The Past................................Daphne Makinson
I was raised in a post-War rural England. A sleepy seaside town that cradled poverty with benign neglect and fostered a lack of vision to take with us when, each in turn, we left. No riches, No heavy industrial waste, no crimes, no heat in its houses, no heat in its soul. One coffee house, two traffic lights and a couple of miles of promenade to shiver along as the North Sea interminably pounded its greyness into our lives.
I grew up in a store, open from eight to eight, never a meal interrupted, never a sale large enough to feed us for long. Count the inventory, count the change, count the expenses, and the best of all, count the people. I became a mathematician with an infinite capacity for the variety in people.
My mother was in love for life with a self-centered, bad tempered, hard working, highly skilled craftsman. His gifts to me were unusual freedom and 800 pages of a well bound 'Wonders of the world", pored over each time I had asthma. I had asthma often. Later I was to go in search of the wonders. My mother came from the oral tradition, knowing intuitively how to peaceably run her home for people with incurable diseases, how to keep village women content in their jobs there, how to live a life of her own. I like to think I learnt a lot from her. I have my father's artifacts around me now, but I carry her always inside my head.
Finding the larger world came easily. I hitchhiked, ate oranges, slept in fields, hostels, homes, made friends both fast and fleet. And as the land rolled in through my eyes, it breathed out through my lungs and at long last they relaxed. Europe, North Africa, North, Central and South America ....... a journey through the pages of that book, a journey that I hope will never end, but certainly has ground down at times from exhaustion, economics, babies, even malnutrition.
I emigrated to the United States in 1969 and settled soon after into small town Vermont. A life of practical skills, of reading incessantly, of learning isolation, of learning the land, of daily contact with people of every kind. A time for creating community, starting a daycare, an after-school program, building playgrounds, finding computers for kids, getting rehab, grants for housing. I had one baby, enormous, and then another, just when their father had flown. That grounded us. It made us step one foot in front of the other, after we'd learned how to crawl. It wasn't his sense of absence that troubled, that silence was silver, but the absence of optimism. There was an economic and emotional poverty enmeshed with delight in the children, a familiarity of circumstance, shadowed on my lungs, improved by strong women and shared by most single parents. We grew, piece by piece, given time, out of diapers and daycare into first grade, out of the old car into two, out of the limited work I could manage into absorbing jobs, out of bare cabins into a house, and away from fears of mortality into joys of life with two kids.
The present ........................... Daphne Makinson
At 43, after 9 years of single, parenting in the snows of Vermont, I am probably ready for anything. My survival skills are tried and true. My intellectual curiosity is high. My livelihood is garnered from college teaching, advising youth, problem solving for small businesses and raising sheep. It hasn't always been this way.
My "good" British education had its limitations. At age 13 we were required to specialize into arts and sciences, at 15 to drop all pretensions of a well rounded education. Every class for the next seven years was in mathematics or theoretical physics. Travelling and daily life in England became my education in the liberal arts. I am good mathematician, but it was not my passion. People are, and always have been.
Twenty years ago, I rejected the computer world for its lack of humanity. It, and hopefully myself, have come a long way since. Had I stayed in England, the prospects seemed only to be head of a Math. department by the time I was 40. In the U.S., I have been able to be a social worker, counselor, teacher, arts administrator, accountant, construction worker and director of an alternative high school. So Far. Now I am ready to be the educator that I have in part been for many years. My particular interests are sociology, people with chronic and terminal diseases, survival characteristics, single parenting, women's learning and rural communities. The stories of my life.
I want, and need, to formalize what I do know, in the common language, to qualify and quantify my experience in alternative schools, public school, experimental health center, traditional college, adult degree program, and community organizing. I want to fill in the gaps and build beyond my present experience. I want formal research and evaluation skills, I want advice, collaboration, new information and old fashioned criticism. I want, of course, to change the world.
I was raised in a post-War rural England. A sleepy seaside town that cradled poverty with benign neglect and fostered a lack of vision to take with us when, each in turn, we left. No riches, No heavy industrial waste, no crimes, no heat in its houses, no heat in its soul. One coffee house, two traffic lights and a couple of miles of promenade to shiver along as the North Sea interminably pounded its greyness into our lives.
 |
| Daphne at the age of 11, first day of academic high school (Circa 1956) |
I grew up in a store, open from eight to eight, never a meal interrupted, never a sale large enough to feed us for long. Count the inventory, count the change, count the expenses, and the best of all, count the people. I became a mathematician with an infinite capacity for the variety in people.
My mother was in love for life with a self-centered, bad tempered, hard working, highly skilled craftsman. His gifts to me were unusual freedom and 800 pages of a well bound 'Wonders of the world", pored over each time I had asthma. I had asthma often. Later I was to go in search of the wonders. My mother came from the oral tradition, knowing intuitively how to peaceably run her home for people with incurable diseases, how to keep village women content in their jobs there, how to live a life of her own. I like to think I learnt a lot from her. I have my father's artifacts around me now, but I carry her always inside my head.
Finding the larger world came easily. I hitchhiked, ate oranges, slept in fields, hostels, homes, made friends both fast and fleet. And as the land rolled in through my eyes, it breathed out through my lungs and at long last they relaxed. Europe, North Africa, North, Central and South America ....... a journey through the pages of that book, a journey that I hope will never end, but certainly has ground down at times from exhaustion, economics, babies, even malnutrition.
I emigrated to the United States in 1969 and settled soon after into small town Vermont. A life of practical skills, of reading incessantly, of learning isolation, of learning the land, of daily contact with people of every kind. A time for creating community, starting a daycare, an after-school program, building playgrounds, finding computers for kids, getting rehab, grants for housing. I had one baby, enormous, and then another, just when their father had flown. That grounded us. It made us step one foot in front of the other, after we'd learned how to crawl. It wasn't his sense of absence that troubled, that silence was silver, but the absence of optimism. There was an economic and emotional poverty enmeshed with delight in the children, a familiarity of circumstance, shadowed on my lungs, improved by strong women and shared by most single parents. We grew, piece by piece, given time, out of diapers and daycare into first grade, out of the old car into two, out of the limited work I could manage into absorbing jobs, out of bare cabins into a house, and away from fears of mortality into joys of life with two kids.
The present ........................... Daphne Makinson
At 43, after 9 years of single, parenting in the snows of Vermont, I am probably ready for anything. My survival skills are tried and true. My intellectual curiosity is high. My livelihood is garnered from college teaching, advising youth, problem solving for small businesses and raising sheep. It hasn't always been this way.
My "good" British education had its limitations. At age 13 we were required to specialize into arts and sciences, at 15 to drop all pretensions of a well rounded education. Every class for the next seven years was in mathematics or theoretical physics. Travelling and daily life in England became my education in the liberal arts. I am good mathematician, but it was not my passion. People are, and always have been.
Twenty years ago, I rejected the computer world for its lack of humanity. It, and hopefully myself, have come a long way since. Had I stayed in England, the prospects seemed only to be head of a Math. department by the time I was 40. In the U.S., I have been able to be a social worker, counselor, teacher, arts administrator, accountant, construction worker and director of an alternative high school. So Far. Now I am ready to be the educator that I have in part been for many years. My particular interests are sociology, people with chronic and terminal diseases, survival characteristics, single parenting, women's learning and rural communities. The stories of my life.
I want, and need, to formalize what I do know, in the common language, to qualify and quantify my experience in alternative schools, public school, experimental health center, traditional college, adult degree program, and community organizing. I want to fill in the gaps and build beyond my present experience. I want formal research and evaluation skills, I want advice, collaboration, new information and old fashioned criticism. I want, of course, to change the world.
 |
| Daphne, her Worcester house, her majestic truck and the pile of wood she stacked. (Circa Oct 2015) |
