Weird Dreams: A Birthday Party
I had a dream about my college students throwing me a surprise birthday party for my 18th birthday. There were a number of oddities about that; first, my earliest teaching role was as a calculus teaching assistant at the University of Texas at the age of 19. Second, my birthday falls on Dec. 30; there are no college classes held on that holiday week stretching Christmas to New Years. Third, I wasn't very popular with my own students, as a teaching fellow at the University of Houston or during my 5 years as a professor (the last a temporary visiting professor at Illinois State). If they ever had a party to celebrate my leaving the college, I was never invited. I think over 8 years, I got one invitation: one of my Mexican (not hyphenated) students at UTEP invited me to his family's graduation celebration; I had to decline because I was scheduled to attend my baby sister's graduation at UTSA the same day.Mom has pictures of my first birthday party in the family album (on Cape Cod where my USAF Dad was reassigned several weeks after I was born). It was my Dad's longest military assignment; my next 4 siblings were born there and I had started primary school before Dad got reassigned to the Florida panhandle. It had to be hard on my Mom; I think my maternal grandmother/godmother was initially diagnosed with colon cancer when Mom was pregnant with me and I think they didn't want to break the news to her at the time. (My Mom had married at 18, and I was born 13 months later.) I wasn't 3 years old by the time Grandmother died. Oddly enough, my bilingual Grandmother didn't go by mémère but signed "GrandMa" in a card to me. (Both parents' homes were primarily French-speaking, and in fact, French was my first language, which became an issue when I started kindergarten.)
I turned 18 during my sophomore/junior year at OLL. My family was in Europe after the south Texas USAF base (when I had attended a local high school) was shut down; my Dad was reassigned to Germany. (The shutdown was rumored to be over a morale issue. It seems that Mexican whores in Nuevo Laredo preferred not to service black GI's.) My folks had wanted me to go with them to Germany and attend classes taught by the University of Maryland's global campus; I really didn't want to lose credits for certain classes that wouldn't transfer. So my maternal Grandfather paid expenses for me to visit him in Fall River, just across the state border from Providence, RI. (I still have relatives in the area who technically live in RI.)
The "highlight" of my birthday was when Grandfather proudly escorted me for mandatory registration for the Selective Service system. Now in fact, even though we were still in South Vietnam at the time, the draft lottery had finally ended sometime before my birthday. I still thought it was weird that my Grandfather would have been fine with his first grandchild getting his ass shot in Vietnam. I, in fact, had been a silent objector to our military involvement in Vietnam (I didn't oppose military service for defensive wars); I didn't want to make waves as a military brat. I remember as a kid pretending to be a TV news anchor during the war. Walter Cronkite would rattle off the war casualties as casually as reporting the stock market indexes for the day of trading. Somehow the war seemed as perpetual as the stock market; I saw the TV footage, but it came across as surreal, like some Hollywood war flick. Until my Dad got assigned there. I was 12 years old, the oldest of 7 kids. I wasn't ready to become the man of the house if my Dad died there. Yes, I know he wasn't in the Army infantry, fighting on the front lines. But just being in a war zone was like opening Pandora's box. I refused to see him off at the airport heading to Vietnam. It's difficult to explain. It was like he had to come back because we hadn't said goodbye to each other. Somehow Dad's orders got changed to Thailand by the time he arrived in Vietnam (thank God).
The war changed Dad; even Mom notes that he wouldn't talk about it to her either. I remember a candid moment years later when I confronted him over whether he felt proud of his part in the war (a
mechanic of jets pounding Southeast Asia, causing massive collateral damage and civilian casualties). He refused to respond to the bait. I think Dad in a sense felt trapped in the military, tied down by a large family he needed to support and the difficulty of starting a second career. (In fact, I qualified for the free school lunch program all though high school; my folks basically lived paycheck to paycheck on his meager enlisted pay. The folks always put the kids first; we didn't go hungry.) He finally made the decision to retire while in Germany and struggled for a while in the first few years of military retirement (I especially remember his making just over the minimum wage as a contractor mechanic at the San Antonio airport) before joining the USPS.
I arranged for the college (OLL) to give the family a couple of rooms in the men's dorms for a couple of days as Dad looked for a family residence in the San Antonio area as he served out the balance of his military service. I still remember Mom commenting about smells coming from adjacent rooms; I remember laughing, explaining to her they were smoking marijuana. (I never personally smoked anything. but I recognized the smells.) I cringed as my baby sister (maybe about 6) loudly pointed out our RA (TP) had a missing leg. (TP was a Vietnam vet who lost his leg in the hapless stalemates of Hamburger Hill.) Tom had a prosthesis, but often didn't wear it, hopping around on one foot and/or using crutches.
TP had a very pretty, petite Latina coed girlfriend Sally, another personal friend. I would have dated Sally in a split second. Her personality was very similar to Anne, my Navy crush. (See my essay blog for a post on Anne and my Navy experience.) We worked together as dishwashers at the college cafeteria my freshman year. I used to tease her that she could serve as a model for a Latina doll; she would respond by throwing gross stuff at me. The college grounds included a residence for Roman Catholic sisters/nuns (CDP: Congregation of Divine Providence), including older/retired ones. The sisters occupied the left dining hall, and the students used the right. One day (don't ask me why Sally raised the topic) Sally started discussing sexual positions (she preferred being on top) and solicited my opinion. I was a virgin and not an expert, but I didn't have an issue with her preference. To this day, I have to wonder if any of the sisters overheard our conversation while rolling their trays down our chutes.
What's Happened to Old-Fashioned Marriage?
First, an item I would have normally included in my COVID-19 diary segment, but I didn't have enough material to justify its own segment. My nephew's sister-in-law recently gave birth to premature twin girls. So they are going to be in the NICU for a while; I think one of the babies needed mechanical breathing assistance at the start of her stay, but a recent text mentioned that she is now breathing on her own. I remember one of my nieces was in a NICU while I was earning my doctorate, and I drove to the San Antonio area to visit her. Visitation was already highly restricted--I think only immediate family and grandparents, so my RN sister had to smuggle me in to see her newborn daughter. So it turns out that under prevailing COVID-19 policies, visitation is even more restrictive. The twins' mother was discharged fairly early from the hospital, and there're a lot of hoops and hurdles for her to go through to visit her own babies. Hopefully they'll transition to more humane policies. Thoughts and prayers for these two beautiful gifts from God.My niece, mentioned above, became an elementary school teacher. She has had a difficult time since the Great Recession. She was laid off at a Colorado public school under seniority retention. She struggled to find work thereafter, also weighed down by college loan payments from her South Dakota private school alma mater. (One reason she went there is that she is a talented euphonium player; I had gone to her college's performance in Washington DC to see her play.) She eventually made her way to briefly staying with my baby brother's family in the San Antonio suburbs; she landed an hourly-paid music teacher position at a local private school. Her youngest sister, also an education major (but more like a junior high math/robotics teacher), had landed a position in a Kansas public school district, and she eventually got a job offer from the same school district where I think she worked for a good 2-3 years and got along well there, until her private life intervened.
I don't get a lot of gossip from my siblings or my nephews and nieces. But my understanding is she met this guy through the fitness club they both belonged to. Long story short, they got married and eventually had a firstborn son. (She did tragically miscarry a second baby, a girl, about halfway through her pregnancy; my understanding is the umbilical cord had wrapped around her throat.) To this day, I've never met my nephew-in-law or my grandnephew. I've had encounters with the nephew-in-law, mostly through Facebook; I had accepted his friend request and then found my news feed swamped with these dark abortion-abolitionist posts. Today I would probably simply toggle off following status, but I found his obsession rather disturbing and messaged my niece that he needed to tone things down. He responded with a flurry of personal attacks, mocking my professed pro-life views as hypocritical. Now, to be honest, I seem to attract enemies like a lightning rod and people disagreeing with me is more the rule than the exception. What puzzled me was the hair-trigger escalation and ferocity of response; I thought there was anger issue here, and I doubt that I was the first or only target. I began to get concerned about my niece's safety.
I don't recall the exact sequence but, as I've mentioned in earlier posts, she posted some teacher propaganda piece about how we don't appreciate the extra hours teachers put in. I responded something to the effect that a lot of us work extra, unpaid hours (for example, a lot of database maintenance, patching, and upgrades take place on off-peak hours--nights, weekends, and holidays when users aren't accessing the databases); other relatives joined in, and my niece melted down over the disagreements. Her better half (?) soon came to her defense, concentrating his fire on me. He quickly jumped from the meme kerfuffle to resuming his attack on my pro-life "hypocrisy". I don't mind a disagreement over opinions, but his personal attacks were out of line. I warned if he didn't tone it down, I would defriend him. Let's just say that he beat me to it.
I don't know the specifics (I have my suspicions), but somehow the relationship had ruptured to the point my niece left her stable teaching job in Kansas and moved to her folks' Colorado home. She once again ran into issues finding teaching work. I think she got some work at a Montessori school and/or other lower-paying/hourly teaching work. My nephew-in-law also had an unstable work history and if anything, my niece brought in more money to the household. At some point, they reconciled and moved to his home base around Springfield, MO. I was personally skeptical that the nephew-in-law had "changed", and my niece really didn't have a support system in Missouri. I think one of my nephews at the time taught school in the St. Louis area across the state. Again, my niece struggled through a series of lower-paying jobs (I think some of them non-teaching).
In the meanwhile, my sister and her husband retired from civil service, sold their house to my RN goddaughter, and moved to my brother-in-law's home base near Cincinnati. Something happened (I suspect spousal abuse but unconfirmed), and she and her son moved to my sister's Ohio home.
Among other things, trying to teach in another state runs into reciprocity recognition issues, which might range from taking additional courses to passing other tests. I think my niece has picked up some income through substitution teaching (dried up during the COVID-19 shutdowns) but recently messaged she passed some Ohio qualification test with super-high scores and should get her Ohio license soon.
My sister texted out my niece has finally filed for divorce. It's sad to see, of course, although my niece's health is a higher priority. That makes 5 divorces among 4 sibling families (one sibling has no married children yet, and the other has one married daughter). Several nephews and nieces are unmarried (up to 3 are gay), out of the 21. In the case of my 3 divorced nephews, it wasn't their idea; their wives no longer wanted to be married. In the case of my other niece, her husband decided he didn't want to be tied down.
It's sad. My parents were still in love by the time my Dad died from sepsis following major back surgeries. My married aunts and uncles (except maybe one uncle) had lifelong marriages. My 6 siblings also have lifelong marriages.
