About College Life of a Retired Senior
Seven years after she retires from the Royal Bank of Canada, ending a thirty-seven-year career, banker/author Yvonne Blackwood surprised her friends and family by returning to school at sixty-four to pursue an English degree. She craves knowledge and is motivated by four powerful reasons—To add texture to her writing; to ward off dementia by exercising her brain muscles with her studies; to add ongoing structure to her life by attending classes regularly; to inspire her two young grandsons to attend university full-time when they graduate from high school.
Blackwood attends York University, Canada’s third-largest university, and struggles with maintaining her established lifestyle, being in class with hard-to-connect-with millennials, and a shocking diagnosis in her final year. She stumbles upon several obstacles in her quest to earn the degree. They include two strikes at the university, one lasting 143 days; the lockdown of the campus when the WHO declares COVID-19 a pandemic; and hospitalization. The university’s motto is Tentanda Via—the way must be tried. Blackwood weaves this theme and the metaphor of climbing a mountain into the narrative as her guiding light. When some situations become almost unbearable, and she thinks of quitting, she perseveres and relies on her faith. She writes, “What I didn’t know was how much the pursuit of the degree would inform me, challenge me, satisfy me, and drive me to consider giving up on more than one occasion.”
Blackwood does not shy away from sharing her fears and vulnerabilities. She writes, “I attended university to pursue an English degree, the scholarly aspect of my learning; however, I had another kind of learning in mind all along—the social facet of my peers.” She becomes a keen observer of her millennial classmates and shares several anecdotes involving them.
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Author Bio:
Yvonne Blackwood is the author of four adult non-fiction books, Into Africa: A Personal Journey, Will That Be Cash or Cuffs? Into Africa: the Return, and College Life of a Retired Senior: A Memoir of Perseverance, Faith, and Finding the Way. She has also published three children’s picture books: Nosey Charlie Comes to Town, Nosey Charlie Goes to Court, and Nosey Charlie Chokes on a Wiener. An award-winning short-story writer, Blackwood has contributed stories to several anthologies, including Human Kindness, Canadian Voices, and Wordscape. She has published articles in magazines including More of Our Canada, Adelaide, InTouch, and Green Prints and has written columns for the Toronto Star, Pride Newspaper, and The African Connection.