Retirement Purgatory: Staying Out of Jail

Several times as the principal of my modest school, I was faced with the opportunities to be sent to jail. First by a parent who accused me of "whipping her son into hysteria" because of my perfume. This was her reaction to her son's being suspended for showing off his penis in class. We repeated the same reason for future suspensions several times, thus mother calling the police to have me arrested. I let the officer smell my perfume. He liked it! Again I was faced with going to jail for failing to get the BOE to fix the school fire alarm system. A much needed repair after one serious fire and two teachers getting burned using electrical outlets. The fire marshal showed up...he threatened jail....I literally cried & asked him to "do the deed" hoping jail time would get the alarm fixed. Instead I just got a curt letter from him. The final chance for me to experience jail time was when a late arriving secretary parked in the front of the school in a "no parking zone." She intended only to be in the building for a few minutes to grab payroll paperwork and drive to central office.Instead she found a police officer writing her a ticket. Patty threw a hissy fit, told him she was the principal, and gave him the bird as she peeled out of area. I was called to the office later that afternoon to discover 2 officers determined to "set that principal right." I was clueless about their indignities but kept hearing the word "jail." Patty sat through the entire tirade of legal threats, listening to me insist on my innocence. The following day, Patty told her story and accepted her transfer to another school with complete remorse.

Retirement Purgatory

At the beginning of my 13th year of being the principal of the same school, I literally woke up and said one day, "There's a pattern going on here. My new parents of pre-kindergarteners and kindergarteners used to be my students!" I had fought a war with central office to get full day pre-k and kindergarten classes, and was anxious to meet the "new" parents. At the parent orientation, one perky parent, drooling child in tow, pointed to me and said, "You better be good, or she'll GET YA!!" It was Michelle!!!!! My sixth grader who would "self suspend" usually after screaming "Suck my dick!!" or "Lick my balls." This gal had a real gender problem, but the evidence of a child led me to believe she figured it out. And there was James in the parent orientation group. He was primarilly in special ed because both of his parents were idiots, and they thought his constant grabbing of ANYONE'S genitals at anytime was funny. And he was now one of my parents. This, I knew, was wrong. But this most glaring of errors was when I spotted the Newmans. They sat in the orientation meeting as grandparents. I knew them as lunatic parents who had earned the 2001 school year restrining order. Mr. Newman was a short stumpy man who had rage problems. He had tried to stomp on a third grader one morning, and I nicely tried to explain to him why this was not good idea (especially since he ws wearing metal-toed cowboy boots.) Somehow he started walking towards me with raised fists and I instantly knew in a few steps he would have me against the wall in my office where no one could see what was happening. I stood my ground. He stopped walking towards me. To make long story short, he and his wife began a year long letter campaign to every soul connected with our school system. I knew if I waited them out, they would put into writing something that would give me a reason to bar them from school grounds. They upped the ante....I got a restraining order, and they chose to home school their 3 children. And now they were grandparents, not biologically, but spiritually. Hey, I didn't make the rules in that community. My daily lorazepam use doubled that year. I traveled to school with an emergency stash. I couldn't leave any extra meds in my office because one of the basic skills needed to be a school custodian was that you had to be able to sniff out meds kept in school for emergencies. Only I and the school nurse "supposedly" had the only keys to the school's medicine cabinet. Oh...and did I mention that one of my custodian's husband was a locksmith for the school system. Do the math. We did the math at least three times year when the "end of the day meds tally" didn't match the "beginning of the day meds tally." But the school system wouldn't let me try a cool sting operation and catch the thief. But remember my mantra: "Everyone loves to snitch." So snitch'n "did in" Mary the night custodian. All I wanted was my bottle of vicodin that she had stolen from my desk in 1995.

Retirement Purgatory:ThePsychic Part

So...you're saying, "Get to the psychic part that you noted in your short bio." The whole story about my being a psychic IS a whole different story, but let me segway it into my present career recollections. I have always known I was a psychic thanks to my grandmother who raised me. She and I just couldn't figure out my "avenue." Ten years after she died I discovered I was a psychic through dreams and smells. But again, that's a whole other story. I can actually smell death on a person or in a room where a person has been. I rarely think about it until I get "the smell." From the very first year of my principalship I had an area foreman, in charge of 50 schools and their maintenance crews. Jim was a real Cajun. From The Bayou. He married (third time) a wealthy woman with big John Deere money; she moved him to our area from New Orleans and got him this job to basically keep him out of trouble. My Cajun Man. He looked like a young Kris Kristofferson. Same smart-ass grin with deep dimples, same crackly voice, and stories that enchanted me. He visited me every day since I had a school that was a dump with a custodial crew that was worthless. He never missed a day visiting me. Often bringing bits of gossip or "heads up" as to what was going on at central office (I was only one school in a school system of 200 schools.) He called me a prima donna. And he was intrigued about how I could get all of my waist length black hair piled on top of my head. One day I was in a pissed off mood and made him wait 45 minutes in the office to see me. When he came in to my office, he put his face down right in front of mine and started singing a Cajun song to me. I guess to make me laugh. And I smelled sour dirt. A rotting smell. Maybe it was in his clothes from being on the job. But in the next few months I continued to smell the same odor, sometimes very very strongly. My God, he's rotting! On a day that was a "snow day" and schools were cancelled, I called into school to tell my chief custodian at 7:00 a.m. that I wasn't coming in. I asked her if she knew when Jim had scheduled the big crew to come in and plow us. Ofcourse I got her same dumb reply to all of my questions, "I don't know."
I got call that night from the chief of operations that Jim had died on his way to my school. An aneurism. He was only able to call the dispatcher from his truck that he didn't feel right. He died in his truck. 46 years old. What should I have said to him?? Hey, I'm a psychic. I smell that you're dying. Go to the doctor's. "On the job" I smelled people dying perhaps 5 times, but it was difficult since many parents just had bad hygiene (whoa..awful B.O.!) I won't go into my psychic strut at this time....but will when I finally get to my "full retirement." I never told anyone about it except for my husband, daughter, and best friend. I know it would creep people out. My mother the most, since she knew that I had inherited my grandmother's "eye." "She has "The Eye" as I was described with scorn by my mother to her relatives. But I really liked Jim. And he liked me. Fate kept me from possibly "walking on the wild side" with him. And I know now that he & I would've become better friends. He was too charming to me at my tender age of 43.

Retirement Purgatory Part 4

Parents were a varietyof statistics to me: restrainignorders, social sevice abuse reports (one a week) deaths, incarceration, disappearances, and employees. yes...I hired these people. They had no jobs, and I had plenty of federal money to hire them. Well, I hired them, but they always broke my heart andnever lasted long.Inshort, they mademore money with benefits while on welfare. And they always did something stupid to get fired. I desperately tried to hire a Mrs. smith (yes, her "real" last name) becasue she volunteered every day nd was an extraordinary artist. Intelligent, witty, pretty, and had great kids. I would pay her $15 an hour every day for six hours a day to be a teacher's aide. She said she couldn't take any job because she didn't have a social security number...didn't have driver's license, and only stayed in a friend's house rent free. Owned nothing, not even a credit card. So she became a teacher's aide for free and became a statistic in 2001 when she died at age 42. I hired another parent volunteer as a part-time secretary and got her husband a custodial job as a light bulb changer ($17,000 a year for him with benefits.) After 10 months she stopped coming to work due to"stress' and her husband quit his job because the van in which he had to drive to various schools was unreliable. He showed up the day before I terminated his wife to explain that he and his wife had not used cocaine in 7 years so I'd better not think this was "drug related." Shortly there after their house got raided as a meth lab and they disappeared.They denied living in the house when it ws meth lab. During kindergarten recess we watched the entire raid since the back of the house met our playground . They and their kids visited one day the week before I retired to say goodby. I fired another parent who was cafeteria aide because she posted a list of girls' names, ranking them based upon how big their "boobs" were. She was going to prove over the course of the year how the rankings would change as smaller boobs got bigger. Her reply to my firing her? "Yeh...you're right. I shouldn't a done that." But when I hired teachers who were from our community, that was a whole different story. A good idea that became a GREAT idea.

retirement Purgatory

During my tenure as principal of my little ghetto school I met and worked with some unbelieveably notorious characters: parents and teachers. Let me begin with parents. My first encounter with any parent happened on the first day of school for children...my first day as their principal. After greeting children and parents who streamed into the school on a very hot humid day, I retreated to my office for an"air conditioning break." The school, built in 1942 had an addition added in 1960. The open classroom fiasco. No windows, just one large room and 16 spaces for classes. Unfortunately, they ran out of money, so the airconditioning was never installed. This is BAD in Maryland where we have humidity at 100%. With the horse hair padding under the vomit ladden carpeting, the school smelled like a barn. My door flew open and a gnarly looking man stood looking in at me and yelled, "Lady, you are full of shit if you think my daughter is gonna have colored teacher!!" The door slammed. I sought him out in the hall crowded with parents and tried explaining in my best principal voice that the color of a teacher is no reason to transfer a child from one teacher to another. He was beyond pissed...so I gave him my director's telephone number. My director called me that afternoon and said the angry parent was going to be a thorn in our sides, so since I was getting an additional new first grade teacher, just place his daughter into the new teacher's class. Tell him it's not because of color...just class size. My director said he was beyond rational thinking..perhaps chemically enraged, especially when he chose to "up" his conversation to include the word nigger. Ofcourse he didn't realize that my director was a black woman. During that first year, I broke up a fist fight between two parents who were sisters, made a habit of checking the back door of the building every morning for discarded panties (prostitutes did their work behind our school at night) threw out Barney the Purple Dinosaur at Halloween because the person in the costume wouldn't identify himself or herself, got in trouble with the police for flushing 4 viles of cocaine down my toilet that a child had found on the playground, and tangled with a clan of Romanian gypsies...REAL gypsies in transit to Ohio. The mother would send the boys to school, so smartly dressed, but rarely sent little Gloria, a tatter of a child. Mom would make her way through our morning cafeteria breakfast, free to all of my students, filling a baby stroller with food she snatched from tables. Occasionally a tiny arm would come from inside the stroller and help mom grab things, especially in our office where the tiny hand would snatch staplers, pens, and paper clips off secretaries' desks. The gypsies vanished from our community, actually from the park where they were living in tents, in the spring. I had been told they would be back in seven years(like locusts??) I tangled with a parent of a 4 year old who insisted that her son have a teacher's aide assist him in the bathroom because her son's penis was too large for him to hold. I eventually had a restaining order placed against her. She was my first restraining order against a parent. I averaged one a year. These parents were addicts, prostitiutes,con artists, transsexuals, pimps, drug dealers...but they were parents, and I had to deal with them. Aretha Franklin was my inspiration...RESPECT. I listened to everyone of their outrageous requests, ignored their smells, language, screamings, and being"on the nod." When I finally got an assistant principal, no parent would talk to her, "I want the fucking principal." From every bizarre parent, I usually got
an apology. And they loved to snitch on each other. I think they felt it got them brownie points with me.But did I really want to know that Ms. Mary gave $5 blow jobs? Did I really want to watch a parent on The Jenny Jones Show when the theme for the show was"women who love the men who beat them"? Did I really want to know that Mrs. Alt's third grader was her child to her father-in-law..thus making her son and her husband half brother's?? ( I was sworn to secrecy.) The number of students with extra fingers, toes, and webbed appendages made me wonder if this community was sharing the same gene pool...for decades. Ms. Debbie, across the street stormed into my office when I had suspended her older son for shooting a rifle from across the street and blowing out our front window. "Ofcourse he's angry, Stupid!!" she said to me. "He just found out that his daddy is my brother" (and we're not talking step brother.) Yes, a good reason to be angry. Ms. Debbie was also statistic to me. I averaged one parent a year who died. Usually drug related. She died five years later. But they all loved me...after they discovered I wasn't a Jew. For the first 2 months of school every Monday morning I would see a swaztika painted on the side door to the school where I parked my car. No big deal. Get the chief custodian to gasoline it off. My head secretary, a WWII WAC officer( who lived across the street), whom I had inherited from the previous 20 years of principals, asked me one day if it were true that I was NOT going to have the annual Christmas party because I was a "Jewess." "First of all, Betty, we're having the Christmas party. And secondly, I am not a Jew." Never saw that swaztica again. I nudged Betty into retirement that January by requiring her to use a computer. In February, retired, she volunteered EVERY day in our school as an "extra" secretary for 10 years. Betty got alshimer's 10 years later. We brought her lunch every day from school. We made sure she kept a light on in her front window so we would know she was okay. We took turns taking her to the doctors, grocery shopping for her, and even enrolling her grandson from another school so he could be with Grandma every day.Eventually we had to stop Betty from voluntering. She got lost in the building, cried alot, and got upset with new faces on the staff.Twice we had to go across the street to call for an ambulance for her. On my last day as principal Betty walked across the street, sans shoes and with disheveled matted hair, because she had "to give the children their medication or The Principal will be angry at me." In her own way, Betty knew I was leaving. I had won her admiration and she mine. She was the only person who made me cry on my last day.

Ummm I have some confessions

I had a blast as a principal of a rat infested disgusting looking elementary school. I was given this school in exchange for dropping a sexual harrassment suit against a central office big wig. I'll take it!! It was a hell hole...located on the city line. An urban garbage can of a school. My Pygmalion. I ended my career there 13 years later: new state of the art building (new building!) Blue Ribbon School...endowments for the arts....quite a show place for local politicians and central office people.But boy did I have fun doing so many "unprincipal-like" things. Such as calling in the local madam of a brothel (whose sons went to my school) and asking her to NOT have her "girls" walk their beat during the morning opening and closing of schools. I'd support her for a PTA office. Sending people to the local cemetary to "collect" fresh flowers so we would look classy in the school lobby with floral arrangments...calling a heroin addict parent "Mr. Merde" (to his face) after he told me I was full of shit. He LOVED it when I called him Mr. Merde. I told him it was a French title of nobility. And when I got out of my car to tell a prostitute to please stop leaning on my car....she was an undecover cop who was trying to keep me from moving as an undercover drug deal was being made in my parking lot. And the confession letter I kept for 13 years from the PTA treasurer confessing she stole $1200 and would repay it by selling her Pomeranian puppies. She never paid it back...but her best friend, the PTA president, had her uncle, a CPA, doctor the PTA books to erase the missing money. That letter gave me control of the PTA for 10 years. I dealt with a lot of prostitutes, addicts, alcoholics, child abusers, pedophiles (one was my best teacher...he committed suicide) and the best array of tattoos and piercings on the parents to whom I had to say, "yes, Maam/Sir while wondering how these people could eat with so few teeth and such long fingernails. Threats on my life, my face, my freedom from jail and loads of threats to sue "my ass" kept me charged with energy. I knew I had the highest IQ in the entire community...and so did the parents. I got them full course Thanksgiving "baskets".....car loads of toys for their children for Christmas....trips with me to visit the governor and as sidekicks when the governor and visitors from Russia and Japan visited our school. I spent most of my time "getting" what I could give away to parents and children. One day a man literally showed up at my door the day before Christmas vacation saying he had broken down and had 500 decorative cans of popcorn. Could I use it?? Every child and teacher went home with a cute but large tin of porcorn. Southwest airlines asked if I wanted to take a group of children to Sea World..free! We had a ball. And those children's parents loved me forever. It was a love/hate relationship. My director said she had never seen such a great marriage between a principal and a school. My next director was a close friend and told me to never leave because no one would want to take over my school. Too tough. But alas...13 years later I got one a new new director who was an "over night sensation" after being a principal for 2 years. AND THAT'S WHEN I REALIZED I HAD TO RETIRE.She was clueless to the history of my little community, and the sound of her stiletto high heels poked holes in my brain. Here was a broad waiting to become"someone" especially since we now had a new superintendent. Soooooooo the words, "You can kiss my ass" came out of my mouth into the telephone, into her ears while I tried to explain WHY I had a parent arrested for spitting on me and shoving my AP. "Hot Babe Director" told me I must've done something to provoke her. YES! I told this woman to stop picking up her kid every day at 5:30...stop passing out on the playground....and stop saying she lived in our community when I damn well knew she lived far into the city. Then she spit on me and told me that I'd better have the doors to this school locked tight every day "cause you don't know who can get in here." 911. The next day..."Kiss my ass." The following day: "It's time to retire."

Retirement Purgatory Continued

So making more money retired than working and discovering that my antiques business was a huge success didn't resolve my feelings of worthlessness. Yes....I was keeping a journal of my "thoughts" and the journal read like a diary of an insane woman. Reading the daily classified ads for the "perfect part-time job" started me on a regular morning routine: get up at 11:00, get a cup of coffee, and go to the garage to read the newspaper and smoke cigarettes. Damn!! After giving up cigarettes for 20 years because I didn't want students and parents to se me as a poor role model, I said "What the hell!" and began smoking....alot! I found an interesting ad for a part-time florist. Called the store....went in for an interview...got a call from the owner who asked me if I was "Sure" I wanted to work for $7.00 an hour. And free flowers?? No...those were donated to local hospitals and delivered by the workers daily on their way home. I called him back the next day and said, "No thank you." Gee...I would've worked for just the free flowers. Back to the garage and cigarettes. Oh, ofcourse I had sent in at least 10 resumes to local colleges for teaching positions and received not even an acknowledgement that I had applied! Hey...didn't they read that I had actually been a professor at 2 universities? Ummmm someone must've told about how I made a graduate student cry (hysterically) and run screaming out of my classroom when I lectured about the scams people ran to get money from SSI by insisting their children, grandchildren, foster children, and cousins were serious "speds." Oooops. Didn't know that this student had a sped kid, and she complained I had misrepresented special ed parents' intentions. Nasty letter to the dean...copy to me. Ouch. The truth does hurt the guilty (her, not me.) So now the one year retirement anniversary has passed, and I am still unemployed. I will now"call in some markers" to get a cushy state government job in the state capital during the legislative session. I need a job!!!!

Retirement Purgatory

I was always characteized as an over achiever (did my undergrad degree in 2 years) with a large dose of self determination. Organized. Focused.Career demon. Loved awards. Free trips and adulation as being a "great boss." Planned my retirement finances from work day#1. So 35 years after attaining the pinnacle of my career, The Washington Post Distinguished Educator of the year....Fulbright Scholar to Japan...golden child to the local politicians for turning their ghetto school into a Blue Ribbon School, I decided thatI was tired. Tired of fixing my hair, my make-up, taking 3 stress related meds, and not having one thing left to attain that was fun. I had slowly began an antiques shop years before retirement and woke up to find that I owned 3 antique shops! Whoa...alot of fun. Good -by career...hello antiques and auctions. No long emotional transition. I just walked out after sending out a letter to my teachers saying "It's time." I kissed my building goodby (literally) as The Baltimore Sun reporter shadowed me on my last 3 days. Got in my truck and drove away. No presents. Just a $3.99 grocery store plastic wrapped bunch of flowers from a first grader. I cried for 4 hours that night after reading about my retirement in The Sun paper 2 a.m. in the morning. I'm 50 years old!!!! Now what am I going to do? Did I really screw this all up?? Could I have taken a new challenge in a new school after being principal at my school for 13 years as an icon. Noooooo...I burned that bridge when I told my new director the week before retirement to "kiss my ass." Oh, God....what will I do now??Never to fear!!! My best friend and colleague, Mike," promised me a job as a student teacher coordinator. Three months of telephone tag resulted with Mike's telling me that he just couldn't believe how many people had applied for those jobs with him. Hey...I taught at Loyola College...and Notre Dame. Forget it. Mike didn't come through.
Okay so I made more money retired (no dues or retirement money taken out of my pay.) Maybe I could travel. Problem. all my friends are retired and had jobs with the MSDE...since I had always "done my own thing" I was never the typical "yes Maam" administrator. I just knew I should not have shown off my Kanja tattoo on my thigh at a principals' meeting or I just knew that shouldn't have added 6 more ear piercings...or pretended to shoot nemisis principal while holding a gun at Violence Awareness Meeing for principals. Maybe The WAnt Ads will help!!