It Ain't Over (18 page)

“It reminded me of when I dropped the kids off at a new school when we first moved to Ohio, and how scared they were as I drove away,” she recalls. “They looked at me like, ‘Do we really have to do this?’ And there at Cornell, I realized exactly how they felt. I kept thinking,
I’m here all alone. I gotta do this. Can I do this?
”

Susie had spent her entire adult life dodging that question. Right out of
high school in North Carolina, she’d started working alongside her dad as a computer consultant. Married by 21 and divorced by 34, with two young girls, she had always longed to go to college.

“That hole in my education always bothered me,” she says. “I’ve always known that I’m very smart, and yet everyone talks about that diploma, and how important it is. So going to college became like a dream to me. But every time I considered actually applying to a school, I’d think, ‘Well, I’ll have plenty of time when my girls get into junior high.’ Then a few years later, that turned into ‘I’ll have plenty of time when they’re in high school.’ It was all about ‘later’—I kept pushing it down the road.”

And it got pushed farther down the road when her father’s health began to falter and he needed to be near good hospitals. So in 1998, Susie, her girls, and her parents moved to Cleveland, where her sister lived. With the computer industry struggling, and Susie in need of an income, she had a brainstorm: She’d open a restaurant specializing in southern cuisine.

“Northerners love southern food,” she says, “and I’d always been pretty good at making it.” So she found a good location, rehabbed a century-old building, and thought of a name she loved: the Town Fryer. And in 2002 she was open for business.

You name it, Susie fried it: chicken, catfish, even Twinkies and Oreos. And at night, she brought in singer-songwriters to entertain the after-work crowd.

“You’d see a cop sitting next to an attorney next to a tow-truck driver next to a guy with a Mohawk and tattoos. And everybody got along. It was a really special place.”

The only problem was making money, especially after the recession hit in 2008 and regulars started coming in only one day a week instead of three or four. To add to Susie’s stress, in December 2009 her older daughter, Ali, who was 26, single, and had a one-year-old daughter, fell and broke her neck.

“You pick up your baby and you could end up paralyzed,” the doctor warned Ali.

So Susie, distraught, took charge of her granddaughter, toting her around on her hip while cooking and taking care of customers. It was physically and emotionally draining—and scary. If her daughter didn’t recover, she asked herself, how could she support her and her granddaughter with the little money she was making? And with no health insurance?

“I had no idea where to turn,” Susie says.

Enter a longtime customer-turned-friend who’d earned an accounting degree in his thirties and was headed into law school. He and Susie began discussing her predicament—her financial worries and her struggle to carve out a new life.

“Why don’t you go to college?” he asked Susie.

No sooner were the words out of his mouth than Susie began tossing off all of the old excuses.

“I can’t afford it.”

“I don’t have time.”

“I’m too old.”

And on and on.

“Suit yourself,” he said flatly. “But beware: Ten years from now, you’ll look back on this day and realize it was the perfect time to take the leap. But by then, you’ll be ten years older in the same life, rather than ten years into a new one.”

Susie didn’t argue back—and her friend took that silence as an invitation to continue. Right then and there—in the restaurant booth, with Susie’s grandbaby on her lap—he pulled out his laptop and went to the local community college website. The more they cruised around the site, the more excited Susie grew.

“If I’d had any time to think about it,” she says, “I probably would have
chickened out. And I did balk quite a bit. But he kept saying, ‘You can do this, Susie. You can do this.’ ”

Together they registered Susie for three online classes for spring 2010—Introduction to Jazz, the History of Cleveland, and Microeconomics. “I wasn’t thinking about degrees at that point,” Susie says. “I just wanted to take some classes and get my feet wet.” And she not only completed all of her courses, she aced them.

“That’s the moment I realized that my dream wasn’t impossible after all,” she says. “That’s when I thought,
Wow, I can do this
.”

With her daughter making a full recovery, Susie decided to close the Town Fryer to focus on school full-time, funding her education by selling the restaurant kitchen equipment and furniture from her house and taking out grants and loans totaling $17,000.

“I was a woman on an academic mission,” she says.

She took more courses over the summer—English Composition, Beginning Algebra, History of Africa—and by the following fall, her 3.8 grade point average earned her a spot in Phi Theta Kappa, the academic honor society for two-year colleges, as well as membership in the scholars program, which centered on social justice.

Susie felt right at home in that program, as it reignited the social conscience she’d had since she was a child. She particularly loved a philosophy class where students pondered open-ended questions: What is justice? Who defines justice—the government or the people? “The class provided an awakening for me—or as I like to call it, an
unfolding
.”

But the best was yet to come. During her fourth semester at community college, Susie received a letter from Cornell University—one of the nation’s eight Ivy League colleges—commenting on how impressed they were by her academic success in the scholars program, and inviting her to apply to the ILR
School, founded as the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, with a focus on improving work life for people. Surprised and flattered, Susie decided to visit the campus—and she was wowed.

“The place just enveloped me,” she says. “I instinctively knew that I
belonged
there.”

Then Susie met with an admissions counselor, and she asked him point-blank if he thought she had what it took to be a Cornell student.

“You wouldn’t be here right now if we didn’t think you could do the work,” he said.

So Susie applied to Cornell, even though she had no idea how she’d pay for the $1,300-per-credit-hour tuition. (Community college had been $100 per hour.) And when she got a call telling her that she’d been accepted—and that she’d had not only earned enough credits to enter as a junior, but that her $60,000-per-year tuition would be covered—she was overwhelmed.

“I just sobbed,” she says.

Once in class, Susie demonstrated a kind of real-world authority that only age and experience can provide.

“In my Workers’ Rights course, the professor described how women laborers in a small North Carolina town had suffered serious, long-term illnesses from factory work, gluing couch cushions. One student said, ‘Why didn’t they just find another job? It’s a free country.’ Well, I found this sort of amusing, because I was actually very familiar with that town! So I explained to the class how poor the area was, and how women didn’t have the money or support system to make a change. I also explained how important family can be for working women, and I described how I’d moved to Cleveland so my daughters and I would be closer to our families. I think I helped my younger classmates look at life a little bit differently.”

Then again, youth does have its advantages in an academic setting,
particularly when it comes to memory. “The hardest thing for me was retaining information as quickly as I needed to. By the time you reach my age, you can’t even remember a grocery list!”

In the fall of 2013, Susie headed for a semester abroad in Ireland, setting her on course to receive her bachelor’s degree from Cornell in Industrial and Labor Relations the following spring. She hopes to use that degree to help corporations implement socially responsible practices.

“I want to get this degree so I can get out there and start making a difference,” she says.

The Cornell kids no longer look at Susie like she’s an alien. On her fifty-fifth birthday, students in one class surprised her by putting up a slide at the start of class that read, “Dearest Susan, Happy Birthday! You are such a wonderful individual and we are so glad to have met someone like you. You continue to be an inspiration every day.”

That slide touched Susie’s heart.

“Just a few years earlier,” she said, “I was the one searching for inspiration. Now I feel like I can do anything. Instead of closing doors in front of me with a long list of excuses, I step through them to see what’s on the other side. Maybe that’s the best lesson I’ve learned from going to school.”

Layla Fanucci, 56

St. Helena, California

I
t was a big, blank space that bugged the hell out of her. And it was smack in the middle of her living room.

Music teacher and choir director Layla Fanucci was standing at the foot of her couch contemplating the empty wall above it. A Monet poster used to hang there, but Layla had taken it down.

“It was nice,” she says, “just like some music is nice. But to me, there’s a difference between hearing a good CD and hearing a live band that moves you and takes your breath away.”

She wanted the wall to take her breath away. And—
boom
—that’s when it hit her: live music, live art.

So Layla started scouting out galleries in towns near her Napa Valley home. “I couldn’t find
anything,
” she says—and, man, the sticker shock! She was not going to spend thousands of dollars on artwork she didn’t love.

So she did what any self-respecting DIY-er would do: She decided to paint
something herself. There was just one
little
problem. “I had never painted in my life,” she says.

But on her maiden voyage, Layla went all out. She bought a six-by-five-foot white board, laid it on the ground, and covered it with an explosion of blue, red, yellow, green, and white paint. As she worked, her hand flew across the canvas with the energy and grace of someone who’d been doing this for years. The design was abstract, but hidden within the paint drippings, Layla had added a clarinet, a Christmas tree, and three figures representing her kids.

“It’s big, it’s bold, it’s got color—we’re good to go,” she told herself. “End of story.”

But, really, it was just the beginning. When friends came over and saw Layla’s creation, they were wowed. Over the next year, nine of them paid Layla to produce “real” art for their homes, too: an abstract portrait of children, a postmodern still life.

“I was surprised and delighted, and I had no idea where this was coming from,” she says. “One couple painted their whole living room to match the colors in my painting.”

Inspired by her friends’ reactions, Layla painted, and she painted. She painted between teaching gigs. She painted at lunch. “I just wanted to paint all the time,” she says. “I had all of this inside of me, and now it was pouring out.”

It also made Layla reflect on her life. “I loved music and loved teaching children,” she says, “but I hadn’t admitted to myself that after 25 years I was getting tired.”

That is, until she discovered her inner artist.

She’d earned a steady salary, money she and her husband, Robert, a tax attorney, counted on to pay their kids’ college tuition and to help support their small family wine business.

“But now everybody, including my husband, said, ‘Teach part-time and
see if the art goes anywhere.’ But I knew if I wanted to give art a shot, I had to give it everything I had.”

So in 2001, two years after hanging her first painting on the wall, Layla quit teaching cold turkey. “My husband said, ‘I feel like we’re on the
Titanic
and you just jumped.’ ”

She’d heard the dismal statistics: Only 5 percent of artists make money. How was she going to become the exception, turning her art into a business? First, she needed to create a body of work. She gave herself a two-year deadline to do so. “If I wasn’t able to match my salary, I’d go back to teaching,” she says.

Layla put on one of Robert’s old white work shirts and started to paint, ten to twelve hours a day. “You know how runners talk about that amazing euphoric feeling they get at the end of a marathon?” she asks. “When I paint, I have that wonderful feeling the entire time.”

That joy resulted in a burst of productivity, and within two years, Layla had produced nearly 200 paintings—abstract depictions of flowers, musicians, men and women (she gave them monikers like
Lisou, Madeline
, and
The Martini Lady
). “I was inspired by Matisse’s style and colors,” she says.

Through word of mouth, Layla was soon selling her paintings and making almost as much money as she had as a teacher.

Encouraged, she sent photos of her work to a top art consultant in New York City and set up a meeting. “I was so nervous riding up in the creaky elevator of this chic French New York hotel to go to the suite of a stranger with a book of photographs of my paintings,” she says. “I remember thinking to myself,
What are you doing?
”