Well, isn’t she something!

This semester I’m living with Jackie, my uncle’s marvelous mother-in-law. I’ve always been close to her daughter, my Aunt Nana, and it’s fun to spot similarities between such distinct people. Jackie and I met briefly in May when I visited overnight, but this week we’ve certainly gotten to know each other better. She is a force to be reckoned with: opinionated, outgoing, and lively. Her favorite phrase is "I'm so lucky." She finds most people around her "delightful" and pours herself out for neighbors and friends in tough times. One of the first to earn a master’s degree in linguistics, she taught reading and high school English for decades, mostly to non-native English speakers. The house is filled with her watercolors, most based on photos she’s taken in her world travels.

She’s passionate about athletics and the outdoors: she bikes three times a week, sometimes with a club called the Cycle-Paths. Twice, she’s biked from Pittsburgh to Washington, D.C. and back. After college, she danced professionally for a year. When her daughter got serious about gymnastics years ago, Jackie became a national-level judge, judging Mary Lou Retton from age 6. Years of skiing and hiking hut-to-hut in the Alps inspired her to take up German in the last ten-odd years. When I wake up, she’s usually returning from the gym.

During the lull before student teaching, I’m enjoying the chance to be included in some of her interests. We solve the New York Times crossword puzzle together - I contribute 3 answers; she gets the other 27. She takes me biking around Pittsburgh and walking through the woods behind her. (We got home from biking 20 miles yesterday; while I took a rare nap, she swam laps.) She shares her “Economist” magazines, her Wall Street Journal, and her library card. I chat with the mostly-retired neighbors in her condo complex about their upcoming events in the Bulgarian Cultural Society. I eat sweet corn on the porch with her and her “special friend” Ben, pleading to help clean up for once.

It’s also neat to see her nearly Internet-free lifestyle. For years, she’s had four hours per month of dial-up. Since I’ve gotten here, she’s used a biographical dictionary, a 1974 World Book Encyclopedia, a catalogue of bird species, an atlas, and other paper-based resources. She says she does Google her crossword clues on occasion, but generally the Internet is superfluous for her.

I hope Jackie rubs off on me this semester.