Getting on the ferry for the ride back we got separated. When I caught up with her, she told me about the deck hand who helped her get her new bike onboard. We saw him again and he offered to take us to the pilot house. Who would say no to that? So off we went. We got the tour and saw the most fabulous sunset view of lower Manhattan.

It is actually quite fascinating when you think about it. The ferry runs at least every half hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They run in all kinds of weather. If it is too foggy to see, they navigate by equipment only. The guys who run the ferry work four days a week, 11-hour shifts. That’s a lot of trips back and forth. But as the assistant capitain (I forget his name or exact title, my journalism skills are getting a bit rusty) said, it’s never the same trip twice: Every hour the sky changes and the currents shift. Traffic patterns change. A tangible reminder that life is not the same. Each day has its own particular nuance and cadence. Currents shift and while some days it seems there is too much heaviness and it is hard to breathe, other days the winds blow fresh air.

The trip wasn’t long enough or exciting enough to warrant a chapter in the book that I am not writing anyway (as the ferryman suggested), but it was an interesting diversion on a mild summer evening and a new way of looking at the city. That makes it worth taking note of.

Even though I didn’t know what union they were with, my sentiments are decidedly pro-union, so they had my support. My father was a union man—the president of his local. Talking to a colleague a couple of years ago we compared upbringings, and when she said, “We ate the government cheese,” I knew exactly what she meant. At the time I didn’t quite understand what going on strike really meant, except that my father had to take an extra job to get us through, but as I got older I respected him for not crossing the picket line and for standing up for what was right, not just for him but for the entire working class. There is something to be said for solidarity—the substance behind the word, not just the word.

When I became a writer about six years ago and joined the National Writers Union, a union for freelance writers, I jumped at the chance to get involved. I happily volunteered my time and efforts. When it became apparent that they needed someone with financial expertise, I gladly stepped up even though I had given up that career path. I uncovered embezzlement at the national office and was elected financial secretary/treasurer. While this position pays a small stipend, it was a tremendous amount of work. I felt, though, that the sacrifice was worth it. As a UAW local, I also was able to get involved at other levels. When they called, be it to help knock on doors or teach a class, I answered. In the process I met and heard the stories of some wonderful people, people who had made sacrifices far greater than mine to fight for the union. I will always be proud to call these folks my friends.

A couple of years ago, the dream died (pardon the cliché, but sometimes dreams really do die), and I find myself fighting the union that I gave up so much for. The details will come out in later posts, as I have decided I can no longer be publicly silent. But trust me, I have been making plenty of noise within the leadership of our local and within the regional and international levels of the UAW. Noise that hasn’t won me many friends, but sometimes you can’t just go along to get along with things that you know are wrong.

What pains me is not only what is being done to me personally, which is quite a lot, but the realization that the leadership of the UAW has no qualms about disrespecting all the workers who make the UAW what it is: The workers who stand on the front lines every day. The workers who stand up to management and fight for the right to work in a safe environment and be treated with dignity and respect and to earn a fair wage. When the UAW leadership makes it their “job” to harass and mistreat me, a UAW member, they are using their members’ dues money to fund their war efforts. Even worse, they put me in the position of having to speak out and be critical of the UAW in a climate where there is too much negative press.

So, what does this have to do with not writing? Basically, this situation has put me up to my neck in a vat of molasses. (I am not drowning in it yet, so that’s a good sign.) I had to take a very basic job in order to have some kind of cushion if they do succeed in throwing me out. That means that I am working two full-time jobs, and while I can’t complain about this other job (other than the pay, combined I am barely earning a living), it is not what I love. And in my union job I have seen everything that I have built systematically destroyed. That and the definite betrayal by the union I have given so much for sits like a load of bricks (to be polite) on top of my head. Every day brings a new attack, so I find myself constantly on the defensive.

I no longer know what I should be doing, but I know it is not this. It can’t be this.

School’s out for summer
School’s out forever
School’s been blown to pieces”
~~Alice Cooper, “School’s Out”

So, today was the official goodbye to the MacDuffie campus, where I spent my more formative years (calendar-wise, I’m still formulating). A “small, private all-girls prep school in Springfield” hardly describes the school, the experience, or the lingering effects.

It was the seventies, but even that doesn’t begin to describe it. A friend of mine put it best on a recent Facebook status: “It was never a very happy place for me, but my time there is very much a part of who I am.” I find that as time goes by that my own feelings are similarly mixed. At the time, I really didn’t want to be there. I begged my mother to let me go to public school for at least a year. That never happened. The value at the time wasn’t particularly apparent, and not just to me. Once, when my grandfather was visiting, he caught me sitting cross-legged at the dinner table. “We’re sending her to finishing school for what?” He asked my mother. To this day I am still pretty pleased with myself that I couldn’t be “finished,” though I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the reaction he was going after.

My family is working class, and I was there on scholarship (and maybe some help from the aforementioned grandfather), so I always felt a little out of place with the girls whose parents ran companies or were presidents of foreign countries. In my experience, the school was particularly clique-y and my “clique” ended up being those who likewise didn’t fit into any of the other cliques. Those friendships saw me through.

There were fun times: Hanging out in Finn’s Bin, dances at nearby prep schools, the gooeyist chocolate chip cookies ever, field hockey (which I wasn’t outstanding at, but, hey, it was fun), skipping class to hang out in the art room, field trips, visits to art museums in New York City, and an exchange-student trip to France. (I stayed with a boy’s family. I hung out with his mother who was thrilled to have female company, even though she didn’t speak English and my French was pitiful.) There was dance club, and my unforgettable performance dancing to Steve Martin’s “King Tut.” (Needless to say, it was more of a comedy performance than a serious dance routine, but laughter always has its place.) For English class we wrote our essays for college entrance applications. One of mine was on the three people I would invite to dinner. I chose three of the members of The Who. (Did I mention it was the seventies? And, yes, I did get into college!) I was surprised to discover both that my English teacher let me submit the essay (it was a thing of beauty) and that she was a Who fan herself. (A secret that I kept until now.)

There were also tragic–well, tragic for a high school student–times: Dissecting fetal pigs in 10th grade–I can still smell the formaldehyde. There was the year that the headmaster (these were the “Lauber years”) decided that he was going to teach 11th-grade English, and I was in 11th grade. He failed me on my personal essay because of a misspelling (this was way before spell-check), and chose to humiliate me in front of the whole class for it. In my senior year, my skipping class caught up to me in a big way when my report card came in and showed that I was absent/late about 75 times. I was always in school, but purposely missed homeroom to get on the absent list so that I could pick and choose which classes to skip. I never skipped English (I would have been killed), but only went to calculus class once a week to turn in homework and take the quiz. I apparently impressed the teacher with my ability to maintain an A, so she never complained. My mother, though, went ballistic and did complain. So they assigned me about 200 hours of after-school duty (cleaning the school). If that didn’t make me feel like my life was over, around that same time my mother took me to a career counselor because she was worried that I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. He did his tests and the result was that I would make a good house painter. I still don’t know what I want to do with my life, but I no longer let it bother me.

As soon as I graduated, I put my high school experience behind me. My criteria for selecting a college was that it be large, co-ed, and in a city. So off to Boston I went. But life is cyclical and has a way of looping back in unexpected ways. A year or two ago I was at a conference in Chicago. I was talking to this guy and he asked me where I was from. When I answered Springfield, Mass., he said that his wife was from there and asked what part. When I said Sixteen Acres (as if no one would have ever heard of it) he answered that his wife was from there. It really got spooky when he asked where I went to high school. I said that I went to MacDuffie, a small, private school that most people in Springfield didn’t even know was there. He got really excited and said that is where his wife went. Not only that, but when he mentioned her name, I knew it. He literally grabbed my arm and dragged me over to her.

We became Facebook friends and from there I connected to over 50 other MacDuffie alumni and faculty. I reconnected with most of my former non-clique-clique and made new, close friends with others from my time there–even with one girl who had terrorized me back then. Life has a funny way of resolving things if you just give it the chance. As the friend mentioned above said, it was part of who I was, and it still continues to make its mark on me.

Over the years, when visiting my family in Springfield, I had always meant to go visit the campus, but I never could decide if I wanted to revisit old ghosts or just let them lie, so I never went. Then they sold the school and made plans to move it to a new campus. This was the last year before the move. As if that wasn’t enough, with the property up for sale, a freak tornado storm swept through the area causing millions of dollars of damage to a number of the buildings. (The campus was made up of traditional classroom and gymnasium buildings as well as several mansions bequethed to the school that served as dorms, office buildings, etc.)

They say you can’t go home again. That may be true. But, luckily, home never leaves you.

And (because you can’t have too much of a good song):

So, one of the jobs that I find I have to do involves working at a copy/computer center. In the whole mix of things, it’s an unglamorous but steady job that helps pay the rent. And it is personally rewarding in its own way since I enjoy working with people. It feels good when you can help someone get to where they want to go. (The same reason I like to teach.) Sometimes, of course, people will leave you with nothing but a story to tell. This is one of those stories:

A high school teacher was in making copies of her students’ fashion drawings. While to the outside observer these weren’t all that special, they were, of course, special to her. (One of my on-the-job mantras is that I treat everyone’s project as if it were my own. She was no exception.) Anyway, the copier jammed a couple of times, so she had paid for prints that she couldn’t use. The company’s policy on credits is pretty liberal in that you only have to pay for what you leave with, but if you take it you have to pay for it. I processed her credit for the bad copies.

The trouble came when she asked to have them back. I told her that I had to keep them since she wasn’t paying for them. She insisted (without offering to pay for them) that she had to have them back since they were student work. (They had no names or identifying information on them, they were just the drawings.) I told her that I would dispose of them properly and even offered to put them in the shredding bin in back instead of the regular recycling bin. She didn’t like this suggestion, stating that I may say that, but that she was afraid they would end up on Facebook. She was serious! So I responded, a bit sarcastic for emphasis as to the ridiculousness of the charge, that if she wanted I would have the store manager escort me to the shredding bin. She actually took me up on the offer. So I went over to the unsuspecting manager (who happened to be on the floor) with the teacher in tow and calmly said, “Would you please escort me to the shredding bin so that I won’t stop and post these on Facebook?” When we returned, the woman apologized for my taking her request personally. But really, how else was I supposed to take it?

If you are reading this, you recognize the effort that would be involved to post these and the total lack of resulting purpose. I mean, who would be interested in them and how would it get back to the students? More to the point, here was this teacher who, admirably, wanted to protect her students, but by her complete ignorance of social media was definitely not. She may have “prevented” some “unscrupulous” copy center employee from stealing the prints, but it would seem to me that she would truly be protecting her students, who I guarantee you live online, by knowing how social media works and helping to guide them around the real dangers to be found there.

And, of course, while I would never dream of stealing copies out of the trash, the story is fair game and mine for the taking. That can now be found on Facebook.

Bonus Dire Straits video: “Brothers in Arms,” a haunting song and a beautiful video