On the October visit, our schedules overlapped and we had lunch in the cafeteria at Northbridge. We sat at a table near the window and talked about the project and about something that was happening with his account management team and about what we wanted to do for the holidays. We ate ordinary cafeteria food. Nobody made it a thing.
That is what progress looks like when it is working. It looks like lunch in a cafeteria that is not a big deal.
## What Marian Is Like
I keep coming back to Marian because the change in our relationship is one of the things I genuinely did not see coming.
She ran a school administration department for nineteen years. I have learned some things about those years through our conversations: she managed nine direct reports, navigated three different principals, survived one particularly difficult period in the mid-2000s when a budget crisis required her to tell people she cared about that their positions were being eliminated. She did not enjoy that period. She said it took her two years to trust the work again after it.
She volunteers with two organizations now that she is retired: the volunteer committee she mentioned when she asked for my thoughts, and a library foundation that she joined because she believes in libraries with a conviction that is somewhat fierce for its simplicity. She serves on the library foundation’s events committee, which she finds logistically disorganized in a way that bothers her, and we have had at least three conversations about whether and how she should raise the organizational issues with the committee chair.