During the spring of 2009 my sister Sarah (or as Lindsay affectionately calls her “Sister Sarah”) was accepted and enrolled in Graduate School at Boston College. That same spring I moved back to Chicago after completing a year coaching at Dartmouth College (in Hanover, New Hampshire) and, as luck would have it, I was selected for an in-person interview for a head coaching job at Hudson Valley Community College located in Albany, New York around the same time that my parents were planning on helping Sarah move to Boston.
After some careful rearranging of plans, and compromises by all parties involved, it was determined that my interview and Sarah’s move could be combined into a pseudo family trip, minus my brother Daniel, where my parents and sister would drive to Albany with all of Sarah’s possessions packed into their Jeep Grand Cherokee and I would fly there so that I could spend the extra time preparing for my interview. After seeing them off on Tuesday my parents and sister drove to Erie, Pennsylvania, and on Wednesday, while I was flying nonstop, they were driving along I-90E below en route to Albany where the 4 of us rendezvoused at an airport hotel.
That night we ate dinner at a nearby Moe’s Southwest Grill, and afterward my mom and sister helped me put together the packets that I was going to distribute to the search committee members present at my interview in the morning. Before it was too late my 3 traveling companions were asleep and I was left alone lying in bed with my nerves and thoughts keeping me awake most of the night. The next morning my mom and I got up early and after I was dressed and looking my Sunday best we got coffee and she drove me to campus. During my interview she drove back to the hotel in order to finish packing and pick up my dad and sister so that they could all return to campus and we could leave from there for Boston.
Even though I felt that my interview went well, and that I had a genuine shot at getting the job, the Athletic Director told me at the end that they wouldn’t be making a quick decision and that I should hear something by the end of the following week. Unfortunately, this news didn’t jive well with what I was hoping to hear since I had put another job offer on hold in order to interview and knew that I needed to either accept or decline that position before Hudson Valley was going to make their final decision. When my family picked me up from the interview I expressed my conundrum and then I spent the next several hours in the car on edge and forcing everyone else to walk on eggshells around me.
By the time we approached Boston that afternoon everyone wanted out of the car and to be able to take a minute to themselves; however before we could move Sarah in to her new apartment we needed to make several stops including campus and Target. Even though the family had taken a trip to Boston a few years earlier we still weren’t very familiar with the layout of the city and surrounding areas, and to make matters worse none of us had a smart phone and we were relying on printed out copies of MapQuest directions, an atlas and directions we received at random gas stations in order to help us navigate one of the toughest driving cities in the country. So, to the surprise of absolutely no one in the car, we got terribly lost trying to find the campus, and then even more lost trying to get to Target, which led to much frustration, a little name calling and a car filled with hostility.
When we finally reached Target my mom and sister, who were barely on speaking terms at that point, called a truce and headed off in one direction while my dad and I took off in two others. A few minutes into our shopping experience my phone began vibrating and my world was once again thrown into flux after I saw the call was from the head coach at the job I had put on hold. I answered the phone and he immediately asked me how my interview had gone and what my plan was, and while I was waffling through my answer, and doing my best to stall, my phone cut out because I no longer had reception. Instead of calling back I immediately went searching for my dad and after finding him we bumped into my mom and sister whose “Target shopping truce” had been revoked.
With everyone back on edge we went into full on family survival mode and all agreed to stop talking, and (most importantly) griping, until we finished shopping and got back in the car. Once back in the car everyone returned to their previous state of agitation, and to make matters worse, as well as more tense, it began raining, and, of course, my dad took one wrong turn and we became unbelievably lost. A pair of gas station stops helped us right our course and find my sister’s new apartment in Brighton, but after we all silently, and angrily, unloaded the car and got everything into her apartment we immediately had another family freak out after we couldn’t decide where to eat dinner, which caused my sister to start crying and for me to go for a walk in the rain.
