don't bunt.

My cousin posted this picture on facebook this week. It brought back a lot of memories. Back during my days as a receptionist, I always looked forward to when it was my turn to take the company cars for cleaning at the Elephant Car Wash. It was an hour and a half out of the claustrophobic hallway office that I shared with three other women, a kind of sacred time for listening to NPR and The Mountain. It's funny what a picture brings back. I can almost hear the Tom Petty coming out of the radio as I headed down 5th Avenue.

I was connected yet again to that transitonary period of my life (between educational institutions, and, little did I know, out of the church) when I discovered a cannister of change in one of my dresser drawers as I was packing today. In addition to the change, there were barrettes and other detritus that I'd been stashing for no real reason. I was happy to find one of the bits was meaningful.

On my first day at Callison, my co-workers took me out to lunch at Palomino, a restaurant in the building we worked in. I felt so grown-up and professional-- until we sat down at the table. There were little cards on the table with inspirational quotes inside. I saved mine because it horrified me at the time-- here I was starting a new job, only to realize on my very first day that it was not enough.


Needless to say, it set the tone for my employment there. I finally reconciled my aspirations with my faith (at least temporarily), secretly applied to graduate school and ended up here in Utah. I was glad to find this little reminder of my time in Seattle, that profound year of deciding to be somebody. For all the doubts I've had lately about where I decided to do my PhD, it was reassuring to remember that this is not the first time I've gone jobless in my little Honda car towards the unknown.