Dorothy Borden is out her front door at 7:30 a.m. sharp on school days to walk the seven blocks to campus.
Her best guy is always at her side, carrying her book bag on his shoulder. They wave and say "Hi" to people they see all the time on the way, chat about this and that, make plans for the future.
They wait together outside the classroom with a few other early-bird students.
"Oh, Jessica is looking nice this morning. I like what she's got on," Dorothy says of a classmate's long skirt before giving her a big hug. "Hi mama, how you feeling?
When the classroom is unlocked, Dorothy heads inside to work on graduating from high school. But not before the goodbye kiss she always gets from David Borden, her husband of 62 years. He heads off until it's time to pick up Dorothy after school and walk her back home.
This has been the Santa Ana couple's routine since September, when Dorothy, 80, started in the adult high school diploma classes offered through Santa Ana College's School of Continuing Education.
She is the oldest student in the class and older than her teachers, too.
The only person with the program older than Dorothy is a counselor, Wayne Snell, who beats her by a year. He remembers one of her sons as a student decades ago at Santa Ana High, where Snell worked for more than 30 years.
Snell, like everyone else familiar with Dorothy's quest for a high school diploma, marvels at her determination to get the 160 credits needed to graduate. She had 0 to begin with and now has 75.
"For someone that age to come back to school," Snell says, "it could be an inspiration to someone else out there."
A DIFFERENT ERA
Dorothy, born and raised in Brooklyn, dropped out of high school just months into her freshman year.
Jobs were plentiful in the years just after World War II. She found work right away as a dime-store clerk and dishwasher, then quickly moved on to Bloomingdale's, working a cash register in the toy department.
Victoria Skinner, a West Indies immigrant who raised five kids alone on $2 a week as a maid, was upset with her youngest child for deciding to sign herself out of school -- something you could do then once you turned 16.
"Whoo boy! Here came the whippin'," is how Dorothy recalls her mother's reaction. But Skinner couldn't make Dorothy go back to Eastern District High.
Dorothy had lost her enthusiasm for school after some trouble at the end of eighth grade that caused her to miss that year's graduation. She still regrets not being able to wear the pretty new dress and shoes her mom bought for the occasion.
When she started high school, Dorothy struggled mightily with some of the same subjects that challenge her today, like English composition.
"It's hard for me to express myself, to write it down on a piece of paper," she says.
But she's gotten through Comp I with the help of one of her teachers at Santa Ana College, Barbara Purcell. Two of Dorothy's compositions -- "Planting a Vegetable Garden" and "A Day at the Beach" -- are posted on the Writer's Corner bulletin board just above the quiet spot where Dorothy prefers to do her work, away from the tables where the other 40-50 students gather.
On this particular morning she is hunched over a sheet with pre-Algebra problems, an extra pair of sharpened No. 2 pencils, scratch paper from her binder and an eraser handy.
"Hey Ralph," she says to math teacher Ralph Osterkamp, "glad you're here today. I need you. You have to help me."
She tells him that she's having trouble with the "minuses" -- the negative numbers in the equations from a chapter on order of operations. A problem like this, 10/ (-1 - 4) x 2, is hard for her to solve. Yet, she only missed three of 20 practice problems.
Osterkamp stops by to give Dorothy one-on-one instruction, patiently walking her through several problems step-by-step and reminding her to refer to a rules sheet to help keep things in order.
"Don't take any shortcuts," he says. "Just try to think things through."
THE REAL THING'
Dorothy got her high school equivalency certificate in 1973 to get a better paying job.
The Bordens had moved to Orange County from New York in the early 1960s. David, 85, drove a cab and did construction work. Dorothy had a succession of jobs -- housekeeper, hospital psych technician, and, like her husband, cab driver.
She barely passed her GED test, but it landed her a job as a directory assistance operator with Pacific Bell, where she stayed for 20 years and five months before retiring in 1993.
This time, she's back in class for what she calls the "real" thing -- her high school diploma -- because of something a relative said during an argument last year.
"Told me I was too stupid and I was dysfunctional and a couple more choice words. So I said to myself, 'I'm going to prove that I'm not stupid and I'm not dysfunctional.'"
The high school diploma program -- split into four-hour day and evening sessions -- is self-paced. Dorothy plans to graduate next year. Family, friends and neighbors look forward to watching her march in cap and gown.
Victoria Borden, the youngest of Dorothy and David's four children at 56, updates her co-workers and bosses in the business office at Redlands Hospital on her mom's progress.
"My supervisor is always asking, 'How's your mom doing in school? Tell her to hang in there.'"
Her office plans to give Dorothy a party when she graduates.
"I just can't believe her, at her age, going back to school," says Victoria, who is named after Dorothy's mom. "That is so wonderful. That shows that you never know. You're never too old to go to school."