In the late summer of 1997, change was becoming a permanent part of our lives, the newest member of our
family. My thirty-year public-school teaching career had ended; Joyce’s mother,
who had suffered profoundly from Alzheimer’s and had been living in a care
facility nearby, had died on February 5, 1995, and Joyce was now moving through
her life without parents—wonderful parents who had supported her in every way.
I grieved for her, but I could not really understand:
Both my parents were still alive. But I would learn ...
And in the late summer and early fall of 1997
we were preparing to move from Aurora back to nearby Hudson, Ohio (exactly 8.3
miles, says Google Maps), where we’d lived from 1979–1990. Joyce had seen a
house for sale in Hudson, a house she knew we’d love (and have indeed loved for
twenty years), and our Aurora home was on the market.
Complicating things even more: Our son had
graduated from college in 1994 and, after a year of having no full-time job,
had returned from the Boston area (he’d gone to Tufts), had enrolled in the
journalism school at nearby Kent State University (about a dozen miles away).
For a while he’d lived with us again—an arrangement that proved, uh, more
complex than any of us wanted to deal with, so we’d found him a place over in
Kent, where he was enjoying his studies; not long after, he would get a
full-time gig as a reporter at the Akron
Beacon-Journal (as I noted above).
And there was more. In that summer of 1997
the vast Dyer family (my dad was one of eleven siblings) were going to gather
out in his home state of Oregon for a reunion, and I knew it would probably be the last time that
so many of us were together. My dad had turned 84, was not doing well, but he really wanted to get out there. And I
wanted to see again my dear aunts and uncles—and all their offspring.
I look in my journal for August 1–4 (when I
was in Oregon), and all I see is this: SEE
HANDWRITTEN JOURNAL ENTRIES. Fine … but where are they? I’ve just spent about
a half-hour fruitlessly checking every Reasonable Place. So … the notes are either
in an Unreasonable Place, or I’ve overlooked them in the Reasonable Place. I
guess I’ll find them later and revise this portion as needed.
I do see—in my typed pages, which resumed
after my return from Oregon—that I was still reading Mary’s Rambles, and I typed my final notes on
the book on August 12. I see, too, that I was preparing to teach a beginning writing
course at Hiram College in the fall (their Weekend College program) and that son
Steve was publishing pieces regularly in the Beacon and that I was about to begin William Godwin’s novel Caleb Williams and that …
… I had begun training to climb Oregon’s Mt.
Hood.
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