Introduction
How did this little book start? What is it about? Why would anyone want to read it?
Those are questions we all ask when we pick up a text, so I will tell you how and where my story started, and then you can decide for yourselves whether it might interest you.
For the past twenty-four years I have been a college English professor and a writer. Along the way, I raised two sons and helped raise a stepson, and I consider that I had a meaningful, busy, productive life. Of course there were adjustments when those boys left home, but my work, writing, and marriage seemed to fill the empty spaces. By the time I was sixty-two, I had survived breast cancer and four surgeries for a detached retina, but other than those traumas I was in quite good health. It seemed, though, particularly after the eye surgeries (reading and writing have my most loved activities since I was three years old), that I needed to reassess my life. Where was I going? What did I want to do in my remaining years? realizing that while I still had functional eyesight that that could change at any time. I actually lost sleep over these questions, as many of us do as we age, but I wasn’t coming up with any answers. I wanted to be a famous famous writer whose books were adapted for Coen Brothers or Merchant-Ivory type movies—a full professor at Harvard—a scratch golfer—but I wasn’t sure any of those things would happen. I am a fundamental optimist, so I haven’t given up hope that my dreams still might come true, but in the meantime I needed to figure out what I wanted to do next. After working for forty years, it was difficult to switch gears and start to slow down.
Over and over people had told me to “do something different in retirement” or “do something that I had a passion for but hadn’t had time to pursue.” That was all well and good, but I couldn’t think of anything different and I didn’t have any passions (except getting on the senior pro golf tour or something) other than the things I was already doing. Occasionally I spotted glimmers of other horizons—like moving to Northern California to start a small organic farm, or moving back to Pennsylvania and building up the seventy-five acre abandoned farm we own there—but it was hard to translate those glimmers into any kind of practical reality. I did know, though, that I was tired of the winter climate in Park City, Utah, where I have lived for the past twenty-three years. The landscape is exceptionally beautiful, the air clean, the people mostly all smart and fit, but I still hated the long winters. Sometimes they stretch from October to June with scarcely a break. My husband, Bill, would consider Hawaii, but I always countered with the thought that it was too far away from my sons. I am not sure that objection made sense, as I now fly from Utah to see them (in Atlanta, in Los Angeles, and in Seattle) and I would have to fly from Hawaii, but I have a psychological barrier about having to cross that wide Pacific every time I needed a “kid fix.”
However, I could imagine myself living on or near a sunny beach—that was easy. When my son Ben and his wife Rachel announced that she was pregnant the summer of 2009 (the same summer of the horrendous eye surgeries, accompanied by my very real fear that I would go blind), ideas started to simmer. I am not sure at what point my busy brain hatched the idea, but I decided that Bill and I would move to L.A. for a few months to help with said baby. No one asked me; this idea was entirely my own brain child. Bill had minimal part-time consulting, so it wouldn’t be hard for him to leave, but what to do about my own job? At first I thought I would ask for a semester’s leave at no pay, then go back the second semester of 2011 to teach full time. I thought further: if I would lose my sight at some point, did I have any more time to do the massive amounts of reading required to teach college-level reading and writing classes? As much as I loved being in the classroom, maybe I didn’t have any more time to write lectures or respond to essays, some of the latter brilliant but many others poorly thought through and poorly executed.
I think the trigger was the fourth eye surgery that I had in late July 2009. Bill and I had taken Ben and Rachel on a house boat trip to Flaming Gorge, Wyoming. (If you haven’t been there, you have missed one of the most beautiful places on the planet.) We meandered slowly through the red rock passages and deep canyons, anchoring at night in small coves studded by green trees and waterfalls, osprey and fish. We had a wonderful time fishing, swimming, eating, and playing board games. We used to take our sons and friends to this spot when they lived with us, and house boat trips had become a perennial family favorite. I was still vibrating inside from the idea that I was to be a grandmother—I cried when Ben and Rachel told me, and I felt emotional each time I thought about it. My grandmother had lived with us while I grew up, in Titusville, Pennsylvania; I don’t remember much about my mother (I have learned recently through my Uncle Gene that her drinking problem was much more severe than I ever knew—women hid their alcoholism at the time—I can recall nothing about her from my childhood, and even as an adolescent and college student she seemed distant and unknowable), and it was my grandmother who actually mothered me. I attribute my present mental stability and any small success I may have had as a human being to Ruby Dewalt Ropp. So, the last morning when we backed the boat into the marina, I felt as content as I had ever felt. I was going to be a grandmother.
But, as we unloaded the boat, I noticed that my left eye blurred the dock right in front of me. The night before, when we sat before our campfire, I noticed some jagged lightning-like flashes across that eye, sometimes a sign of a retina tearing. But they went away and my vision was all right, so I didn’t mention them to my family. Now, though, twelve hours later, something was going wrong—again. I walked over to the bathroom on shore, thinking that perhaps the bright light reflecting from the water bothered my eyes. No—even inside the darkened toilet stall, when I closed my right eye I could only see about half the world, from the ground up. When I came out, Bill pulled up in the truck to drive me back to Park City. I told him: I think my retina is detaching again. I will always remember the panicked feeling I had on that long, five hour drive to the Moran Eye Center in Salt Lake. As Bill drove, it was as if someone was pulling a dense brown curtain down slowly over my left eye. By the time we reached Evanston, Wyoming, I was completely blind again. We reached the eye center before Dr. Al Vitale had gone home. When his assistant covered my right eye and asked what I could see, I had to say, “Nothing.”
This was a Monday. Dr. Vitale operates on Wednesdays, so I had a day and a half of long waiting. That night I lay awake, trying to decide what to do if I lost all my vision. That was easy: I was going to go out into the deep snow in the wintertime and go to sleep. I did not want to be blind. Bill knew I was awake, and I told him that was what I had decided. He said he would come with me—he is the most loyal and loving mate possible, but I told him that he couldn’t: all three of his sons needed him. The surgery went well, but I was under the anesthetic for nearly four hours, and my recovery was slower this time. I think I was simply exhausted from the mental and physical strain. Fortunately I didn’t have to keep my head down for eight days, as I had done after one of the earlier surgeries—that experience can only be described as physical and mental torture.
When it was time for my duties at Westminster College to start again the last week in August, I did not think I could take them up again. My one concern at that point was whether I would still have access to health insurance if I retired. Bill had good insurance for me as he is a Kennecott retiree, but he wasn’t sure if I would be eligible for it when he turned sixty-five. He finally reached an H.R. person the morning I started teaching again, a Wednesday, and he called me at work to give me good news. I sat at my roll top desk and composed a two sentence letter to my department chair and my dean: it was time for me to go. Of course I would finish out the academic year, but that would be the end.
I had some regrets all through that year: leaving close friends, leaving the classroom, leaving the familiar routine, but I didn’t change my mind. I made other plans.
I would go to a warmer climate, I would live near a family (I always have missed the extended family that I took for granted growing up in Pennsylvania), and I would figure out how to do this financially. Bill would come with me for four months in the fall of 2010 and we would take turns babysitting our granddaughter. That way we could both pursue our own interests and not be overwhelmed by the demanding task of giving child care for nine hours or so a day. Rachel would be on leave from mid-March until the end of August, and then she and our son Ben would return to their teaching jobs. I thought I might do a house trade or find someone to rent our Park City house. Rachel was immediately pleased, Ben a bit apprehensive—he had been away from home for about seven years and was used to living on his own. Bill and I knew that when the time came he would want the help, but we let him work this issue through on his own. He needed to feel comfortable with having us around. I don’t know whether Rachel finally just told him she wanted grandma and grandpa to be the nannies, or if he realized the advantages of having loving caretakers, but both parents agreed: we could come.
I began this book with the idea of writing a blog twice a week (I had seen the movie “Julia and Julie” and learned how much fun blogs can be), but I could never quite get the hang of how to post them. I didn’t have much free time after I reached L.A. on August 27, 2010, and, besides, my computer literacy skills are woefully lacking. Instead, I ended up writing journal entries twice a week and sending them to a group of fifty or sixty friends, most of whom sent me enthusiastic responses as the weeks went by. I loved being in immediate touch with readers: I had never experienced this with my three academic books (an edition of writer Henry James’s letters to powerful women, an edition of writer Henry James’s letters to loved younger gay men, and a biography of Henry’s sister-in-law and William James’s wife Alice Howe Gibbens James titled Alice in Jamesland). Eventually I had feedback on all those books, most but not all of it positive, but this was different: it was my voice, my life, my audience. I loved telling about my days, and I think truthfully writing things down kept me sane. When I reflected on what I was doing (changing diapers, giving bottles, calming a crying little girl), I could put it all in perspective.
Thus it was that I began what became one of the best adventures of my life. All my plans did not work out, as my readers will see in the ensuing pages, but something was fundamentally sound in my idea: I grew stronger emotionally and physically. My story is not important on the international stage, but it is important in terms of how we can evolve even as we age: while old age eventually leads to a death sentence, we can still experience magical journeys along our way.
How did this little book start? What is it about? Why would anyone want to read it?
Those are questions we all ask when we pick up a text, so I will tell you how and where my story started, and then you can decide for yourselves whether it might interest you.
For the past twenty-four years I have been a college English professor and a writer. Along the way, I raised two sons and helped raise a stepson, and I consider that I had a meaningful, busy, productive life. Of course there were adjustments when those boys left home, but my work, writing, and marriage seemed to fill the empty spaces. By the time I was sixty-two, I had survived breast cancer and four surgeries for a detached retina, but other than those traumas I was in quite good health. It seemed, though, particularly after the eye surgeries (reading and writing have my most loved activities since I was three years old), that I needed to reassess my life. Where was I going? What did I want to do in my remaining years? realizing that while I still had functional eyesight that that could change at any time. I actually lost sleep over these questions, as many of us do as we age, but I wasn’t coming up with any answers. I wanted to be a famous famous writer whose books were adapted for Coen Brothers or Merchant-Ivory type movies—a full professor at Harvard—a scratch golfer—but I wasn’t sure any of those things would happen. I am a fundamental optimist, so I haven’t given up hope that my dreams still might come true, but in the meantime I needed to figure out what I wanted to do next. After working for forty years, it was difficult to switch gears and start to slow down.
Over and over people had told me to “do something different in retirement” or “do something that I had a passion for but hadn’t had time to pursue.” That was all well and good, but I couldn’t think of anything different and I didn’t have any passions (except getting on the senior pro golf tour or something) other than the things I was already doing. Occasionally I spotted glimmers of other horizons—like moving to Northern California to start a small organic farm, or moving back to Pennsylvania and building up the seventy-five acre abandoned farm we own there—but it was hard to translate those glimmers into any kind of practical reality. I did know, though, that I was tired of the winter climate in Park City, Utah, where I have lived for the past twenty-three years. The landscape is exceptionally beautiful, the air clean, the people mostly all smart and fit, but I still hated the long winters. Sometimes they stretch from October to June with scarcely a break. My husband, Bill, would consider Hawaii, but I always countered with the thought that it was too far away from my sons. I am not sure that objection made sense, as I now fly from Utah to see them (in Atlanta, in Los Angeles, and in Seattle) and I would have to fly from Hawaii, but I have a psychological barrier about having to cross that wide Pacific every time I needed a “kid fix.”
However, I could imagine myself living on or near a sunny beach—that was easy. When my son Ben and his wife Rachel announced that she was pregnant the summer of 2009 (the same summer of the horrendous eye surgeries, accompanied by my very real fear that I would go blind), ideas started to simmer. I am not sure at what point my busy brain hatched the idea, but I decided that Bill and I would move to L.A. for a few months to help with said baby. No one asked me; this idea was entirely my own brain child. Bill had minimal part-time consulting, so it wouldn’t be hard for him to leave, but what to do about my own job? At first I thought I would ask for a semester’s leave at no pay, then go back the second semester of 2011 to teach full time. I thought further: if I would lose my sight at some point, did I have any more time to do the massive amounts of reading required to teach college-level reading and writing classes? As much as I loved being in the classroom, maybe I didn’t have any more time to write lectures or respond to essays, some of the latter brilliant but many others poorly thought through and poorly executed.
I think the trigger was the fourth eye surgery that I had in late July 2009. Bill and I had taken Ben and Rachel on a house boat trip to Flaming Gorge, Wyoming. (If you haven’t been there, you have missed one of the most beautiful places on the planet.) We meandered slowly through the red rock passages and deep canyons, anchoring at night in small coves studded by green trees and waterfalls, osprey and fish. We had a wonderful time fishing, swimming, eating, and playing board games. We used to take our sons and friends to this spot when they lived with us, and house boat trips had become a perennial family favorite. I was still vibrating inside from the idea that I was to be a grandmother—I cried when Ben and Rachel told me, and I felt emotional each time I thought about it. My grandmother had lived with us while I grew up, in Titusville, Pennsylvania; I don’t remember much about my mother (I have learned recently through my Uncle Gene that her drinking problem was much more severe than I ever knew—women hid their alcoholism at the time—I can recall nothing about her from my childhood, and even as an adolescent and college student she seemed distant and unknowable), and it was my grandmother who actually mothered me. I attribute my present mental stability and any small success I may have had as a human being to Ruby Dewalt Ropp. So, the last morning when we backed the boat into the marina, I felt as content as I had ever felt. I was going to be a grandmother.
But, as we unloaded the boat, I noticed that my left eye blurred the dock right in front of me. The night before, when we sat before our campfire, I noticed some jagged lightning-like flashes across that eye, sometimes a sign of a retina tearing. But they went away and my vision was all right, so I didn’t mention them to my family. Now, though, twelve hours later, something was going wrong—again. I walked over to the bathroom on shore, thinking that perhaps the bright light reflecting from the water bothered my eyes. No—even inside the darkened toilet stall, when I closed my right eye I could only see about half the world, from the ground up. When I came out, Bill pulled up in the truck to drive me back to Park City. I told him: I think my retina is detaching again. I will always remember the panicked feeling I had on that long, five hour drive to the Moran Eye Center in Salt Lake. As Bill drove, it was as if someone was pulling a dense brown curtain down slowly over my left eye. By the time we reached Evanston, Wyoming, I was completely blind again. We reached the eye center before Dr. Al Vitale had gone home. When his assistant covered my right eye and asked what I could see, I had to say, “Nothing.”
This was a Monday. Dr. Vitale operates on Wednesdays, so I had a day and a half of long waiting. That night I lay awake, trying to decide what to do if I lost all my vision. That was easy: I was going to go out into the deep snow in the wintertime and go to sleep. I did not want to be blind. Bill knew I was awake, and I told him that was what I had decided. He said he would come with me—he is the most loyal and loving mate possible, but I told him that he couldn’t: all three of his sons needed him. The surgery went well, but I was under the anesthetic for nearly four hours, and my recovery was slower this time. I think I was simply exhausted from the mental and physical strain. Fortunately I didn’t have to keep my head down for eight days, as I had done after one of the earlier surgeries—that experience can only be described as physical and mental torture.
When it was time for my duties at Westminster College to start again the last week in August, I did not think I could take them up again. My one concern at that point was whether I would still have access to health insurance if I retired. Bill had good insurance for me as he is a Kennecott retiree, but he wasn’t sure if I would be eligible for it when he turned sixty-five. He finally reached an H.R. person the morning I started teaching again, a Wednesday, and he called me at work to give me good news. I sat at my roll top desk and composed a two sentence letter to my department chair and my dean: it was time for me to go. Of course I would finish out the academic year, but that would be the end.
I had some regrets all through that year: leaving close friends, leaving the classroom, leaving the familiar routine, but I didn’t change my mind. I made other plans.
I would go to a warmer climate, I would live near a family (I always have missed the extended family that I took for granted growing up in Pennsylvania), and I would figure out how to do this financially. Bill would come with me for four months in the fall of 2010 and we would take turns babysitting our granddaughter. That way we could both pursue our own interests and not be overwhelmed by the demanding task of giving child care for nine hours or so a day. Rachel would be on leave from mid-March until the end of August, and then she and our son Ben would return to their teaching jobs. I thought I might do a house trade or find someone to rent our Park City house. Rachel was immediately pleased, Ben a bit apprehensive—he had been away from home for about seven years and was used to living on his own. Bill and I knew that when the time came he would want the help, but we let him work this issue through on his own. He needed to feel comfortable with having us around. I don’t know whether Rachel finally just told him she wanted grandma and grandpa to be the nannies, or if he realized the advantages of having loving caretakers, but both parents agreed: we could come.
I began this book with the idea of writing a blog twice a week (I had seen the movie “Julia and Julie” and learned how much fun blogs can be), but I could never quite get the hang of how to post them. I didn’t have much free time after I reached L.A. on August 27, 2010, and, besides, my computer literacy skills are woefully lacking. Instead, I ended up writing journal entries twice a week and sending them to a group of fifty or sixty friends, most of whom sent me enthusiastic responses as the weeks went by. I loved being in immediate touch with readers: I had never experienced this with my three academic books (an edition of writer Henry James’s letters to powerful women, an edition of writer Henry James’s letters to loved younger gay men, and a biography of Henry’s sister-in-law and William James’s wife Alice Howe Gibbens James titled Alice in Jamesland). Eventually I had feedback on all those books, most but not all of it positive, but this was different: it was my voice, my life, my audience. I loved telling about my days, and I think truthfully writing things down kept me sane. When I reflected on what I was doing (changing diapers, giving bottles, calming a crying little girl), I could put it all in perspective.
Thus it was that I began what became one of the best adventures of my life. All my plans did not work out, as my readers will see in the ensuing pages, but something was fundamentally sound in my idea: I grew stronger emotionally and physically. My story is not important on the international stage, but it is important in terms of how we can evolve even as we age: while old age eventually leads to a death sentence, we can still experience magical journeys along our way.