Thank you UMSL

Thank you to UMSL on Retirement

When I was a little hippie girl neither I nor anyone who knew me well expected me to live beyond the age of 25. My career path consisted of sex, drugs, rock and roll, dying young, and leaving some brilliant poems letting the world know how badly I'd been treated.

You can imagine, therefore, my dismay when I woke, or to be more accurate, came to, on my 30th birthday. My plan was not working out at all. Apparently it is harder to kill an Irish woman than I had thought. I decided to quit trying. I cleaned up and started looking for a life.

It was at this juncture that I got into the 1970 VW Beetle with the (as my mechanic once put it) stickers and shit all over it and drove to the UMSL campus and took a job as a word processor. I decided to work at a college campus because the only time I had been vaguely happy to that point was during my 7 short years as an undergraduate.

For the past 24 years UMSL has been my community and in many ways my family. I've made lifelong friends and had loving, patient mentors. Frankly, I've learned everything I know about being a grown up either here or in one of my many support groups.

What did I learn? I learned to show up for work. I learned to believe in public education. I learned that I could learn. I learned that I could be wrong and live. I learned that the smartest and most accomplished people are often the kindest and most generous. I learned there's no substitute for actually doing my job, no matter what kind of mood I'm in that day. I also learned that if you bang a phone on your desk you can actually break it, but we won't talk about that today. Most of all I learned that there is great joy in being of service.

These may not seem like big life lessons to you, but they changed my life.

Since 1983 I have had the privilege of working with all of you and of being of service to many students. You have given me a place to live the life I was looking for when I got here. I has been an amazing ride and I thank each of you from the very bottom of my heart.