Fortuitous News; or, A Valentine to Austin

Do you like how I posted about how I need to be like Ferdinand recently, as in, I need to chill out and enjoy life more, and worry less, and now we are headed for the land of Ferdinand?

It was seriously a coincidence.

I have had friends congratulating me and tell me that I "deserve" a great place to be, but I don't feel it's something I earned; ending up in Spain is fortuitous and I did nothing special to get there. There are so many amazing and wonderful teachers in the system also waiting for their own golden ticket to somewhere else, and they may end up having to wait another year. They, too, "deserve" to transfer, so I feel very uncomfortable when anyone says that to me. It's all a numbers game and I just happened to have the right combination of certifications, years, and places I was willing to live ("worldwide," by the way). I am lucky; I am not deserving.

So I'll just say "thank you" for all the congrats. THANK YOU! 

absolutely awful picture---but I think the only one I have---of Austin (center)
with my friend J.Carol and my husband

You know when something big happens in your life and you have to call someone to tell them? We called our family as soon as we found out that we are moving to Rota in the summer, but there was someone we really both want to call but can't. I have thought about her so much the last few weeks (and honestly, a lot since we moved to Cuba). 

Dr. Karen Austin---or simply Austin, as all her students who loved her so much called her----was one of the best teachers I've ever had, and as I've gotten older, I've realized the best lessons from her classes stretched way beyond the books and lectures in the classroom at USM.

I had Austin for several upper level Spanish classes---advanced grammar (seriously fun---I'm not kidding, I love grammar and I love conjugating verbs), Spanish history (she made the Spanish Civil War comprehensible), and maybe a Spanish linguistics or conversation class. I really don't remember too much about exactly WHAT she taught; it was her fervor of the nuances of the Spanish language, the stories behind the history, and her own personal connections that made it so interesting and made her memorable.

And she was larger than life---she was tall and not a small woman, with wiry, crazy hair, and smoked like a chimney when I first met her (so did many of my other profs---even in the classroom. She quit, and by the time I graduated, you couldn't get near a building with a cigarette in your hand). She had a boisterous laugh and a lively spirit. I was devastated when I heard that she had died shortly after we got here, because in the whole process of moving here, she is the person my husband and I wanted most to talk to about Cuba. She would understand more than anyone else why we were dropping out of civilization, giving up life in the US, and starting over in the unknown. She loved risks and was a hero to me---she broke the glass ceiling at my college by becoming one of the first tenured female professors. She helped take care of a friend dying of AIDS in a time when most people were terrified to get near anyone with the disease. She had lived in Spain as a single woman under Franco's rule. She was adventurous, unafraid, opinionated, and brilliant.

As much as I loved and admired her, you can triple that for what my husband felt for her. She was his advisor and did so much more for him than any advisor I ever had---she took time to get to know him and her door was always open for him (or any other student). She advised him on life as well as college. He will always (deservedly) give her more credit than anyone else for motivating him to graduate college, and she had a soft spot in her heart for the skinny kid who would let her insult and scream at him in her Spanish for Law Enforcement class and played along as she read him his Miranda Rights in Spanish.

When our son decided to go to college in Madrid, I wanted nothing more than to pick up the phone and call her. I wanted him to meet her. The last time I saw her, he was only a toddler, and she sat him on her lap and sang him a lullaby in French. My adventurous son would love the crazy lady with the wild hair, the big laugh, and the great stories. I can imagine the pure joy on her face and her excited voice and animated manner as she would tell him the best cuisine and places to see, and share some of her hilarious stories as a young lady in Spain that would amaze and amuse all of us.

I was driving home a few days ago again lamenting the fact that we will be in Andalucía, the area where she lived and loved the most in Spain, and I can't tell her how excited we both are about it. 

My husband and I hadn't discussed this at all, but later that night, he said, "you think Austin's watching over us?" He feels it, too. I just feel like she's guiding us along the way. I'm not superstitious and don't feel she's literally watching over us, but I do feel like her life has influenced us both to be brave, adventurous, and helped plant the seed for a good case of wanderlust. And we know that without her in our lives, living in Spain would not have even been on the radar. 

She's been gone 4 1/2 years, but as her obit reads, she "was a force to be reckoned with." (If you get a chance, read her obit---she LIVED life).  I hope we do her proud in our adventures in Spain, and I will think of Karen Austin and her infectious laugh often; instead of sadly regretting the stories we didn't get around to sharing, my husband and I will be telling our sons stories about Austin and creating our own Spain story.