January 17, 2014.

January 17, 2014

The beginning.

So, here I am living with my 4-year-old son, Harry, in my mother’s slightly drafty old farmhouse. The house I grew up in. Sleeping in my old room, but this time on a blow-up mattress. Outside a small town (population 2678) in Wisconsin. It’s not where I thought I’d be at 53, not even close! But here I am. I have now been unemployed for a very looooong 6 months…in fact, almost 7. My position. Eliminated. Sounds so final, and indeed it is.

Home…again. 

I’ve spent 30 years in visual journalism, first as a photographer, then editor and then manager.  I’ve been pretty successful and worked really hard. I’ve been blessed with many opportunities and I’ve traveled the world and met amazing people. I’ve tried to make a difference wherever I’ve been. I’ve tried to learn from every experience, every challenge and yes, every mistake. And now, I find myself in this place. Unemployment. Searching for the future. And with a small son, it’s really scary. I thought writing about the journey might help. Thus inpursuitofserendipity was born.

So, if you want to come along for the ride, I might be able to impart some wisdom, some advice or just entertain you with a good read.  Life is full of surprises and I’m hoping that there are many in store for Harry and I, as we figure out where Mommy will work and where we will make our new home. For now, Harry’s in a home school 5 days a week and I spend hours upon hours at the Public Library or at Starbucks, using the Internet, because as you might imagine, there is no Internet at my mother’s slightly drafty old farmhouse.

My son is amazing. I gave birth to him 4 years ago, this past December. He is a loving, wonderful soul. So happy. So kind. So smart. And at times, so stubborn. He giggles and laughs with abandon.  He is my light, my encouragement, my love. He is why we will land again…happily...somewhere.

The two of us.

Harry and I had all the comforts in our last home that the phrase “the comforts of home” was meant to describe. Large open floor plan, beautiful hardwood floors, sunshine pouring in the windows, two bathrooms (one, a large master bath - with a window, a Jacuzzi tub, a huge glass encased granite shower), a walk-in closet with plenty of space for my many shoes and boots – yeah, I know, blah, blah, blah. There were stainless steel appliances and a granite countertop in the kitchen. An espresso machine (sigh…I miss that morning Cappuccino), and every major appliance you could imagine. There was a heated garage and an elevator. It was convenient to Harry’s school, my office, the grocery, the car repair, our favorite ice cream stand, the T and just about everything else. We had satellite service on a 45” flat screen television, “on demand” and Wi-Fi. It was comfortable. And it was ours. The things that filled that home are now in storage. An 11 x 17 foot box, full of all of our stuff, with a monthly rental fee. Rent on my stuff.

Our condo.

A little lunch before leaving New England.

As I mentioned, we are staying (temporarily, God willing) with my mother in the house that I grew up in, sleeping in my old room.  The bright lime green that we thought was a great color to paint the floor when my older sister and I had our twin beds in that room, is showing through the more neutral beige my brother painted it when he had to move back home some years ago. I should say right now, that we are lucky to have family to take us in.  And we are grateful, eternally grateful. And I don’t say that lightly. We could be in a much different position right now, but because of my mother’s generosity we do have a roof over our head, the support of family and much more.

A little drafty, but home for now.

I did have one interview in August and I think that it went extremely well, but for one reason or another, there has been no decision. Taking a leap of faith, I packed our winter boots, coats, and most of our sweaters away in storage.  Certainly we would be settled by the time we needed them? Not so. The only thing to do as the weather turned from fall to the snowy, brutal cold of Wisconsin was to buy new coats, boots and some cold weather clothes for Harry and I. Frustrating because everything we needed was in a box in storage.

One day, I was reminding Harry that he should use his manners. Four-year-olds are a work in progress. “Harry what has happened to your manners. You used to have such lovely manners,” I said. His answer? “I put them in storage in Boston.” My guess is that he had heard that phrase so often in answer to his questions about toys, books, and other things, that it seemed sensible.

My mother’s house is good-sized old house. Technically there are 5 bedrooms, one downstairs and four upstairs. There is an attic, but only one excruciatingly small bathroom. A bathroom that we suspect was actually a small coat closet before being converted to a bathroom, when outhouses went out of vogue.  The tub was so small that I remember being too long to fit – butt to toes - when I was a kid. A few years ago, I traveled from Boston to Wisconsin for about 10 days, with a good friend, who was skilled in the do-it-yourself skillset. We ripped the bathroom down to its studs and rebuilt a modern version.  It’s one of the nicest rooms in the house, but still extremely small.  There was a finite space to work with.  The tub was replaced with a shower. A new toilet and sink with a vanity, new lighting and granite floor.

Our little family.

The Kitchen is circa 1964. The floor tiles are peeling and if I remember correctly contain asbestos. We discovered that when we found a box of extra tiles in the basement. I don’t think it’s much different than when my mother and father brought my older sister and younger brother and I here to live. The counters are Formica with a faded gold daisy-like pattern. The hardwood floors have been redone in the living and dining room. In fact, I remember when mom took that project on herself.  We were eating sawdust for weeks. The floors have never been refinished upstairs and many of the walls are unpainted, still just plasterboard with patching compound smeared over the seams. None of the bedrooms are furnished. They are filled with boxes and things that one accumulates over 50 years in the same space. There is an old Quasar (tube) TV that if you don’t follow the exact sequence of button pushing on two separate remotes, turns into a hissing banshee. It’s actually a bit frightening and causes Harry to burst into tears.

The accumulation of things is a bit of an issue. Anyone who knows me, knows that I am extremely organized and a true believer of “a place for everything, and everything in its place.” For goodness sakes, I had color Polaroid pictures on the ends of my shoe boxes in my closet, so that I knew what pair of shoes was in what box.  It really saved time.

My mother is a Saint. I used to joke that she was the closest thing to a Saint, while still being a Methodist. She has been kind and generous and well, tolerant of our intrusion into her life. There are daily adjustments for both of us…well, all three of us. But it’s a good place to be.

My mother believes in saving the planet.  And sometimes I think she wants to do it all on her own.  She recycles EVERYTHING. And I mean EVERYTHING. (Did you know that old dryer sheets could be used as a filter when pouring something down the drain?) This desire to recycle, combined with the many years that my mother devoted herself to her mother (who lived in the same house until it became a danger for her to be left alone while mom was at work and was moved to a nursing care facility) and for her significant other of 18 years, Stan, (also living in the home) before he died from the cancer that ravaged his body… well, life just got way ahead of her. She cared for both of them tenderly and all-consumingly. And there wasn’t much time for organizing or doing things that we all find ourselves doing to make our homes more comfortable. When both Grandma and Stan had died, she made a real effort to catch up, but then she had some health issues.  She needed (and got) two stents implanted in her heart and she was put on medication - medication that she has been fighting the affects of for some time now. There was high cholesterol to control and then along came the Statins.  They threw her for the proverbial loop.  She had side effects that affected her ability to just plain live her life. Then on a visit to Boston to see Harry and I, she fell off a curb in a parking garage.  Mom never told me, or my brother or my sister how miserable she was, how much pain she was in.  But for three years, she barely functioned, just making it to work and back. Stubborn woman! She had knee surgery over a year ago and it completely corrected the daily pain that she endured. She is off the Statins. And she is doing pretty well, health-wise.  She just turned 76 on November 30 and she’s got a lot of spunk. To illustrate that, she took Harry and I to Rochi Cri State Park and climbed the 303 stairs (the length of 7 football fields, only up) to one of the most beautiful views in the area. She stopped once (that I recall) and was not discernably gasping for air the way I was.

At the top. Rochi Cri State Park.

Grandma and Harry.

The point to all that is that the things she wouldn’t throw out or couldn’t find another use for? They accumulated in the house. Everywhere. And Mom is a child of the depression. She grew up very poor. Her constant refrain is “Waste not, want not.” Honestly, she has a hard time throwing anything away.

So, for the last few months, I’ve been trying to help out.  I scraped, sanded and painted her garage doors. I re-glazed the glass panes of the windows that were all about to fall out. I scraped, sanded and painted her front porch. I’ve organized, bundled and recycled hundreds (no…really hundreds) of magazines. I’ve gone through boxes and sorted and re-boxed and sorted some more.  My sister and I have gone through old boxes filled with mail (dated over 15 years ago.) That paper is burned. Other impersonal stuff is put in the trash. We are actually making some progress, but there are miles to go.  Our goal? To make mom’s life more comfortable…and frankly Harry’s and mine for the time being.

Scraped and ready for sanding.

Recycling: phase I.

Recycling. Circa 1979.

Recycling: phase II.

I continue my daily treks to the Public Library (or to Starbucks…although I’ve given up coffee for a few weeks) to use the Internet. I search and surf and browse for open positions. With all our expenses every month, Harry and I can last on our savings for about another 5 months, but that puts us at zero. And that’s really starting all over.  My hope is that I find something before then. I know that my situation isn’t much different than thousands of other Americans right now, but I hope that we’ll have a happy ending…or actually a happy beginning to another phase of an already amazing journey.

January 20, 2014

Remember Martin Luther King today.

“Mommy, where did you bought me?” Harry asked Sunday afternoon. I repeated his question, wondering, “Where did I buy you?”  And then he asked,“ Did you buy me at Wal-Mart?”

Many things have changed in our lives since we began sharing my mother’s home. One of the more minor things is that we frequently shop at Wal-Mart. Harry thinks you can get anything at Wal-Mart. It’s a massive store that I dislike very much, even though the area ducks seem to find the parking lot very welcoming. I find myself there at least three times a week. Especially when Harry’s favorite Mango yogurt is “rolled back” to $1.00. It’s a different mindset.  I didn’t pay attention to the price of a single yogurt cup when I was employed and earning a paycheck. I’ve spent years, while earning a decent salary, buying what I wanted and pretty much when I wanted it.  Some of that changed when I had Harry, but the money I used to spend on myself, I spent on him instead. It’s been a challenge to “reign in” my spending, the impulse buys, the “I want it now” buys. One I’m working on and failing at a lot of the time.

Wal-Mart parking lot.

It was an amazingly beautiful day on Sunday. Bright blue skies, sunshine and temperatures in the mid-30s. It felt so warm. I guess that was in comparison to the bitter (that doesn’t even seem a descriptive enough adjective for what it really felt like) cold. When I was buying Harry and I some boots to get through the winter here, (that is once I realized that we were going to have to get through a winter here) I was joking with family about the cold rating of the Bogs that I’d chosen for both Harry and myself. “They’re rated to 30 below zero…” I said with a big smile on my face, like “huh, that’s never going happen.” My family just laughed a nervous sort of laugh.  Indeed, only two weeks ago it was a bitter 25 degrees below zero real temperature, with a wind chill of 47 degrees below zero. Seriously.  It was excruciating. It was...well, it was really cold.

Bogs. Good to 40 below zero.

One day, last week, while Harry was in school, after a long morning at the Public Library dutifully searching job databases and tweaking resumes and cover letters…again, I decided to go for a walk in the woods.  It’s something that Mom always said helped to clear her head. It was a relatively warm day and while I’d gone into the library under some cloud cover, the sun was now shining brightly. It had snowed overnight, about 4 inches or more, so the walk was brisk and took some effort through the new fallen snow.  I walked into the pines and around the woods to the back field. I was looking at all the animal tracks in the snow: deer, rabbits, mice, turkeys and other birds. My brother, the hunter, would have been proud. Then I came around the edge of a stand of trees and there I saw it, a half-eaten carcass of a deer.  I studied the area. There were no human tracks, at least since the snow. The carcass had been several feet from where it laid now (dragged by the coyotes, I'm certain), the grass showing through the snow. The rib cage was eaten away but blood and fur remained. I know Mom has coyotes on her property, in fact, when we cleaned out the freezer a week or so ago, we took the old (really old) frozen meat out to the edge of the woods and left it for the coyotes to feast on (something you’d never have heard me say, living in the city.) Sometimes at night, we can hear them howl. There have also been a number of sightings of wolves and there was some sort of “allowable hunt” going on for the largest of them in the area. So, I was just a little bit excited to tell the story to my sister and brother-in-law when I stopped at their house on the way back home. I described the location to my brother-in-law and he just harrumphed and said “Fallow deer.” You see my brother-in-law raises Fallow deer (small deer, much smaller than a Whitetail and very tasty) in his own scaled down, yet oddly similar version of Jurassic Park.  A huge, fenced in (at least a 20 foot fence – apparently Fallow deer can jump pretty high) enclosure where the deer (about 20 of them now since the last slaughter) live with a mean one-horned goat named Katie and a turkey. The deer that had become a feast for the coyotes, I learned, had been a Fallow buck that had caught it’s own horns in the water trough and broken its own neck. My brother-in-law had taken it to the woods for the coyotes. So much for my "expert" tracking abilities.

The deer.

Over the weekend, I taught Harry how to shovel and together we shoveled Grandma's driveway before going for another walk in the woods, this time with Grandma. 

Tools of the trade.

It was the most incredible day and comparably warm for winter in Wisconsin. Things were melting a little and the sun was shining in a bright, bright blue sky.

Blue Skies and warm temps.

Melting.

I made snow angels with my son. Harry liked the idea of falling back into the snow so much that we had to practically drag him away and even Grandma (at 76 years of age) went down to make her own snow angel. She did, however, need a little help getting back up.

Snow Angels.

Another thing that has changed in our lives is that I now cook for two. Harry is still the pickiest 4-year-old eater on the planet (Thank Goodness for Mango Yogurt, applesauce and my sister’s banana bread muffins!), so when I say that I now cook for two, it’s for myself and mom.  She’s really enjoying coming home to sit down to a hot meal, instead of getting home around 6 o’clock at night, or later if she has a stop to make on the way back home, and then trying to figure out what to make. And by the time she would make whatever it was, it would be 8 o’clock or later.  And then she would fall asleep sitting in her favorite chair in front of the television. Now she has a nice, hot meal waiting for her when she arrives. And her Grandson, Harry, to dance the Nutcracker ballet for her, while she sits in that favorite chair.

Harry is obsessed with the Nutcracker.  He LOVES the music, LOVES to dance to the music. His homeschool teacher, Miss Margie, introduced him to the Nutcracker a few weeks before Christmas and it was love at first listen. He was SO excited when I picked him up from school the first day he heard it. So inspired by his love of the ballet and the Nutcracker, I ran to find a Nutcracker for Santa to leave along with the DVD. Nutcrackers themselves are a bit creepy, but I managed to find one that I felt was the least offensive and Harry loved it. I had to immediately order the music, of course. And once it was on my iPhone, we listened every single night…for weeks. Harry would wait anxiously for Grandma to get home, tell her to sit down in her favorite chair and me, in the corner chair in the living room, and he would dance the Nutcracker.  Admittedly, the dance started out rather crudely, but now he’s performing full pirouettes, leaps and actually dancing on his toes! He’s very upset that Christmas has passed and Miss Margie has told him that the Nutcracker is really only for Christmas. I still let him dance and listen whenever he wants.

I spoke with an old friend last week that has just begun some tough times of her own. Just lost her job. She reminded me of a mutual acquaintance – actually the wife of a former colleague – that is a headhunter. I’ll be calling her on Monday to see if she can offer some advice on how to proceed with more success than I am experiencing simply with online job searches, networking and posting on several job sites at a time.  It’s such a different and sometimes confusing landscape – the job search. I’ve found that major institutions won’t even accept an application for a position unless you submit formally online. One reason? Hundreds of applicants for one position.

Part of the reinvention of me is to think about the skills I have exploited in a very different setting.  I’ve spent almost thirty years in newsrooms and of one thing I am certain. Newspapers and I are parting ways. It’s been difficult for the newspaper industry, such complete and utter transformation, moving rapidly and sometimes seemingly out of control. My skills will translate to many fields. I am quite certain of that. But knowing how to open the door to those other fields is a bit out of my realm at the moment.  I’m hoping the headhunter can, frankly, educate me about finding a new career. And get "me" back on the radar.

I did apply for a position online late last week, one that I am confident that I would excel at.  It’s not what I thought I’d be looking for although I don’t exactly know what TO look for. I am excited about the possibilities and the position is with a very respected organization. I know that I could bring great value and expertise. I just hope that while I’m thinking about how well my skills translate to other endeavors, the HR department recognizes the same. Life in a newsroom is unique, and it definitely loses a little in the Hollywood translation. Adaptability and change are a constant in the newsroom because you are responding to a world that is of the minute. And thinking about it just now, I’ve had to professionally reinvent myself many times in the past. The difference is, this time it’s for me. For me…AND for Harry.

Catching snowflakes.