I have no reason why I just now came across my blog, but I did. I see that I first began it in what will be ten years ago next month. What a joy it is to peruse my entries at this point, ten years later. My grandson, Christian, who was three when I began the blog and who formed the basis of, or is included in, many of my entries, is now thirteen. His sister, Makayla, will be eighteen next month and has received early acceptance into the college of her choice. 

Where in the world did the time go? 

Yesterday, while I was on my way to my morning Pilates class, Makayla called to ask me if I would meet her at Urgent Care because she suspected she had strep throat and could not go alone since she was under eighteen. I met her there. As we sat and chatted while waiting for her to be called into the examining room, I teared up at the thought that in a month she would be eighteen and a “grown-ass woman.” How could that be? ”Nana are you crying?” she asked, confused because the story she was telling me did not call for tears. I suspect she won’t fully understand my tears until she has kids or grandkids of her own. It seems we were just all gathered in DC for her birth, which did not occur for another full week, well after her sisters and other mother had returned to their homes out of state. Or even before that, when her mom (my daughter) and I chatted on the phone while I was on my daily walk as she regularly encountered morning sickness while at work during our chat.

It can be so overwhelming to go through the day-to-day logistics of having children. Loving them, clothing them, feeding them, educating them, socializing them, making sure they have what they need for school or activities each day, schlepping them back and forth to their activities, making sure clothes fit and are clean, homework checked, meals balanced, boo-boos mended, hurt feelings soothed, fears calmed. And that’s all before they get to be teenagers who try your last nerve in every way possible as they check out the boundaries of their new-found freedom as teens. 

And don’t get me started on them driving. My daughters couldn’t understand why I stood there crying as they passed their drivers’ test. They didn’t understand the concept of my being responsible for their protection in a car all their lives and now giving that role over to someone who couldn’t manage to keep a room anywhere near clean or who routinely told “convenient” lies about their whereabouts if they knew I would not approve. Someone who danced in her seat when her favorite tunes came on the radio, who would now have to concentrate her energies on remaining safe in this death machine on wheels, in my eyes. :-)

Then, before you know it, they’re off to college, never to really return as before. The truth is, all of my three have returned home (I promise their dads were not made out of rubber :-) ) for some legitimate reason or other at some point. This generation is not like the last, with the expectation that they will have the lives their parents had. We have felt it. From divorces to jobs that didn’t work out like you expected, to deaths, to returning to school, life lessons that made each, I’m sure, grateful for a soft place to land.

And in that ten year period since first I wrote, so much has taken place, one day at a time. Yet here we are. 

I chuckled when I read about having carved out a day to grade a slew of papers, only to get a call that Christian needed to go to Urgent Care and his teacher-mother needed to be at work. I am now retired. No more papers to grade. Whoohooo! While I LOVE teaching law and could have done it until I was no longer able, after thirty-eight and a half years, thirty-three in the same university, I could feel that something else was calling me. I did not know what, and had no yen to do anything else in particular, but I could feel that there was something else I needed to do and it would reveal itself. At age seventy, your Social Security payments max out as as much as you you will be able to collect each month and you have to begin your monthly check collecting, so on my seventieth birthday, I retired. 

I wasn’t worried about what I would do. I know how the Universe works in my life. 

So, I leaned into retirement, understanding it would be a process after a lifetime of regimented living, after starting school at age four and going straight through law school, then to work after that. I began to get used to the idea of what it meant to not care about a weekend because every day is a weekend day you didn’t have to work. That takes a while to sink in. The world depends on weekends. You no longer have to.

I went through a process of figuring out what time of day worked best for me to arise and go to sleep now that I had no reason to wake up at a particular time. I realized I’m not a late sleeper. I experimented with various things figuring out how I wanted to spend my time. Did I really want to clean out the messy drawers and cabinets I’d been waiting for time to tackle? Was I ready to go down the rabbit hole of my genealogy like I’d been itching to do for ages—even though I could now do a good deal of it from the comfort and convenience of my computer rather than spending hours in the dark and dusty basement of some institution looking at microfilm? Was I ready to write books? If so, what? There were so many in my head. Did I want to travel? My mother died suddenly of a heart attack when she was fifty years old and I was twenty. One of my takeaways from that was to live each day as if it was your last, do what it is you want to do and don’t save it. The truth was, I had traveled all over the world to wherever I wanted to. I was sure I’d still do some traveling, but I had no great yen to do so. There truly is no place like home for me. Truly. Contentment Cottage is my special place and while I love people and going to events and having new experiences, it is my comfort and joy.

Every day was full of something. I realized that I loved Pilates enough to go to class every morning at 6 am, rising 2 hours earlier so that I could walk for an hour before class. I realized, once again, since I had done it before, that the worst thing about getting up at 4 am isn’t getting up at 4 am. It’s going to bed around 8 or 9 p.m. when you do your best work at night. 

I learned I must take great care of my aging self, including, among other things, that I must have between 7 and 8 hours of sleep each night, put eating berries in my day, put exercise in my day, do things that challenge me mentally, stay engaged, and all the things the experts say to do. I wanted to e able to enjoy my aging and remain vital and not a burden to my daughters and grandchildren. When your mother dies of a heart attack at 50 and your Dad dies 37 years later with Alzheimers he had for at least a couple of decades, you try to do what you can to preserve your health.

I still speak, teach and consult, but I have a much more relaxed schedule to do it. Since I arranged my life so that my house and car were paid for and I was debt-free before I retired and my daughters were all past college (turns out, nearly), I didn’t feel the need to hustle to make ends meet as many retirees do. I could take my time and open myself up to see what it was the Universe needed me to retire in order to do.

My first big surprise was receiving a call from my university’s president telling me that a committed had submitted a suggestion to him that an endowment be created to give an annual award to a faculty member who had demonstrated a significant commitment to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging (DEIB) both inside and outside the classroom and he was accepting their suggestion. The call was to notify me of this and ask if it was okay with me if they named it for me. 

Huh? 

“Is this a trick question?” I asked once I, literally, found my voice. He laughed. ”No. We can’t name it the Dawn D. Bennett-Alexander Inclusive Community Award without your permission.” 

They received it, of course.

The second surprise was being told that the university wanted to do a video of me. I couldn’t even understand the request. I’d never seen such a thing at my university. Once they explained that it would simply be about me, I agreed, though reluctantly. I still didn’t get it. I said yes because I guessed they needed it for the new award announcement. I needed to do my duty. I just didn’t have a picture in my head of what it would be or why. Just about me because I’m me and do what I do, it turns out. Weird. It received wide press, including national, upon it’s release. Unbelievable. My favorite part was that a young Black male senior in his last semester, who aspired to be a movie producer, was tapped to create the video. It was his first project. He took it very seriously and did a great job. I was so happy for him. My favorite part of that is that in his interview for the video, he really heard me and understood what was important to me. He sent me two “director’s cuts,” one of which was purely about me quilting. I absolutely loved it since quilting is such a big part of my life, connects me to my Ancestors and is such a metaphor for life for me.  

I wasn’t in a hurry to rush the Universe to unfold its plans. I was fine if nothing ever showed up. I had plenty to keep me busy—even though I did not need to be busy. 

But something did show up. It turned out the plan was to write after all. 

Fiction, at that. 

What?!

Having ever only published legal textbooks before, I have now finished four novels, three of which are now available on Amazon.com and other places. The fourth I just finished last week. They are, in many ways, a culmination of everything in my life leading up to now. The goal of the books is to bridge the gap (more like a widening chasm lately) between diverse groups of people, in a fun, interesting and entertaining way. The method is to use all the parts and experiences of my life to weave tales of quilts that do extraordinary things while leading to information about some issue of DEIB.

Huh? How in the world does that work?!

Even I had never heard of such a thing. It just came to me. From the Universe, I’m sure.

Ever had a fierce argument with someone, only to discover well into the argument that the two of you were operating with a different set of facts? Facts that once the other side knew, they actually agreed with, but neither side knew each was dealing with a different set of facts? Time after time after time I experienced this phenomenon in the work I did, and do, as someone who teaches and consults in Employment Law, Global Diversity and DEIB. While we always have a great time of it, it is clear to us that that is what is going on. It always startles the people involved. Always. They always come away wishing they had known the other set of facts because it would have made such a difference in their thinking. They feel cheated, like someone lied to them.

Each of the books in The Quilt Journeys Mystery Series explores a different DEIB issue and tries to fill in the information gap that my 40+ years of experience has shown me often exists about the issue with those not in the group the book addresses. Each of the quilts is different, and all but one have extraordinary powers. The book are a very fun and interesting way to explore the issues while just reading an intriguing cozy mystery. Not sure what the cozy mystery genre is? Think “Murder, She Wrote.” Comfortable, cozy, spellbinding, without the murder, blood, guts, police procedure, etc.

Writing the books has allowed me to explore a talent I did not realize I possessed, even though my students and training attendees said it all the time: storytelling! I still don’t see myself as a storyteller or even imaginative, but I guess that sounds ridiculous at this point. How the stories come to me and develop is way beyond me. I have no idea. My co-author is my niece, who I consider the imaginative one. But often, once I begin the story, it just takes off on its own and I feel like I’m just along for the ride. I have no idea where it’s going. I want to see where it goes as much as the reader does! It is absolutely fascinating. I feel like I’m just the vehicle for something the Universe wants to deliver.

It all began with my niece, who was visiting from Texas, asking me to tell her about the stack of handmade quilts I had made that were sitting on a chair. I keep them there because they inspire me. Like the books, once they are done, I can’t believe I actually made them. While I was telling her about the one I made to commemorate the 200th birthday of her great-great-great-grandmother, born in 1815 into slavery in Alabama, she said we ought to write a quilt about a book. I’d been a textbook author for over thirty years; she had never written a book. While she was incredibly intelligent and imaginative, she rarely finished a project she thought up. Determined to have her learn that one could actually begin something and finish it, the next morning I opened my laptop and said, “So what happens?” She had no idea what I was even talking about. After I told her what I meant, she said, “Well, a woman goes into a shop and buys a quilt.” I stopped her right there and started writing. That was Monday morning. By the time I left for my speaking engagement in Arizona on Friday, the book was all but done. The rest is history.

So, while I began this blog ten years ago and have been pretty intermittent about it, a lot has happened in those ten years. My oldest daughter now has a young woman about to graduate from high school and begin college, rather than an eight-year-old, and a then-toddler son who is now a teen. My middle daughter has bought thirteen acres not far from us and built a container home that became a UN prototype for sustainable housing before COVID hit and stopped everything dead in its tracks. My baby daughter graduated from college summa cum laude, 17 years after beginning, and is now working on her Master’s degree. The two oldest daughters have lost their dad, my first husband. I have re-connected, to some extent, with the true great love of my life and it has fueled me in ways that could only come from the Universe because it had work for us to do. I have weathered the COVID pandemic pretty much unharmed, except in ways we all have felt a new reality we’d rather not have done. We have experienced the end of the first Black man as president who set a sterling example of presidential behavior, and endured the reign of his successor who tested us in ways we still reel from, yet he is looming on the horizon as potentially another term. One that, if it comes to pass, will make me continue to wonder who we are as a country, because I thought I knew, but am learning more and more each day, maybe not so much. 

I have retired and learned to love it, felt the continuing love of an institution to which I devoted thirty-three years in ways that still startle me, including a Valentines Day text early this morning from a student from years ago. I have traveled to England to deliver an invited paper at Oxford, Italy to teach sixty eager students, Italy once again for my oldest daughter’s fortieth birthday, India as a gift from my middle daughter, Aruba, the Dominican Republic, Cancun, a solo cross-country drive from Georgia to Colorado just to see the Rockies, a cross country road trip with my former partner and our two grandchildren, gazing at, among other things, the wonders of the Rockies, the Crazy Horse Monument, the Badlands, Mount Rushmore, the St. Louis Arch, and the site of the Oklahoma City Bombing. I attended the donor’s event for the opening of the incomparable National Museum of African American History and Culture, had my first inspiring visit to Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, AL, the inspirational National Quilt Museum in Paducah, KY, that I didn’t even realize existed, made several incredible quilts of my own, including finishing a Dresden Plate quilt I discovered that I had begun thirty-five years before, won a national teaching award that included $25,000, with which I created an endowed scholarship for students who engaged in DEIB efforts, received numerous other awards and recognitions for teaching and service, including several teacher of the year awards, lost one hundred pounds, gained some of it back, grew my very short natural into flowing dreadlocs, grew innumerable beautiful precious flowers and veggies in my garden and am still awed by each and every one, published three more editions of my co-authored Employment Law textbook, finally withdrawing after the tenth edition, content in the knowledge that it had been number one from the moment it came out and still led the pack after ten editions, and did lots of great work on my home. 

Did I mention becoming the mother of three kittens during COVID, one of which my middle daughter promptly claimed as her own? Or becoming one of the instructors in the first online certification course on the planet for the new international DEIB standard, ISO 30415:21, whose US task force I served on for three years? Or teaching in the first National Judicial College 4-day course on The Anti-Racist Courtroom? Or recording my first audiobook? Or attending my first high school reunion? It took me fifty-five years, but I finally managed to get to one. . . and ended up in a Washington Post article about it. Oh, and had the unique and totally unexpected experience of being a delegate to the 2016 Democratic National Convention, along with a delegation that included luminaries such as my personal hero, the late Rep. John Lewis, and the incredible Stacy Abrams, and was able to become a part of history by casting a vote for the first female candidate from a major political party for president of the US, Hillary Clinton.

Well, I’m sure I’m leaving out lots of other things that happened over the past ten years since I began this blog. In fact, probably at least as much as I remembered. But I must say it was rather lovely revisiting what I did manage to remember. All in all, I realized that whether or not ten years seems like a long time depends on what you’re thinking about. For my grandchildrens’ births, even the quilt from thirty-five years ago, it seems like just yesterday. For my trip to the Rockies, it seems like forever ago. I guess it just depends. And that’s life….