Ch. 27. Building my new skills stack, near and far

From graduation in late 2014 until March 2020 when the COVID lockdown hit, I worked a series of jobs in my new field. I spent a year in the beautiful mountains of North Carolina, working as a reference and instruction librarian at Western Carolina University. I loved that job and I loved the mountains. I had two lovely plots in the Cullowhee Community Garden where I rediscovered the joy of gardening. But I was a geographic bachelor and when my wife developed some health issues I rushed back to Washington to be at her side.

a couple of blog posts from Cullowhee

In the interim, I returned to State as a retired annuitant senior advisor in the office of Public Diplomacy. It’s barely worth mentioning because two weeks later I began part time as a reference and instruction librarian at American University (AU), I position I kept for the next two years. Working the reference desk at AU, I learned about the OSher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) hosted at American and prepared a course proposal for a 10-week course/study group reading all ten plays in August Wilson’s American Century Cycle. Meanwhile, I began a short stint as program manager at DC Archives. I was there for one year, my August Wilson course proposal was accepted and I ended my association with DC Archives to devote full time to course preparations.

June 21, 2025. It is the summer solstice and I have apparently run out of space in my sandbox so I’ll be depositing some dated thoughts here. In April, 2025 we completed our project to process the professional papers and work-related documents of Ambassador Terrence Todman, a six-time U.S. ambassador. Yes, he holds the record for number of ambassadorships, which is why we were passionate about preserving the record. He had deposited several (over 21) boxes of papers. photographs, video tapes, cassette tapes, over the years with his designated repository at a college library in his hometown in the Virgin Islands and over the years the unprocessed boxes had fallen into a state of disrepair. A mentor and colleague of mine, Jim Dandridge, discovered and retrieved 21 boxes, moving them to safer storage at DACOR-Bacon House here in DC. He found out I had developed some skills as an archivist in my post-retirement career as a librarian and solicited my assistance. We discussed the project and I came on board in the Summer of 2024. I designed a database that could be uploaded to any content management system in conjunction with librarians at the University of the Virgin Islands (UVI).

Working on Saturdays with of couple of Dandridge’s family members (his daughter and his grandson), a couple of retired ambassadors, and a soon to be retired government historian, we completed the arduous task of identifying, de-stapling,and re-foldering each to-be archived item. In February 2025, Jim and I set a goal of completing the project by the end of April 2025, concluding that only working on Saturdays would not get the task completed on time. So in March, I added a couple days per week to our schedule, coordinating working days with DACOR-Bacon House.

Happy to say we met our deadline and shipped xxx holllinger boxes to their final destination at the University of Virgin Islands, Todman’s designated depository. The team of librarians at UVI will be using a content management system all archivists are familiar with, ContentDM, to uploard the database and make Todman’s papers accessible digitally to researchers everywhere.

My next project, currently underway, is to consolidate seven years of notes I have accrued as study group leader of the August Wilson American Century Cycle, Over the years I’ve done study groups at Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI), at American University and at San Diego State University, and book clubs at DC Public Library. Starting off with over 400 pages of accumulated notes, blog entries, and transcribed marginalia, I’ve edited it down to just over 200 pages, built a table of contents and a detailed index. The index construction was quite a challenge, calling on all my librarian and archivist skills. I hope to have a finished project, uploaded to substack and available in print form, in time for the next study group offering at OLLI-AU in September.

In my final update note for today, June 21, 2025, I’d like to mention a month’s old text I found on my phone last night. I am horrible about keeping up with texts. It just seems to me that keeping up with mail and email corresspondence should be enough. Anyway, the two month old text was from a high school classmate of over 50 years ago, complaining that some members of our original prep school integration cohort were somehow not telling the whole story about the integration experience, not including all participants. I hardly felt qualified to weigh in, considering I only spent two years, not four, at the institution under discussion and returning home short of completion and graduation. In fact, I think the school only includes me in the graduating class because I pay my dues annuallly to the scholarship foundation, which is the least I can do for the high quality education I received for the two years I was in attendence. Nonetheless, I am allowing myself to be involved in the group discussion.

On reflection, and I think this is an important consideration, each person has the obligation, the duty to tell his own story, to create content, so to speak, for history sake. That is what I have been doing with my substack memoir project here. We, each of us, also have a collective obligation to share with members of our cohort the content we have created, especially as we enter our golden years. We have already lost three members to untimely deaths (isn’t death always untimely?). Soon we will all be in the ground and our memories will perish in our graves if we do not WRITE STUFF DOWN!

Moreover, and I think this is most significant, I feel personally that we are called upon to live complete lives, not just a high school slice of life, or a college slice, or a work slice, or, in my case, a military service slice, an off-the-grid slice, and a post-retirement smorgasbord slice (smile). Our whole lives provide the only adequate or competent measure of the lives we have led, our accomplishments from A to Z, from tit to tat, from birth to death.

"Tell me not in mournful numbers
Life is but an empty dream
For the soul is dead that slumbers . . . "