At twenty-four, I went to grad school. (Linked to post)

In the winter I start to get sick. It gets worse. The campus doctor increases my medications, but the stress of grad studies has caused a flare-up of my colitis, and I continue to worsen. I am wracked by abdominal cramps, depleted by exhaustion, vomiting, feverish, and spending hours in the washroom, day and night. The doctor wants me to go home and see my gastroenterologist.

"I can't," I tell him. I am now 2 & 1/2 months short of completing my courses. In those days, courses were year-long, not one semester. If I leave now, I'll lose my whole year. Not going to happen. Somehow I make it through to the end of classes, and earn an A- average.

Back home I rest, and improve a little. I take a summer grad course at U. of Toronto for my final credit, and work on my thesis. The date to defend my thesis is set for early September.

By the end of August, I am beyond sick, but still refusing to quit. Ian finally makes an appointment with my gastroenterologist and half-carries me to it. After a short examination, he orders me straight into hospital; I'm not even allowed to go home for my toothbrush. I'm in hospital 6 weeks; that's where I spend my 25th birthday.

My summer course grade comes back: A-.  My thesis adviser writes to tell me I have missed my defense and that's it. No appeal; I'm out. All along I have been a number for him - one of the 50% who don't complete - and now he has proof. He doesn't say this, but it's there, between the lines. I appeal to the Chair of English Grad studies. My gastro gets his receptionist to write a letter informing of my condition. I never see this letter, but this is one formidable lady, believe me. I'm relieved but not surprised when the Chair writes back assuring me I can defend my thesis when I get well.

And so, just before Christmas, I go to Ottawa to defend my thesis. My adviser gives me a pep talk just before it begins: "They're going to give arguments against your thesis," he tells me, "But don't agree just to be nice. You have to argue back." I'm 5'2, eyes of blue, and I'm sure I still look thin and wan and weak. He expects me to get slaughtered. And I'm sure his only concern is that it will reflect unfavorably on him.

I manage to keep a straight face as I assure him I will. I come from a family of debaters; I argue in my sleep. And so I walk in and it begins. What a blast! I love debating English, I'm quick on my feet, and this is my thesis, I know it inside out. I'm genuinely sorry when it comes to an end, and wish I could think of a way to keep it going. Outside the room, my adviser looks at me speechless for a moment, then tells me I did very well.

And so I have my M.A. But it has taken it's toll. I know I can't get my PhD. I will never be a university prof. This is the road not taken.

We can spend our life in regret over the road not taken, or we can focus on the road we did take. Two years later, I have the first of my three daughters: an all-consuming love. And many years after that, I am a college prof, instead of a University Prof. I don't teach 18th C poetry or even Can Lit - I teach business writing and Ethics, drawing on my undergrad minor in philosophy. But I enjoy the teaching. And in between, I have done a multitude of interesting things.

The road not taken is not always a tragedy. Often, it is just the road not taken.

What is the road you didn't take? Do you regret it? Did you find another road?

Despite my diagnosis of Colitis, I complete my Honours B.A. and apply to Grad school. The plan to get my PhD and teach at University is still intact.

Three of the four I apply to offer me Teaching Assistanceship incentives to come. I accept Carleton U., because Ian has applied to two Ottawa papers and we hope he will follow me. Instead, The Globe & Mail, in Toronto, offers him a job, so we are apart for the year that I am doing my course work. Just as well - in an effort to get on with my PhD, I take all my courses at once, planning to write my thesis over the summer, defend it and start my PhD  next September. Did I mention having the quality of impatience?

The first hurdle is to find a prof to work with me on my Thesis. I have decided to study Canadian Literature, thinking it will be more practical than 18th C or 19th C Poetry, which I love. Unfortunately, nothing in our literature really speaks to me; I am not a modernist. This does not make me an interesting candidate to work with. I am told "50% of M.A. students never finish. I haven't time to take on another." One female Prof baldly tells me she "doesn't believe I have what it takes." Finally, with great reluctance, one takes me on.

I sign up for five courses, treating myself to one Drama and one Shakespeare course: the rest are as dull as I feared Can Lit would be. One of those is with the prof who thinks I don't have it in me to get an M.A. She is one of those attack-prof types - she pounces on the student who obviously doesn't want to be called on and berates him/her soundly for not having read the assigned pages or not giving the answer she wants. In the first class after my unfortunate interview with her when she refused to take me on as a thesis student, she calls on me, as I hide behind my text, to explain the meaning and significance of a passage.

Grad school is grueling. I work day and night to keep up, and still don't always get the readings done. (Maybe because I'm taking twice as many courses as most of my grad colleagues?) At any rate, I am madly reading the passage as she hesitates, letting us sweat, before she picks me as her prey. I look up into her wolfish grin, see her holding her breath, her eyes hungry as she prepares to demolish me.

And I begin to explain the passage to her. Let me tell you, I can barely add two 3-figure numbers. Geography and science are foreign languages to me - no, worse, I'm pretty good at languages. But English? I am a whiz at English. Having whipped through the passage for the first time in the few minutes it took her to ask her question and choose me, I begin to explain it, ideas coming to me as I speak, getting more and more interested in this stupid text as i delve into it, all off the top of my head - and I see the grin on her face fade, replaced with surprise, disbelief, a fading hope that she can find something wrong or lacking in my answer, and finally, re-evaluation of me. When I am finished, she stammers, "Yes...well.. very good," and hurries on to the next passage.

I walk out at the end of that class, go straight to the admin office, and drop her course.

After returning from Europe I get a job and work until the end of August. Ian and I are married on Labour Day weekend. I turn 23 on my honeymoon.

I hate to admit that this is a difficult and unhappy year. I move cities to Oshawa, where I know no one, and commute into York university to finish my last two credits - the goal of getting my Phd and teaching is still in place. I have too much free time, even with 2 part-time jobs, and Ian, at the beginning of his career, has too little. The adjustment to marriage is hard, and I'm sure I've made a terrible mistake.

To complicate matters, I'm ill. One day I faint at University, and immediately take the bus home. I mean home, not the one-bedroom apartment I share with Ian. I want my Mom!

Three months after the wedding, I am hospitalized in Toronto and diagnosed with Ulcerative Colitis. They'll fix me, I think, but I soon learn that this is not a fixable disease - it will be with me for life. Medication is prescribed, and I improve, although it never goes away. I am not one of those who go into remission. Instead, I learn to build a life around it. Not the life I imagined, but a very good life, with my loving family, many good friends, my wonderful daughters, and a husband who stands by me through it all.

What more can one ask? A lot. Everything is not possible, as I thought, standing on the threshold of adulthood in University. Pain, illness and fatigue remove a lot of options.

But there are compensations: since I can't work, I meet many wonderful people volunteering, and I get to stay home with my children, an option I would have wanted anyway. And thank God I live in a country which has excellent health care and considers that a right, like schooling and roads and police and fire services, not a luxury only for the rich. No matter how often I'm in hospital, we don't lose our home or our car, or suffer the shame of bankruptcy, or have to fight an insurance company for the treatment I need. Thank you Canada!

Colitis teaches me to count my blessings; to ennumerate the things I'm thankful for every day; to notice happiness, and nurture those things that increase it; to be grateful for things I might have taken for granted. Would I have liked a life free of illness? You Bet! Would I have been happier? I'm not sure..

What curve-balls has life thrown at you?  How do you view them from the distance of time? Did they come with hidden blessings?

I have worked and saved all the summer of 1975. I've bought my Eurailpass, my Youth Hostel card, a map of Europe. Goodbye Canada, I'm off to explore the world!

Paris (look right through backpackers), Rome (every female backpacker was fair game) , Venice (magic maze of a city), Florence (breathtaking and friendly, I fell in love with Florence), Pompeii (see these ruins last, because all others pale after you've seen them), Athens: so many magnificent sites to see. Here's the Acropolis in Athens, seen from the top of the hill it's built into.

Driving down the coast of what was then Yugoslavia. Men and women working the fields dressed as 19thC peasants, a poor, cold, beautiful land. This picture hardly does it justice.

Switzerland, and the best youth hostel in Europe, a chalet built into the Alps. Hiking trails everywhere - rebel that I am, I left the trails, climbed my way onto a slide that started to give beneath me - lucky I didn't break my fool neck! Here are the Alps seen from a ledge I scrambled onto, trying to find a safe way down.

On to Austria, and Germany. Here's the concentration camp, Dachau, where I wept.

Amsterdam (Anne Frank's house) and Belgium ( where an elderly woman took me in because the Youth Hostel had closed - it was November by now). Her kindness, and that of a few others, stands out. The old cities of Europe tolerated us - barely. Young kids, tourists without any money, drifting irreverently through the stately treasures of their cities.
It was exhilarating, educational, hard work, sometimes scary and often lonely, but I'm so glad I did it. And by the way, it's cold in Europe in November!

EUROPE

An alien fog,
couched by weeds
whipped white with frost.

Frost stalks me also
knowing that here
I am a weed
ugly and uninvited in this land.

I find in motion
temporary warmth
leaning from trains or pocketing my hands
and hurrying through narrow streets,
with buildings rooted firmly
by countless cameras.

I drift like litter,
walking graffiti,
through their cities.
The frost
follows my footsteps
and the warmth of a colder land
calls to me.
   *


Do you remember your first trip on your own? What was it like?

This is my final Undergrad year, and as spring approaches, I cut loose: I get drunk 3 times. It's pretty safe because the parties are all on campus and I'm with my possee of girlfriends. The third time is a party thrown for graduating students on the evening of the last day of classes by the college Master, who has an apartment on the ground floor of our dorm. My Mom arrives the next morning to take me home for study week before exams begin. I sleep in, waking minutes before Mom's due to arrive. I grab my wastebasket, which I threw up in during the night, and run to the washroom. When I return after washing it out, Mom's waiting in my room, and it's pretty obvious that I threw up and slept in my clothes. Typical of Mom, she says nothing, and I, embarassed, also say nothing. We both ignore the elephant in the room (a pretty smelly one) as I pack a suitcase and slide into Mom's car.

I have been very happy at York University. Oh, there were boyfriend issues and such - but I lived with a fantastic group of girls, and for the first time, I'm not out of place here, with my penchant for debating and love of reading and passion for literature and philosophy. In fact, I've decided to go for my PhD and become a university professor! But this year, all my friends are graduating - some to go on to teacher's college or other training, some into the work force. I decide to graduate with them, even though I need an Honours degree (4 years, not 3) to go on - but I've been taking extra courses each year, so I only need three credits, and decide to take them individually.

I have a summer job with the Department of National Defense - my second summer with them - writing press releases for their exhibitions and displays events. I sign up for a summer course to get one of my credits.

I take the bus to Ottawa in the break between classes ending and exams beginning, to do the paperwork for the summer job. On the bus ride home, at the half-way point, a young man holds the door open for me. Nice. I'm impressed. When we re-board the bus, which is half-empty, he asks to sit beside me. We talk all the way to Toronto, and he asks me out to dinner.

After dinner, he asks to see me next weekend. Our first date - he is two hours late. He's a journalist, and a story comes in at deadline, and he doesn't think of phoning to let me know. I wait and wait. My girlfriends begin to pity me. "No," I tell them, "He's coming. I'm sure of it." They pity me more. And more. And more. Finally they convince me to get changed back into jeans and go to the college pub with them.

On the way out the door, guess who finally shows up?
Yup, it's Ian. And he is surprised I doubted him. I don't know whether to be relieved or ticked. I settle on both.

Within a month we are engaged to be married.

The date is a year away, because I have already made plans to backpack around Europe with a Eurail pass and a Youth Hostel card for 3 months when my summer job ends. I will leave right after my 22nd birthday (on Sept. 10), and get home in time for Christmas. But that's a story for my next post!

How did you feel leaving college? Were they the "best years of your life" - or the worst?

.

My Grandma was a jolly, fun woman who loved to laugh. When I was in my second year of university, she was in her 90s, and her health failed. Dementia began to set in. She could no longer live alone in her apartment.

Mom brought Grandma to live with her. But Mom was still teaching, supporting me at university as well as herself, and couldn't stay home to look after Grandma.

In an age when women did not work outside the home, my mother had been raised to feel it was shameful to send one's aging relatives away to a "home" to be cared for by strangers. Good, decent descendants took their kin in and cared for them at home. A string of women paraded through our house, hired by my mother to stay with Grandma while Mom was at work. They repeatedly got better jobs, failed to show up, called in sick just before Mom left for work... It was a nightmare for my mother.  Finally, she had to admit defeat--failure, I'm sure she called it to herself, though no one else did--and place Grandma in a nursing home. She visited her there every day, and I visited her whenever I was home from University.

Here's a picture of my Grandma on her 100th birthday shortly before she passed away.

What I remember about all this, is my Mother's heartache over Grandma's failing health, the look on her face as she watched Grandma, nodding off in the armchair in the living room after dinner. I watched Mom knitting the shrug Grandma's wearing in this photo, late at night as we watched TV before bed, and the image stayed with me - of Mom trying to ward off the cold of Grandma's approaching death.  I wrote:

MENDING

You watch her
wearing her last days,
and late at night
I hear you
scrubbing, patching, darning
the worn fabric
of her years.

Again tonight
while she nodded in shadows,
your troubled eyes
examined her
seeking the fault
in your mending.

I am in University. Love it, love it, LOVE IT! These three years are among the happiest of my life, and I am lucky enough to know it.

Memories of English classes and pub debates, movies and coffee-houses with folksingers or poetry readings, student theatre and dorm pranks, faces of friends i will love forever, cold walks across campus to the library, sitting on the floor along the dorm hallway with my floor-mates, drinking tea and talking, all-nighters to meet essay deadlines, Hallowe'en and Christmas dances, disgusting cafeteria food, and the feeling that anything was possible, that my life could be wonderful...

My creative writing class was in a cement building. One day, the prof told us to write a poem in 10 minutes about anything. I looked around the room, and saw one long narrow window in the corner of the classroom. I am an outside person, a small-town girl who spent most of her childhood out in the hills and trees and rivers. Not a city girl. I look at this single, sad window and I write:

THE WINDOW

In remorse
the architect
slashed
a long, thin wound
into his concrete creation.

The sunlight
leaps in,
glitters fiercely
on the rug.

Overhead
the law-abiding
electricity
hums complacently.

I'm looking forward to reading and commenting on ALL the posts I'm missing as soon as I get home, and I'm thinking of all of you! It is beginning to feel like I've grown up with you and/or your characters.

So year eighteen - in Canada, when I was in high school, we had a 5th year - Grade Thirteen - for those students going on to University. It was - in my high school, at least - brutal. I worked twice, three times as hard that year as any year in my undergrad degree - and pulled in lower grades than I ever got in university. The teachers were deliberately hard markers to "prepare us for university".

It was the best year of my high school life! No, really. I got to take 2 Englishes (that alone was heaven) plus 2 histories, French and German - and unfortunately one mandatory Math. I couldn't wait to get to University and take ALL Englishes (does life get better?) My teachers, though tough, were amazing, especially Mr. Elliot, my English teacher. I sat enthralled through his classes. And we actually had discussions in class. I was in my element, and it lasted all through University.

Although I  was mostly miserable during the first 4 years of high school, I was sad to see it end. I am nostalgic by nature, and endings always sadden me.

This is also a time of examining everything - including  my unquestioning childhood faith.
Here is how i described that in poetry.

MIRACLES

Somewhere
the yellow-warm easy-love
faith has been
spilled or broken
before its first miracle.

but we
emptied half-animal
into cold white,
naked and ugly
with instinctive gropings,
how do we find
hidden with the cleansers
under the kitchen sink
the small, sealed bottle
of mountain-remover?

The year I was seventeen, York University in Toronto held their first Symposium, for High School students across Canada. Winners spent a weekend at York presenting their winning entry and generally soaking up the university atmosphere (and, of course, being subtly wooed by the university). In this photo I am with two other winners and two of the Profs involved in the symposium that year.

The boy on my left won for research in medicine, the boy on my right, with glasses, for biology (he also became my boyfriend for 3 years, took me to his prom and I took him to mine.)

My winning entry? For poetry. Afraid I couldn't dig up that entry, but you'll be seeing some of my poetry in upcoming posts. I wrote poetry from - oh, grade two, probably - until I got married. (No one is ever going to see the Grade Two stuff, so don't ask!)  When I started writing again, 20 years later, I was more interested in writing fiction, which is what I mostly write now, along with memoir.

But here is the poem I wrote on breaking up with this lovely young man, my first boyfriend:

Autumn Air

Thin and bland
are our
decaffeinated
coffee conversations
as we politely
distance our affections.

Like smokers cutting down
or mallards
preparing for departure,
we recognize
the autumn air
between us.

Sweet Sixteen. And It was a sweet year! Sixteen was the year I found the love of my life: travel!

Okay, maybe just ONE of the loves of my life, but certainly an abiding one. My first solo trip was a summer student exchange trip to Quebec. I'd been studying French for three years in school, and thought I was prepared. Trouble was, we learned the pronunciation of Parisian French in school, not the accent and idioms of rural Quebec, where I was headed.

My train stopped at a tiny station late at night to let me off. Most of the other exchange students had left at Montreal and other cities and large towns along the way. My French exchange student, Lise, and her parents greeted me. Nervous? Nope, I was terrified. They barely spoke English; I barely spoke French.  I followed them into their car and we drove, mostly in silence after a few clumsy and ineffective attempts to communicate, for an hour, further and further into the dark and isolated countryside. That was my fault: I had asked to be placed on a farm.

When we arrived at their house, it was midnight. They offered me a drink before going to bed. Unfortunately, they offered it in Quebecois: "Est-ce que tu veux une liqueur?" I got the 'Do you want' part, but the last word threw me. Shocked, I stammered, "Je ne suis pas Veingt-et-un!" They laughed heartily. 21 was the legal drinking age then, so it was obvious what I thought they had offered me. Lise's Mere, wiping tears of mirth from her eyes, got out a can of pop and said, "de liqueur."

We went to bed, and the next morning I woke up with a terrible case of culture shock. Everyone gets it once, like chicken pox, then you're immune. I lay there in bed paralyzed with fear. I was adrift on my own, surrounded by complete strangers and I couldn't understand a word they said, and they couldn't understand me. It took every ounce of courage I could muster to get out of that bed and go downstairs to meet them.

And after that, it was fine. They were good people, and Lise and I became great friends, and still are. We developed a kind of Frenglish between us that seemed to work. I have never experienced culture shock again.
Here we are, that summer we were 16 together.

At then, in an embarassment of riches, Mom and I went to England that same summer! With all my older siblings out of university and independently settled, Mom could finally pursue her own life-long dream - to meet the English relatives and see the beloved places she had grown up hearing about.

My Grandmother was a WWI war bride. She nursed my Grandpa back to health when he was wounded, and married him to keep him that way. She never quite adapted to 'the colonies' and missed her home, I think, all her life. She got back once, when my Mom was a teenager, but that was a financial stretch that couldn't be repeated.

When Mom was planning her trip, she told Grandma about it when we were visiting her, and asked Grandma if she wanted to come with us. I'll never forget my Grandma's answer: "Phyllis, I've said goodbye to my family twice now, each time believing I'd never see them again. i can't do it again."  I think that comment, and the force with which it hit me, is why, for all my love of travel, I've never settled far from home. Home is the place you come back to, and home is always your people.

That trip to England was WONDERFUL. My English relatives were welcoming and funny and, in three short weeks, the distant genetic connection became a huge emotional connection. Every day I woke feeling like it was Christmas, with something new to see and do. The best day was when my second cousin, three years older than me, and his friend, took me around London. A whole day without adults - not that I didn't love them, but I was inundated with them - what a relief!

I said goodbye to these new family members I'd come to love, believing I'd never see them again - and cried all the way home on the airplane.

(I did, however, see them again many times. Any time I hop the pond, I check in on them before exploring other parts of Europe. Furthermore, I married an English Immigrant, and his Geordie relatives have become family, too, which also draws us back when possible.)

And finally, as if that weren't enough for one year, I became an Aunt (and a Godmother)! Here I am with my sister's child, Staci. The following year, my brother Peter and Jan had a baby boy, Michael. I adored them from day one, and all my other nieces and nephews as they made their entrance. Love just keeps on growing!

What an awesome year!