A Rough Start

In January of 1986 I finished my move to New England.  The $14,000 a year they were paying me seemed like a lot to me at the time, but I soon discovered that the fact that I would be living less than an hour from Boston meant rent would be ridiculous.  I settled on a very small one bedroom in Oxford, about 20 minutes away from the New England Yearly Meeting office.  I knew no one in the complex, and the majority of my neighbors commuted to Boston and I never saw them.  Settling into the office itself was a little more interesting.  The offices were upstairs in an old house which also contained Worcester Friends Meeting.  A lady named Stella lived in the house and took care of it, and she was none too happy that rooms had been rented out to the Yearly Meeting.  You can get a sense of the pecking order from the size of the signs in the picture above.   We were on egg shells any time she was around, although Stella was never anything but nice to me.  We, however, is a strong word.  No one mentioned to me that the only person who actually worked out of the office was the Administrative Secretary, Candida Palmer.  Candida was a sweet older women from New Zealand.  Her ex-husband was a renowned Quaker author, and she was quite bitter about her divorce.  The rest of the staff (I think there were 4 others) worked out of their homes, spread all over New England.  By this point I had discovered that New England covered six states- Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Maine.  I would spend almost every weekend on the road, visiting Friends Meetings all over the region.  With only Candida as a co-worker, and without being able to attend any Meeting on a regular basis, I quickly came to the conclusion that I would spend a great deal of time alone, and that making new friends would be difficult.  I could not have been more correct.

The other interesting thing about the office is that it never occurred to the committee that hired me that I might actually WANT an office.  I had books and files and other things one might expect to see in any office, but I had no place to put them.  My office was really the printing room; I managed to clear off a table and get a computer to use for word processing (this was WAYYYY before Internet was an issue).  I began to organize retreats and events for the youth, and to write and publish a newsletter.  These were things that had never been done, and for which there was no budget, but I pushed ahead.  They also gave me excuses to meet with Chris Jorgensen, who was still my only friend in the 6 state area.  I would work all week at the office, with the day interrupted by long talks with Candida so she could complain about her work load or her ex-husband.  In February, I came to work one Monday morning only to discover that everything in Massachusetts was closed for something called Patriot's Day.  It's the day they run the Boston Marathon.  No one bothered to tell me, and that was typical.  I would spend nights at the apartment, eating alone, reading alone and watching TV alone.  I was often depressed at night.  The only things that kept me going were my faith, pizza from a local place in Oxford, my ongoing belief that I could accomplish some things with the youth of NEYM, and the occasional visits from Marilyn, my parents and my friends from NC.  It was going to be a long haul until Marilyn arrived for good in September.

In my travels over the next few months I met some interesting people and visited some strange places.  Both the southern accent I spoke with and the actual words I spoke became issues, and I seemed to "step in it"everywhere I went!  I'll tell you some of those tales tomorrow.

Because of Jesus,