31. Joan
When I was the ripe old age of twenty-one, I was getting ready to graduate from Ohio Wesleyan University, and I needed a job. My boyfriend (AKA Greg) also needed a job, so we decided that whoever got the first job would win, and that is where we would move.
I was a math major, but was also taking education classes, so applied to some teaching jobs in Ohio with very little luck. A few ramshackle private schools in the middle of nowhere returned my calls. It turned out they paid next to nothing, and you had to run bingo games on weekends (yes, that is actually true).
And then my luck changed. I found a notice at the OWU career placement about a teaching job in Baltimore. For a science teacher. At the Baltimore Friends School.
I didn’t really know how to TEACH high school science, but I’d TAKEN high school science classes, so that seemed good enough.
As luck would have it my mom had a high school friend who lived in Baltimore, named Joan.
Joan sprung into action and agreed to pick me up at the airport, put me up at her house, and shuttled me around for the interview.
I got a sense of Joan on the phone as we were making our travel plans. When she asked how she would recognize me at the airport, I said I would be wearing jeans and she said very wryly “Oh, that should be helpful.”
Joan was a straight talker who was outlandishly generous. She had a caustic wit and a great big heart. Not only did she feed me and drive me and give me a place to sleep, she also stepped up once I got the job, and helped us once again.
She helped me and Greg find our first apartment, invited us to crab feasts, and eventually became our landlord when we moved into the first floor of the gorgeous old house she and her husband had renovated in Towson. She became our SBM (Surrogate-Baltimore-Mom!)
Normally when I think of our move to Baltimore I think of how Greg and I left the Ohio homestead and traveled east by wagon train all on our own to start our new life. But really, back behind us, helping us spread our little wings, was Joan.