Category: Prose

On my Retirement from UMSL

Back when I was a little hippie girl neither I, nor anyone who knew me well, expected me to live past the age of 25.  My career plan consisted of sex, drugs, rock and roll, dying young, and leaving some brilliant poems letting the world know how badly I’d been treated.

You can imagine, therefore, my dismay when I woke, or to be more accurate, came to, on my 30th birthday.  My plan was not working out at all.  Apparently it is harder to kill an Irish woman than I had thought.  I decided to quit trying.  I cleaned up and started looking for a life.

It was at this juncture that I got into my 1970 VW Beetle with the (as my mechanic described it) stickers and shit all over it, drove to the UMSL campus, and took a job as a word processor.  I decided to work at a college campus because the only time I had been vaguely happy to that point was during my 7 short years as an undergraduate.

For the past 24 years UMSL has been my community, and in many ways my family.  I’ve made lifelong friends and had loving, patient mentors.  Frankly, I’ve learned everything I know about being a grown up either here or in one of my many support groups.

What did I learn?  I learned to show up for work.  I learned to believe in public education.  I learned that I could learn.  I learned that I could be glaringly, publicly wrong and still live.  I learned that the smartest and most accomplished people are often the kindest and most generous.  I learned there’s no substitute for actually doing my job, no matter what kind of mood I’m in that day.  I also learned that if you bang a phone on your desk you can actually break it, but we won’t talk about that today.  Most of all, I learned there is a great joy in being of service.

These may not seem like big lessons to you, but they changed my life.

Since 1983 I have had the privilege of working with all of you and of being of service to many students.  You have given me a place to live the life I was looking for when I got here.  It has been an amazing ride.  I thank each of you from the very bottom of my heart.

 

Eulogy for my Mother

4/8/1930-10/10/2007

My mother enjoyed life and a wide variety of things in it.  To her, whatever was up next was going to be great!  She loved her family, all children, books, crossword puzzles, teddy bears, dolls, the Catholic church, seafood, cigarettes and coffee, the Secular Franciscans, and jazz.  Hers was a world in which Precious Moments could groove to Oscar Peterson.  As a child she’d taken acrobatic ballet lessons and late into her life she could still do perfect cartwheels for her grandchildren.  Without any formal education or training she made a successful career of writing and publishing; and she made it look natural and easy.

My mothers life was not easy.  And it was populated by some difficult people.  For many years I was one of them.  And yet she absolutely insisted on seeing the world through the eyes of love and grace and beauty.

Ever my father’s daughter, I can’t tell you how many times I tried to explain to her (and these word are all capitalized like in Winnie the Pooh) The Reality of the Situation.  She would just say, “I know, Peg,” and go right back to seeing the world of love and grace and beauty.  And no matter how many times I tried to warn her, she always talked to strangers.

I want to tell you my family’s iconic Francine story:  It is the mid-sixties, a time when going out to eat was for very special occasions only.  We’re in one of my father’s awful cars, let’s say the Rambler, and we drive past a pancake house.  My mother says, “A pancake house!  Those are always so nice.”  A pause.  My father says, “Fran, have you ever been to a pancake house?”  She hadn’t.  But she knew that if she did, it would be great.

In her final days my mother’s body was broken from the accident and she had pneumonia.  It hurt her to move and it hurt her to breathe.  But, typically Francine, because her family was standing around her bed she said, “Hasn’t this been the best week ever?”

Myself, I’m not a believer.  But for her I am sure that whatever is up next is bound to be great.