Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho, It's Off to Work I Go

I start a new job tomorrow, Wednesday, September 16, 2020, ending 45 days of unemployment.

I didn’t shout from the roof tops that I was fired on July 31, 2020. Although it came as a shock, after a few hours I realized that this was one of those situations when the Universe, God, Karma, a Higher Power, whatever you choose to call “it”, intervened and made a decision for me my deep, inner-self knew I should make, but I didn’t have the courage to do so. I even said that in the message I left for my shrink. Although I loved the clients I worked with, the brass tacks of the “job” was becoming a shit-show I didn’t want any part of or responsibility for. My parting words there are: Good luck at the upcoming annual Federal review. You’re fucked.

I’m not naming my new employer so don’t even ask me. I’ve removed my profile from Linked In. I removed the previous agency where I worked from my employment history on Facebook and I no longer “follow” them. You won’t find the name of my new employer associated with me in any way on social media. I’ve been fucked too many times by employers trampling all over my First Amendment rights while I’ve never disclosed any PHI (Protected Health Information) or violated anyone’s HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) rights. Yet somehow, I managed to get myself in trouble with previous employers, particularly by what I write about in this blog.   

I am a storyteller. If you’ve ever had a conversation with me, you’ve encountered me “setting the background” of whatever it is I’m finally going to tell you or engage in conversation with you about. My case notes can be horrendously long if I’m not mindful of keeping it to the “Description, Affect, Plan”. I am well aware of the ethical boundaries of my profession regarding confidentiality. No one has ever accused me of violating anything related to inappropriate disclosure of PHI because I never have. Simple enough from my point of view.

I’ve documented something every day of the last 45. It could be whom I spoke with regarding Food Share or comparing insurance plans on the healthcare.gov marketplace. It could be how useless and disappointed in myself I felt because I could no longer provide my husband’s Part B for Medicare by having employer sponsored health insurance. It’s there and sometime in the future I’ll re-read all of it; just not when doing so feels like walking across a sea of grit.

Tomorrow I’ll get up, shower, do my make-up (minus lipstick because thank heaven we’re all still wearing masks at work), and try to do something with my hair that doesn’t look like it’s 1986 and hanging over my eyes. I choose my work clothes the night before which prevents me from standing in front of my closet and drooling in the morning while I attempt to make a shirt and a pair of pants not look like I’m walking off a golf course in 1974.

As you get up and go to wherever it is you work, remember that I’m with you. Starting something new.

Gravehopping and Finding My Way Home

My favorite song about home is “Can’t Find My Way Home” by Blind Faith. The summer of 1989 my life-long group of high school friends and I saw Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young at Alpine Valley. 

We started the aimless trudge through the parking lot on the hunt for Eric’s Ford Escort, when Rolf called “Shotgun!” When we found the car, 45 minutes later, by parking lot etiquette, Rolf sat in the passenger seat and I sat in the back seat of what was really, quite a teeny, tiny little car. 

That Blind Faith song was on a “mix tape” stuck in Eric’s cassette player. I swear to god we heard that song two dozen times. I fell asleep at one point so that may be a low-ball estimate.

We were driving to Madison without a map, just some sketchy directions and a lot of pot. Did I mention we were all totally high the entire night? That probably explains why we shrieked like Howler Monkeys when we finally got to someone’s brother’s cousin’s house we’d been searching for in Madison.

“Home” has had multiple locations and connotations throughout my life. Geographically “home” has included Appleton, Boston, Neenah, Menasha, Milwaukee, Green Bay, Oconomowoc, and Shawano. The consistent location of home has always been Shawano. My maternal grandparents spent their entire lives there, or within the “suburbs” of Wescott and Richmond. My grandma grew up on what was or would become the Menominee Rez. My parents met and married there. I was baptized three weeks after being born there because my father was shipping out to Basic Training before deploying to Vietnam. While he was in country my mother and I lived with her parents, my Grandpa and Grandma Krause. 

We moved to Appleton within weeks of my second birthday, but still, Shawano was Home. When we were leaving after a weekend there, Grandma would kiss us gently on both cheeks and say, “Now you come home again soon.” Her cheeks were soft like powered pillows. I cannot remember a single time when leaving that house without hearing her speak those words.

Sometime in early 2003 my sister and I discovered that on Saturdays of Memorial Day Weekends, our grandparents and our grandma’s two sisters and their husbands, our great-aunts and great-uncles, spent the day driving to the graves of our ancestors. They cleaned off the headstones, pulled out the fake, faded flowers from last Memorial Day Weekend and stuck in a bouquet of new, brighter fake flowers, and shared stories on the drive to the three cemeteries they visited. With their tasks complete, they stopped at a tavern in Red River, another Shawano suburb. In this part of Wisconsin there are no “bars” – far too “big city.” These were taverns. They had supper at one of dozens of supper clubs they could choose from. Places we went to when I was kid and thought eating frog legs made me “exotic” and “sophisticated.” I was eight years old.

Saturday of Memorial Day Weekend 2003 my sister and I tailed along with our grandparents, great-aunt Margaret and great-uncle Dave, great-aunt Shirley and great-Uncle Butch. Butch and Shirley had an enormous Suburban with a back row tiny enough to rival the back seat of my friend Eric’s Ford Escort, which is where my sister and I sat. I swear to god every time we stopped at a cemetery, tavern or the supper club, Margaret would forget my sister and I in that cocoon and shut the door without letting us out of the car. That was the only way we could get out and every stinkin’ time she forgot, we knocked on the window looking forlorn and pissed off at the same time.

Every year at her grandmother’s grave, a woman I never met yet lives inside of me, my grandma said, “There was never a better grandma than her.” Every year I said, “She has a run for her money because you’re the best grandma there ever is.” She held me a little closer and said, “I can only hope so, Dolly.” She called all five of her granddaughters “Dolly”.

It didn’t take long before my maternal aunts and cousins filtered in to Gravehopping with us on the Saturday of Memorial Day Weekends. The more we gained, the more we lost. We all lose those we love to the inevitable unknown of Death. It may come fast or slow, tragically or peacefully, but still, it comes. There can be no other way. Margaret was the first of “the Golden Girls”, as we referred to them, to pass in 2010. Then it was Grandma in 2016 and finally Shirley in 2018.

My husband and I moved to Green Bay in August 2019 for my new job. With the help of Siri, Irish accent version, I can now find more places than the casino, the airport and the stadium which was the extent of my geographical knowledge of this town until moving here.

As Memorial Day Weekend closed in around me this spring, plans for Gravehopping were made. As I was writing down ingredients for Cucumber Salad, my signature dish and meal contribution since Grandma died, I stood in my kitchen and suddenly dropped my pencil, my notepad, and I couldn’t shut the cupboard door because I was literally paralyzed. I didn’t blink, I don’t remember breathing although obviously I was, I stood there with one thought banging inside of my skull: From where I stood, I didn’t know how to find my way Home.

Shawano has been my true north since conception. Not knowing exactly how to get there is akin to fate shaking me like a snow globe only when I land, the earth is sand, the air is stiffening fog and I have no voice.

Just like so many decades before when trying to reach Madison without a map made driving monotonous and pointless, I felt that way about driving up to Shawano. For the first time in my life I couldn’t find my way Home. 

Of course, Irish Siri got me to my aunt’s house easily. Gravehopping was accomplished and is in the books for another year. However, if I had to get in my car right now and drive to Shawano, I couldn’t do it...without GPS. In the genuine sense of the lyric, “I can’t find my way home.”