Ok, so here I am at an Episcopal Retreat House in Oviedo, just down the road from UCF. It’s an Americorps PD quarterly meeting.
Met some nice people. Mary, the state coordinator is still clueless about my skills, but others are figuring it out.
I guess I don’t really need for them to know how smart I am.
I need a man.
I already miss Jen. I resent having to be away from her. And then she’s leaving for 18 days on the 23rd. And then she’s leaving for 6 mos. in July.
I guess I’m doing okay here. I need to find out about the pain in my arms & legs.
David will be in Florida Wednesday.
So, does anyone know who I am? Or what I would be really good at?
“How come existence?” John Wheeler, Quantum Physicist.
Kathleen A. Gagne
Kathie Gagne died 4,646 days ago.
May 13th, 2002 @ 12:00 pm
May 11th, 2002 @ 5:22 pm
I’ve owned my own domain name — davidgagne.net — and kathiegagne.com since the late 90s and I control the email addresses that work with them. I told mom that she could always just enter whatever she wanted and as long as she ended it with “@davidgagne.net” or “@kathiegagne.com”, the messages would get delivered to us. Usually she just typed “david” and “kathie”, but sometimes she would type silly things.
In this email about visiting me after my friends’ wedding, she got creative. She was very excited about me returning to Florida for a visit. I had been in Los Angeles for almost two years by this point and she missed me terribly.
From: me@kathiegagne.com
To: mywonderfulson@davidgagne.net
Sent: May 11, 2002 8:22 PM ETOk,
So, here’s what we need…
Check with [redacted] to see what time he expects to leave the wedding (vis a vis on his honeymoon…). If it’s sometime before midnight Saturday, Jen and I can pick you up then.
If he’s actuallys staying for a […] barbeque thing, do you […] have to be there? So then we could pick you up at the butt crack of dawn on Sunday.
It might actually be a good thing for us to go to Daytona right from there. No matter how it works out, we’re talking about 19 hours of driving while you’re here because my mapquest says it’s 3.5 hours to the Sarasota airport. Hopefully, [redacted] lives really far north of that!!!!!!
Anyway, just let us know, and we’ll be there. I’m taking two days off and I’m pretty sure Jen will be, too! (HA!) We would dearly like to have as much time with you as possible over the weekend, especially since you have to leave Tuesday.
Oh, and get me [redacted]’s address, or the address of wherever we can pick you up.
Love you,
Mom
May 9th, 2002 @ 10:30 pm
Jen moved in about a week ago — she is being incredibly wonderful, and I treasure every moment. She’s going to Alabama on the 23rd, then to Chicago and the App. Trail with [redacted]. Then, in July, she’s going to Chicago for six months.
David will be in Florida in about 5 days and Jen and I will get to see him. I want to take him to see Mom.
Mom’s decided to live in an ALF. She sounds great. Men are flirting with her. She’s making friends.
Somehow I managed to write a few pages today. Marina. 50,000 words already.
This is a milestone. Need to get an agent! ASAP.
Kathleen A. Gagne
April 12th, 2002 @ 12:00 pm
Jen is definitely moving in, but only for May and June. Then she plans to go to Chicago for six months and come back to work in January. Six months at a time in Gainesville with no one to love me. And no money. All those days off in the summer, and no one to share them with.
How am I supposed to do this? How do people stand being so alone?
Kathleen A. Gagne
April 5th, 2002 @ 12:00 pm
Sunday night (Easter), Mom fell on my doorstep and broke her left ankle. We spent hours in the emergency room before they finally admitted her. I spent most of Monday trying to find a place where she could get appropriate care. Finally, Tuesday night, Jen and I drove her to Port Orange, to Horizons where we met Dic.
It’s a little after midnight Thursday and I’m still exhausted. But I love Mom.
I think one of the long bones in my right foot is broken. Happened before I had insurance.
I had a fairly good talk with David Wednesday night.
Missed writer’s group 3 weeks in a row. Need to connect with one of them, maybe this weekend.
Jen’s in Tampa, on and off until Thursday. As always, she’s incredible — she was a great support with Mom.
Kathleen A. Gagne
March 31st, 2002 @ 12:00 pm
Jen’s pretty definitely moving in sometime in May. She says we’re in a good place so we can get along. But she also says she’s probably going to move to Chicago before the end of the year.
And tomorrow’s Easter. A year since we’ve seen David for more than 24 hours.
What the hell am I supposed to do??? I can’t even begin to cope with this. It’s my worst nightmare coming true.
Kathleen A. Gagne
March 28th, 2002 @ 12:00 pm
Jen is back from Chicago. She got in Tuesday night, and today she’s coming over for Mom Night. At the end of May, she’s going on the Appalachian Trail for a week again.
David is definitely not coming for Easter. I hope he’ll be in Florida for a few days when Ryan gets married, and I hope Jen and I (and Mom & Dic) can get to see him.
It’s been a year since we’ve seen him for more than a day. It feels like it’s been forever. It hurts that he doesn’t seem to understand or care about how we feel. In my heart, I hope it’s because he feels a little guilty about being so far away and can’t face it. In my heart, I hope his hearth misses us …
It’s becoming more evident every minute that I’m in huge trouble financially. I tried to talk to the Florida Credit Union about refinancing the car and second mortgage, but they said they don’t make loans until your bankruptcy is 5 years old. In September, it will be 4 years.
Once again, I just can’t see any way out financially. I don’t know where to turn. I feel so alone about this. Where can I cut expenses? I’m in the same position I was in before my degree — it’s like all the years of struggling to raise David and Jen.
Jen talked about moving in in May, for a while.
Kathleen A. Gagne
On March 26th, 2002 I emailed my mom and dad a link to http://www.frontiernet.net/~cdm/age1.html. 1 My mom replied to me and said:
David,
That was SOOOOOOO cool! I looked at all of them and printed them out just because they were so cool!
Makes you think – at least at my age….
I love you lots! Call me tomorrow if you can.
Mom
The link is for a silly little page with a JavaScript alert box that asks for your birthday. Then it calculates how old you were at a few of the important events in history.
For my mom’s birthday — September 22nd, 1948 — it told me this about her:
You said your birthday is 9 / 22 / 1948 which means you are 63 years old and that you were:
52 years old at the time of the 9-11 attack on America
51 years old on the first day of Y2K
48 years old when Princess Diana was killed in a car crash
46 years old at the time of Oklahoma City bombing
45 years old when O. J. Simpson was charged with murder
44 years old at the time of the 93 bombing of the World Trade Center
42 years old when Operation Desert Storm began
41 years old during the fall of the Berlin Wall
37 years old when the space shuttle Challenger exploded
35 years old when Apple introduced the Macintosh
34 years old during Sally Ride’s travel in space
32 years old when Pres. Reagan was shot by John Hinckley, Jr.
31 years old at the time the Iran hostage crisis began
27 years old on the U.S.’s bicentennial Fourth of July
25 years old when President Nixon left office
23 years old when Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace was shot
20 years old at the time the first man stepped on the moon
19 years old when Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated
16 years old during the Watts riot
15 years old at the time President Kennedy was assassinated
10 years old when Hawaii was admitted as 50th of the United States
9 years old when the Soviet satellite Sputnik 1 was launched
4 years old at the end of the Korean War
It’s really, really surreal to think that my mom was younger than I am now when the Challenger exploded. I remember that day quite vividly. My sister and I had both stayed home sick from school and were in the front yard of Nana and Papa’s house in Daytona. I ran into the house and told Papa that I thought something was wrong and there was an accident. He told me it was just the boosters separating and everything was fine. Then we turned on the TV and saw the news. We went back into the front yard and watched the rest of the smoke clouds disappearing into the air.
1 I’m astounded that — as of September 7, 2012 — that link still works.
March 25th, 2002 @ 1:10 pm
Apparently on March 19th of 2002, I emailed my mom a link to an article about how the Earth had almost been hit by a massive asteroid. I’m sure at the time I sent it I was laughing because she and I used to joke about a horrible sci-fi made-for-TV movie we saw in the early 80s about an asteroid.
Her response to me was:
David,
This stuff is always good to know because we don’t usually have enough really good things to worry about – you know, aids, icebergs, pollution, cloning, product tampering, terrorism, job security, inflation, atomic war, Saddam Hussein, Osama, wrinkles, getting older, terminal diseases, dying, earthquakes, hurricanes, new Gator coaches, computer viruses…
love you,
mom
March 21st, 2002 @ 12:00 pm
Susan and I spoke at length about my fears about health. I think I told her more about what it does to me than I’ve ever told anyone. She said it comes from me not having anyone understand me or comfort me when I was a child. I told her I felt as if there was / is something wrong with me.
I think Fran might be dying. Jen called from Chicago and said we could go see her next week.
David called around 11 to talk about [redacted] … He actually asked for advice and said I really helped.
… [redacted] …
So I’m worried about Jen flying home and David being able to handle this delicate situation lovingly and [redacted] and [redacted] both feeling hurt no matter what he does.
And Fran.
Work is ok. Maybe good. I get lots of time off in a full year. I calculated it to be 36 days, paid. (Not paid much, but paid.)
I guess all we can ever do is hope and trust (what?) that things will work out. Sometimes they do.
Kathleen A. Gagne