Connie died on January 1, at the beginning of the month in
which she was born. She stopped short of her 79th birthday.
Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio
I met Connie in September 1960, our first week of college in “the southwestern subculture” of Ohio — so said our college acceptance packet. We were in the same hall, and somehow we gravitated toward each other. She was petite, with dark curly hair, and expressions that flashed between sober and gleeful. She had a way of walking that looked almost like dancing, and she sometimes went to Friday night folk dancing on Red Square (this was a place on campus paved with red brick).
She was from Long Island, as was my roommate, Eileen, who wanted everyone to call her Charlie. We called ourselves the Traumatic Triumvirate. We thought being neurotic was the thing to do and could have been models for Jules Feiffer’s neurotic young women in the Village Voice, which we hadn’t yet seen.
Connie had spent several years with her family in France, which was very exciting to me. Her father’s job? I think he was a journalist. She played the flute and introduced me to the music of a jazz flutist named Buddy something — I want to ask her, but she can’t answer me. Many years later, when she lived in New England, she happened to meet Susan Palma, a flutist with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra (a group that my husband, Jack, and I have had a longstanding subscription to), and played with her; was it a performance? a workshop? just hanging out together?
Our first or second week, we walked into the village where our small liberal arts school was located. On the way to Xenia Avenue, aka Route 68, the main drag, we passed a gift shop. “Let’s go in,” Connie said. Inside, we wandered from display to display, admiring necklaces, earrings, rings. One ring in particular appealed to me. It had a mottled green stone, set in a silver band, surrounded by flattened silver balls, and etching covering the band. It was beautiful, but it was expensive: $5. (That would be almost $50 today.) I passed it up. When we left the shop, I noticed that Connie had bought the ring. I knew she wasn’t rich and thought, if she can afford that, so can I. I went back to the store, but the identical ring wasn’t in the case. There was one with the same stone, but no etching on the band. It wasn’t quite so beautiful, but I wanted it anyway. More than 60 years later, I still have it.
After folk dancing, people sat on the Student Union steps and sang folk songs. Did she date any of the folksingers? One of the songs on the steps was “Freight Train,” lyrics by Elizabeth Cotton. Her grandson Gabe sang it at her memorial. She also came to the rock and roll dances in the North Hall Common Room on Saturday nights.
Connie taught me how to smoke. I was terribly shy, had never learned how to just talk to people, especially someone I might be attracted to (read, boys). I noticed at the library that people went to the lobby to smoke, and if you had a cigarette, it was normal to ask for a light. Asking for a light might lead to more things to say, or do. If I learned to smoke, maybe I’d learn to talk to strangers.
Connie smoked Kents. I asked her for a cigarette in the ladies’ room; I didn’t know this was called “bumming.” I lighted a match, held it to the tobacco end, breathed in—but then what? I coughed. Everyone coughs on their first cigarette. “Here,” Connie said, “inhale the smoke into your lungs. Watch me.” That seemed impossible, but I watched her and tried it myself, and soon I looked like a grownup in a movie, holding the cigarette between the first and middle fingers of my left hand.
New York City, I
Connie, Charlie, and I all wanted to be in New York City for our first Antioch co-op jobs in the spring of 1961. (Antioch College had what was called a co-operative work-study program. Students spent three months on campus taking academic classes, then three months on a real job, usually paid, anywhere in the United States. To get co-op credit for the job, students wrote a paper, about the job, about how the job linked in to academic work, or even something creative. Students did not pay tuition for the time that we were not on campus.)
We didn’t
care what we were doing, so long as we were in New York City. So we all got
jobs at now defunct department stores, me at Saks-34th Street ($50 a week), Charlie
at Lord & Taylor ($45), Connie at B. Altman’s ($55). We rented a tiny
one-bedroom apartment on West 87th Street, between Central Park West and
Columbus Avenue, from a list of apartments regularly rented by Antioch students
in New York City. (This apartment was my first sighting of a cockroach.) We had
another Antioch student roommate because she needed an address; her Antioch
College boyfriend had his own apartment on West 72nd Street, rent paid by his
father, and that’s where she spent all her time.
Antioch College II
In the fall Connie went to Detroit for her co-op job, at a mail-order bookstore selling spiritual and esoteric books. I think she came back for the winter quarter and then returned to Detroit for her spring co-op job — while there I think is when her father died, and she couldn’t come back to Antioch. We both dropped out of Antioch at the end of the spring quarter of 1962, Connie staying in Detroit and, I think, taking some classes at Wayne State University, and I was in Washington, D.C., which is where my co-op jobs had landed me.
It was winter 1962 that we had strange weather. One day in January it was 14 degrees below zero; your breath crackled as you exhaled, moisture in your breath freezing instantly. In March it was balmy, in the 60s. Connie asserted that when the seasons speeded up like this, the world was coming to an end—and her claim has stuck with me. (We hadn’t yet heard of climate change or global warming.)
Connie’s sister, Chris, was living in California and was for a while in touch with Charlie, aka Eileen, from our freshmen “traumatic triumvirate” days. But neither of us ever saw Charlie again.
New York City II
By the summer of 1963, Connie was back in New York, in an apartment on Madison Avenue and 69th Street. In July I came up from Washington to visit her; I don’t remember what we did together, but I know I sat out by the fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel to experience the solar eclipse and was disappointed. It didn’t get dark enough to be scary, as I’d read people felt in earlier times. In the fall of 1963, the weekend after JFK was assassinated, I came to New York for a weekend work assignment and stayed at Connie’s, though she was not there that weekend; maybe she had gone home for the weekend? Either later that year or early the next year, Connie came to Washington to visit me in the communual house I was living in then. I set her up with a man named Jim Pivonka, who lived in our building but was not part of our commune. Jim was a really sweet guy, but according to Connie, he had some strange sexual inclinations. They spent another weekend together, but that relationship did not continue.
In 1964 Connie moved to the Lower East Side, at 59 East 7th Street, between First and Second Avenue, but not for long. Just a year ago she found a picture of that apartment in the British Guardian, in a photo feature of New Yorkers showing off their wonderful apartments. This apartment still had the bathtub in the kitchen and, Connie wrote in her e-mail to me about it, “The apartment looks just the same, only a little more cluttered and ‘decorated,’ but just as shabby now as then.” I’ll bet the rent is way higher now than in 1964. If you want to see that tub in the kitchen, go here. It’s the third photo down.
In November 1965, I had plans to visit Connie after work because she had a TV, and Jack and I didn’t; CBS was scheduled to broadcast a National Citizenship Test, and I wanted to see it. When the lights went out all over the Northeast shortly after 5 p.m. that evening, it wasn’t such a long walk from where I worked to her apartment. Clearly, we never saw the National Citizenship Test that night.
Connie was working at Matthew Bender, the legal publisher, by then, but not yet dating Don. Her boyfriend at that time was Dave Sachs, and he and Connie helped us move from one apartment on West 82nd Street to another a block away at the end of 1965. They’d met when they both worked at the Paragon Book Gallery, which specialized in Eastern books. I found this memory from her in a 2013 e-mail: “Paragon Book Gallery on Lexington and 59th St. I don't think Dave worked there for very long — I myself was only there for about a year. Seems unlikely that that building is there anymore; it was an old wood-floored, 3-story building, with a very ancient, very slow elevator, complete with elevator operator. From its window I watched the Beatles drive down 59th St. followed by screaming masses. It was above a chicken roasting shop, so the odor of roasting chicken wafted up all day long. I remember sitting with you guys in your apartment (which one doesn't matter) drinking beer, listening to Bob Dylan and telling stories.” Dave also sold marijuana. One night the four of us went out to dinner with Gerald, a good friend of mine and Jack, and Gerald’s brother, Tom, from Memphis and still in high school. Dave impressed Tom in some way, and after he and Connie left, Tom asked us, “Who was that?” Jack, wanting to show off, said, “My connection.” Tom said, “Mike Connechi?”
Connie was seeing a therapist, and also sleeping with him. When she told me that, I thought he must be taking advantage of her, but when I said so, she didn’t agree. She told me he’d said it would help her with her other relationships, and she thought that might be right. Connie had always seemed more adventurous than I was, but was this really adventurous?
In late January 1967, Connie started a new job, at the American Bureau of Shipping. What was this? Had she started dating Don and was there a policy at Matthew Bender preventing employees from dating? My datebook records a couple of times in the spring going shopping with Connie, and in June there’s a note about “Connie’s dress.” Was she thinking or planning on getting married that year? I hope she told someone about this memory, because it eludes me.
Sometime in 1966 or 1967, we met Don. He was staying at the Essex House, in an apartment, Connie told me, that belonged to his mother. Don was much older than we were. I still remember him chuckling at some point, and saying, “You kids today.” He sounded very condescending to us.
Vermont I
On February 13, 1968, Connie and Don got married, and she became a stepmother. I wish I remembered more about this. Was it at City Hall? Sometime in 1968, she and Don moved to Guildhall, Vermont, and she was living there in September 1972 when I came up to Vermont with another college friend to visit yet another college friend who then lived in South Ryegate. Connie came down to visit with Julie, then 3 years old, and I had Christie, a three month old, with me. Connie had just found out she was pregnant with Kerry. She told me then she felt fairly isolated in Guildhall; there were few people our age or younger, since as soon as people grew up, they left the area. In my journal, I noted: “Connie had thought there would be a strain between us [because she’d moved away, had a kid], but didn’t feel any. I hadn’t thought about that, but I did feel it.” She referred to letters we’d exchanged, and I kept six, from 1973 to 1997. And e-mails, of course. Now I’ve sent the letters to Kerry.
Kerry, did she tell you the story of why she thinks you were born three to four weeks early? She wrote to me that it was because January 24 was her birthday, and “I gorged myself on beef fondue and other goodies. At 2 a.m., I was suffering all the usual penalties of eating too much, heartburn, bloated feeling and needed to go to the bathroom. At which point the membranes ruptured.... Labor was induced by intravenous something or other (they kept missing the vein) on the 26th in St. Johnsbury. The whole birth process was very spirit-raising.”
New Hampshire
My address books say Connie moved from Guildhall to Franconia, New Hampshire, in 1977, and stayed there until 1981. I think this is when she was attending Franconia College, an experimental liberal arts college rather like Antioch. In fact, one of the faculty at Franconia was Richard “Dick” Ruopp, who had been our co-op adviser our freshman year at Antioch. I don’t know if Connie ever talked about this, but I was very skeptical about Dick Ruopp. Every first-year student, in our first quarter, took a class called Introduction to Antioch. Everyone in our hall, however, were some sort of experiment Dick Ruopp was running. Once a week he would meet with all of us as a group, and when we asked him what we were supposed to be doing or learning, he would say, “This is your group. You decide.” We were 18 years old, it was 1960, just coming out of the “conformist ’50s”; we had no idea what this meant or what we could or might do. By the time Connie got to Franconia, she may have developed different thoughts about this free-form educational style—but alas, I don’t remember.
Connie was in Franconia for a few years after the college closed because of bankruptcy, in 1978. In 1980 she sent me a Christmas card and mentioned taking a class in classical Greek mythology and psyche, which, she wrote, “offers a whole new way of seeing experience that is based in western cultural tradition. But I guess there’s no instant cure for whatever it is that ails me. Things are moving in usual fashion—one step forward, 2 steps back.” She said that Julie was in a wonderful school, but that “K., J. & Don complain I’m never at home so I’m feeling both guilty and resentful, but otherwise things are averagely O.K.”
By 1981, she was in Littleton. I visited her there a few times. My daughter, Christie, went to camp in New Hampshire, and in 1984, 1985, and 1986 Kerry went to the same camp. In 1985, Christie and I went up to Littleton after camp and spent the night—we were on our way to Quebec. I think this was the time that Connie suggested that if I didn’t want milk on my cereal (milk makes the cereal, ugh, soggy), I could use yogurt instead. Thank you, Connie, for that brilliant idea! This may also have been the year that Connie told me about Don’s fight with the town of Littleton, which had put up an enormous cross in a public park on a hill overlooking Connie and Don’s house. That fight made it into Don’s obituary in 2009.
Vermont II —> India
Sometime in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Connie moved to Montpelier, Vermont, I think to join the community connected to the one in India. My aunt Nita lived in Adamant, just outside of Montpelier, and Connie had already met her. Connie sent me a letter in spring 1997 soon after hearing from me that Nita had died. Connie wrote that she had run into Nita occasionally in Montpelier, and that Nita “had invited me to have lunch, or some kind of contact, when I felt ready, especially with respect to finding work.” But, Connie wrote, “I never did feel ready, so it never happened.” That is too bad, especially since Connie also wrote, “I remember maybe 2 heavenly afternoons spent with you, and you and Jack in Adamant.”
Later in this same letter, Connie described what she was doing in Kullu: “mainly I watch my mind and how I get identified with it, see how attached I am to my personality, and, through meditation, slowly change that identification to identify with the Source of all of that.” She continued: “These days I seem to run up against the same recurring thoughts, that I’m really crystallized and can’t change the aspects of my personality that have to do with interacting. But then I have moments... when I see that none of that exists—or rather when it actually doesn’t exist. It’s just a thought, and if I hold onto it I make it real; if I ignore it, or rather if I put my attention on something more positive and expanded, it doesn’t exist. I have to change my identification from body & mind, from Connie who’s always had certain characteristics and ways of thinking, to one who knows herself as much vaster than the limitations & boundaries she learned to rope herself in with.”
I think this is when the differences between Connie and me became sharper. Her fascination with this way of thinking about her life and problems did not attract me. I don’t seem to want aspects of my personality that I don’t like to not exist, but rather for those aspects to not bother me in a negative way. I don’t know whether I ever conveyed this to Connie. I hope I did, but I may not have, and now I’ll never be able to.
After Don died in 2009, Connie was back in the States to settle his estate and came to New York for a weekend. She sent this in an e-mail: “It was like old times—because that connection never seems to change—but also slightly different, because we seem more ‘grown up,’ more ‘up-to-date’ — like we've matured, and we're more established and accepting of who we are.” I wonder if this is the visit when I asked her what appealed to her about Swami Shyam, and she replied, “He’s so certain about everything.” Here again is another way in which we diverged: Connie seemed to need that kind of certainty, while I distrust certainty and feel more in tune with ambivalence and ambiguity.
Connie was back in the States in late summer of 2013 for dental work and to renew her driver’s license. I took the train to Vermont and we spent a few days together, visiting Julie in West Rutland and Kerry in New Hampshire and hanging out. I remember we went for a walk on a wooden boardwalk over a marsh. Very peaceful. Later, I was able to send her info from the latest Antioch College directory of alumni she was interested in, but I don’t know whether she ever contacted any of them.
In 2014, my daughter and I signed up for a tour in India. Connie and I e-mailed several times to see if I could attach a visit to Kullu, but in the end, that didn’t happen. She wasn’t able to meet me in Delhi, and I was developing physical impediments that hindered my traveling to Kullu on my own. We did have a Skype visit, so I saw where she lived and the view of the valley below her home. We exchanged e-mails occasionally, including during the first year of the pandemic, but nothing after spring of last year. Was that when she was beginning to be sick?
Writing these reminiscences has kept Connie alive for me, so much so that I feel quite frustrated that she’s not here to answer my many questions where there are holes in my memory. It’s sent me to my journals, where I’ve found thoughts and facts I’d forgotten, related to Connie, but also to other people in my life. Despite the differences in our outlooks, or perhaps because of them, I always enjoyed our time together. It’s sad that this plunge into reminiscence can never again connect to her side of things. I also feel sad in finishing this and sending it into the world, as though Connie will really be dead when I am no longer writing about her. About 10 years ago, Connie wrote in an e-mail: “This morning I was thinking about my father. He seems so long ago (he died when I was 21). So then, was he really there? Did I make him up? Am I making him up now?” It’s too soon for me to be making up Connie — but am I?