A Precious Piece of Personal History

Sister Mary Nazi predicted with disarming certainty that I would lose my religion *and* become a Communist within one year if I defected to the local public high school. Threats of going to hell in a hand-basket fell on deaf ears. My mother paroled me willingly (one of the last willing decisions she would make with regard to me) at the end of 9th grade when she discovered an administrative injustice that deprived me of an earned award. To this day I don’t know why the principal, a cranky barren old woman who surveilled the halls between classes chasing down girls who lingered in rest rooms applying make-up, opted to withhold that certificate of achievement purportedly based strictly on test results. What I do know about adult bullying, however, I learned at the feet of the Sisters of St. Joseph that year. But I was free at last, a phrase that would not become an historic epitaph until later that year in 1963.

Gregarious and competitive by nature, I welcomed the challenge of making the transition into the foray of public education. I walked to school, made friends, surfaced as an obvious over-achiever, and enjoyed my new life of learning and self-discovery. I also discovered Bob Knox, who was one year ahead of me and the smartest guy I’d ever met. The adventures we shared shaped many aspects of my reflective thinking, social conscience, critical awareness, and political views. No other intimate relationship comes close to influence Bob’s character and intellect had on my formative years. And I didn’t lose my religion as much as I cast it aside after I provoked pre-Vatican II Father Flynn to refuse me absolution in the fateful Saturday confessional when I challenged his edict that I lose the boyfriend who was leading me into sin. The egregious soul-damning sin: erotic kissing of the French persuasion!

If my mother acquiesced to my choice of high school, such generosity of spirit dissipated as I approached the decision on where I would go to college. Coercion by any other name would still be coercion, so my choice for college, limited by my parents’ refusal to let me apply anywhere else, left me behind at the local university as Bob entered his sophomore year at Yale. Yale exuded a mysterious and seductive ambiance. I envied Bob’s Ivy League education, and New Haven sucked me into its vortex. In the beginning, I embraced the intrigue of just getting there (a jaunt of 90 miles), escaping many times on false pretenses to my mother. Capers quickly lost their luster. After two years of unrelenting parental wrangling and the complicated logistics and alibis, Bob and I stepped into the abyss, eloping to the local courthouse on Long Island with several close friends in attendance in the midst of the last gasp of spring in 1968. The wedding dress, my first Jonathan Logan and white of course, still fits. Upon reflection, I think it made me look a “little bit” pregnant (a very old joke punch line), and this perception (not reality) may have been just the ticket to persuade the middle-aged female judge to perform the nuptials post haste.

Glory days! The music, the marching, the trips to everywhere, the sun dazed days on the Green, and the classic films at the Lincoln and the Film Society! Eyes wide shut, we grabbed the stars right out of the sky. Some of the greatest minds of our generation passed in and out of my life and now return routinely in dreams, always urgent in their cadence and just out of reach. These years count among the best years of my life. The glass was never half-full; it was always overflowing.

“Regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention,” as the Sinatra song goes. These many years later, my first love still holds a special place in my life as a source of continuing inspiration and optimism, the ultimate gift of our time.