Today we faced the White Bear. That is, Gracie and I drove to White Bear Lake where the galley of a book that caught my interest earlier this summer when I read an interview with its author was waiting for me in my campus mailbox. I had used my campus address having decided that my best chance at getting a galley from Viking was to flaunt my school affiliation. I was right! It worked. Unfortunately, White Bear Lake is about a one hour drive away from the inner ring suburb of Minneapolis where I live. White Bear Lake is where I work, though. It's where Gracie and I will have to drive a momentous three times a week for sixteen weeks beginning August 23. Driving there, going in to get the book from my mail cubby in the English mailroom, and driving back (another hour for a total of two hours round trip!) was clearly a dry run for fall.
After the fact, I will admit that it was me and not Gracie who had ALL the problems. It took me fifteen minutes of wandering around the house to collect everything I thought we needed, the most important item being Gracie's orange vest. Then, about two blocks from the house, I realized that I had not brought her water bowl. It was going up into the nineties today and having that along seemed essential. Back we went. I had planned to get to campus by eleven but it was eleven thirty when we finally arrived. Gracie loves the car and was content the whole long trip. Were our roles reversed, I would have asked at least three times, "Are we there yet?" I got the book and was on my way out, when another part-time instructor from the speech department who once sat in on a teaching circle with me caught up to us. She wanted to know all about Gracie and what she could do for me. Then she told me that she had lost her peripheral vision in one eye and wasn't sure if she would be able to keep driving. All this was fine. I had my hearing aids on, and we were inside the building. Gracie, to demonstrate how wonderful she is, lay down next to me while my colleague went on to say that she had finally been hired full time at another community college in the area, one at which she had not taught before. This was so interesting that I stopped thinking about our next stop--a birthday lunch at Red Lobster with another colleague! Of course, once I had Gracie in the car and was exchanging her orange vest for her seat belt harness, my phone rang with a text. "Are you coming?"
Thanks to construction (I thought that had stopped when the state government of Minnesota shut down!) the five minute drive took fifteen minutes. Luckily, my colleague is as easy going and forgiving as Gracie. We went on to enjoy a two hour lunch during which Gracie behaved perfectly...well she did try to crawl over to a little spilled food, but I stopped her.
So, today Gracie and I met the White Bear, and I think we're going to be all right. That is, if I can get myself a bit more organized!
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