Why I can't be president

Something has come to light.

Charlie

This section will be written someplace where kids can't read it.

Living with Mom

OK this is really really raw first draft writing. If I were you I'd skip it for a few months until I get it in some conherent form.
... moved to kidless venue

back to Springfield - for a while

moved...

east village life

.

The free store and other free things

basement on 6th street

more radio life

moved for more privacy....

radio life

Second draft of stories

Well, I've gone through the "Stories" stories a second time. Now I'll down load them into a Word file into one long piece and then maybe rearrange sections. I also have to add my own pictures instead of what I find on Google. Then I'll be going through the "hippy dayz" first drafts. Another project I'll be starting is to interview my friend Jim R. on tape and transcribe that. He has had an interesting life. I want to ask him about being a conscientious objector during the Korean War. (nothing like jumping into the middle) His wife suggests I ask him about growing up in the country.

seventy first

Now things get hazy and it's hard to put things in order. Still, this is not history, it is "what it was like" not "what it was". My rambling is not fact-finding. When I have dementia and repeat things, will you say "you said that already"? This is not an essay test. .... moved ....

South Salem I

The Track part 3

sex drugs and rock and roll I

I took a day off

I've been holed up writing and little else. Probably mourning Stuart's illness and death. But today was a day to get out, and I did. Back to writing tomorrow morning.

The Track part 2

On the first dinner hour at the college dining hall, I knew nobody, so I struck up a conversation a student in the line and asked if I could sit with him. When I sat down I saw I was the only female, but felt undaunted. The guys were using slang I'd never heard before, like "get on the stick" and "psyche". Z. was saying something about his sister and I tried to joke along and suddenly his face became very grave and he said "my sister died last year". I was mortified and embarrassed. Everybody looked at me with scorn. Then Z. started laughing and everyone else laughed at me as well. Psyche. I never ate with those people again. I chose to sit alone and let people come to me.

And I liked the people who sat with me. There was Bill E. an exotically handsome sophomore who seemed to be a snob, but it turns out was very nearsighted but too vain to wear glasses. He simply couldn't see anybody. Over time, he showed himself to be a creative instigator. He thought of rebellious things for his friends to do, but he actually did little himself and thus avoided trouble. He and I started the first food fight in the school. He threw an olive at me, I threw jello back at him and seconds later we were sitting under the table as the whole dining hall erupted. It only lasted a few seconds and then everyone was stunned at what happened.

There was Jennifer, a sophomore who had a freshman roommate. That roommate, Kass, had managed to avoid the freshman pack. She made it clear that she did not value virginity or abstinence of any kind for that matter. She had a little ditty of foul words that she could chant and I was enchanted. I remember when I first was visiting their dorm room, she was brushing her hair in the mirror and wearing only panties. She put her large breasts on the bureau to simply rest while she was doing her hair. I was in awe of how casual she was.

Jennifer was raised a Quaker, a member of the Society of Friends, like Doc Brainerd the biology teacher. She was descended from the first Quakers, (It seems she said George Fox, but I don't know if he had children). She also said that she was related to someone important in the Guggenheim art museum (Peggy Guggenheim?) Unusually tall and thin, she was interested in dance notation. Sometimes she and I would get together at the only piano on campus and she would dance while I was working on learning to play an arrangement of Gershwin's Rhapsodie in Blue. She had a boyfriend on campus who claimed to be the first drummer for the Lovin' Spoonful. As I write this, there seems to be a lot of name dropping connected with Jennifer.

After the Freshman orientation banquet I became good friends with Jim. Jim set out to relieve me of any straight laced ways I may have had. He pointed out that nobody would notice if we didn't wear a beany and if we walked on Senior Walk. For me that turned out to be true. He was noticed however. Like all our friends he smoked cigarettes. There was another college "tradition" that students were not to be seen smoking by visitors, so there was no smoking outdoors. (Yes, that's OUTdoors) So Jim and his friends smoked outdoors on the hill on the lakeside of the dining hall. One night Jim was awakened in the middle of the night, stripped naked and Ben-Gay was applied to his testicles and he was deposited in a women's dorm. He was tied up and a pack full of cigarettes was shoved in his mouth. The next day he wore his baby blue suit to all his classes and meals. He was extremely depressed and that was his way of getting out of it.

I had another friend who didn't associate with the crowd where I found refuge. Our parents had been friends when we were young. We also liked singing. Standing next to her in chorus was an education. She took singing lessons, and I modeled my voice after hers. I got rid of my breathy kids voice and developed a head tone. I had a very large range and could sing as low as any tenor. Singing in the college barbershop group probably contributed to saving my life years later because of a trip our chorus took to York Pennyslyvania. I stayed with a rural family who had values I plugged into later.

I went to see the Antonioni movie "Blow Out" several times. It had a clear message that if you examine something closely, it loses its distinct form. It had consciously hip actors, style, sex, nudity, and mime.

My clean-conscious roommate got fed up with me. I'd gotten to the point of taping leaves to the wall for decoration and not doing my laundry. The leaves curled up and wrinkled and the laundry piled up in my closet. She proposed that we do some roommate swapping and I moved in with Claudia, a sophomore who was something of a social outcast. She was a social outcast because she had a "reputation". Unlike Kass who didn't care about her reputation, Claudia insisted on her virginity. Claudia was sweet and friendly and a great roommate. Except for when male friends wanted me to talk to her about her skin (which was evidently too rough for their taste) or they would get drunk and horny and call for her through the window.

The Track part 1

I had a choice of music school to become a music teacher, or Springfield College to become a YMCA director like my Dad. My Dad was much less neurotic than all the music teachers I knew, so I picked Springfield. Also Jerry S. was going there. Springfield told me I had to lose about 30 pounds and suggested I read Camus's The Stranger. The diet pills I started taking were my entry into the drug world. Camus was the entry into existentialism, which I never understood but I enjoyed it and it made me feel intellectually important. When I arrived at Springfield I was pretty disappointed that few had read The Stranger. I was also somewhat stunned about the hazing of freshman. My parents had taught me that such things were denigrating and I couldn't see what it had to do with academic growth. My Dad had gotten his masters at Springfield a few years earlier and I had studied his term papers. I'd only seen the academic side.
I wore a beanie without complaint and stayed off of "senior walk". I got a job in the cafeteria to help pay for my books. I enjoyed my first class when "Doc" Brainerd stood on the chair and yelled "Biology is the science of life!" and then got off and calmly asked "Did you put that in your notes?" It turns out that Doc Brainerd was the only faculty member who ever referred to Camus during that year.
During the first orientation week, the "girls" under our resident assistant lined up by height to meet her RA boyfriend's students, who were also lined up by height, and we walked to the gym where there was a banquet to welcome us to the college. My partner didn't seem too pleased to meet me and I thought he looked rather spoiled in his baby blue suit ... although I was wearing a baby blue suit too. We seemed resigned to put up with each other until someone in front of us started talking about skiing and then Jim and I discovered a mutual passion. We talked about skiing until we sat down. Across from us was a Japanese-American named Billy K. Billy was an immediate education. His let us know that his parents were civil rights activitists who knew Stokely Charmichael, that his parents had been interred in U.S. camps during WWII (I had never heard about internment camps in school history classes), and that he had smoked pot. Jim and I immediately asked if he could get us some pot and he said it might be arranged.
While I was getting tight with Jim and Billy, I was becoming increasinglly alienated from those in the college mainstream. My roommate took several showers a day, and if we had a fire drill, she'd take a shower after that. I showered less and less. We had an "initiation" where we were blindfolded and ridiculed and made to eat dogfood and such. This was and is known as "tradition". Springfield frowned on fraternities or sororities, but it was known that the Varsity students formed a fraternity and had a house off campus. I visited it when I was invited, out of the blue, on a date with someone I had never met. When I got there, I was pretty much ignored by my date and I chatted with the girls. One of them told me that she also had to lose weight to attend the school. Years later I saw the movie "Dogfight" and tearfully realized that I had been invited as part of a fraternity contest to see who brought the worst "dog" to the party.

That's it for the first draft

I have some things to add, but they are part of the appendix of things written by other people. I'll include my Cousin Edith's letter describing when the Kennedy's used their rest room after the end of a white water race on the Hudson. And then there are things my Dad put to paper about relatives and about his WWII experience. So I've come to the less pleasant part of writing: looking at the thing as a whole, and working on the second draft. The way I'll work on the second draft will be to revise these blog entries ... so I don't think that will show up on facebook posts.

Meanwhile, I think my writing activities will be divided between this and a first draft of something else. I'm thinking a description of the hippy years. In a way, it's sort of embarrassing, but it also may be of interest. Some people will find it boring compared to what they imagined, but others may react differently.

And what a job it will be to write about! I have to keep my modern judgments out as much as I can. Also want to keep out the bragging "dope story" aspect. I don't know if I can do either.

Today I'm thinking about the old friend who died last winter, and I only just learned about it yesterday. This was an old friend I was happy to let go of, but I also had the thought that I'd see him again some day. I don't have an image of heaven as an old time reunion place, so I don't have that expectation. So I'm mourning him and thinking about what I can write about him. I cared about him a lot and had a lot of important experiences through him, but also didn't like him much. He was an amazing conversationalist and could play chords on the guitar and hold his harmony well. He was uncomfortable around me, probably because he knew what I knew about him and knew I didn't much like things about him. He told me a lot of his shortcomings and withheld some that were so huge, I only speculated about them. (I do the same myself - I'll tell you 80% of who I am so you won't find out about the 20%.) We were very intimate, but touched rarely - rather like Robert E. Howard and schoolteacher Novalyne Price Ellis in the movie the Whole Wide World. No wonder I wasn't in contact with him when he died.

running into strangers

Grammar off day. This stuff is going to take a lot of revision!

sad story from dad
the little indian boy in Little Falls

Dad loved transportation. His idea of an entertaining time was to take the family to the airport to watch planes or to take a train ride. (He died while on a cruise to see the Panama Canal.) When we lived along the Mohawk River, he liked to take us down to the Erie barge canal. On one of our walks, Dad told us stories of a little Iroquois Indian boy who played on the cliffs before the town of Little Falls was built. I don't remember the stories, except perhaps that the boy collected the "Herkimer diamond" quartz crystals. But the little boy became very real to us. One day I asked Dad what happened to the boy and his Indian family, and Dad told me that our ancestors had driven the Indians away. I still remember being very upset about this.

Down at the station early in the morning

See the little Puffer Bellies all in a row

See the engine driver pull the little handle

Chug, chug, toot, toot

Off they go

I've got a mule, her name is Sal,
15 miles on the Erie Canal
She's a good old worker and a good old pal,
15 miles on the Erie Canal

We've hauled some barges in our day
filled with lumber, coal and hay
And we know every inch of the way from
Albany to Buffalo.

Chorus:
Low bridge, everybody down
Low bridge for we're coming to a town
And you'll always know your neighbor, you'll always know your pal
If you've ever navigated on the Erie Canal.

Dad and Marian invested in a movie camera and used it to record family members for posterity. (I had some of those films converted to video. Now I need to convert the videos to DVDs.) When they visited more distant relatives, he interviewed them on film. One film of a highly accomplished and aged second cousin had understandable sound of her playing the piano, but the picture was baffling. Dad enjoyed showing this film of something fuzzy but apparently alive. At one point, Dad would shout out, "Here comes the blink!" and, sure enough, the object moved. It was an eyeball. Marian had filmed the whole scene holding the camera backwards.

One time Dad had driven south to visit me in Maryland. We were to meet Marian at the airport because she was arriving from a conference in New Orleans. When we were at BWI near Baltimore, Dad went to the counter to ask where to find the flight. When he took out his notes, he saw that he was at the wrong airport. We were supposed to be at the National Airport near Washington DC. As we were thinking about the logistics of finding our car, driving to Washington, and being very late to pick up Marian, we were amazed to see her walking down the BWI hall towards us!! It turns out that there was some problem with landing her plane and they were rerouted to BWI. Just a few moments later and we would have been heading to DC only to have to drive back. Who was more surprised? Probably Marian was equally surprised to see us waiting for her.

It seems that people in my family frequently run into people we know. I think this could be true for everyone if they kept their ears and eyes open.

Dad was visiting Annapolis Maryland from upstate New York. He was at the downtown docks looking at skipjacks and other sailing vessels. Passengers were disembarking from a small tourist ship and Dad found himself face to face with a man who was on the board of directors from his last job in Poughkeepsie, NY. This man had a lot to do with Dad's decision to retire, so it was not someone Dad was fond of. "Bob! What are you doing down here?" the man asked. Dad pointed across the river "See that large yacht over there ... ?"

Dad was in the ski lodge at Gore Mountain. Someone sitting nearby was looking at an ad in a local newspaper and telling his companion,"See that guy in this real estate ad? I think that's the Bob Morse who was in my third grade downstate in Ardsley." And Marian, who overheard, said, "That's my husband."

A friend of mine, Jamie, and I drove from Annapolis to Arlington Virginia to join in a Messiah sing. I kept looking around the singers to see if there was anybody I might know. Jamie said, "I half expect you to stand up here and shout,'Anybody from Potsdam, NY?' " After the singing, there was coffee and cookies in the church basement and we were approached by a young man who evidently was attracted to Jamie. During the conversation, we learned he had gone to music school at Potsdam State at the same time I was there.

One summer, I was in a special short residential program for math and science teachers around Maryland. There was a special banquet to start things off. I got into some good conversation with people at the table and was very pleased to learn that one woman had gone to the same upstate NY high school that I had. She was four years old than I, so I had never met her. But I was astounded to learn that she was in the Hi-Y club where my dad was Y director. That club had no more than 10 kids in it at one time. Still more remarkable was that my dad, when asked, could describe her. After over thirty years.

Seth in New York
My grandson tells the story of making a trip to New York City. He said to his Mom, "I feel like I'm going to see someone famous, right here in this street." Shortly, a man near Seth asked him about the Japanese Manga (graphic novel) that he was carrying. (***.... get details from Seth)

sad stories from Mom

Mom told us that she was 13 when her mother went to the hospital and never came home. She had teeth pulled and, as a result, developed leukemia. (I suspect that it was really sepsis, but this is the story my mother's family tells) Mom told us that she regretted saying mean things to her mother before she died and that the hospital would not allow her to visit because she was under age for visitors.

Mom was never a good swimmer. She says that her mother taught her to swim by calling her to wade into water that was over her head. This was one of the few persistent memories she had of her mother. She describes her parents as so in love with each other that they gave their children little attention.

After her mother died her father was overwhelmed with taking care of three girls. He did hire a Mexican girl to help. Mom told us about living in a tent and having squirrel meat for Christmas. Of course that story was also her way of letting us know how ungrateful we kids were for the good fortune we had, just as I disapprove of how spoiled today's kids are.

Another story Mom shared was of being reprimanded in school for chewing Dentyne gum. Dentyne had been advertised as being good for your teeth. Mom did not think of it as chewing gum, but as doing something healthy, so she was highly offended at being told to stop.

She also fascinated us with stories of wearing a horned toad as jewelry. She avoided trouble in school until one day a teacher saw it move.

That reminds me of a story about some relative who had a pet frog that lived decades until it got stepped on on the stairway. I can't remember the source of that one.

Patty passes on this story.
The turkey incident was in New Mexico when they were living in a tent and Mom was sleeping in a food locker. Grandpa was so good with a twenty-two, he could hit a squirrel between the eyes to save the meat. I don’t know what they were going to have for Thanksgiving, but it wasn’t going to be turkey. They woke up in the morning and there was a flock of turkeys in the yard that they had never seen before. Of course Grandpa shot one for dinner and they never saw the flock again. And that was the story. Turkeys around here are pretty common, I guess they just hadn’t seen any.