Blog By Knight
The Green Velour Christo

I picked Amanda up yesterday morning from her red eye flight back from Rio. She had been going to school there for eight months and has been there since Christmas day. It is wonderful to have her home for a few days. She will be going back to New Orleans next week to finish up her last year of College at Tulane majoring in Latin American Studies and International Development. Amanda would have graduated last spring but she was a sophomore when Hurricane Katrina came through completely knocking her world. She had been looking forward to her sophomore year in a sorority, had gotten accepted into a special dorm for students doing community volunteer projects and was going to be taking pre-med courses that year.

When the evacuation orders come out, Amanda was in New Orleans helping to get first year students and their stuff, dropped off and moved into their dorms. Only on this particular day, the parents just dropped off the stuff, and had to take their kids back home with them. That afternoon, Amanda piled some of her friends into her car and drove back up to Atlanta to watch the drama unfold on TV and wait to go back to school. Each girl had brought a small overnight bag, everything else they owned was in their dorm rooms. Well as you know, they were not able to go back to Tulane or even get onto the campus at all that semester.

Amanda could have gone to Agnes Scott right away, they were so accommodating, it made me want to go there. But she didn’t. She wanted to go to Emory. Emory had already started their semester and they made the Katrina kids formally apply and then took three weeks to get them into classes once they were accepted. That meant that these kids were thrown into, in Amanda’s case, Physics and Organic Chemistry, shell shocked and three weeks behind with no special attention.

Amanda might have been able to pull it off had on top of everything else, her best guy friend from junior high through high school died of from a meth-amphetamine induced seizure. This changed everything. Spenser had been like my third child and we were all devastated but not totally surprised. Spenser, a brilliant beautiful kid, had been struggling with addiction, and was in and out of rehab while all of his friends were finishing high school and going on to college.

With all of that piled on, Amanda made the decision at that point to drop out of Emory and go back to work at Taco Max where she had waitressed that summer. The short version of the story is that this decision set her on a path that changed the course of her life. She got a lot of great life and job experience, traveled and went to school in Portland for a semester, went back to Tulane and instead of going back to sorority life, got a job bar tending and managing a bar in a restaurant that hired Brazilian cooks, learned to speak Portuguese, decided to change majors to Latin American Studies, went to do an internship in Rio, fell in love with Rio and with Leandro, and finagled her way back to Rio to study last year.

All of this demonstrates the theme of a little book, What Now? I picked up at the library last week, by Anne Padgett, the author who among other things wrote the book, Belle Canto. Padgett had gone to college at Sarah Lawrence and this book was based upon a commencement speech she gave at Sarah Lawrence all these years later.

When Michael and I went to do the great Northeast whirlwind college tour, we went to Sarah Lawrence, a short train ride from Manhattan. We were both struck at the similarities between Sarah Lawrence and Paideia School where both my kids had both gone from Kindergarten through High school. The Sarah Lawrence campus was made up of buildings that looked like large Druid Hills Homes, just like Paideia. There on the green quad was a ragtag group of students playing hacky sac on that sunny but chilly March day. Michael decided it was a little too familiar and ruled it out.

In What Now? Padgett normalizes the anxiety that kids feel about figuring out about “the rest of your life”. She says that from the time one is getting ready to graduate from high school people are constantly asking the seniors, where are you going to go to college? What are you going to do when you graduate? She says these what now questions can be harrowing to the student since they really don’t know what is next and every decision feels so important.

Padgett tells of her path to becoming a novelist and her theory is that seemingly random occurrences were what set the direction of her life more than the big decisions she made. In her case, as a shy lonely freshman, she accidentally met the new college president when her dorm stove wasn’t working and she had a tray of cookies to bake. Being fairly shy, she probably would never have ventured to the large house next to her dorm to ask to use the stove, had she not been frantic to bake the cookies or had she known that the woman next door was the college president. She ended up finding more than a stove, more like a surrogate family and became a lifelong friend.

Padgett’s career path was fairly indirect including waitressing after graduation, going to grad school and waitressing some more. She found that despite her best laid plans her life did not go accordingly and then to her surprise sometimes what looked like annoying or even horrible detours were actually what got her to an even better place than she even knew she wanted to go.

So you see, it is really important to know that sometimes the worse things, Like Hurricane Katrina coming through, or the C you get in a psychology class that has you rethink whether the major you are about to begin is right for you, or getting fired from a job that probably was not in your best interest or even in the best field for you, can really become the best things. It is hard to see that when you are in the midst of all of the change and upheaval. Actually it becomes easier once a person has lived through and experienced a positive outcome from one of these devastating detours. In my case, I failed my comprehensive exams in graduate shchool and I had never failed a test before or since. This kept me from going on my intership that year and I had to stay and retake the exam in six months when it iwas offered again and then could go on Interneship the following year. That embarrassingly horrible event caused me to stay in Tampa and finish my PhD dissertation so that when I went away to do my Internship I never had to go back to USF ever again. In retrospect I hated grad sshool so much at that point I may never had made it back to finish my dissertation and could have easily ended up with an ADB ( all but dissertation) rather than a PhD.

I hope that Amanda and Michael and Duane’s daughter, Janet and son Perry, all four in those college/just post- college years, take to heart. that it is not really what happens that matters, it is what you do with what happens that matters the most and that sometimes the things we do or the left turns we take that at the time, that don’t seem to be relevant to our life goals, are the things that lead us to a much better place then if we took a straight line “safe” route. And if you all forget this and feel a little queezy from time to time, you can borrow the green velor Christo that Amanda brought me back from Brazil. He looks like he can help.

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