“I’ve Done Everything Backwards”: A&M-Central Texas Student, 73, Finishes Her Degree and Graduates with Honors
By Karen Clos
Recent Texas A&M University–Central Texas graduate and Georgetown resident, Glenda Nord, 73, calls herself “backwards” but she laughs when she admits it, and her steely deep sapphire blue eyes squint just a little bit at the corners as she throws her head back as if her whole body were enjoying the irony.
It is just the way life works sometimes, she says, dispensing the kind of pragmatic, no-nonsense, Texas woman wisdom that is her truth. Petite in stature, there is the definite sense that her power comes not from anything as obvious as stature, but from her life experience – not always a thing that happens in a straight or predictable line, but a youthful string of make-dos, do-overs, mistakes, triumphs, and tragedies all knit together the way things sometimes are when stitches drop and are revised and made whole.
In high school, she said, in the early 1970s, she was a student at J.W. Nixon High School in Laredo, Texas. For all intents and purposes, she grew up an only child, once again laughing as she observes that her parents had two “only children” – herself and her sister, Sharon 15 years apart.
Her father was in the Air Force, she says nonchalantly, post scripting her own childhood as a series of seemingly random moves – 18 different schools by the time she entered ninth grade. Say what you will, she adds stoically. It is a hard way to be a kid.
Her parents, she remembers, were mostly the quiet types – even when she became pregnant in her senior year and married. Calmy embraced her and offered their home to her and her two children after she and her husband divorced and remarried and divorced again. There is a reason, she reminds the listener, that she sometimes thinks she got her life backwards.
Even though she might laughingly refer to her early years as backwards, that is not where she lingers for long. What really matters, she quietly observes, is that her younger self would finally get it right – well, she shrugs, the romance part, anyway.
A neighbor who lived across the street had a friend who was visiting. The friend worked at the airport, she learned later. He saw her playing with her children in the front yard. Sometimes, it is the small unforeseen things that are eventually held the most dear.
She said yes to a blind date set up through that neighbor. First, the movies, she said. A Robert Redford film — “The Great Waldo Pepper.” This time, she said, she had learned the hard way to take her time. They dated two years before marrying in a small Baptist church with 10 guests.
When they set up house, she remembers, she did what most other women she knew were doing in the 1970s. She raised her two children, both now adopted by her husband, and together, they added a third. Her husband was a helicopter mechanic in the Texas National Guard, retiring as a Blackhawk inspector in both guard duty and civil service.
Their kids, she says, are a source of great pride. She is a mother of three, a grandmother to six, and a great grandmother to three more aged 34 to 11. Wait. Have to brag about this one: number three great grandbaby is due any day now.
Something else is due, as well. On Friday, Dec. 12, Glenda – also known as Nana – will crossed the commencement stage at A&M-Central Texas and received her undergraduate degree in liberal studies with honors.
It all started, she said, because earning a college degree was “on her bucket list” and the Temple College courses were right there in Hutto. Little by little, she observed, being a college student was like unwrapping little dormant gifts that she had been accumulating and quietly storing away.
She already knew she loved to read. Loved writing even more. She is a three-time published author with works ranging from cowboy fiction to Texas wildflowers. Completing the general education required courses was like a smorgasbord, she thinks. And her appetite for learning is voracious.
In a single un-impetuous but maybe slightly familiar backward move, she enrolled in college in 2019 at 67 years old, finding herself in Dr. Van Note’s English class, twice or maybe three or even four times the age of the other students – some who were still in high school. Still, she happily fit right in. Sometimes, she laughed, the dual credit students told her she reminded them of their meemaw.
Semester after semester, she persisted. Two maybe three classes at a time. She was there to absorb everything they had to give, she said. And they gave a lot. Composition, of course. Then literature. Hard left into science and foreign language. History and government, fine arts, algebra, and speech. Honors lists every semester.
It wasn’t hubris that kept her going. She had decided when she began that there was no quitting. Maybe, she added, thinking deeper and opening up ever so slightly, maybe she could live up to her younger sister whom she had always quietly admired. “A success” she called her. Someone who did everything in the right order. Not backwards.
Quit or no, things happened, she confessed. In 2021, in almost perilously short order, a series of health scares and near-misses would test her mettle. A bonafide and almost undiagnosed heart attack in March of 2021, followed by 30 weeks of cardio rehab. Then, a trip over a computer cord and subsequent hard landing that banged up both hands and a knee fixed months later.
A breast cancer scare in August of the same year and bout of covid in November. Five semi-catastrophic health challenges. Surely, she slowed down. But no. Not even. However, this woman might choose to declare her own life as “backwards,” it is also patently and quite obviously true that she simply does not have a reverse gear.
Have a few key things seemed out of sequence? Maybe. Not entirely in the same straight line that she thought was the “right way?” Certainly. But in a reflective moment, she remembers a moment. A while back, she says, her lessons complete, she poured herself a bath and lingered for a moment, wondering if her foray into higher education would have made her parents proud.
The same girl who followed her father and mother around and through everywhere an Air Force base might find itself. Everywhere, she laughed again.
She remembered that, she says, because it is how her undergraduate studies have shaped her. Transferred to A&M-Central Texas, she nestled in among other students, closer in age to her by a generation or two. No matter. They were welcoming. Still voracious, she took it all in: political science, history, sociology, psychology, and, of course, English.
One class, she remembers, included the complete reading of Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech. At once, she said, she was back there. A pre-teen girl on an Air Force base 100 miles north of Mobile, Ala.
She had lived through the decades pre-, during, and post-civil rights. Children to raise. A florist business to run. A family to prioritize. No regrets, she adds, but it doesn’t give a person much time to think. Until these years later. Another unexpected gift of what had once seems like her backwards way of moving forward.
Of course, she knew about the story behind the speech, she said. But she had never read it in its entirety. It was her professors whom she credits for that – her favorite professors, she admits decisively – Jerry Jones, Ph.D. and Timothy Hemmis, Ph.D. — who listed it among dozens and dozens and dozens of course readings. That one, she says without a shred of pretense, made her cry.
That is the impact of learning, she knows. Never one to be accused of being less than clever or in any way shy or retiring, this woman was accomplished in her own right before she began college. But the journey deepened her appreciation for the life she has lived. And the life others live, as well.
Most recently, Nord is consumed with last minute homework. She is four pages short on a 20-page capstone class required for graduating students. Two essay questions on a history class focused on Mezo-American history. Commencement is just a day away, she laughs good naturedly, adding that she plans to be wearing sneakers with her cap and gown.
As a gift, she said, her husband of 49 years has offered to celebrate by taking her on a different kind of “senior trip” – a visit to Moody Gardens in Galveston. And maybe, she teases, a cruise.
But not to worry, she interjects. She has no plans of stopping – either now or at any time in the near future. After graduating as an honors student at A&M–Central Texas, she is headed for graduate school – maybe she says, a semester off. But not longer than that.
