SOLSC 7: Current Work

             I am technically retired from Publishers Weekly, but I still do freelance copy editing for them. Currently, I am working on the magazine’s special issue for its 150th anniversary — yes, it started in 1872.

            Today I got a phone call from the editor in charge of the issue while I was out for a walk before the rain my weather app told me was due in half an hour. He told me that a file I had been asking about for a few days, he had sent to me three times, including today. I knew I hadn’t gotten

it because I had cleaned out my work e-mail right before I went for a walk. What could have happened?

            Then it hit me, because this had happened before. Somehow I accidentally told Outlook that one of his e-mails was junk, and Outlook had dutifully sent all of his subsequent e-mails to the junk folder.

            Sure enough, as soon as I got home, I checked the junk folder, and there were about 20 e-mails, including three with work I need to do. What a bummer. However, now it is fixed — and I have a lot of work to do.

            Do you use Outlook? Has this ever happened to you?

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I’m participating in the 15th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 7 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!

 

 

SOLSC 5: I Could Have Been a Tourist

             It was in the upper 60s in New York City today, and I needed a cereal I couldn’t find in my neighborhood grocery store. There are two supermarkets further downtown where I might find it, so I decided to combine that search with my daily walk.

            Took #1 train to 79th Street and walked down Broadway to Fairway, at 74th. They had what I wanted, and I was through the self-service lane quickly. My walk continued down Broadway to 64th Street, where I stopped at a little park opposite Lincoln Center, as my old orthotics no longer cushion my feet as well as they used to. I felt like a tourist, taking out my notebook to write what I’d just done. A man nearby was reading his phone. A young woman with a large orange dog (breed unknown) sat opposite, soon joined by a young man. At another corner of the park, five men in their older years chatted in a circle. An older woman stopped to sit down and look at herphone; after a few minutes, she stood and continued down the street, pulling a small wheeled case. Fewer people were wearing masks, even older ones.

            It was almost balmy, and I could have sat there for hours, but it was almost 4 p.m. I had planned to walk to Columbus Circle, but as I continued down Broadway, that was only five blocks from the park, so I walked on down to 50th Street, where I got on the subway home. At a stand near the park  with flyers for various events around the city, I made my other touristy move: picking up a brochure for places to see and things to do in lower Manhattan. There are streets down there I know I’ve never set foot on (Beaver Street) and museums I haven’t seen enough of (Museum of Jewish Heritage; Poets House).

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SOLSC5: Black Lives Matter on the Street Corner

From June into November 2020 in my upper Manhattan neighborhood of Morningside Heights, there was a daily demonstration, prompted by the killing of George Floyd, to support Black lives. Anywhere from 12 to 25 people were at the corners of 111th and Broadway, with handmade or custom designed signs — “HONK IF YOU SUPPORT BLACK LIVES,” “RACISM IS A PANDEMIC TOO,” etc. — and so many appreciative honks from passing cars, trucks, and buses that some with small children needing to be put to sleep in buildings overlooking our corner complained.

            After the election, on the day Biden was declared the winner, there was a spontaneous gathering of a couple hundred people at the intersection where we had stood. But the daily demonstrators dissipated. However, a few of us knew the issue of Black lives and police accountability persisted, so we have continued to stand at our corner, for 15 minutes every Saturday, for the past almost year and a half. That’s where I was today, with three other women — there’ve been as many as nine, as few as two. The wind felt arctic, though the air temperature was over 40.

            We get honks, and sometimes disparaging comments from passersby. The latter are why we have to be out there.

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I’m participating in the 15th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 5 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!

 

 

SOLSC 4: Writing

I was telling a friend today who’s always only written for publication what the Slice of Life Community was like. So I wrote this to explain my relationship to writing, which is quite different from hers.

 

            At some point I realized I have often/always? been writing. There's a scrap of paper I'm having trouble finding right now on which I wrote as a child: "My name is Sonia and I am 5 and a half. There is a boy, his name is Mark and he is 4. The baby is Carla, and she is 2. Mommy is 30 and Mr. Jaffe is 31." (yes, at 5 I wrote about my father as though he was a stranger.)  I remember being 11 or 12, sitting in our car in town while my mother shopped, writing furiously in one of those black and white composition books about who knows what, because rereading it a year or so later, I was disgusted at my younger self and threw the notebook away. Did that a couple more times through high school, always throwing away. In 9th grade i wrote a very derivative short story about a girl who dressed up as a boy so she could do something interesting (this was a Western, she was a cowboy on a ranch; I had been reading Zane Grey). When she's injured, either falling off a horse or trying to rope a calf, the boy who's her co-worker, and who she has a crush on, has to take off her shirt and discovers she's really a girl. I forget whether they fall in love or she's humiliated and runs away.

            Started a diary again in college, which I kept up sporadically for a few years. But made the mistake of showing something I'd written to the young man (Jack) who I eventually married; don't remember what he said to me about it, but I read a letter he wrote to his best friend in which he made snide comments about it, so I stopped writing again. (A few years ago, after he died, I found a packet of letters he'd written to that friend, who'd returned them to Jack a few years earlier. Reading through them, I realized that in that period of his life, he was snide about *everyone* even people I know he liked and considered friends. And I also noticed that there was nothing else in the packet after a letter about having met me. I think he threw out all the later letters with their snide or less flattering comments about me — just the sort of sweet thing he would have done.)

            The summer before I got pregnant, I was reading Anais Nin's diaries and thinking, I want to keep a diary. This time I will really do it, and I won't throw it away if I reread bits and don't like the person I seemed to be at that time. So that's how my 50+ years of writing, sometimes a lot, sometimes not so much, in what's now called a journal came to be. And eventually I became a writer who occasionally gets published.

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SOLSC 3: Food

I love to cook. Even after my husband died six years ago, I continued to cook the amounts I’d made before, so  extras into the freezer or lots of leftovers (I love to cook, but not every day).

           
I also used to eat out a lot. I’d eat dishes I didn’t want to cook myself (mussels, lamb shanks) or cuisines I don’t have all the ingredients for (Chinese, Japanese). Since Covid, however, eating out has been limited to weather warm enough to sit outside. So I’ve had to cook more often.

            Like today. I had some shiitake mushrooms from the local farmers’ market and maybe two cups of kasha left over from a meal a couple of days ago. So I sliced maybe three ounces of the mushrooms and a small onion, sauteed them, then added the rest of the kasha to warm it up. Ate that for dinner with the last of baked sole and some sauteed kale. There’s still a few servings of the kasha left, so that will take care of more meals. There’s also lentil stew I made a couple of days ago. But tomorrow I’ll think about what protein to stock up on to go with that kasha.

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SOLSC 2: What I Liked and Hated About a Job

 
More from my journal 50 years ago. I was working as an associate editor for a book publisher (Bobbs-Merrill) that no longer exists, and working myself into a tizzy between the parts of the job I liked and those I hated.

“I do know what I’m good at: I’m a good editor. I am very good at rewrite and organizing and putting a ms. into good shape, into a workable book. I’m also a good copyeditor. The thing is, I don’t want ot have anything to do with authors. In my mind they beocome enemies to be fought with, not over what they’ve written, but over non-editorial matters like scheduling, ads, promotion, jackets, titles, things an author isn’t supposed to worry about.”

            So could I continue to work for a small publisher, when I would have to be involved with those parts of the job I hated, or could I go work for a large company as a manuscript editor where I would have to deal with bureaucracy and paperwork, which I knew I also hated. In a way, it was fortunate that I was also five months pregnant, which once my daughter was born became a legitimate reason for me not to go back to full-time work there.

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I’m participating in the 15th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 2 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!

 

 

SOLSC 1: Anger as Camouflage

I’ve got a personal archive: my datebooks back to 1963, my journals starting in mid-1971. I’ve been rereading my journals looking for any interesting “Fifty Years Ago Today” items, but this one, from February 6, 1972, is more interesting to me as a look into my psyche. I had been having a fantasy about having an argument with a man in my therapy group, who I often had actual arguments with. (It’s also worth noting that I don’t easily, then or now, actually get angry with anyone in real life.)

“Had an insight into why perhaps I keep having these really fruitless, frustrating fantasies. In a sense, it’s laziness. I have all this energy which I could be putting to some useful use—like writing, for instance—but that’s work and I’m afraid to try it. So I direct to this fantasy. Get into an argument that will take up a lot of time. Then you won’t be able to do anything else. Anger as camouflage.”

Fifty years later, I still have annoying fantasies that involve getting angry with someone about something, either which I have no control over, or some issue that might not even require me to become angry. I wish I’d realized how smart I was back then.

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I’m participating in the 15th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 1 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!

 

 

Street Art, spring 2020

Someone sent me this 2-minute video of trompe l'oeil, and it is taking up too much space on my laptop hard drive. Maybe I can load it up here and delete it from my laptop. Fingers crossed. It is very clever. Do watch it.

Job #3: Saks-34th St. (first Antioch co-op job)

How the Antioch College work-study system worked

This was one of the appealing features for me. Its cooperative education work-study program was not anything like “work-study” in colleges and universities today. In Antioch’s program, everyone spent time on campus taking traditional classes, and an equal amount of time off campus at any of hundreds of regular jobs around the country. The student body was essentially two student bodies, or divs (for divisions): one half on campus while the other half was off working. (Just to complicate matters in telling this story, my class was the last for many years in which everyone in our class started in the fall. In 1961 began two entering classes, one in the summer, the other in the fall, which lasted for perhaps 15 years.)

My class was divided into three divs: one group of students went off on a job after the fall quarter (Antioch wasn’t on a semester schedule), another group after the winter quarter, and the third group after the spring quarter. I was in the second div, so somewhere around the middle of winter quarter we visited the co-op office to look through the jobs lists for jobs (1) we were interested in doing, (2) we were qualified for, and sometimes most important (3) located in a place we wanted to go. And I, my roommate, and our closest friend (we dubbed ourselves the Traumatic Triumvirate) most definitely wanted to be doing anything at all in New York City.

I no longer remember what other entry-level jobs were available, but all three of us ended up as department store sales clerks: my roommate, known as Charlie, went to Lord & Taylor’s (at $45/wk.), our friend, Connie, at B. Altman (at $55/wk.), and I to Saks-34th ($50/wk.). There’s interesting retail history around these three stores, but I’ll save that for later.

The job

Our jobs started in early April; this is when I filled out my first W4 forms. Then three days of training. There were five or six other women being trained with me, but they all hoped to be staying on. We had to learn how to operate really old cash registers, with rows of raised “pedals” for the numbers and a handle on the side to record each price as you entered it. Then there was complexity of counting out at the end of the day. You had to get the register to total the daily transactions and then count up the cash in your envelope—and those numbers better match. Mine always did.

What else did we learn? When and for how long we could take a break and go for lunch; to be friendly and gracious to customers. What our employee discount was and how to use it. Did we have to punch a time clock? I don’t remember. And there was no mention of a union.

Once trained, I was assigned to the costume jewelry counter on the first floor, near the entrance from 34th Street. I shared the counter with a couple of other women who were much older, so we didn’t commune much. Did I say I was terminally shy? The hardest part for me was standing behind the counter, facing out toward potential customers, and trying to look helpful. If I saw someone pausing to gaze into the cases, I would edge gradually in her direction while hoping she would move along or leave before I got close enough to have to say, “Can I help you?” On the other hand, if someone knew exactly what she wanted, I enjoyed picking out the bracelet or necklace or pair of earrings, packing them neatly into a box labeled “Saks-34th,” and ringing up the sale. Mostly, I walked up and down behind the counter, rearranging items on display either on the counter or inside the cases. Time passed very slowly.

Near the costume jewelry counter was a free-standing triangular table with a few dozen watches individually chained on display. Every now and then I was assigned to “handle” that table, which meant I had to stand out on the floor near the table and look alert, ready to address anyone who stopped and picked up a watch, though they usually hurried off if I did approach. Here time passed even more slowly, though it became a sort of game to straighten out the watches to make parallel and aiming toward one point of the triangular table or another.

At least a couple of times a week, someone would stop by the counter and ask where housewares was. The first few times this happened, I was confused—we didn’t have any housewares. “But there was an ad in the paper,” the woman would say, showing me the page that clearly said Macy’s or Gimbel’s. Saks-34th was on the south side of 34th Street, while Macy’s was across 34th, and Gimbel’s was on the other side of Saks, on 33rd. Eventually, I realized that people came up from the subway and didn’t know where they were, and I felt superior pointing out where they needed to go.

Lunch was either at the Nedick’s tucked into the corner of Macy’s or the Woolworth’s lunch counter next door. Can’t remember what I ordered at the counter, but sometimes I would buy a box of melba toast and a can of smoked oysters—eating raw oysters would come later—take them back to the break room at Saks, and eat oysters on toast for lunch, feeling extremely sophisticated and elegant.

I knew about the sit-ins and picketing of Woolworth’s the year before, but those seemed over by spring 1961. The political issue I was aware of April of 1961 was the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, an abortive anti-Castro attack that Kennedy inherited from Eisenhower. That and the possibility of nuclear war. (Current research tells me that the nuclear test moratorium wasn’t breached until fall 1961, but my fear of imminent war that led to personal events that summer must have been based on something. Were there stories hinting that various countries might violate that moratorium?)

One day while having lunch at Nedick’s, I heard the squeal of brakes and gasps from those around me. A gray-haired man lay in the middle of the street, hit by a car that sped off. From inside of Nedick’s I could see only a trickle of blood by the man’s head; in my memory his body is larger than the people gathering around. I looked away, but not quickly enough.

Outside the job

The job was the least reason I wanted to be in New York. Once we had our jobs lined up, we next had to find a place to live. Here, too, Antioch’s co-op office had lists of apartments where Antioch students had lived in the past. Somehow, we settled on a one-bedroom apartment on West 87th Street, between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue, which when we arrived in early April 1961 turned out to be tiny. The bedroom barely had room for a double bed, a single bed, and two small bureaus. It was weird sleeping with another woman in the same bed, but we did it for three months.

This apartment was the first place I saw a cockroach—yuck! Did we actually cook any meals there besides breakfast? I remember none.

I do remember boys, however. Charlie invited over two boys (we still called young men around our age “boys,” while we called ourselves “girls”) who worked in the stock room at Lord & Taylor, and they brought along a slightly older guy named Rudy. We sat around our apartment drinking, playing music, laughing. We must have gotten really loud because someone called the police. And when the police came to our door, we were terrified, and then astounded when they knew Rudy! The police were pretty cool, just told us to keep it down.

One night Rudy took Charlie and me for a ride in his red Corvette, with the top down. I was in the front seat as we went down to the Village, and driving around Washington Square, Rudy started chatting up a young woman with a suitcase, walking along Waverly Place. Somehow he finagled her into the car, even though there was no place for her to sit. Her suitcase went into the back, and Charlie, who’d been squeezed into a space with no seat got out and took the subway uptown. The new woman climbed over me and sat on the gearshift, hopping up whenever Rudy needed to change gears. She had a bottle of liquor in her hand, and possibly she was drunk. She kept shouting, "I'm Nell McCafferty!" Was she famous? Should I know who she was? I felt pushed into the shadows, excited yet confused. Was she going to invite us into some situation I wouldn’t know how to handle? I thought of the previous summer, when walking around the Village with a high school girlfriend, she got us picked up by a much older man. (Another story, another day.) It hadn’t ended badly, but what now? After driving around the park a few times, we let her off, somewhere.

I discovered the Scribner Bookstore on Fifth Avenue and bought perhaps my first hardcover book: Katherine, by Anya Seton. I had read this historical novel, about real-life people in 14th century England (the female romantic lead was Geoffrey Chaucer’s sister-in-law), when I was 14, and it was one of the books that attracted me to history. I bought a pale yellow hat one day because that’s what I’d read grownup women do when they feel down in the dumps. I also bought a pair of white gloves, because grownup women wore gloves in the summer as well as the winter. But nothing sticks in my memory about going to a museum or any other cultural space. The museums were known to me since my mother had taken us to MoMA and the Museum of Natural History when we visited her parents in Brooklyn. 

Aftermath

At the end of June, our jobs were over; Connie and I went home for a week, then returned to Antioch College. Charlie, however, had her financial aid cut so much that she couldn’t return. The last I heard of her, she was living with a graduate student in NYU housing in the Village. This guy drank too much, Charlie said, and she would pour his liquor down the drain. But he always got more. Where did she work? Did she stay at Lord & Taylor? I don’t know. She went out west at some point, and was friends with Connie’s sister, but then she disappeared. I admired her when we were at school, as I admired many girls in those days, but she deserves her own story. 

To get co-op credit for our jobs, we had to write a paper. The paper could be on anything: how the job compared to or contrasted with our coursework; something that happened during the co-op; what we learned about life; maybe even something creative, like a piece of fiction or poetry, or a song or music. I must have written a paper about being a sales clerk, but I did not keep a copy, and I doubt that Antioch College kept co-op papers from 60 years ago. Too bad — I'd have liked to look back on what I wrote at age 19 about a thoroughly boring job. And my taxable income for 1961 was $677 (equivalent to $6,546 today).

Now about those department stores

Lord & Taylor’s was the oldest, the first American department store, founded in 1826 and closing its physical stores in 2021. B. Altman was founded in 1865, and its flagship store, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 34th Street, closed in 1989. It’s now the site of the CUNY Graduate School. 

West 34th Street was the first New York City location, in 1906, for the Saks & Co. store that been founded in Washington, D.C., in 1867. In 1923 Saks merged with Gimbel’s (owned by a cousin), and the following year the owners of the company opened Saks Fifth Avenue—but kept the store on 34th Street as Saks-34th. Although Saks-34th and Gimbel’s were owned by one company, they operated as separate businesses. So maybe those people who thought they were in Gimbel’s weren’t as confused as I thought they were. However, Saks-34th closed just a few years after I worked there (its closing the result, according to a 1995 story in the New York Times, “of poor layouts, no escalators, a confused identity”), replaced first by Korvette’s, then a vertical mall in the 1980s, and it’s now an outpost of the Swedish H&M stores.

Job #2, Robin Hood Dell usher

             Robin Hood Dell was an outdoor concert space in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park. Concerts were free for people who didn’t mind sitting on blankets on the grass. But there were a few thousand permanent folding seats close to the raised stage where the orchestra sat, and these seats were for those who paid for a season. There were also jobs for young people to be ushers (all girls) to take the season ticket holders to their seats, and also to be valets (all boys) to park the cars of the season ticket holders. There were concerts several times a week for a six-week summer season, and ushers who worked three nights a week were paid $5 a week.

            Ushers arrived at the park about an hour before concert time. Most likely no one would need our services so early, but just in case... We brought a piece of cloth to wipe off the seats, which were clean anyway, but just in case... Then three or four of us stood around chatting, about what else we were doing that summer, who was dating whom, where we were going to college in the fall. I became friends with Lois, a friendly, red-haired, slightly plump girl who was starting at Penn (University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, not to be confused with Penn State, out in State College). Lois was dating Barney, one of the valets.

            As couples, or groups, many middle-aged or elderly, arrived, we would approach them with a helpful expression on our faces. This was the hardest part for me. I was intensely shy, didn’t know how to talk to anyone, let alone strangers. But here there was the framework of the job. I would hover near the area where people walked in and try to look friendly. A little smile? The man, and it was usually a man, would hand me the tickets. I would look at the seat numbers, then lead the couple or group to their seats. There, I would fold down the seat, wipe it with my cloth, step back to they could get to their seats, and hand the tickets back. The man would then hand me a coin, for a tip. It was usually a quarter. (The equivalent today of $2.35.) By the end of an evening, I might have accumulated $2 or $3, and could have gotten more if I were more assertive in approaching ticket holders.

            One elderly couple was notable. They were older than most. And after I’d wiped their seats and let them move into their row, the man would hand me a dime with a little smile. I couldn’t tell whether he thought this was a magnanimous amount or the least that I deserved. But a dime? (Less than a dollar today.) Even then, it seemed stingy. I wanted to throw it back at him, but I never did. But I never forgot.

Job #1: Babysitting

            Is babysitting a job? Not if it’s only now and then. Not if I hated it. I was only comfortable if the baby/child/children were asleep when I arrived, which they usually were. There was the occasional child I had to put to bed, but  nothing memorable to make permanent imprint on my memory. The number of times I baby-sat may not have reached double digits.

            All of my babysitting happened in Levittown, Pa., where my family lived for three years, when I was in high school. Levittown was divided into sections with cutesy names: the section I lived in was Snowball Gate, and all the streets in Snowball Gate began with the letter “S.” My street was Sweetgum. Maybe there was a sweet gum tree planted somewhere in Snowball Gate.

            How did I get these jobs I didn’t want? Maybe my mother saw a sign in a neighborhood store. I would call, find out the date and the time range — it couldn’t be too late even if it was on a weekend. I would either walk to the home where the children lived or be picked up by the father and driven to the home if it was beyond walking distance or it was dark out. I often didn’t know either of the parents, and it felt weird to be in a strange house, even if the layout was similar to my own home. Snowball Gate had four different home layouts, and they alternated down the street: layout A, B, C, D, A, B, C, D, you get the idea.

            If the baby or children were asleep when I arrived, I was vastly relieved. This meant I could sit in the living room and watch television or read the book I had brought or do my homework. I could have explored these strange houses, looked through their books, eaten food in the kitchen, but I did none of these things. I was afraid, but not quite sure of what. Maybe I would disturb something, and the parents would be angry. Maybe I would eat food they were planning to eat the next day. Maybe I would find something I didn’t want to know. I had already poked around my own parents’ bedroom and found a book about sex from the Soviet Union; it described a young man who had rigged up some sort of alarm system that would wake him during the night so he would never miss an opportunity to masturbate. I wasn’t quite sure what this meant, but it gave me an unpleasant feeling.

            Mostly I just wanted to walk in the door, sit in a chair, hope the children would remain asleep until their parents came home and the father would drive me home after putting some wrinkled bills in my hand. I didn’t talk in the car, and the father usually didn’t ask any questions. Oh, when the parents walked in the door, the mother would ask how everything went, did the children stay asleep.

            I hated it if the phone rang. I would have to answer, because the ringing phone might wake the children. But I didn’t know phone etiquette. “Hello,” I would say. When they asked for Marge or Harry, I’d mumble, “They’re not here. I’m the babysitter.” If I was lucky, they’d say, “Oh, I’ll call back tomorrow.” If I wasn’t, the person would want to leave a message; I would have to find a piece of paper and a pen or pencil, and then worry that I wasn’t understanding what the person was saying. I didn’t know that I could just ask them to repeat. And then I’d have to remember to tell the parents, when they got home, that there had been a phone call.

            I didn’t worry too much about someone breaking into the house. Crime wasn’t an issue that I was aware of in Levittown. A few years earlier, when we had lived in the Connecticut countryside, there was a spate of UFO sightings. One evening I was babysitting my own brother and sister, and on the phone with a girlfriend. She told me there had been some strange lights in the sky over the area where I lived.  I was in the living room in front of a big picture window and slowly turned around to look out into the dark night. No lights in sight. But I remained staring out the window, unable to turn away from where the aliens might be coming from. In Levittown, I could tune out any unknown house creaks and cracks by turning on the TV. But the presence of a house on either side of the one I was in was reassuring.

            That is all the paid work I did in high school, other than the chores I had to create to justify asking for an allowance from my parents. My father didn’t understand why my brother and sister and I might want an allowance. If we wanted anything, all we had to do was ask — and maybe we’d get it, if the parents thought it was a good idea. That we might independently want to decide to get something — a book, a soda, a candy bar, a sweater — didn’t fit into their idea of child-rearing. So when I was 17, I created a list of chores (such as setting the table, clearing the table, doing the dishes), a schedule of who would do what when, and presented the list to my father with the suggestion of $5 a week. To my surprise, he accepted it. The list was posted on the side of the refrigerator.

Remembering Connie (1943–2022)

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

           Back to school for the summer quarter (Antioch was now open year-round), we lost Charlie because her financial aid was cut. Connie and I roomed together in a small dorm that used to be a private house. She had a boyfriend named Larry in a boys’ dorm called Orton. So, for Antioch’s regular joke photo, the girls in our dorm dressed up in bathing suits and called ourselves the “Orton Piece Corps.” (Larry’s parents were both psychologists, and he became proof to us that being a psychologist was no guarantee that your children would be without emotional problems.)

            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.

           By 1965, I had moved to New York City and married Jack, and Connie and I saw each other more. We had lunch, she came for dinner (the photo on the right was probably one of these times), or we had dinner at her place. In October she had a party—was this when she moved in with Paula Sherman, one of my colleagues at Bantam Books, on Eighth Avenue near 53rd Street? In early December I made sukiyaki in my electric skillet (the big kitchen technology of the time) and Connie came to dinner, and on Christmas Eve we ate at Connie’s. We also often went to a bar on the corner of 54th Street that had Christmas lights and decorations year-round.

            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.”

           A couple of years later (1974 or 1975?) Connie and Julie came over to Adamant, Vermont, where my aunt and uncle lived, and Jack and Christie and I were visiting. That’s where the photo Julie posted on Facebook (and on the left) was taken. Julie was extremely shy, hardly spoke to any of us strangers. But Connie looks very happy. Connie sometimes talked about her stepchildren and sometimes having problems with them, or maybe they were problems she wasn’t sure how to solve. It seemed to me that Connie felt overwhelmed by becoming a “stepmother,” suddenly having these kids already into their middle school years when she was still pretty young herself.

 

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?