My blog is 3 years old. It doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up, but that’s cool.   It can live here until it’s 32 as long as it pays rent.

My precious little papoose still makes all kinds of delightful toddler mistakes that make me giggle and generally happy it exists. It improves all the time, getting stronger, more capable.  But it still has this tendency to fall smack down on it’s cute little face when its thoughts go too fast too quickly that it can’t catch up to its own mouth.

Also when it’s messy or rude or whiny, as all good littl’uns can be, it is cringeworthy.  Downright exasperating.  When it knows what it wants to say, but can’t, because it gets distracted like a mole on ritalin…

Erg.

I guess you could say it’s a small child you don’t mind visiting, but you might be really happy isn’t yours.

Only it is mine.  And I’m absolutely certain I’m not parenting it correctly.  Not because I don’t want to, but because I just don’t have the skills.  So you know what this mamma’s gonna do?  She’s going to do the equivalent of following the Dr. Spock manual word for word.

She’s going back to school.

A Top 4 ranked low residency program offering courses in Creative Nonfiction, Fiction, Poetry, and Popular Fiction

In July, after a 20 year hiatus, I’m going to return to the hallowed halls of the UMaine system at Stonecoast, through USM, which offers an MFA in Creative Writing.  Add it to the list of dreams come true.  My life is charmed, and blessed, and amazing and terrifying and awesome.  Kind of like the experience of raising a child…or a blog.

I look forward to every second.

While teaching this morning, and listening to some really inspiring presentations on my students’ current “Kindness Projects,” I was reminded of one of the saddest things I have ever experienced. A young student who didn’t want to complete the assignment at all was telling about how, through his project (giving hot chocolate to some construction workers who were building a house in his neighborhood in the recent cold spell,) he had come to realize the power of a simple act of kindness.  He encouraged his classmates to “make the change” as well.

I was newly married in the memory that popped into my head, and I remember this because I had a new ring I was proud of, and not at all not proud of, showing off.  And this I remember because at first I thought the Dunkin’ Donuts cashier was flirting with me.   And I was all hey thanks for the free coffee, but, ahem, please notice the sparkly number on this here left hand I am gingerly reaching toward you to grab said coffee.

But he wasn’t flirting.  I know this because this free coffee thing?  It went on for several days straight with no actual flirting.  (This gives me another clue that I was newly married– ie without children — for I was still in the habit of buying coffee and a bagel sandwich every morning at a coffee shop. Sigh.)

So anyway.  Days.  It went on for.  Then, one day, my cashier friend asked me for my $1.98, because I was only getting a coffee that morning, no sandwich, no muffin.  I had not paid for coffee in like a week.  I was getting quite used to it, and much to my hindsighty dismay, didn’t even question it anymore.  I’d like to think I had better things to think about, but my guess is, not so much.  I was still getting ten hours of sleep a night in those days.  I was probably mostly still asleep.

I, being confused that I was actually being asked for money, took a couple of minutes digging it out of my pocket.  Like a college student.  I don’t think I carried a purse for another couple of years.  And he, for his part, stood apologizing to me.  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he began, but I interrupted him.

“No, it’s fine, just a second, I have a couple of ones here somewhere,” I stuttered.

“Oh, good!  Ones!” he said, “I know how to make change from those.”

I had been receiving free coffee (and indeed, breakfast) because my cashier friend could not make change if the total was a number he couldn’t subtract in his head.

I learned very soon afterward that, of course, he was fired because he had been giving lots and lots of free coffee and pastries to lots and lots of patrons.  I don’t know why I’m telling you this, except that I have thought of him often in the past 16 years – I wish I had known the right thing to say, or I wish I had offered to teach him how to make change, or I wish I had given Dunkin’ Donuts the money I surely owed them, or…something.

I just thought of him today, and I wanted to write it down.  That’s all.