Juggling Tasks
For the forty-five years of my active career, I recognized that the art of juggling tasks and prioritizing the use of one’s time was simply part of the job of working. I also knew that it was part of life in general outside of work, but rarely found that the personal tasks had the sort of urgency of triage that they had in business situations. Now I was never in the military and was never doing things that had regular life and death demands (at least not to my knowledge), so maybe that’s why I sensed more difficulty in the tasks of work than the tasks of non-work life. I can remember one family situation which had a lot of that juggling in a short window of time.
I had never gone to a college reunion gathering until my 20th undergraduate reunion in 1995. Before that I had been to Ithaca for recruiting students from Cornell or for some visit, but generally, I was busy in New York City building my career and life without much retrospective on my good old college days. I don’t think I am unusual in needing some time and distance before getting too nostalgic about my college days. But for one reason or another, the 20th reunion seemed like a good round number with which to start my reunion activities. I signed up for my whole family to go and I planned to do this in the most traditional manner in that we would all be staying in the dormitories, the same ones that I had spent my freshman year in all those twenty-four years prior. My second wife, Carol, was six-months pregnant with what would become my third child, Thomas. SHe would share a double dorm room with my daughter Carolyn and I would share a dorm room with my son, Roger. We were to be joined by my friends Paul and his wife and his two daughters, who were good friends of Roger and Carolyn and of similar ages.
On the night we arrived, the dorm lounge served as a class gathering place and we said all our hellos and signed the kids up for the various age-appropriate kids’ activities (almost a camp-like environment for them). The adults would spend the next two days going to classes and gatherings as are normal in big reunion environments. The weather was good, but a bit hot already for early June and it all promised to be a fun weekend for all. We went to bed in the not air-conditioned dorm rooms and figured we would tough it out with windows open for a breeze. Hell, we had managed it in college, why not now, right? That’s when the wheels came off.
About midnight Carol awoke because she began hemorrhaging and became quite scared for herself and the baby. I put the kids together in my room and explained the situation as best I could to them that I was taking Carol to the hospital, which was about five miles away (I was quite familiar with Ithaca and the surroundings). I also woke up my friend Paul and asked them to watch over the kids and if need be, to take them to the activities they were signed up for if I was delayed at the hospital for some reason. This was before everyone carried a cell phone in their pocket, so I told them I would coordinate through the Class office phone in the lounge, which was always manned by a class representative who could pass on messages.
Off I went with Carol to the hospital. She was in emergency and out of immediate danger (the hemorrhaging had stopped) based on coverage and care by the attending resident physician. However, the obstetrician would not be in until morning and she would have to wait until 10am or so to see him. I called the lounge phone and passed the message for Paul to take the kids to their activities as planned and I would be back by noon. When the obstetrician arrived and saw Carol, he said she would be there at least the rest of the day for tests. Carol and I agreed that I would return to the dorm to get some of Carol’s personal items since we didn’t know what the duration of her stay would be. Once I had taken care of that and returned to the hospital (everyone was out of the dorms when I returned but I left another message for Paul with the lounge attendant), I was told that Carol could leave at about 4pm, but that she should be taken home to NYC thereafter to rest. Also, she should not stay in the un-air-conditioned dorm room, but I needed to get her into and air-conditioned room somewhere. I set about pulling all the strings I had and secured her a room at the Statler Inn on campus. I took her there and set her up in the A/C and then went back to the dorm.
That is when I got a note from the Cornell clinic that my daughter Carolyn was there and I should come there right away. When I got there I found a scared little nine-year old who was wide-eyed and being led by a masked medical worker. Masks may seem normal today, but they were decidedly abnormal in 1995. It was explained to me that they suspected her of having Chickenpox and that they could not treat her there, but I had to go to a special clinic up on Warren Road. I went there, reassuring her through her tears that she would be fine. When I walked into that lobby and told the nurse what I was told, you would think I had a bomb strapped around my chest. I was briskly ushered with her out the door and told to go to a side door where they received potentially highly contagious patients. This did not make Carolyn less fearful. They then diagnosed her and confirmed Chickenpox. They told me she could not go back to the dorm and needed to go home to Long Island under a controlled situation. It was 5pm and Carol needed to sleep and Carolyn needed a place to stay. I had had Chickenpox so I was safe. The first thing I did was call Carol at the Statler and ask if she had had Chickenpox. I had been warned to ESPECIALLY not expose any non-immune pregnant women to Carolyn. While Carol called her mother, I called my Aunt Aggie and Uncle Art, who lived in Ithaca, to ask if they were immune and able to house Carolyn for the night. They were immune and they would be happy to help.
I can still remember the brave but tearful look on Carolyn’s face as I drove off from Aggie & Art’s house with her standing there with these relative strangers. Meanwhile, back at the dorm I saw Roger, who had had the best day of his 13-year-old life being free-range on a college campus. The thought of leaving a day early to drive home with a wobbly Carol and a sick and scared Carolyn was not a pleasant thought. He then chimed in that he had not had Chickenpox either. Now I was at an impasse. Paul offered to drive him to NYC before returning his kids to Allentown, PA on Sunday. Then I had to call the kids’ mother and break all the bad news at once. Their mother was inordinately calm about it all and seemed to sense that I was juggling a lot.
That evening there was a reunion dinner at the Statler where I had to explain to everyone what was going on and why I had to leave early. People just shook their heads. Then Carol came downstairs at her insistence to wave to the crowd like a conquering heroine and wobbled back upstairs to bed. We left the next morning and Roger got home fine to his mom, who then had the challenge of keeping an infected child apart from an uninflected child. Carol was fine, Carolyn was fine, Roger was fine, and even I was fine, though somewhat exhausted.
This morning felt like another one of those days with a gardener to direct at 7:00am, a hearing to attend at 8:00am and a massage scheduled for 10:00am. And then the hearing time started to move around and back and forth and I felt like I was back juggling tasks again. Then I remembered that day in 1995 and thought, juggling tasks in retirement beats the hell out of juggling tasks in real life.