Niceville, Florida

saying good bye to Florida...

Yesterday, I went to Niceville High School, the school I graduated from in 1972. 37 years ago. There were 2 young women in the parking lot chattering about the day and I asked them to take my picture in front of the school. Was I ever that young?

I only attended this High School for 1 year. It was a pretty awesome year. Being the only one of my friends with a car, I was the designated driver all the time.
I met my husband that year at Eglin Federal Prison, neither of us were inmates. I was part of a 21 member chorus - 4 civilians (suprano, alto, bass and tenor), 17 federal prisoners. (That would be 2 females, 19 males. I was 18.) He was a friend of one of the other civilians.

So yesterday, I crammed a year of memories into 2 hours and took a side trip back in time. The interesting thing is there was so many things that were the same and this triggered memories long ago filed away - like some crazy google search on random words.

I remembered :
being editor of the literary magazine
being kissed by someone I loved
the cheering section at my graduation
the death of a good friend in a car accident
my sister taking my car in the middle of the day with my books in it
traveling around the panhandle (sorry, emerald coast) on the prison bus performing at churches
all the laughter - swimming in the afternoon, driving too fast, packing 7 people in my Pinto (yes...my pinto with the eight track tape player)
playing Led Zeppelin too loud.

and what I felt was grateful for all of it, and for all of those people who touch me and shaped me and shared their lives with me then. I don't miss those times because they are incorporated into my being, into the way I see the world and to some extent into the way the world see me.

I will probably never return to Niceville, Florida. But in so many ways it will never leave me.

On the Road Already

I so want to be on the road. I have places to go and people to see.

One of the most difficult things about aventures is something always has to be left behind. And I have tried to leave this place more than once and it keeps drawing me back. I want to be gone. I want to say goodbye and wave sweetly and feel the pang in stomach. Because this is the only way that I can get to the exhileration of starting something new.

This starting something new has kept me attached to SFC for so long. Every sememster new students, new classes, something else to learn, something else to write. But that seems to be gone. We are using other peoples stuff in the classroom and there is no time for the exhileration of creation.

I love teaching. I love new classes - starting the process of making individual students a learning community, a group with a common goal - learn (or even just getting through this class). I like setting up situations where they have to depend on one another rather than me.

Sooner or later I will be off. I just need to be in the moment now. To drink in all of the love.

Mostly I love the process of taking on new information - learning from the students, learning so I can teach them, sorting out the important foundational parts. I will miss this. I will miss the students.

There is something very seductive about watching a person redefine themselves. Starting off timid, or angry and finding something inside themselves, through education, that they did not realize was there. Once you are a part of that it is hard to walk away from it and it redefined me.