Thirty years ago today I stood at an off ramp of the interstate to downtown Oklahoma City with no idea what my future was. After an extremely successful career in Los Angeles as a teacher, cartoonist, and public figure, it all came crashing down with an ill-fated romantic entanglement with a very nice man who, unfortunately, eventually showed he had more baggage than a luggage carousel at Logan Airport.

The long and short of it was that I was heading back East with a lot of “splainin’ to do” and to face the disappointment of family and my having to re-prove myself in the eyes of the people back home. They hadn’t seen the life I had in California so its reality would be hidden by what they saw come home.

I might not have given friends and family enough credit as far as  welcoming me back as a Prodigal Son, of sorts, but I really was not in a place to take the gamble.

I was no longer that person who had left home and headed west, so I could never technically redeem myself to any prior point as I was no longer that person assumed to need that relevant redemption.

And, I needed redemption.

I was at the off-ramp because I had accepted a ride just outside of Grants, New Mexico, from a man who was returning from California to his home in New Jersey after having driven out west to plead with his ex-wife to allow him to visit their child of whom she had complete custody and perhaps get shared custody. He needed someone to tell his tale to, and I needed a ride. After having gone from patiently and supportively engaged in conversation about his plight and ending with a man so depressed I could see his car against the support pillar of a highway overpass in his future of which I did not want to be a part, knowing someone in L.A. from Oklahoma whose grandmother’s last name was Walker, and based solely on that, I had the Jersey guy pull over and let me out when I saw an exit labeled “Walker”.

So, there I stood.

I knew nothing about the city, knew no one there, and had no idea how I would find this friend’s grandmother to at least have a place to rest a bit before moving on.

My employment situation back home would have been messy as the school district in L.A. had lost parts of my professional file, so I would return without proof of my teacher credentials having to reestablish all that a continent away from where the papers had been lost. And, let’s be honest, as they would have a right to, although the degree needed to be kept reasonable, I would face the recrimination of those who saw the before and after without any understanding of the glory of the in between.

I looked up every Walker in the phone book at the Greyhound bus station and, remembering her once or twice mentioned first name, wended my way from there to the North Highlands neighborhood where I found the grandmother’s house and as the grandson was coming to visit was welcomed to stay for his arrival in a day or two.

This led to a room in her house and the opportunity to re-establish my files by having a state department of education request papers from a school district that had lost them exercising power an individual like myself does not have.

My stay was to be temporary until I had redeemed myself sufficiently enough to go home with some good news as opposed to what I could have brought and with a complete professional file.

Not intending to stay beyond the time it would take to recreate my professional files, and to aid in the process, based on one paper I had in my wallet never to be lost because of someone else’s carelessness, I was offered a position as a substitute teacher in Oklahoma City and given two choices of schools needing a Special Ed teacher if even just for one semester.

The school I chose, Taft Middle School, had been built as a potential upper-class kids’ school in what was planned to be a rich people’s neighborhood that had not panned out that way as the rich moved further north where the land gently rose, leaving behind a gem heavily influenced by the Art Deco craze, and I chose it solely because of the huge Art Deco light to the right of the main entrance, and for no other reason.

I ended up at a progressive school in the Buckle of the Bible Belt and began a period of redemption that took 18 years.

And it all began with uncertainty 30 years ago today.

Fifty years ago when I began my teaching career it was in Richmond, California, where a large number of Oklahomans had moved during the Dust Bowl and in 1973 I had met many parents and grandparents who had made the trip, some of whom had dreams of returning to the land of family lore.

Twenty years later I was standing in that land of family lore and ended my career teaching Oklahomans.

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