Good Things About Being Home #1 (Transition piece)

 Good Things About Being Home #1

(Transition piece)

When we first arrived in Ohio in 2006, I had no job and no plan — which will surprise no one who has been paying attention. To support myself, I was a substitute teacher for several school districts, so I spent most days driving from Oxford to Cincinnati, Eaton, and even west into Indiana. As a traveling sub, the work took me to urban schools and rural ones, wealthy districts and poor ones — a cross-section of southwestern Ohio I never would have seen otherwise.

On the days I wasn’t subbing, I was visiting job services, looking for regular employment. As the first school year ended, I found work for a real estate business that prepared titles for transfers.  What a shitty job that was – an hour-long, stressful commute through rush hour traffic to go to a stressful job I probably was not very good at followed by another hour in the same traffic going home. One day I said to a coworker,  “Ever wish they would fire you so you don’t have to work here any longer?”  And what do you know, that afternoon right before time to punch out, the temp agency called and told me not to come in tomorrow.  I was grateful and as I left, I thanked the boss for giving me a chance and felt bad that it hadn’t worked out. 

In a curious twist, as I was driving home, before I had begun to worry, my phone rang with a sub job for the next day.  The school year had started and once again, I was gainfully employed. I subbed again through the fall and into the following spring.  Out of nowhere, I got a call about an application I didn’t even remember submitting, for a job teaching basic computer skills to senior adults at the Mayerson Jewish Community Center in Cincinnati. 

I worked at the Mayerson JCC from 2008 until I was hospitalized in 2010. While the job environment could be stressful, again with a punishing commute, I found teaching adults how to check their email, surf the web and open attachments much more satisfying than researching titles.  I was also encouraged to develop my own programs, so I created basic classes, intermediate classes, a photography club, and helped create a “check-in” phone service, where seniors called other seniors just to make sure they were okay.   Because my program was funded by grants, there was a constant threat of the grant being pulled if the organization that supplied the funds was displeased, so there was always that layer of tension in the air. Nonetheless, I think I did pretty well. 

Working at the Mayerson provided a level of professional fulfillment I had never experienced before. One of the things I was most proud of was the program I created where we paired Jewish high school students with Holocaust survivors to use Google Earth to chart their experiences during the Holocaust. Many JCC members had been relocated to Cincinnati after surviving Nazi concentration camps, Russian imprisonment, and life in the ghettos of Germany and Poland.  One woman, who was still a high school student, smuggled in food and medicine because she was assigned to a work detail that allowed her to briefly exit the heavily fortified ghetto walls. Another woman left Europe with her mother and went to Palestine, before it became Israel. She met her husband while fighting in the violent battles over Israeli statehood.  She brought pictures of her husband to the JCC and showed us the bald spot on his head from a Molotov cocktail that had dripped fire on him while he was throwing it.  In doing this project, I learned a lot about not just history but what surviving impossible times actually looks like.

But that season was not meant to last. Shortly after Christmas in 2009, I began to notice a persistent numbness and tingling in my legs. This was the onset of an illness that would divert the flow of my life into a dark channel. What follows is the first blog post I wrote after my initial hospital stay.