Back Where I Come From

When thinking about a topic to blog about next, many ideas ran through my already cluttered and busy head. My thought process stopped dead in its tracks after reconnecting with two people I have always carried with me, who in my teen years were instrumental to my relative success now.  Due in large part to their mentorship, my love affair with food exploded under their tutelage.  Many years later, I am just as passionate about food despite a near 20-year hiatus from the restaurant industry.  A few weeks ago, a spark reignited when I started shooting a series of cooking videos for our local CSA to help people expand their recipe ideas when dealing with large amounts of fresh produce and some not-so-common vegetables produced on the farm.

Angela and Seth Raynor

Just another sorority girl

The Seattle Yacht Club

Last night was a pretty rare occasion for us.  We don’t usually go out, and we certainly never splurge.  Last night we did both.  It wasn’t a normal date night; it was the Puget Sound Association Phi Beta Kappa Chapter’s 60^th Anniversary dinner.  Dr. John Churchill, secretary of the national Phi Beta Kappa Society was the guest speaker and the event was at the Seattle Yacht Club.  This might not seem like a big deal, but it kind of was.

Dr. John Churchill inspired both Duane and me with his speech about higher education.

Most people when I tell them I am a Phi Bete, which I rarely do for this reason alone, think I am just another sorority girl.  Nothing against sororities, but Phi Beta Kappa isn’t one—it’s the nation’s oldest academic honor society.  It’s kind of a big deal.

Requirements for nomination are tough.  Less than 10 percent of the nation’s universities have a chapter and less than 10 percent of students at those universities are nominated for membership.  I was inducted in 2002, my senior year at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.  I’m fairly certain if you knew anything about my past, you would know this was probably one of the proudest moments of my life.

Duane and I at an Airman Leadership School graduation

At any rate, when the opportunity to attend this dinner came up, I asked Duane if we could go.  I say “asked” because I know it isn’t in our budget, and I knew I’d have to buy a dress since we haven’t been to an event like this in ages.  Spend almost ten years in the military and see what happens to your wardrobe.  The nice thing about being in the military is any time there is a function, you can wear your service dress. 

I made a pretty good Flapper at a Decades party

We weren’t quite sure what to expect since Seattle is fairly laid back.  People wear leather and cargo pants to the opera.  No joke.  And no one stares.  It’s Seattle.  That said, I didn’t want anyone to stare at me for being over- or under-dressed.  Call me paranoid.  I wasn’t all that excited about shopping.  I hate shopping.  Last time I had to calculate on this level what I was going to wear was for a decades farewell party.  Everyone chose the 70s or 80s because it was easy; we chose the 20s.  It goes without saying if there was a costume contest, we would have won.  We looked awesome.  It isn’t that easy anymore to just slip into something comfortable.  Shoe shopping is a special kind of torture—not only are they extremely expensive, but I will only wear them once and I immediately regret my decision to be wearing any shoes about 14 steps into the evening.  In Mississippi, I just wore capri pants and flip-flops and looked fabulous.  Four pregnancies, 11 rounds of hormone-laden fertility treatments and two surgeries later, things don’t fit me like they did then.

Jessica Simpson can kiss my ass if she thinks I am going to wear these shoes for longer than five seconds.

Duane and I both managed to get through the formalities of trying very hard to look like we hadn’t tried hard at all to fit in at this event.  We had no idea what to expect or who would show up with their A-game for networking.  Turns out, we shared a table with the University of Washington’s provost, a World War II veteran, and a brand spanking new member of Phi Beta Kappa.  The best part about it all, is as I tried to practice my conversation skills, I played the “Who is the Phi Bete” game and learned every single man at the table was the spouse, not the Phi Bete.  Even the woman married to the WWII veteran—she was the scholar.  Girl power!

Our tablemates.  He is a WWII veteran, she is a Puget Sound Association Phi Beta Kappa Chapter past president.

At the end of the night, I felt like a piece of me had returned.  It was a piece that has been missing for a long time, and that piece is the fighter in me who worked full-time while going to college full-time.  It’s the woman who became a woman, not by wearing pretty clothes or learning how to do my own makeup, but by reading books, studying and learning how to argue and defend my beliefs.  Last night reminded me how I got here: by spending five years of my life working my ass off, nose in the books, learning, determined to make a better life for myself and my future family.  When we first moved to Seattle, people assumed we moved for Duane’s job.  I watched their faces turn to embarrassment when they would learn it was my job we moved for.  Last night I realized just how far I’ve come and how much farther I can go.  The American Dream is still alive and well and I am proof of that.

Leaving breadcrumbs

It's been three months since we arrived in Seattle.  When I started this blog a year and a half ago I had every intention of writing about being an insta-mom when we got our foreign exchange student Muro.  Now that I am a mom, I have no idea where the time went and there is this big abyss between this blog post and the last.  I suppose life is like that.  We spend our lives looking ahead, fixating on that end goal, where we want to be and at some point, we stop and have to connect the dots to figure out how we ended up where we are. Some of our living is deliberate while other times life just takes its course and Duane and I let it.  I wanted to start this blog up again for two reasons.  One is to give myself a roadmap to talk about the goals we set for ourselves as a family, as parents, as spouses, as friends, as workers, as Airmen, as humans.  The other reason is to give us a place to reflect on where we find ourselves when life takes its course and there is no trail of breadcrumbs to get us back to where things are comfortable and familiar.  In the end, it's all about the journey, the trail of breadcrumbs we leave along the way and the things we see and experience while leaving them, not the destination.  This blog is my trail of breadcrumbs.

I recently created a book for our families that took them back to our beginning.  It got me thinking about all the places we've been and how far we've come in just a short time.  

All those images and memories dance in my head and they emerge when something triggers them.  Big fluffy snowflakes make me think of Duane's smiling face when he was in Iraq.  I was living day to day then, each day waking up hoping it wouldn't be the day I had to leave him, yet wanting to leave Iraq and get home to Japan.  Then I spent the next nine months wishing time away so we could be together again.

Last night Duane and I watched the movie Click where the character in the movie, played by Adam Sandler, spends his days with a magical remote fast forwarding through life, hoping he will hurry and get to the good part only to find that the little moments in between where he finds himself is the good part.  It isn't until he is on his deathbed that he realizes he's inadvertently wished away all the good stuff.  Looking back over the whirlwind of the past five years, I want to make sure those moments in our lives find a home that will always be there.  I was able to capture some of that when I made that book, but I realized I've been a terrible keeper of our memories.  This fueled my decision to blog again.

Five years later, here we are.  How did we get here?

I'm not really sure, but it sure was nice to go back and connect the dots.  I realized in the process I hadn't left myself any breadcrumbs and trying to make sense of our journey was harder than I'd thought--we'd done a lot!  All of those memories in between might one day fade away.  At the same time, here we are in Seattle, making new memories, and we are here alone.  Our friends have to live vicariously through our facebook posts and our families cling tight to their email inboxes, hoping for another photo of August.  Whatever we do, whoever we tell, one things for sure: wherever we go, there we are.  Time will continue to pass and I don't want to forget what happens in the middle.  So come along with us on this journey and we'll get lost together.  At least we know there's a trail of breadcrumbs to get us back to the comfortable and familiar.