Thursday, September 8, 2011

Saying Goodbye to Blairhaven

In early June I took a trip to a place that has been near and dear to my heart for almost 35 years. I drove some of the same familiar roads I’d always driven to get there. When I got to the center of town I drove through the little rotary where a flagpole marks the center, I took a right onto Standish Street and then another right at the fork in the road onto Crescent Street. This is where the tears started. I knew it was going to be one of the last times I would see Blairhaven.     I’d been to Blairhaven in South Duxbury, MA countless times. First as a camper in the late ‘70s; then as a teen attending retreats with the NCYL (now SCYL) in the early to mid ‘80s; as a camp counselor in the summer of 1982; as an adult staffing teen retreats in the late ‘80s to early ‘90s; and even as an adult attendee at a women’s retreat. In addition to all those visits, we often attended the end of year church picnic at Blairhaven. Over the years the building and property became very familiar to me and I truly loved being there. The sunsets on Kingston Bay were always gorgeous. Walks to Myles Standish Monument were part of the regular routine during a visit to Blairhaven.
    When I first I attended Blairhaven as a camper, Lois McCurdy was the camp director. I didn't grow up in the church. I started attending the Sunday school in Elmwood, MA when we moved there in the summer of 1975. The pastor was rather bland and the Sunday School was pretty generic but the kids kept talking about Camp Blairhaven. My mom decided to send me there. I honestly don’t know if her decision to send me to camp was a result of my nagging or if she’d talked to other moms in the neighborhood. Blairhaven was only about 30 minutes from Elmwood so it must have felt safe to her. For the rest of my life I will never forget my first encounter with Lois McCurdy, the camp director. Smiling, cheerful, and welcoming are words that come to mind when I think of Lois. She was sitting at a table on the porch near the front door of the big house. My mom brought me over to the table to check me in and Lois introduced herself and told me to call her "Aunt Lois". I immediately felt comfortable. It wasn't that I was really worried about being away from home because I knew several neighborhood kids who were also attending camp, but Lois’s demeanor immediately put me at ease. In addition to being camp director, Lois taught the religion class.
    Up until that point, I really had no idea what religion the Elmwood New Church was associated with. I was christened at Christ Church (Episcopal) in Quincy, Massachusetts. My mom always wanted us to go to Sunday School so we went to whatever Sunday School was convenient. As long as it wasn’t Catholic, or too weird, we went to Sunday School. When we moved to East Bridgewater, sending us to the Sunday School 5 houses down the street was really convenient. We got a basic Christian education at Elmwood New Church. It wasn’t until I went to Camp Blairhaven that I discovered for the first time that the beliefs of the church that I’d been attending for at least a year, mirrored my personal beliefs about heaven and hell. I was 12 years old. You could say I was hooked. Between learning about the church, making new friends, swimming in the bay, trips to Powder Point beach, games on the front lawn, craft projects, and the camp store, the days were packed and there was little time for boredom or homesickness.
    I attended summer camp at Blairhaven until I was considered “too old” at which point I started attending camp at Fryeburg (but that’s a story for another time). In the summer of 1982 I was, however, old enough at 17, to be a junior camp counselor. The camp director that year was Trevor Woofenden (now my husband). I’d known him for several years through attending church conventions and retreats with the NCYL. Little did I know then that as soon as he saw my application to be a counselor that he immediately decided he wanted me to be on staff. Junior counselor really meant dishwasher and I washed so many pots and pans that summer that I was washing pots and pans in my dreams. As a junior counselor we had to be in the kitchen after every meal for at least an hour but for the rest of the day we were free to do whatever we wanted.     Other staff members that summer included: Jim Lawrence, Gladys Wheaton, Sue Tafel and Robin Tafel, to name a few. As a dishwasher, I participated in most camp activities and trips but for me the highlight of working at Blairhaven that summer was simply being there for the entire month of July.
    I attended my first youth league retreat at Blairhaven on Memorial Day weekend in 1980. Anyone who has ever attended a youth league retreat knows how much fun they are but what was really special about a retreat at Blairhaven was the location. Watching the sunset over Kingston Bay from the front porch, sunbathing on the porch roof, late night walks to Myles Standish Monument, and playing games on the front lawn were just some of the more memorable things we did at retreats.
    In the mid 1980s the Blairhaven Committee hired their first resident director of Blairhaven, Rev. Ken Turley. Ken was also the pastor of the Elmwood Church at the time. Ken and his wife Laurie lived in the main house while the barn (which had previously been used as a boys dormitory) was completely renovated and converted into the director’s house. Also around the same time, the much-loved front porch was enclosed and a ramp was built, covering the much-loved front steps of the main house. Other changes to the main house included a handicap accessible bathroom on the first floor. While these changes made it possible to host larger groups, the feel of the building was never the same to me. The wide porch on two sides of the building had been completely enclosed.
    I’ll admit that I have a thing for porches and it goes back to my childhood when we would visit my great-grandparents’ summer house in Chatham on Cape Cod. The house was a simple cape but it had the most magnificent porch on all four sides, three sides had a view of the ocean, with one corner glassed in, also facing the ocean. The glassed in porch was the perfect place to be when the wind on the bluff was just a little too much.  Blairhaven, with its magnificent porch on two sides, one facing the bay, was a close second to my great-grandparents’ house in Chatham. I was sad to see the porch go, and even though the enclosed porch had plenty of windows it wasn’t the same. The Blairhaven that I had grown to love had been changed forever.
    When it was suggested to sell Blairhaven a few years ago, it wasn’t the first time. There hadn’t been a resident director for quite a while and the building needed some serious work. But still, just the idea of letting go of Blairhaven seemed like it would never happen. I thought that it would always be there. It was a relief to learn that the town of Duxbury would buy the property and that it would be part of a waterfront park.
    In May, an email from Rev. Susannah Currie alerted me to the fact that all of the furnishings from Blairhaven would be available and that the Massachusetts Association and New Church Union wanted    sister camps to be first on the list to take whatever they could use. As registrar for Fryeburg New Church Assembly I knew that the camp could certainly use some new-to-us beds. On the weekend of June 11th and 12th, we arranged volunteers, rented a truck and took one last trip to Blairhaven. It was bittersweet, to say the least. It was wonderful to be there again, even in the pouring rain, as it was when I arrived. We spent that Saturday afternoon going through house, and packed a U-Haul truck with furniture for Fryeburg. It felt good to know that Fryeburg would be benefitting by the sale of Blairhaven but at the same time I fought back many tears and occasionally gave in and had a good cry. A small group of people, including Ken and Laurie Turley, Gladys Wheaton, Herb Ziegler, Beki (Phinney) Greenwood, and Denyse Daurat enjoyed a delicious dinner together that evening. We shared some memories of Blairhaven and some were surprised to learn of other’s connections to the place that has meant so much to so many people. On Sunday morning about 40 people turned out on a rainy morning for the final service at Blairhaven. More memories and remembrances were shared, as well as a tear or two shed.
    I was lucky to have one more visit to Blairhaven on July 4th. Trevor and I were in the area and were able to spend the night and watch the fireworks across the bay from the (now enclosed) porch. The next day we packed up our truck with more items for Fryeburg and said our final goodbye to Blairhaven.

Friday, August 26, 2011

Networking Works!

I got a job by networking. Yes, it's true. I got a job by NETWORKING. I start training at my new job next week. I will be part of the team of Reference Librarians at Springfield Technical Community College (STCC).

Exactly how did this happen? Back in late April I attended a one-day workshop at Mount Holyoke College. The presenter was fantastic and one of those amazing librarians that you suspect doesn't sleep much. During our lunch break I was chatting with a couple of GSLIS students and one of them introduced me to the dean of library services at STCC. We chatted about science librarianship and she told me that they were hoping to have an opening in the fall and they would like to have someone on their staff with a science background.  I told her that I have a BS in Geology and would be very interested in working at STCC and gave her my card. She told me to be patient because STCC is state-funded and it would take a while.

Over the summer I continued my job search and wrote a few impassioned cover letters but kept checking the STCC website hoping to see a posting. A couple of weeks ago she called me to tell me that they would be having a couple of openings in the fall and would I be interested. We had several emails back and forth over the course of the next week. She encouraged me to consider the part-time evening position that would start in September. Last week I took a trip to STCC for a 2 hour "meet and greet" with the library staff. It wasn't a formal interview but it certainly felt like one. The next day I wrote to her to say that I would love to work there. The position was officially posted, I applied for it, and learned on Wednesday of this week that it's mine!

Another recent GSLIS grad had a similar "not an interview" experience recently. I'm beginning to suspect that in this tough job market that the folks who do the hiring are trying to avoid reading through hundreds of resumes and prefer instead to hire someone that they've met. Lucky for me I happened to be in the right place at the right time.

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Wrapping it all up

 Mount Shasta and Whitney Glacier in California, seen from the crater (Shastina). Photo by C.E. Watkins. Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel. 


My time at Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science is coming to an end! Saturday May 7th is the last day of classes and I graduate on May 20th. It's been quite a journey for me and I won't go on and on at length about that right now. This semester I had an internship at the Science and Engineering Library at UMass/Amherst. I loved being there and would love to work there someday. If you want to know what I did there you can read about it in the GSLIS newsletter, Infolink.
In addition to my internship I took a class called Photographic Archives Management which was absolutely fabulous! I spent the semester working on a group project which turned into a website called Photography of the American West: 1850-1885. I really enjoyed working on the project and the class was really fun. I love photography and this project was a great opportunity to explore 19th century photographers and the "wild west" as Trevor has been calling it. I hope you enjoy exploring the website. I'm proud of it! I wish I could take credit for the design of the site but I can't. We were fortunate to have someone in our group who is very tech savvy and knows all the cool tools to use. I'll take credit for a good portion of the content and quite a few of the fabulous resources we found.

Thursday, March 3, 2011

Repair this Book!

Seriously, send this book to be repaired. This book is from an academic library in the Happy Valley. Yes, that is a little sticker in the upper right corner that says, "Loose pages. Be careful. Please rewrap in rubberband after use." Yes, that is a produce rubber band. You know, the kind that comes with your asparagus from Peru in mid-winter. It says, "PRODUCE OF PERU". People, please, repair this book!

Saturday, February 12, 2011

BUY this book!

I've been reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. The blurb about the book says, "Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years." It's really well written, hard to put down at times, and to be quite honest, shocking.

The HeLa cells have been used for medical research for decades. Doctors, researchers and big pharma have gotten quite wealthy as a result of using her cells for cancer research. Yet her family is poor, undereducated, and many go without medical insurance.

At about 2/3 of the way through the book I couldn't stand not knowing if Skloot was going to do anything to right the wrong that had been inflicted on the Lacks family. So I skipped ahead to the back of the dust jacket and read that the author had set up a scholarship fund in Henrietta's name. Curious, I went to the website and learned that the author is donating a portion of the proceeds from the sale of the book to the foundation. Then I learned that the foundation had already awarded grants for tuition for 5 descendants of Lacks as well as healthcare for 2 members of her immediate family. Feeling guilty for borrowing this book from my library, I immediately went to Barnes & Noble on-line and ordered it. As soon as my book arrives I will return the one I borrowed from the library that is now overdue and in high demand. Thanks, Rebecca Skloot, for taking care of the Lacks family!

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Resolutions

It's that traditional time of year when people make resolutions. I generally make a resolution that I think is actually achievable, not some grandiose, completely impossible goal that will be completely abandoned by January 8th (or sooner). For example, I never resolve to lose 50 pounds.  Although losing 50 pounds may be a good idea and possibly a good goal, I think I would abandon it by January 29th or the start of the new semester, which ever comes first.

A few years ago I resolved to use less plastic shopping bags. This required that I always have a shopping bag in my bag (which means I have to carry an ample size tote and not a cutesy tiny purse). I bought a ChicoBag. It's made of nylon and squishes into a little pouch when not in use. It's about the same size as those cheapo plastic bags that you get at a grocery store, Target or CVS (or anywhere else that has plastic shopping bags). It's been so well used over the past few years that I've reinforced the seams with my trusty sewing machine. In addition to the ChicoBag (I actually have 2 now because I got one for free from an exhibitor at the ALA mid-winter meeting last January -- Thanks DK Publishing!) I have several cloth shopping bags that either stay in my car or leave the house with me when I know I'm going shopping. This is where it's all about learning a new habit. You know you're going shopping, right? You've got your list all ready? Grab some shopping bags on your way out the door. Put them in the front seat right next to you. When you go into the store, take them with you. Use them.

This was working pretty well for the first year so I decided I'd make that my resolution for the next year. You know, improve upon the first lesson. And it worked so well, that I repeated it for a third year.

Just want to let you know that this had less to do with saving the environment than it had to with the fact that we have WAY too many plastic bags in this household because we live with other people. I'll never ask them to stop using plastic bags but at least I can contribute less to the accumulation of plastic bags in our house.

This year, I've set, what I think, is an attainable goal for the month of January. Baby steps! I confess that I got an early start on Dec. 26th. My goal is to exercise every single day for the month of January. So far, it's DAY 10. I've either been to the gym and done 20 minutes on the stair stepper, or walked 2 1/2 miles through mushy snow (that's quite a work out!), or gone to a yoga class (turns out  that I'm somewhat flexible but don't have much strength in my thighs -- but I knew that already. PLUS I've got these 2 large melons that get in the way of some poses.)

Most of this is prompted by an article I read in the January 2011 "O", the Oprah Magazine. The blurb on the cover said, "Weight Loss Made Simple: the only tip you'll ever need (page 126).... so I was so excited and thinking this was going to be some super-secret, super-easy thing like eat more chocolate, drink more wine, take this supplement (vitamin)... etc., and the answer was, you guessed it, EXERCISE.  So, it seems that EXERCISE is the solution to most of the problems that I've been having for the past 5 years or so once I turned 40. I don't sleep well - at least twice a week, sometimes more. I want to lose weight -- sure, of course! I want to look better -- who doesn't? I have joint pain - not so much but I had this injury from 2007 when I slipped and fell at work and could no longer sleep on my left side comfortably or sit cross legged (used to be called Indian style) without my left leg wanting to be considerably higher than the right. But when I started going to the gym last January, within weeks I could sit cross legged again. Good stuff, exercise and stretching. So, I resolved to exercise on a more regular basis.

Why the gym? Because I can think of a million excuses NOT to go for a walk outdoors. It's too cold, it's too hot, it's windy, it's too sunny, it's raining, it's snowing, ... the list goes on and on. At the gym it's climate controlled and, believe it or not, there are people of all shapes, ages and sizes. It's just great. I fit right in. They offer all kinds of classes that are free with my membership and I can just drop in for one class and try it out and never return if I don't like it. They have very convenient hours - 4:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. weekdays (not that I've ever considered going to the gym at 4:30 a.m. but it's nice to know they are open), and similar convenient hours on Saturday and Sunday. They've got womens' locker rooms with showers, a sauna and a steam room. (mens' too but I've never been in there) It's about 3 miles from my house.

As my life gets busier when the semester starts at the end of the month I know it'll be a bit more difficult to get to the gym every day but I'm hoping that if I plant this seed now it'll be easier for me to find the time, and I'll want to get regular exercise. At that point I may have to make a new resolution for February.