“A pair of shoes can change your life. Just ask Cinderella.”

yesterday at 12:34 5-6-7 I gave a big shout. although you have to omit the zero from the 07, it sorta works.

 

 

But i vividly recall 12:34 5-6-78 because I was heading up to Estes Park with three professors:  quiet and amusing Yu (philosophy), unbearably handsome Whiteside (history) and  horny as hell West (pol. sci.) for a faculty/student retreat when I was a senior in college ata very nice women's college. the snow falling in the rockies stopped us north of Boulder Colorado and we wound up going back to Yu's large tudor house, popping popcorn  in the fireplace and drinking too much bourbon.  Ah those student days were fun.

 

I started college  as  biology major thinking I wanted to be a dentist.

 

By mid term I had switched to Botany as I had an astounding skill for plant classification. I was given the enormous honor of being awarded a field experience as a Frosh doing a survey of the plants at the Plains Conservation Center and my advisor, a wicked sadist of a woman, took me out there to show me the rattle snake sites and how thick  and high my leather boots would have to be so when the snakes struck at me I would not die. until then snakes were not my favorite animal but i did not dread them.

 

Within a month I was an Art History major because the same ability to visually discern and classify things made me an amazing art historian and I the only snakes I would meet in galleries were the human variety.  Eventually I graduated summa cum laude with a double major in art history and studio art and a significant minor in biology.  My specialty was European and American art from 1850 on... Ingres, Manet, Matisse, Warhol and Frankenthaler ...you've heard of them right?

 

and what did I do with that fine body of learning? Getting an undergraduate degree taught me how to live and maintain a life long love of beauty and harmony and color, be able to create an amazing garden of native plants AND look upon social groups with a raised and often whimsical eye.

 

Many many  years of graduate school later I become a psychotherapist for families, couples and children. I found that path through a desperate must take it job teaching kindergarten in a private school  after i finished school and had started a master's in Art History. This  quickly and emphatically led me to know that working with the souls of young people was the most immediate and satisfying work I could do AND I discovered yet another talent I was not aware of: the ability to establish rapport with even a wild child quickly and solidly and use that relationship to help us both be better people. 

 

Don't ever imagine that life is a straight line. It takes all sorts of curves and slides. sorta like that volkswagon skidding along the highway trying to head north in 1978. we arrived  safely, but not where we expected.