.  It was a year into the job and when I started living on Kelton street.  Looking back on it, it was like that montage in a movie or a tv series, when a main character is doing something new and unexpected.  In a way, the tv series had been re-written, to incorporate new characters and was suddenly a much better show, kind of like Parks and Recreation after Adam Scott and Rob Lowe join.  

I think no one realized how for me, it was this incredible renewal, kind of how I had always thought my life should be.  Run towards life, instead of away from it, like Herman always said.  

I was trying out different things with different people along the way, but in the  school, it was kind of unstable.  I had a lot of friends leave but thanks to social media, I am able to keep in touch with a lot of people I would have lost touch with a long time ago.  In the middle there though, more solid friendships began forming, again related to the school.  I met my friend Tanya and her husband Mike and we clicked immediately.  Tanya was so different from everyone I had ever known.  She represented this new phase in my life, not full of people who were egotistical and inward looking.  Tanya cared and cares a lot about people.  I never knew her to get angry at people or to even gossip about other people.  And she lived in my neighborhood and frequently invited me to the social events connected to her church, that I would join many years later.     

I almost left out a phenomenon that appeared in the midst of all of this.  Skiing came along or in better words, reappeared in my life.  On this blog, I have written many a post on Zen and the art of skiing.  Again, I learned to ski when I was 10 on a family trip to Colorado and I absolutely loved it.  But in the intervening years, so many other things happened that skiing was the last thing on my mind.  But suddenly, when we moved to New England, it reappeared in the most interesting way, in the form of a job, that again, seemed to come from nowhere.  

When I got to that school I worked in for a long time, there was an activities coordinator, a person who takes the students different places around the city and shows the students around.  A job existed and continues to exist when you can walk around a city during work hours and just go to different places????????????????????????????  I did not believe this was a real thing.  And I was determined to get this job.  

At the school, when I started working there, this odd little character did the job and I thought utterly, he was never going to leave.  Who would leave this most perfect of jobs?  Well, six months in, he did.  And then another person took over.  Then she left and I thought — do this.  Do this now.  The good part about it was that I got to see the job from the inside before I did it.  One day, I got an email asking if I wanted to chaperone a ski trip on a weekend.  I didn’t realize it would involve leaving Boston at 5am.  Leaving Boston at 5am.  Let me say that again.  Leaving Boston at 5am.  But I went.  I put the skis on, rode up the magic carpet and skied down and the rest as they say, is history.

Within a few years, I was going skiing all the time, had a really full social schedule that was pretty much 24/7 and doing a job where pretty much anything could happen and I could meet anyone, ANYONE in the world.

My 2013, I had been living in Boston for just about three years.  I guess that’s the time when you decide if you are going to stay or go.  Then something tragic and completely unexpected happened.  I was at the marathon the day of the bombing.  I wrote about it up here several times and I don’t want to revisit the whole thing, but Boston really pulled together when that happened.  I saw the entire city pull together and I thought — you are home now.  No reason to go anywhere else.  It was around that time when a coworker said I was a Bostonian in my soul, which was and is completely true.

By 2013, things had been sort of cruising along for a couple of years.  I had been here about three years and I guess that’s when you start to consider if this is really the place for you.  I knew I had found the place for me when I considered how many people I would have to say goodbye to if I left.  It would be a lot of people.  When I was in DC, I just disappeared one day and no one ever came to find me.  I remember Herman came to get me to drive me to New York, to my parents house and I was sitting in this house in Dupont Circle I lived in at the time and I was completely alone.  Not even my roommates said goodbye to me.  Almost seven years of living in the town and I had no one to say goodbye to.  

One day, coming back to Boston, I thought — man, the people I know here would be really angry if I left and why would I anyway?  Why would I do that?  There was really no reason to.

Nary a year went by that something didn’t happen.  In 2011, things really started to take off.  The job gathered momentum, I started going skiing.  In 2012, I started doing activities and the 4am ski trips, an institution unto themselves.  Then we had 2013.

In 2013, I made the fateful decision to go back to school to study applied linguistics.  I also received the news one day that my workplace had been sold.  The weird, dysfunctional, maddening and yet also homey work place had been purchased by a company in England.  My immediate thought was that we were going to be like Sterling Cooper on Mad Men, when the British came and took over that place and the drunk secretary rode a lawn mower through the office, maiming the young and handsome Guy McKendrick.  He lost his foot, just when he got it in the door.

I was hoping that that wouldn’t happen but I knew we were about to be hit with a lot of changes.

Changes did come over the next year.  This is a public blog, so I’m not going to name names or really publicly drag these people but the place really just needed change.  It didn’t need to be hollowed out from the inside, which is what happened.  There were a lot of things that happened along the way that even a few years ago, I had strong memories of that I could write about here, convicting the people who did them.  But I’ve done a lot of interior work to rid myself of those bad memories.  We wouldn’t know the good without the bad and I guess I would know eventually why they had behaved the way they did towards me.  And I did find that out eventually.

I also met Professor Joseph Leistyna in 2013, who I wrote about here in 2015 after he passed away suddenly.  I guess all the cliches apply to Pepi.  He was one of a kind, a tornado of ideas, stories, rope belts, Harvard degrees and a general contempt for the neoliberal hellscape we all now occupy.  I’ll never forget the recitation of Susan’s entire resume after a women in Brookline asked her for eight slices of prosciutto and commented, while Susan was preparing those mythical eight slices of prosciutto, she said — oh I see you can count.  Susan didn’t immediately punch her, seeing as she was in a public place and she was at her job.  But Susan didn’t allow this woman to get to her because although she had a deep academic background, she was able to brush it off.  Eight slices of prosciutto had never had that much meaning.  See, I didn’t even introduce Susan because Pepi never really did either.  It was just “Susan.”  Susan was his dearly departed wife, who was the center of his universe.  No matter the guy’s quirks, of which there were myriad, Pepi no doubt had an impact on me and in the intervening years, as I have thought about him a lot since then.

School became a refuge what was going on around me.  The people who came to the school after it was taken over had one purpose, to pick us off one by one, so they could fill the place with their own cheaper and easier to control workforce.  After the experience of my first masters degree, I had made a promise to myself that I wasn’t going to alter one thing when I returned to school.  Not a single ski trip would be rescheduled.  I wasn’t moving or changing jobs.  Things somehow had to stay stable and this sudden little development left me in a state where I couldn’t really leave the school until I had finished the degree.  The thing was that the people who came, the new management thought they were smart, but in reality, it was so transparent what they were doing.  And I was just kind of in the middle of it, trying and at times failing to maintain my sanity.

Suddenly though, I realized that graduate school was a refuge.  At first, I had my usual reaction.  I’m outclassed here, not on the smart side and these people were going to eat me alive.  The opposite happened.  Suddenly, we were all friends.  We all looked out for each other and made sure we were all ok.  I sat in class and would get an answer right and do assignments and just get one A after another.  I could not believe how well I did in the program.  I had nearly a perfect GPA.  Me, in my usual way, thought that linguistics must be easy because I was doing so well.  Herman pointed out that it was the first school I had experienced with a clear mind.  He was completely right.

Recently I found out that a professor of mine from the program had died.  Charles Meyer, aka Chuck, taught the first class I ever took in the program, which was classical linguistics.  It was the foundational class in the program.  

Honestly, I had absolutely no idea what I was even doing in this program.  Graduate school one had been difficult, as I wrote in the previous entry.  I thought for sure that this wasn’t going to be any different.  I’d be fighting for every point, outclassed around every turn and scraping by with B+ grades.  And I was sure the people who ran and taught in the program were going to be arrogant and condescending.  But nothing could have been further from the truth.  

I went to Professor Meyer’s class on that first time in a classroom where the subject wasn’t politics and thought — am I even going to be able to handle this???  And then Chuck rolled up with his PowerPoints, explaining everything so thoroughly and well.  I thought — I’m going to be fine.  We’re in good hands.  

Pepi and Chuck were colleagues, friends really, although you couldn’t find two more opposite people on planet Earth.  Pepi was this tornado of ideas, sarcasm, kindness, hubris, rope belts and cats.  Chuck was more of a classical academic, all navy sweaters and nylon tote bags from conferences.  But they were friends.  

A couple of days after Pepi died, Chuck and another faculty member had to go around and tell the students about it.  We had class a couple of days later.  Usually, no matter what happened, Professor Meyer wanted to start class and went about his business.  That day though, he looked tremendously sad and asked if we wanted to reminisce about Pepi.  People were crying.  

I told the story about how Pepi went around telling everyone that “Chuck Meyer wrote a book about the word ‘the.’  Chuck Meyer wrote about book about the word ‘the,’” immediately followed up with that he’d rather die than read a book about the word “the.” 

I shared the story about Professor Meyer’s book about the word “the.”  Professor Meyer goes “I never wrote a book about the word ‘the.’”  At that moment, we all laughed.  I could see Pepi up there having a good laugh.  Exiting this mortal realm, with a huge laugh.  Fitting.  

I took an AMAZING class with Professor Meyer called Structure of English.  I use what I learned in that class every single day.  Sure it was from 7:30 to 9:30pm and the only things that were keeping me alive at the time were Diet Coke, Extra Large Dunkin’ Donuts and adrenaline.  I had class on Thursday nights and I would get home at 11pm and had to get up at 7am to teach class.  I would go to work for three hours and then RUN home to sleep for the rest of the afternoon.  One day, while I was asleep, I heard someone honk a horn in front of my house and the other person responded by saying — shove that horn in your ass.  Just when I thought I couldn’t love Boston more.  Just when I thought that.  

My mom wanted me to go on our annual family vacation to the Cayman Islands then and I told her I couldn’t leave when she wanted me to because I had to go to Professor Meyer’s class.  I had missed a class during the semester and I thought it would affect my grade if I missed another one, even if it was the last one for the semester.   My mother goes — Professor Meyer can spare you.  Professor Meyer can spare you.  It was funny that my mother had to beg me to skip a class with Professor Meyer but it also felt like I was part of something special.  

A lot of the last fifteen years have felt like a movie and sitting there at the memorial for Professor Meyer felt that way, like I was at the end of the movie where everyone gets together to pay a poignant tribute to their friend.  For me, the program felt and continues to feel like I finally found my alma mater.  From going through a series of educational experiences that I feel zero sentiment or nostalgia for, I now have a real place to call home, academically.  To this day, I miss the applied linguistics program tremendously.

Of course, the picture taking continued, unabated. When I had to write Pepi’s INFAMOUS papers, of course I took pictures:

Of course the university would invite all kinds of thinkers and scholars. These are some shots I got of Antonia Darder, a lively scholar and artist who I got some pictures of:

And of course, I got to see the icon, Noam Chomsky. Noam. Who came to speak at the university and got a beautiful introduction from the English department about what an icon he is and they were giving him two books. He shoved the books into his nylon bag, doubtless he had gotten for free from a conference. And he just went into the wrongs of neoliberal politics. Baller.

Old Noam:

The photography of course did not take a back seat during this degree.  I never stopped taking pictures during the degree.  One night, I was in the public library in Copley square in the main reading room doing a take home final for Professor Meyer.  It started snowing like crazy outside and sat there, completely unable to concentrate on what I was doing.  It was almost like it was pulsating outside, like living in a snow globe.  I finished my final and turned it in.  I ran outside with my little water proof camera and started photographing everything.  It looked completely surreal.  Completely.  And in typical Boston fashion, a native started screaming at me — what are you taking pictures of??? Except he used more colorful language.  I didn’t make a note of the fact if he was wearing the Massachusetts native costume of shahts and a Bruins jersey and whatever else this man wore to his cousin’s wedding.  

Crazy snow storm photos:

2015 was the year when absolutely everything was utterly rearranged.  Utterly.  I started the year in one place and ended it in a completely different place.  

It was an utterly unbelievable year.  It could have been several lifetimes in one year.

It started out with the snowpaclypse, where the green line was completely shut down for two weeks.  I guess I can publicly call these people out for this but the people running the school I was working in basically laughed in my face when I was having trouble getting to work.  So there was that.

Again though, that wasn’t the memorable part of the Snowpacalypse.  Not even close.  It was this time when you saw things in Boston that you had never seen and will never see again.  The city was utterly paralyzed for three months.  I saw the Harvard stadium covered in snow, looking apocalyptic on its own.  There was a pile of snow in south Boston that melted for four months.  The day it melted, in July, Boston threw a party.  The sentence “I have never seen that before” was used continually.  

Snowpacalyse photos:
 

During one of the numerous snow storms that year, I was on the 66 bus over by the Harvard stadium.  I looked over at the stadium and it looked absolutely unbelievable.  I was doing a group project with two people in my graduate program, one close friend and one person neither of us liked too much.  We were supposed to meet up, but I lied to the classmate I didn’t like that I was stuck in traffic and would be late.  Good photography is always worth lying.  And this hill I shall die on.  

It was also the year I went to Chile for a wedding but also for a life changing experience.  It was a beautiful experience that helped me learn that the past doesn’t really matter and that it’s ok to push it aside.  

I shared some of the photos in a blog entry around the time when I went to the wedding, but Chile is always enchanting. I still can’t believe I actually got to go there. This is the view that quite literally changed my entire life:

I broke down in tears on the last day of my visit. I’m not entirely sure why, but hey. I broke down in tears in front of the Disney castle too. But I think this was for a different reason. I really knew I needed to change my life and push aside my feelings about things that had happened in my life.

Summer was its usual roller coaster of emotions.  I could use a lot of words or a few words to describe that summer. All I can say is that it seemed to be building up to something big. Something big was in offing. I turned out to be right about that.

Some fun summer pictures I got:

At the end of the summer, something incredibly remarkable happened.  There’s no other way to put this.  I met a man.  I jokingly say that a cloud opened up in Downtown Crossing and a man popped out, with questions about Boston zoning laws.  Really though, he was a kind, serious man who could also cracked jokes occasionally but generally did not enjoy being the center of attention.  He seemed to be going through something in his life and seemed to have come to America to deal with it.  That much was obvious and I treaded very gently with this guy.  I told him amusing stories about growing up in New York in the 1980s and Boston fun facts.  He told me about his dog and the village he was from in his country.  

The whole thing had a lot of really comedic aspects to it.  The day after we met, we ran into each other in front of Dunkin Donuts, because all great New England stories involve the Dunks.  I said hello to him, I mean barely choked those words out and then he goes “it’s really weird being in school again.”  I go — I’m doing my masters degree now and almost finished.  And then he RAN AWAY.  Just up and left.  Not in a malicious way.  Just in a “I don’t know what to say right now” kind of a way.  There were a lot of head spinning, funny moments during the whole thing.  It was a summer of putting up with extremely irrational people of all ages and here was this nice thing that happened.  

I was 38 when this happened, again, hopelessly old and over the hill, at least in my own mind.  Like I mentioned up here before, when I was 28, also hopelessly old and over the hill, one of my roommates in DC told me that I BETTER be safely married by 38, her age at the time because no one was going to want to hang out with me at that advanced age, lest they get infected by the singleness. And here, low and behold, was this head spinning experience.  The door was supposed to be shut on that whole thing but it wasn’t.  

We enjoyed late summer evenings over beer and conversation.  I was certainly on my best behavior, not cursing too much, or telling too many manic stories of the wack things that happened to me over the years.  He didn’t need to hear about the time one of the students had picked up a snake on an activity, just to see what kind it was.  I kept that one in the vault.  For his part, he seemed to measure out every word carefully, I think being acutely aware of my feelings.  

There is one memory that particularly sticks out in my mind.  With a group of the students, we had gone kayaking and walked to Harvard Square.  The man is question had been part of that group.  We ran into a student from the school there and she had a Bernese mountain dog.  The dog got tangled up in the leash and the man got down on his hands and knees and undid the leash.  I stood there, sort of mesmerized by this scene.  Was music playing????  Maybe.  I do remember thinking that he needed to stop doing this.  I already liked him.  This was overkill. 

Honestly, I wished this man had stayed around longer and I spent a lot of time in 2016 trying to process my feelings about this man but at some point, I realized I met him for a reason.  Something happened to me in the short time I knew this man.  Suddenly, I grew a lot of confidence in myself.  Everything flipped around and changed but for the better.  It was clear that when I finished my masters degree, it was time to move on and find another place to work.  There were a lot of feelings to work through, to say the least.

I always joke that I got my little heart broken three months before I had to take my comprehensive exam for my masters and it was true.  My study partner kept everything on track.  I told her the story about the amusing young man who had come across the transom, and she dutifully listened and went — ok.  So can we start studying now?  Hilarious and absolutely what I needed at the time.

Around that time, my high school put on a 20 year reunion for us.  I mean it wasn’t like I really wanted to go to this thing and wasn’t even considering it.  And even if I had gone, my study partner would have enlisted the state police and perhaps federal authorities to block my exit from the Commonwealth.  I wrote a message to my classmates that I was taking the comprehensive exam for my masters degree three weeks after the reunion and that I couldn’t come.  The message looked really glamorous.  I had academic commitments to my applied linguistics degree in BOSTON and all of the scholarly implications of that.

The reality was much less glamorous.  We spent an entire month just preparing the Mount Everest of study materials, with hundreds of flash cards with the name of every theorist, every theory, every term.  I carried my comp exam materials with me everywhere.  I would work and then go study for a couple of hours at the Starbucks by my house.  My study partner and I exchanged notes on the different topics we had studied.  We wrote practice essays.  We discussed the different concepts we were to know for the exam.  Every single day for three months.  Insane.  Eat, sleep, work, comp exam.  Rinse and repeat.

Again, I did continue with the pictures, just to blow off steam. Here a set of completely surreal and bizarre looking pictures of the Ringling Brothers Circus that I took at TD Garden with my TG-6. I can’t remember what I ate for dinner yesterday but I can tell you what camera I used to take a photo. I love these pictures but pretty much every time I have ever posted them, no one has reacted to them in any way. But I like them and as the editorial director and creative visionary around here, well, I’m posting them again. So there:

When the big day came for the comprehensive exam, I was there three hours early.  I had been cool, calm and collected but suddenly, I was really scared.  What if I forgot everything?  What if I blanked on something?  There were three questions, you chose two and you had three hours to write the thing.  I went into the room and immediately wrote down a bunch of names and facts I had memorized and started on the questions.  I think I wrote 12 single spaced pages on the exam or something in that neighborhood.  It was like doing one of Pepi’s notorious papers but as an exam.  That crank had prepared me well for that exam.

We finished the exam and got on the train home.  I sat down on my couch and stayed there for three or four hours, not moving.  I think I eventually got up to grab food or something.  I was that exhausted.  My dad called me to get a run down on what had been on the exam and how I had answered the questions, ever the executive.  

A couple of days went by and I tried not to think about things.  My dad kept saying “you are going to pass that exam, you are going to pass that exam.”  Deep down, I knew I was going to, but there was always the chance I wasn’t going to.

A couple of days later, I was sitting at home and watching, of all things, Cheers and my study partner sent me a message: one of our classmates had gotten her exam results.  I opened my email and I saw: Congratulations on passing the comprehensive exam.  I started jumping up and down on my bed, screaming.  I called my mom immediately and screamed into the phone “I PASSED MY COMPS!!!!!  I PASSED MY COMPS.”  It was this moment of ultimate triumph that really felt good.  Truly, it felt good in a way that no other academic achievement had ever felt.

That was the phase in my life where suddenly, everything felt the way I had always thought it was supposed to.  It all felt really good, in a deeper sort of a way.  So many times, I had gotten to some kind of a milestone and it never felt the way it was supposed to.  It always just felt hollow and unfulfilling, but this felt so good, like it was supposed to.  Life felt like it was supposed to.  Life had sort of started to hit its stride.

The next two years though, were again, pretty rough.  A lot of what happened, I have consigned to the dustbin of history.  Again, we need to experience the bad things to really experience the good things.

I’m glossing over some big things that happened, but honestly it’s really not something I want to revisit or really reveal here.  At the time, it all felt terrible, but it was just a short amount of time and led me to something that rocked the foundation of my life, again in a good way.  

The thing though that sticks in my memory is teaching an honest to God prince.  Real royalty from a well known country that is not in Europe.  

Outside, he really could be rather arrogant, but once you got under the surface, the guy was really just a lost soul.  We both kind of were at the time.  I got to know him as a human and he was a person who had been humbled.  

It’s interesting to me how many prominent people have passed through Boston on their educational journey.  A year or two after I moved to Boston, I went to a sporting event at Harvard stadium.  It was raining before the event and I went into the athletic facility next to the stadium.  I saw this name “Jorge Pablo Lemann” on the wall.  This person had apparently been a champion tennis player at the university.  I got intrigued and I googled him.  He’s now the richest man in Brazil, but in the 1950s, according to him, he got to Harvard and was completely miserable.  It was cold, there was a lot of writing and work which he kind of wasn’t prepared for and he was from a warm place.  It was interesting hearing this story because at least from what I see on the internet, the man is considered the Warren Buffett of Brazil, but then he was just a student from far away in an alien land, dealing with a new bunch of challenges.

When I think about this real life prince that I taught and knew, I saw echoes of Lemann.  Here was a person who had probably never stood in a line before in his life.  For this guy, every red carpet had always been rolled out for him and here suddenly, he was just a regular person.  Boston had humbled him.  It was interesting to watch, to say the least.  Looking at us at the time, you had two lost and broken souls.  

As I have said already many times, the picture taking continued unabated. Photography for me has always been therapy, a release value, a way to blow off steam. I mentioned some troubling times in those years but of course the photos don’t reflect that. A lot of what we put out there doesn’t reflect what’s actually happening in our lives, especially now.

But anyway, here are some greatest hits from circa 2017:

Like I said, 2016 and 2017 were difficult but I think they needed to happen.  Because if they hadn’t, my life wouldn’t have shifted, in the most extreme but good way.  I came to faith.  Like almost everything that’s happened in the past 20 or so years, this was unexpected, to say the least.

I didn’t grow up with any faith.  My parents had grown up in the shadow of the rise of Nazism in Germany and the communist takeover of Poland, so they’ve always been wary of anything too excessive or extreme and I think in their mind, religion goes into that category.  I also didn’t grow up with a strong tendency towards anything, any kind of strong bond to a place or a people group.  

I did though know that I would one day make a decision about faith.  Catholicism was the default in my mind of the kind of Christianity I had been exposed to and I kind of thought that was Christianity.  We’d gone to Catholic mass and I didn’t much understand what was going on.  I also thought that religious people couldn’t get married or start families, which I found a little odd.

We watched the news a lot growing up, what with what was happening in Poland at the time, pre internet it was how we were going to find out what was going on with the family.  I remember maybe seeing something about the Archbishop of Canterbury and them mentioning that this religious figure had a wife and a family.  That just made more sense to me for some reason.  

I also saw those Baptist services on television with the singing and the joy and I couldn’t get over how great and fun that all looked.  When I lived in DC, I would see these women dressed up for weekend Baptist services.  

Like everything in my life, I stumbled into it backwards.  I didn’t do a lot of research or anything.  I had known Tanya by then for a long time.  As I said, I ran into a terrible string of problems in 2017 and there was this thing called Community Group.  And a fat, comedic infant.  Oh and food.  There was food.  That doesn’t sound like some crazy, amazing coming to faith story.  

I realized recently that I really am a Protestant.  I remember watching Phil Donahue as a kid somehow and they had a person on who said that they had found faith when someone close to them had gotten very sick.  I figured that’s when I would find it.  My coming to faith moment happened even before that.

Oh and back to being a Protestant.  I really think Protestantism is the natural fit for me.  I like that we have this family at the center of our church.  That feels natural to me.  I like how we look at the Gospels, the good news that Jesus came to earth, died and rose again for our sins.  There’s this string of forgiveness and longing to be a better person laced throughout the Protestant belief system.  

Jesus is baptized by John the Baptist in the Gospels and wanders the wilderness, continually tempted.  Of all of the things we’ve studied and talked about in the Bible since I started going to church, this is the thing I find the most relatable to my own life.

I wandered in the wilderness for many years, continually tempted by many different things.  Just like Jesus, I was tempted first by deeply hedonistic pursuits.  As time went on, I wondered what was the point of the hedonism.  What is pleasure if that is all we know?  Shouldn’t pleasure be a contrast to what we know day to day, what is really supposed to feed us?  Further, as the Bible cautions us not to do, I turned this wandering and seeking of higher heights of adventure and accomplishments into an idol.  

I wondered for years when was it going to be enough.  When was all of this wandering and credential acquisition going to be enough.  There was always a hollowness of life that I experienced.  I scaled to the highest heights and here I was, still completely unsatisfied.  No matter what I did, how much I experienced, it never really satisfied me.  

There were a couple of parts to why I never felt satisfied.  I just always felt like they had lowered the standards to let me in.  They needed a seat filler.  They probably just took anyone for this opportunity.  I felt like that nonstop.  I never felt like I deserved any of this.  Yeah, it was a lot of hard work and dedication on my part but other people had worked a lot harder than me or conversely, they hadn’t had to work as hard as me and had gotten further than I did.  

Travel was so important to these people I was around too and inevitably, inevitably the amount of it I had done wasn’t sufficient.  I cannot for the life of me understand why they put so much goddamn emphasis on this.  This is just super dumb.  Don’t get me wrong.  Travel is wonderful but it shouldn’t be some test to see if a person is acceptable or not.  Just because you’ve been to more places than I have, that doesn’t make you better than me.  I wonder now a lot why people settle down in life and have a good thing going in their life and their first instinct is to say — now I’m going to leave. That’s the best thing to do.  Leave.  What if the ultimate luxury in life isn’t to leave but to be able to stay in a place that you love, that you feel comfortable in and that welcomes you?

That’s what I found with church.  I stopped the wandering.  I stopped feeling dissatisfied with whatever I had accomplished.  I was finally at peace with everything.  

Life sort of shifted after I joined the church.  My job was and is still important to me but now I had a group of people who had no part in that.  They were separate from that.  Further, their jobs were really not a huge part of their lives.  Some of the people I know at church, I’ve known them for years and I have no idea at all what they do for a living.  We talk about church stuff and what’s going on with us in our lives, rather than complaining endlessly about work. 

As I got deeper into church, of course life around it continued to evolve.  In 2018 though, the light streamed in again, in the most unusual way, because well, things happening for me normally?  That’s not how it goes.  For me, things have to happen in the most convoluted, insane way possible.  

For a long time, there was an ESL school located at a small college that felt like the boonies.  I had always hesitated to apply there because it was too far away, too isolated and me not being a driving a car sort of person, not for me.  But summer was coming around and you know, ESL schools frequently lower their standards because of the number of students they get in the summer and hey, they would take me.  JK.

So I applied and immediately, immediately, things felt right.  The buildings on the campus were on the old estate of a wealthy banker from Brookline.  I guess at some point, he had bequeathed the land and buildings to the college out of the goodness of his heart.  Nah, who are we kidding.  I’m sure it had to do with taxes and stuff.

The commute there was kind of hilarious and as a person who got their driver’s license when they almost had reached a half a century in age, I enjoy a good hilarious commute.  By car, the place would have been a 15 minute drive.  But no.  For me, it was over an hour.  First, I had to board a bus that made no fewer than I don’t know 40 stops on the way there.  Then I had to take the green line.  Then I had to get on a shuttle bus, driven by a humorous man who greeted me by saying “Ola Mamacita!!!!!!!!!!”

On the campus of the college, I taught in a small old carriage house that had been turned into classrooms.  Branson from Downton Abbey would have been very at home there.  I got to work so early that I would sit down and write out honest to God lesson plans.  It was like the old days.  I loved the job again.  I also really grew to like my coworkers, who welcomed me so warmly.

Then something truly insane happened.  I got an email from my dream job.  Now to this day, I am not sure how these people had even gotten my email.  I was working very part time in another school and I was proctoring some kind of school work when I decided to open my email, just to check what was going on.  I saw an email from an unfamiliar name from a very familiar place.  I clicked and knew what I was going to read.  Thanks for playing, we’re full up right now.  Have a nice life.  I would open the email, file it away and go about my daily life.

But that wasn’t what the message said.  It said they wanted little old me to work there.  It was one of those moments you never forget.  I had wanted to work at this place from day one of doing the job and was basically told that someone over there would have to die before they hired anyone new.  And here it was, this email that honestly, did not look real. Here I was on a random weekday afternoon with the wrong color toenail polish on and they offered it to me. Shocked doesn’t even begin to describe how I felt.

Alas, it was real.  What was funny was that they were kind of cajoling me into working there.  The first class I was offered was TOEFL, the test of English as a foreign language, which heretofore, I had not only been bad at teaching but also really did not understand in the first place.  But here was my shot.  Into the phone booth I went and well, I was teaching TOEFL now.  I came to find out later that they were just testing me by tossing me TOEFL.  And apparently, somehow I had passed.

Through that job and other jobs, I had entered the adjunct traveling circus.  Becoming a Christian helped me come to terms with a lot of the let’s call them idiosyncrasies of that particular vocation.  If you had asked me a couple of years ago how I felt about it all, you would have gotten an extreme diatribe, Merchant of Venice style.  Hath not an adjunct eyes??? If you prick us, do we not bleed???  

Now, no matter what, I think that no one can take away the fact that I’ve taught over 60 classes at some of the most prestigious universities in the world.  This particularly hit home when I saw a friend from high school and I was complaining about the different universities I was working at.  He goes — you are a teacher in a college.  You’ve done more with your life than most people.

The pandemic provided a real reset for me.  I’m not going to lie.  When everything closed and no one knew when it would all actually open up again, I was scared.  We all were.  But slowly I realized that it had been an absolutely insane ten years with so much happening and so many changes taking place that I had never really gotten the chance to process or get over.  The pandemic really gave me the chance to do that.  

The pandemic also caused something really interesting to happen. I got back into film photography. I always say that I need another camera like I need a hole in the head but yeah. So before, I would travel with my digital SLR and maybe my waterproof camera. Now???? Now it’s the digital SLR, my Rolleicord, maybe my Holga and whatever film camera I am currently messing around with, which kinda varies based on my mood. Put it this way. I am not the person to stand behind in the airport security line. You will be waiting for a while.

In all seriousness though, getting back into film really reinvigorated things for me. I wouldn’t say I was stagnating, but I knew things had to go in a new direction with the photography and getting back into film really helped that along.

Film stuff, but make it 2020 to today adjacent:

Things sort of picked up again in my life in 2021.  It hasn’t really been smooth sailing with my work life, but my inside life continues to improve.  

Ultimately, I’ve come to one huge realization after all of these twists and turns, reversals, dazzling heights and terrible lows.  The ultimate luxury in life is stability.  

During the pandemic, a pastor from my original church decided to plant a new one in my neighborhood.  It’s funny that I can speak so confidently about church planting, given it’s a relatively new topic for me.  

Somehow, again, having entirely not intended to do so, I became part of this church plant.  I had known the couple at the center of the church even before they planted in my neighborhood.  At the end of 2019, months before our way of life was to be upended in an unrecognizable way, the couple who run the church, who are now close friends of mine, whose kids I am watching grow up, took the stage at the mothership sending church and I thought — I’m invested in these people.  I want this thing to be a success.  

I realized something becoming part of the church plant.  Real luxury isn’t fancy clothes or five star hotels.  Real luxury is being able to find a community where you fit and you don’t have to leave or change.  These are your ride or dies now, no questions asked.  

Luxury in our world now, well, we’ve really lost the plot on that.  People with too much money spend it on the most ridiculous things.  What do you mean a HANDBAG is $50,000????  It’s a BAG.  That holds things.  No matter what, that kind of spending for me is completely, completely ridiculous.

Real luxury is stability and I actually have it now.  I’ve lived in my current apartment for over 8 years, longer than I have lived in any place in my entire life.  Life is full of unprecedented things and experiences and I wonder a lot why things feel so different now, but I have to remind myself that this is a place you’ve never been before.  Before, I’d never lived in a place over 7 years, let alone 16, let alone 8 years in the same house.  

In every other phase of my life, by this point, I would already be living in another place or trying to put down roots somewhere else.  Life had this tendency of just changing or moving on just at the moment when I had started to put down roots.  Denmark, for all of its faults, was a place where I felt like I could breathe and I felt comfortable.  And then one day it was over and I had to go back to a place I hated.  I felt like this pattern repeated itself over and over again.  Now, it doesn’t feel that way.

Many of the people I’ve meant through the church and during the planting process, I see all the time.  I get along really well with most of them but of course, someone comes along who I don’t really gel with.  The thing with community is that you learn how to deal with people like that and sometimes, love them in a genuine way.  A close friend told me when I first joined the community and started going to church, people who are hard to get along with teach us more than the people who we get along with.  A lot of the time, you encounter people you like but it is really true that the people you don’t get along with, those people teach you the most.

I’m turning 50 next year, which is insane to say.  When I was 11, Dr. Emil Kaiser, distinguished biochemist and my dad’s boss died and he was 50.  I thought he was indescribably old but here I am now rapidly approaching 50 and I don’t feel indescribably old.  I feel hopefully about the future.

The axis of my life has really shifted.  After wandering the earth for the majority of my life, the square footage of my life has shrunk and I am not even a little mad about it.  I’m with the church folks most of the time.  I don’t leave my neighborhood a whole lot now and it suits me just fine.  Jamaica Plain.  You could do worse in life.  

The industry I’ve called home for the past almost 20 years is rapidly disintegrating.  I was very angry about this for a long time but I think I’ve accepted it now.  For the past couple of years, I’ve been sitting in the classroom thinking I wanted a year off to ski and do photography.  My daydream was moving to Utah, getting some kind of funny part time job and fully embrace being a ski bum.  But this year, Vermont and New England got all the snow and Utah was bone dry.  So I got my ski-batical, as I started calling it.  I’ve been pretty happy these past few months, focusing on what’s next for me professionally and my next mountain adventure.  And potentially cooking up some kind of western adventure too.  

I don’t know what’s coming next and for a while I feared it.  What if it turns into something negative again but I’ve slowly moved away from that.  The thing is that I have such a solid infrastructure around me now that no one is going to let me fall very far.  In the past few years, I lost Herman and I’ve faced other challenges with the health of people in my family.  I think previously I would have just thought I was cursed and why was this happening to me.  And the people around me wouldn’t have been much help either.  I was surrounded by people who were there for a good time, but when things got real, they were gone.

It’s not like that anymore.  I’m surrounded by a solid group of people who try to make me be a slightly better human every day.  One day, Steven, our pastor said that we’re all saints but we’re all also sinners and that’s fine.  We’re humans capable of compassion and good works but also inherently flawed. 

I cannot say enough nice things about those people.  As I’ve gotten to know them, I’ve noticed a few things about them.  They have overcome some incredibly traumatic things but they don’t make that their whole thing.  They are on the other side of trauma.  They’ve forgiven or dealt with whatever they’ve been through.  They work to make sure we function well as a community.  They make sure to uphold some kind of standards for all of us.  I’ve been at my absolute worst around them and they have still accepted me and loved me.  

I’ve also learned that not only does good come out of bad, but that extreme deviations from what we expected to happen in life can lead us to the most incredible places.  

In 2005, my mom called me one day, to tell me my father had lost his job, which was such a huge blow to us as a family.  I was at a French language course in Canada.  It was at a transitional period in my life.  The plan was that I would come back and be with my parents for a bit, get some kind of simple job to do and then figure out what was next.  I remember thinking that that wasn’t going to happen, that the path wasn’t going to be that simple.

This single occurrence of my dad losing his job led to this incredible renaissance for our family.  I remember being on a ski lift in Sunday River early on.  It had been a stellar day and I was incredibly happy.  I saw a reflection of myself going up the ski lift and I thought — five years ago, you were in bed for an entire weekend.  You never even left your bed and here you are, doing this sport you never thought you’d ever do.  That’s how this past almost 20 years have felt like, doing things that I never thought I would do in a million years.

In the same way, when I left my job in 2016, it could have just been conventional.  Ok, off to do something else.  But now I’m going to church, I’m a member of a church.  I serve in my church.  That was incredibly unexpected, to say the least. 

Now I’m facing a similar crossroad.  The current political situation has destroyed the industry I work in.  I had a lot of anger to process but perhaps through faith, I’ve accepted that one day I will know why this happening.  In fact, I know one day I will know.  

In the meantime, I’m slowly figuring out what’s next.  I’m sending out applications for different things and getting my ski-batical.  

I frequently think of the poetry of Adrienne Rich, who was writing about love but this can also apply to forging a new path in our lives.  What we do together is pure invention. The maps they gave us were out of date by years.  

I know we got all the way to the bottom here and no photos, but here are some I took at our most recent church retreat.  I realized when I went through these photos how much these people mean to me: