Why Do I Get My Best Ideas at 1 AM?
For 34 years, I was a college adjunct professor teaching English at two local community colleges. I loved teaching. I was a born entertainer, and finding ways to make commas interesting (they can save lives, you know) and making Shakespearean sonnets relevant was fun. (I never taught his plays. I hate his plays. Either you’re knee-deep in blood, or there are a bunch of people running around not being able to recognize each other. But his sonnets…) 34 years! But times change. Our population was shrinking (the body of students, not the students’ bodies) and as an adjunct, that meant I was going to be out of work. My marriage of 22 years breathed its last. I lost friends, one to death and others to other activities or changes in schedules. Finally, it just all got to me, and I decided to take my daughter-in-law’s suggestion that I move from upstate New York (think Canada without the benefits) to North Carolina, where my feet could thaw, I could spend time with her and my son and watch my last grandchild grow up. And with a booming population and colleges all over the place, of course I’d find a job.
Except I didn’t. I found a perfect house in a perfect neighborhood with the perfect yard for my four dogs and three cats. I spent the summer getting the house all settled and writing job applications to the seven colleges within an hour’s radius that said they were looking for adjunct instructors, and I waited for the offers to come. And waited. I didn’t even get interviews. Nothing.
Just as I was starting to wonder what the hell I was going to do, a man showed up on my dating site who sounded promising, until I noticed he lived in Texas. For those of you who are geographically challenged, Texas and North Carolina are not really close to each other, certainly not for dating, which was all I was looking for. I had already been married three times. I was NOT looking for husband number 4. I just wanted a best friend with benefits to go out with and stay in with once in a while. Seven months later, on March 4, 2020, Dave and I got married. A week later, the world shut down, and we’ve enjoyed a very quiet, very restful honeymoon ever since. We would love to go places like we did last fall — the Pirate Fest, the State Fair, the Scottish Games, the Air Force Museum — but we sit home, because there is a virus out there, and we are old. I’ll be 69 in less than a month, and he turned 70 a couple of months after we got married. And everything was cancelled and/or closed this year.
Since I’ve been here, I’ve lost a dog to cancer, a cat to old age, a car to a woman on her cell phone, and my career. I can’t go North for Thanksgiving this year like I did last year, so I will miss the first Thanksgiving dinner with my family ever, except for the year I had pneumonia. Dave lost his mother last August and then his brother was found dead in his home, having died weeks before of a massive heart attack. Grisly just begins to describe that. He went back to Texas for a week, chancing the pandemic, to reunite with his remaining two brothers and still hasn’t quite recovered. Without each other, both of us would be in pretty bad shape right now. We thank each other every day for being here.
But there is hope. The election is over, and there’s hope for the country. There’s hope for someone with a brain to take over running the disease control and maybe getting the spread slowed, and there’s hope for a vaccine. I am a test subject for one of the vaccines — I felt it was something I could do to help. Whether I got two shots of the vaccine or two shots of saline solution, no one knows, and I’m not taking any chances, but there’s hope. We will take the chance of having Thanksgiving dinner with my son and daughter and their families — just 10 of us, if we don’t count the seven-year-old as a real person. I have discovered that I love to write, so I have been turning out these stories of my life and my memories and lessons maybe other people can learn from. Lord knows, I haven’t.
And why do I get my best ideas at 1 AM? See that picture up there? That’s my father when he was in college. My father was a night owl, and he passed that gene on to me. He died when he was two years younger than I am now, but I guess it wasn’t because he went to bed late and got up late. Thank you, Dad, for all the good things I inherited from you, but this isn’t one of them. Now it’s 2:00 AM, and it’s time to go to bed. I have a lot of nothing to do tomorrow, and I need my rest. Miss you, Dad.