All my life I have loved to sing. Family gatherings always included singing, with my brother Dickie playing the guitar. On long car trips, in between territorial squabbles, Luli and I harmonized in the back seat. I was in the chorus in high school, and the Jacksonville Concert Chorale when I was a young lawyer.
I sing in the shower. I sing while I’m cooking, cleaning, gardening or driving. But constant song annoys those of us who like to be lost in thought; Joe sometimes and Amanda always asks me to shut up. I comply, though losing my singer makes me sad, and I sometimes resent being silenced, so I decided to take singing lessons and join a chorus.
singing in the kitchen image:ubergizmo.com
In February I went to the United Church of Gainesville’s women’s retreat. This is one of my favorite annual events. I like the women I’ve met at the church, and there are interesting workshops, religious, spiritual, artistic, or goofy. The setting is lovely, overlooking a marshy lake. And the best part is I have two days and a night on my own, with a room all to myself.
image:madisonfl.org
At this year’s retreat I met Rebecca Pethes, a young woman whose rippling curls and liquid voice are bright and warm as a new penny, and who teaches voice at Gainesville Guitar Academy. We instantly hit it off.
Then I attended a workshop, “Sound bodies, the first musical instruments,” where we made as many sounds as we could with our voices and bodies – rattling our tongues, popping our cheeks, howling, stomping, clapping, slapping and finally singing. After the workshop Jan Tucci invited me to join Voices Rising Community Chorus, an intergenerational group of singers who perform a wide range of music in two concerts a year.
Director Ruth Lewis and the chorus. image: Senior Times click
Now every Monday I have a singing lesson. I told Rebecca I wanted to lengthen my breath, strengthen my high voice, and learn to sing softly. We started with one of my favorite songs, John Prine’s Angel from Montgomery, and I began to practice stretching out my vowels and making my consonants quick and crisp. When we had wrung most of the learning out of that, she gave me Caro Mio Ben, an 18th Century Italian song with a simple romantic melody and melodramatic lyrics, full of cruel lovers, languishing hearts and endless sighs. I love it. We’ve been working on it about four weeks, and I am learning to let the air just fall into my lungs even when I want to gasp for breath, to let it flow out again over my vocal cords without straining. I’m finding a balance between my chest voice and my nasal voice.
image: 18thcenturycommon.org
Sunday nights I sing with Voices Rising under the direction of Ruth Lewis, an enthusiastic and exciting conductor. I have always loved classical choral music. In boarding school we trooped up the hill to sing Vivaldi’s Gloria with the neighboring boys school, including the trumpet-filled chamber orchestra, and I was hooked. In Jacksonville we sang Mozart’s Requiem, with the thundering Dies Irae. Now I play it on my stereo at full volume. We sang a concert version of Verdi’s Aida, with four excellent soloists but alas, no elephants. I still thrill at the name of Aida’s lover Radames.
Radames and Aida. image: arovingpittsburgher.blogspot.com
The repertoire for our upcoming concert includes only one classical piece, Sicut Cervus by Palestrina. The other pieces cover a wide range – folk songs, popular songs, and a show tune. At first I pooh-poohed eighty voices singing these simple melodies, but I’ve come to enjoy them. And we also get to sing a complex arrangement of the gospel Walk in Jerusalem, a deliciously woeful contemporary piece, Lamentations of Jeremiah, and the thrilling Pan-African national anthem, Nkosi Sikelela.
Amanda is galloping furiously into adolescence, with me and Joe barely holding on.When I practice my singing, when I’m thinking about my throat and breath and lips and tongue, about the pitch and rhythm of the notes, I forget everything else. When I’m singing with the chorus, surrounded by a great ocean of music, my life disappears. For an hour on Monday and two hours on Sunday night, and in my daily practice sessions, I take a vacation from my troubles. I believe in music. Singing brings me joy.
Gainesville, Florida is a most marvelous place. Though we have our share of ill and elderly, hardly anyone dies here.
image:kerli.buzznet.com
Like many boomers approaching seventy, I’ve started reading obituaries. I like the little nuggets of stories they present, though it surprises me that many families write such long ones, considering the cost. (I believe newspapers didn’t used to charge for obituaries, but everything now must be a profit center.)
The obituary page was particularly full today, with fourteen obituaries. But only two of the dear departed had died. Half of them passed away and one passed on. Number 11 took his stroll onto Glory Lane, number 12 went to be with the Lord, Number 13 set sail on her final and greatest journey. And the heavens became brighter as they received Number 14. Considering the subject, the obituaries page is a very lively place.
image:gospelofprovidence.com
Some of my dearest friends have told me that I am very blunt. This is a tactful way of saying that I am tactless. I deny the charge – nobody knows how often I bite my tongue – but I admit that I detest euphemisms.
I often bite my tongue. image:topenglish.sk
Recently some good people in Gainesville organized a service to help homeless people with terminal illnesses. One of my favorite local geniuses, who shall remain nameless, proposed a design for the business card. It was clear and simple: “Croaking? Call (phone number)”. I thought it was just right, but I’m not involved in the project, and nobody asked me.
In idle moments I like to imagine my own obituary. I think about the things I did that mattered to me at the time, and wonder how far back I should go. I feel no need to say where I attended elementary school, that I came in third and last in a swimming race when I was five, or that I earned a sewing badge in Girl Scouts by making an apron. (Gainesville obituaries delve deep.)
images:cnn.com fabricland.com
I know that I wouldn’t want to mention a beloved dog or cat as a survivor, but I fret a bit about which children I would list, and how they should be described, what with steps and fosters. I couldn’t truthfully say they all mourn me.
So I edit and revise, happily dithering. The one statement about which I have no doubt is the description of what happened. I don’t intend to pass on, or away, or into Glory. I’m just gonna die.
For her 80th birthday, one of my mothers-in-law* asked that we each write a eulogy, telling what she has meant to us. The convention is to prepare a eulogy after death, but a post-mortem eulogy is not much good to the deceased, and Naomi is anything but conventional.
Naomi in the beginning
I first met Naomi when Joe and I were courting. I was 49 and she was 62, so we began a friendship rather than a quasi mother-daughter arrangement, a friendship that started with food. We share a love of eating and feeding people.
It’s a five-hour drive to Deerfield Beach. When we arrive at Naomi’s it’s too early for the big dinner we know will come, so she serves us crackers, cheese, nuts, olives, prosciutto wrapped around mozarella, and of course a welcome glass of wine. Dishes of candy ambush me throughout our visit. Bagels and lox isn’t enough for breakfast: you need egg salad, tuna salad, salami, pickles, breads, coffee cake, strawberries and bananas with sour cream.click At Thanksgiving or Passover, one dessert isn’t enough. You need five.
image: designerevents.wordpress.com
Naomi has a generous, adventurous heart. She has had three marriages with two husbands. (If a second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience, what can you say about a second marriage to the same man?) She raised five sons, and once told me that she loved raising children – it was all she ever wanted to do.
I have struggled so with my various motherhoods; I envy her the perfect fit she found. But a generous heart is bound to be broken, and I don’t envy Naomi her grief. She has suffered the worst, not once but twice. Her third son died at 33 after a long illness. Her fourth died suddenly at 50.
Naomi’s big heart warms to a large extended family, many friends, and the world at large. She offers rides to destitute strangers, and all the protests from her family won’t stop her. She becomes passionately engaged with the children whom she represents as a volunteer guardian ad litem, and is tireless in finding resources and exploring possibilities for “her” kids.
A dozen years ago, when I told Naomi that my daughter was pregnant, she understood my distress. My daughter was nineteen, unmarried, and unemployed, with only a high school education. A moment passed, and then Naomi said, “It will be my first great-grandchild!” and her good cheer made me break down. It was wonderful to know this baby would be welcomed into the family.
And Naomi has thoroughly welcomed Amanda. Her school pictures adorn Naomi’s refrigerator. Whenever we visit, Amanda heads straight to Naomi’s dresser, where a pretty box contains the little gifts Naomi has set aside for her: maybe a colorful dollar bill from her latest trip abroad, a tiny doll, glittery stick-on nails. For all her grandchildren, Naomi has been a source of love and fun. She offers a welcoming ear, and they confide in her.
Naomi with sons, daughters-in-laws, and grandchildren (before Amanda came along)
Naomi lives large. She has traveled, alone and with family, all over the world. (I believe she skipped the Arctic and Antarctic.) She has many of the ailments of old age, but she doesn’t let them stop her. Several times a year she flies to New Jersey to visit Irma and Al, her sister and brother-in-law, and paints the town in Manhattan. She jumps at any opportunity for a luxury cruise with her friend Linda.
Irma, Al, and Naomi paint the town
As I leave middle-age and enter old-, Naomi is an inspiration. If I make it to eighty, I will be glad to have her courage, spirit, and energy.
Naomi now
*Though I lost my mother when I was young click, I have been blessed in middle age with two top-notch mothers-in-law, Naomi Childers and AnnetteJackson.
I was 23, a college student and a single mother, when my mother died at 64. She died of bone cancer, metastasized from breast cancer ten years earlier.
MOTHER AT SIXTY
I was very young, and very deluded; I thought I’d outgrown the need for a mother. As a little child I adored her. As a girl I loved her and took her services for granted. As a teenager I sneered at her, deceived her, and swore I would never be like her. I was thrilled to go to boarding school and escape my ignorant parents.
BOARDING SCHOOL:ABBOT ACADEMY. IMAGE:WIKIPEDIA
After two semesters in college I began traveling: West Indies, Europe and North Africa, Canada. I visited my family, but my home now was Ann Arbor. My parents were irrelevant, and knew little about my life.
Mother was sick and in a lot of pain for a long time. I was feeding my one- year-old son in the kitchen when the phone rang and my father told me she was gone. I told Eric that his grandmother was dead, and cried just a litte as I packed my bookbag and rode my bike to class.
The memorial service was six weeks later. The night before I was to fly to Washington, Eric got a high fever, and I couldn’t go. I was glad to miss the service; I had no need for a lot of mawkish reminiscing.
I was 40 years old when I finally began to grieve for my mother. I was in a counseling session, dealing with some minor life-glitch, when her death and my loss came back to me full force. I thought of taking bereavement leave, but I wasn’t sure it was available 17 years after her death. Instead I took sick leave and spent three days crying and walking and crying some more.
It’s been 43 years since she died, a short lifetime ago. Through all those years I didn’t have a mother. I go through my resume of law, activism, community work, writing, child rearing, and wonder if she would have been proud of me. I ache to talk with her. What would she have told me as I raised my different sets of children? I want to ask her a thousand things.
Now I have memories, pictures, and a few objects from my mother. The memories and pictures have worn a groove in my mind so that when I try to think of her or see her face, I can only summon up the same few stories.
When I was three she left me behind when she drove to the grocery store, and I ran down the driveway crying, desperate to catch her. When I was twelve, sitting in the car in the dark, not looking at her, I asked about sex, “Does he just stick it in?” I wish I remembered her answer – we were not a bawdy family. At fourteen I was pitiless. I left a letter to a friend in my mother’s typewriter that began “I hate my mother.” She cried. It seemed to me she was always crying, and I despised her.
IMAGE:ALLPOSTERS.COM
I called her from Montreal to announce that I was married, and she asked, “Do you love him very much?” “Well, Mom, I met him eight days ago; I hardly know him.” “I always thought I would pin your veil.” Her sentimentality embarrassed me.
When Eric was seven months old, I took him to DC to meet my parents. By then my mother was often in the hospital, and spent her time at home lying on the couch. I put Eric down next to her. He took one look and began laughing, that irresistible baby giggle. She laughed back and it seemed they would never stop. He made her laugh all that long weekend. It was the last time I saw her.
ERIC MADE HER LAUGH
My father lived another twenty-seven years after my mother’s death. The memories he shared with us were filtered through his love and ego. Most of them are wildly implausible myths of his mastery and machismo. When he died we found an accordian folder of all the letters he had written to her the year before they married. She was in college at George Washington. He was six years older, traveling in Costa Rica as a coffee buyer. She saved all his letters, but he had not kept hers.
NEWLYWEDS
I have very few keepsakes from my mother. One is a Japanese black brass figurine of two turtles. Mother kept them on the back of her desk. The baby turtle is climbing onto the big turtle’s back. I hold it, feeling its weight, marveling at every intricately etched detail of shell and flesh. I wonder whether she hefted them as I do, and what she mused about as she held them, cool and heavy in her hand.
Mother always wore two pieces of jewelry: a gold ring with a large blue topaz, and a heavy Navajo bracelet. She left them both to Luli. After I began missing my mother, I bought myself a ring at an art fair, the silver folded like labia around a small opal. I wear it all the time. In New Mexico Joe bought me a bracelet very like Mother’s, with the same twisted wires. I cherished it for about six months, and then it disappeared. It turned up last summer under the bed, and I have worn it ever since. It fits my wrist snugly so it doesn’t wobble around and get in the way. It’s a bit like a shackle, but it feels like a link to my mother.
I have one of my mother’s books, Mary Boykin Chesnut’s A Diary from Dixie. It is the diary of a Confederate officer’s wife, a vivid account of the domestic life of the Charleston social elite as the war rages just offstage. Mother had southern roots. Her grandmother, who ate rats during the siege of Vicksburg, used to take her to the movies, and mortified her by standing when the pianist played Dixie. Mother wrote her name inside the book, Marcy Gray Eder, in the clear angular script that recalls all the letters she wrote me.
None of her letters remain. But in my father’s things we found her 1923 high school yearbook from Central High School in Washington, D.C. She was in the drama club, and an editor of the literary magazine. Unlike most of the graduates, she smiles in her picture, her face tilted slightly down so her big dark eyes look up at me. The caption reads:
This fetching young person with mischievous brown eyes and remarkable personality is most dramatically and poetically inclined. Besides great literary ability, she possesses a truly enviable scholastic record. As to ambitions, Marceline is going to strive to outdo Bernhardt, ‘the immortal Sarah,’ and those of us who know her are sure of her success. Original, clever and peppy – why absolutely.
1923 YEARBOOK: MOTHER IS ON LEFT PAGE, UPPER RIGHT
The yearbook generated my fourth novel, my biggest struggle so far as a writer. First it was the story of Delia, a middle aged woman searching for the truth about her mother Lillian, and Lillian impatiently responding from the afterlife to all her misconceptions. I spent over a year floundering in that direction, writing quite a lot of it, until I acknowledged it wasn’t working, and decided simply to tell Delia’s story. I had a great time immersing myself in accounts of Greenwich Village in the sixties, but I kept sneering at Delia. Writing is revealing – Delia was more like me than any of my previous characters, and I didn’t like her. My novel is now in its third iteration. It is the story of Lillian’s long marriage. I’m almost certain I have found the right story, and I’m working pretty steadily.
GERARD TER BORCH DIE BRIEFSCHREIBERIN. IMAGE:WIKIPEDIA COMMONS
When I read the yearbook caption I wonder what happened to the actress and writer during the forty-four years of my parents’ marriage. Where was that peppy young person with the remarkable personality? If I had known her when I was an adult I would certainly have a very different view, but with my limited vision I believe my father swallowed her up and she disappeared. ‘Aren’t men wonderful?’ she’d say. ‘Marcy, don’t touch that, you’ll break it,’ he’d say. The alchemy of fiction lets me take the glimpses and fragments of her life and their marriage and give them a different story. In my publication fantasies I dedicate this book to Marceline Elizabeth Gray, the woman I search for, the woman she might have been.
GENTLE READERS: I am getting deeper into my novel. So I am cutting back on the blog, and from now on will post one a month.
For Amanda’s 11th birthday Joe and I planned a slumber party. The girls were to arrive at 6 on Friday, and leave at 10 the next morning. As I always do, I fretted considerably over the details.
Sleeping (hah!) arrangements: Last year we had a small slumber party, with four girls, as a kind of trial run. This year I had allowed Amanda to invite eight girls, betting that only about five would come. (In Gainesville it is considered rude to reply to an invitation.)
With two twin mattresses, an inflatable mattress, and two foam camping pads, we turned the living room into one solid bed in front of the couch, with a space left open in front of the fireplace to avoid disasters. I was sure that we could get two on the very deep couch, others could sprawl crosswise aross the twins, for a ratio of three girls to two beds, and someone could sleep in the recliner. But seven of the eight girls came to the party. They had all grown about three inches since fourth grade. And they snubbed the foam mats.
The inadequate bedding may have been the reason several of them never went to bed. When I told one father that his daughter claimed to have stayed up all night, he said cheerfully, “Oh, she’s ADD, she never sleeps.” Now I understood why he had not lingered when he dropped her off.
Food : Fried chicken, baked beans, canned corn, chips and dip, cookies, s’mores, ice cream cake, and six liters of soda pop. Of course they didn’t eat the corn, my one pitiful attempt at sneaking in a vegetable.
Goody bags: We didn’t have them when I was a little girl, but now every child leaves a birthday party with a bag of gifts. Fortunately Amanda reminded me of this a whole day before the party, and I had a lot of fun at Dollar Tree. Nail polish with decals and glitter, a candle in a glass, a box of skittles, and mardi gras beads.
Entertainment program: One girl was going to be late, so we decided to delay dinner until 7. Joe was concerned: what would they do before dinner? I assured him that they could entertain themselves. And they did – as each guest arrived, she joined the pack who were running and screaming from the living room, through the kitchen, down the hall, to Amanda’s room and back again. They settled in Amanda’s room for awhile with the door closed, doing God knows what. Then they returned to the living room to eat an entire bag of Doritos with cheese glop.
For the most part, Joe and I stayed out of the room and within hollering distance. I walked around cleaning up messes more or less as they occurred. I overheard hideous mean girl gossip about the girl who arrived late, a lot of “well she told me she doesn’t like you,” “she thinks she’s so hot…”
Amanda is mercurial in her friendships, and two days after inviting everybody, decided she didn’t like that girl, supporting her dislike with a long list of hateful remarks. So I was worried that the girls would be cruel, but when the latecomer arrived about 8, the party gained new energy, all of them tumbling and wrestling on the mattresses. I was such a goody-goody little girl. These girls are much rowdier. They all play sports, and their play is rough and physical. Not a lady in the bunch, thank God and Title Nine.
image:thegraphicsfairy.com pk yonge blue wave team. image:preps.gainesville.com
They ate almost all the chicken, most of the cake and all the cookies. They drank six liters of soda and belched magnificently. They lay on the mattresses and watched Like Mike (an orphan’s magic sneakers make him an NBA superstar), farted and accused each other of farting. When they weren’t shrieking, yelling, screaming, belching, farting, they were laughing or whispering.
At ten o’clock I went to bed, leaving Joe in charge. At 10:30 the laughing and screaming was even louder, and woke me up. I went out to see what was happening, and found they were all in the pool. We hadn’t told them to bring bathing suits, because the temperature was in the 60’s, the water temperature 70. But they pleaded with Joe to let them swim. Some of them borrowed Amanda’s bathing suits and the rest swam in their clothes. They batted beach balls around and screamed until I came out again and asked them to keep it down because of the neighbors.
They stayed in the pool about half an hour, and then took hot showers. I put all the wet clothes in the laundry, and at about midnight Joe lit the fire. They made a million s’mores and watched Joyful Noise (Queen Latifah, Dolly Parton and teen romance).
They dropped one by one, until at 4:30 I came out and told the last two to go to sleep (they were yelling), and found them beds in the front room.
When I got up again at 7:15, three were up playing hide and seek. By 8:30 all but Julie were up – we couldn’t get her out of the recliner. Somewhat subdued, they ate huge amounts of waffles, eggs, sausage and juice for breakfast. As their parents came to pick them up, they searched the wreckage for their clothes, stuffed animals, and dvd’s. They succeeded in finding almost everything – I had to sort through a few socks, bras and t- shirts later that day.
Breakfast was more subdued
In my eavesdropping I had overheard plans for pranks involving syrup and mayonnaise. At one point they emerged from Amanda’s bedroom and I heard, ‘What if her grandma finds out?’ ‘Just don’t say anything.’ In the end, there were no serious problems. They left a door unlatched and Trisket got into the atrium and ate most of the dog food. After each girl fell asleep, the wide-awake ones scribbled on her arms with marker. And they apparently took one girl’s retainer from her purse, hiding the case under the couch, and the retainer under the cushions. It was a couple of days before we found them. Luckily, the retainer wasn’t damaged.
It helps me to observe other girls in their natural habitat. Like many American preteens, Amanda is precociously sexual, slathering on makeup and sulking when I make her clean it off, begging for the shortest shorts and tightest shirts, bragging about all her boyfriends, dirty dancing at every opportunity. Her seven friends are similar. But at kissing scenes in the movies they yelled ‘Gross!’ and dived under the pillows, and their favorite activity at the party (aside from eating) was hide and seek. All their pseudo-sophistication fell away, and they seemed like little girls again.
Amanda had an over the top party-girl weekend. At 2 o’clock she had a volleyball game, and to my astonishment her team won, though five of the players had been at the party. They had a team party afterwards at Stevie B’s (a pizza and games joint with the nastiest pizza in the southeast) and of course Amanda couldn’t miss that. From 5 to 8 she had another birthday party, this time at a Karaoke club. She got all tarted up in leggings and spangles and earrings, but no way was she going to sing, she told us. By the time we picked her up from the karaoke bash (the birthday mother told us she had to make Amanda give up the mike) she was a rude and sullen mess. But I held on to the memory of her snuggling back into bed at ten that morning, mumbling ‘thank you, Grandma’ before she fell asleep.
Mike Chielens died last Saturday. The many online comments on his obituary noted his love of baseball, beer, and rock and roll. Chielens was director of Legal Aid of Western Michigan, and the comments also spoke of his kindness, his fight for the underdog, his respect for everyone. But I knew Chielens when he was a brand-new legal aid lawyer at Jacksonville Area Legal Aid – JALA. He was a laughing elf of a man, a tiny guy with a huge heart, round face, red hair, freckles.
ROCKING AND ROLLING
Chielens loved to flirt. Though he looked like Howdy Doody, with a little boy’s physique, his charm and intensity could bowl women over. But he was loyal to his fiancée in Michigan, and whenever Van Morrison sang Brown Eyed Girl, Chielens talked about Jan, a warning to us to keep a safe distance.
Mike Chielens and Mike Milito shared an apartment. They were fun-loving wild men, smart, determined, and fierce for justice. I knew them when we were young, when all of us were young, a gang of northerners with law degrees who descended on Jacksonville to be turned into lawyers under the leadership of two slightly older Harvard Law graduates.
SOME OF THE GANG IN 1975
Jacksonville was a blue-collar city, with a large poor black population, a large poor white population, some uppercrust southerners and a whole lot of insurance executives. Lefty lawyers had trouble finding friends outside legal aid, so we became a close-knit group, living in little bungalows in Riverside, near downtown. Some of us lived at Jacksonville Beach, and kept open house on weekends.
RIVERSIDE BUNGALOWS
LAWYERS AT THE BEACH: SUE, SARA, LIZ
When we first came to Jacksonville, my five-year-old son Eric and I stayed with Sara until I found a place, an upstairs apartment with no air-conditioning, but well shaded by thick pine trees. Later, when I was no longer a VISTA volunteer making three thousand a year but a staff attorney making ten, I moved to a house, and new arrivals would stay with us.
On Saturday mornings I’d start my laundry in the laundromat on King Street and Eric and I would walk to visit one friend or another while the clothes dried. Julie and Graddy kept M&M’s on the back of their toilet to encourage their toddler to get up in the night to pee. Sue and Max always had coffee aging in a percolator.
MAX, SUE, AND EMILY – ALWAYS READY TO REHEAT THE COFFEE
In the evenings we often gathered at my house so I wouldn’t need a babysitter. I cooked dinner, Jim brought his guitar, and we sang harmony. I had serial crushes on most of the guys, but generally avoided fishing off the company pier, and instead paired up with quite unsuitable men whom I found elsewhere.
UNSUITABLE MEN
My family came down for Thanksgiving, and legal aid friends joined us. My father was impressed that fourteen people could be so jolly on only two bottles of wine. He didn’t notice some of us sneaking off to the back of the house to smoke dope.
THANKSGIVING FUN
One day our program director came into my office and found me crying. I had discovered that Eric’s after school care was atrocious, and didn’t know where to turn. That night, Paul’s wife Shirley called and said Eric could come to her house after school – she had four daughters from elementary to high school. They lived two blocks from me, and two blocks from Eric’s school.
Shirley and I decided to train for the first Jacksonville River Run, so every morning she knocked on my door at 6:30, and we ran through Riverside and Avondale, on past the huge oaks and houses of Ortega. After the River Run, I drove to the beach and joined a party that lasted well into the night.
LIZ AND SHIRLEY IN THE FIRST JACKSONVILLE RIVER RUN
JALA LIKED TO PARTY
I stayed at Jacksonville five years before I moved to Gainesville. One by one, my friends left JALA for Atlanta, Grand Rapids, Providence, DC, Los Angeles. Most of us stayed connected to poverty law in one way or another.
At every time and place of my life, except one desperately lonely year in Montreal, I have had a group of friends. Happily, in every group there is always one who keeps us all connected after we move on. For the JALA gang it’s Marie, who writes long, chatty Christmas letters, who organized two reunions in Florida, who made an email list of old JALA comrades and told us when first Mike Milito, and then Mike Chielens got terrible cancers.
MARIE (far right) ORGANIZED REUNIONS
Milito and his wife Judy went on Caring Bridge, where we could read the step by step horrors of his treatment, and finally, thank God, his slow recovery. Chielens didn’t use Caring Bridge, but Jan sent emails and Marie forwarded them to us.
MILITO, CHIELENS AND JAN IN HAPPIER DAYS
Mike and Jan put themselves through torture, with the hope that they would have many years on the other side They didn’t; his condition grew worse and worse and after about a year of hell, Chielens died. I got the news from Marie, and cried and cried. It was Marie who sent flowers in all our names, with Dylan lyrics – ‘May you stay forever young.’ And Marie who said, ‘don’t pay me for the flowers,’ and organized a group contribution to Western Michigan Legal Aid.
I hadn’t seen Chielens in over thirty years, and only kept up with him second-hand. But I grieve for him, and for that time, for that community of young people happily misspending our youths together. We played hard, but we also worked hard, certain that our cause was just, hopeful that we could change at least one little corner of the world.
I have reached an age where my friends and famiy will be dying, unless I go first. Many of my friends have survived cancer, some are battling it now. I write this in Miami Beach, where we have come for the unveiling of my late brother-in-law’s tombstone. Adam died suddenly, a few weeks after his fiftieth birthday celebration.
ADAM, JOE, AND FRIEND
Thinking of my own death doesn’t dismay me much, though I hope to hang around long enough to launch Amanda and see her land on her feet, and it would be nice to see my books published and acclaimed before I go. But losing my family, losing my friends – that’s very hard.
SHE’LL LAND ON HER FEET
Young people see old age as boring, or at best, peaceful. They think all the excitement and adventures are theirs. But facing all this loss, facing my own mortality, this is a profound, if difficult, adventure.
Here’s to Chielens. Here’s to all the friends I have lost touch with, and all the friends I will someday lose.
