There’s a complex of buildings on the banks of the Potomac River in Washington, D.C. called The Watergate, built in 1962. Two of those buildings are designated as commercial office space; the remainder consists of some of the most expensive residential condominium housing in the metropolitan Washington area, and for many years was the most favored location of members of Congress, political appointees, and other “inside-the-Beltway” notables.

In 1967, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) moved its headquarters into space on the sixth floor of one of those commercial office buildings. And on June 17, 1972, a break-in occurred at those offices that set in motion what was arguably the biggest political scandal of the 20th Century, popularly referred to simply as “Watergate.” It ended the careers of a number of high-level political figures, not the least of whom was the President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon. Conversely, it also was the making of the careers of two young, previously little-known Washington Post reporters: Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

You needn’t have been born before 1972 to be familiar with the Watergate scandal; it remains one of the most written-about, talked-about, analyzed, regurgitated, and debated pieces of 20th-Century American history. And the ghost of that scandal hangs over the White House and its occupants to this day, 50 years after that break-in at DNC headquarters.

To begin with, it led to the passage in 1978 of the Presidential Records Act, clarifying and mandating that all Presidential records are the property of the U.S. Government, not of the President — although word of that has apparently not filtered through to all of the subsequent occupants of the Oval Office, whose names need not be mentioned here.

And virtually every President since Nixon has in one way or another been affected — “haunted,” if you will — by the ghostly memory of Watergate. There was, of course, the Iran-Contra affair during Ronald Reagan’s administration, which engendered its own devastating effect on the entire country while simultaneously dredging up painful reminders of the Watergate scandal a decade earlier. Subsequently, Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, had a difficult time distancing himself from the fact that, in his early political career, he had been a favorite of Nixon’s. And more recently, the many scandals involving Donald Trump, and the similarities that have been drawn between his actions and those of Richard Nixon, are all too familiar to us.

So in one sense, the Watergate complex on the Potomac does have its “ghosts.” But what about the other kind — the ghosts of a paranormal sort? It has long been asserted that there is no shortage of those in Washington, D.C. While cities such as Savannah, Gettysburg and Salem regularly top the lists of the most-haunted U.S. cities, Washington is also known for its large number of specific locations that should be high on any self-respecting ghost-hunter’s bucket list: the “demon cat” in the U.S. Capitol; Abraham Lincoln and others roaming around the White House; the sad young woman in the Octagon House; and the wandering Mr. Lincoln again — and reportedly also John Wilkes Booth — at Ford’s Theater, to name just a few. But I’d like to add one lesser-known location to that list, based on personal experience: the Roosevelt House at 1215 – 19th Street, N.W.

Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. — or Teddy, or T.R., to those of us who came to know him well — was an imposing figure with an exuberant personality and a wide range of interests. He had been a sickly child, but through single-minded hard work and determination he overcame his limitations by forcing himself to adopt a strenuous lifestyle, thus transforming himself into the robust, athletic adult we now recognize. He joined the Rough Riders to fight the Spanish army in Cuba; served as Governor of New York for two years; and became Vice President of the United States under President McKinley for six months until McKinley’s assassination, when he, Roosevelt, succeeded to the Presidency for the remainder of that term, and then was elected to a second full term.

But before all of that, he had served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, during which time he lived at . . . isn’t it obvious? . . . 1215 – 19th Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. And that is where I came to know him. Or, rather, his spirit. I worked there from 1968 to 1978, when the building was occupied by the law firm of Galiher, Clarke, Martell and Donnelly. And T.R. was still there, mischievous as ever — willing to share his home with the odd assortment of new folks, but determined to let us know he was still in charge.

The interior of the formerly grand residence had been redesigned into four floors of office space, and an elevator was added at the southern side near the internal stairwell. The stairwell itself opened onto each floor, through doors that were kept locked at all times; we had to carry our keys with us, or use the elevator. Visitors entered directly into the ground-floor reception room, and were unable to access the stairway or the elevator unless accompanied. At night, all doors were double-checked to ensure that they were locked, and the elevator also was locked off by the last person to leave for the day.

But T.R. wasn’t hampered by locks and keys. And he loved that elevator, which apparently was like a new toy to him. At random times, with no one aboard, it would simply start up, running up and down and up and down, with no way of stopping it until someone yelled at T.R. to cut it out! The elevator service company would be called, a technician would come out to check the mechanisms, and would invariably declare it to be in perfect working order. Until next time.

T.R. may have loved modern machinery, but he did not feel the same about contemporary music. One evening, a young secretary was working late and was alone in the building. She had personally checked to be sure all of the doors were locked, and had also locked the elevator at her floor. To keep herself company, she had turned on her radio to a rock music station. At one point, she left her desk to go to the copier in another room, and when she returned, the radio had been tuned to a classical music station — FM instead of AM — which would have required the turning of two knobs. Puzzled as to how that was possible, and feeling a little uneasy, she nevertheless changed the station back and returned to work.

A while later, the young lady had to use the rest room, which was on another floor. Taking her keys, she walked up the stairs, did what she had come to do, and walked back down . . . and found her radio once more tuned to the classical music FM station. That was enough for her. She left her work unfinished and fled the building. When she returned to work the next morning, she declared that there would be no more overtime for her unless someone was with her. Several of us tried to reassure her that it was only T.R. being frisky, but she was having none of it.

My own most memorable experience with the former President occurred at Christmastime, on the day of our annual holiday party, which was being held in suburban Maryland. I worked on the second floor with two other women in a large, L-shaped open area, and two attorneys in private offices. Since I lived in Virginia, I had brought my party clothes to work with me so that I wouldn’t have to go home to change before the party. One of the women, a friend of mine named Kathy, lived just a few blocks from the office, but I had offered to drive her to the party and home afterwards, so she had also brought a change of clothes with her. When everyone else had left the building, we double-checked all of the doors and locked the elevator off at our floor. Then she went into one attorney’s office and I went into the other to dress for the evening’s festivities, closing the doors in case someone might return to the office for some reason.

After a few minutes, I heard very distinct, regular, heavy footsteps in the outer area, like someone pacing back and forth on the tiled floor. I called out, “Kathy, is that you?” She shouted back, from the other office:

“What did you say?”

“Is that you walking out there?”

“What are you talking about? I’m over here.”

So who was outside my door? Carefully I opened the door a crack and peered out; the pacing stopped, and no one was there. I went to the elevator and the stairway door, and they were both still locked from the inside. Returning to the attorney’s office, I closed the door and continued changing my clothes. The pacing resumed.

“Kathy, now cut it out!”

“What the hell are you talking about??!!!”

Now dressed, but still needing to fix our hair and makeup, we both came out to the open area, where once again the pacing had stopped. She had not heard a thing. When I told her what I had experienced, Kathy — normally not a skittish person — lost it. She said she was going home and asked me to come with her. But I was fascinated by the phenomenon, and said I would stay, and would pick her up at her apartment in a little while. And with that, she gathered up her things, said she would catch a taxi, and bolted out the door, letting it slam behind her. I was now alone in the building . . . except for the mysterious pacer.

I triple-checked all the locks and headed back into the attorney’s office. But before closing the door all the way, I looked back out into the open area and said, “All right, T.R., it’s your house so you may stay . . . but no peeking.” And as I closed the door behind me . . . you guessed it . . . the slow, steady pacing resumed once more. And when I was ready to leave, and had phoned Kathy to tell her I was on my way, the pacing finally stopped for good. I walked to the exit door, turned around and said to the silent, apparently empty room, “Good night, T.R.”

And since you’re obviously wondering — no, he did not answer. In truth, I’m not sure how I would have reacted if he had. But somehow I knew he was there, and I was sure he was smiling his big toothy grin, happy that at last he would have his house to himself for the rest of the night. He didn’t like it when we stayed late.

*. *. *

I picked Kathy up at her apartment and we went on to enjoy a great party that evening. I never let her live down the fact that she had chickened out — and run out — on me. We laughed about it for many years, but the fact is that that evening made believers out of two hard-core skeptics. And from time to time, to this day when inexplicable things happen, I remind myself that . . .

“There are more things in Heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet.

And on that note, I am
Brendochka
6/29/23

If I were asked to pinpoint the true end of the Age of Innocence, I would say it wasn’t the Roaring Twenties of F. Scott Fitzgerald, but the Sobering Sixties of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

The early ‘60s were a busy time for me. At some point, I decided that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life working at the same job, or even the same type of job — there was a big world out there, and there must be other opportunities. A client of our law firm ran a small electronics manufacturing company and was looking for someone to manage his office. My entire experience in office management consisted of taking over a few of the tasks of our office manager when she was on vacation each year: handling the payroll, ordering some supplies, and calling maintenance if something broke. But I was ready to learn something brand new, and in the early part of 1962, I said a tearful farewell to the only office family I had ever known, and took my first steps toward a new future.

Why didn’t somebody stop me???!!!!!

Biggest mistake of my life, on two fronts. To begin with, the job itself — compared to the mentally more challenging legal work — was boring, boring, boring. But that would have been easy to remedy; I could simply have quit. The second part wasn’t so simple. One of the industrial engineers was handsome, brilliant and charming, and by August we were married. Stupid, stupid, stupid!

You don’t want to hear the details; and I really don’t want to recite them. Let’s just say that the only things I got out of that marriage were two beautiful children . . . and a divorce. So in 1966 it was back to work in another law firm and onward into the last of the ‘60s as a single mom. It may sound bleak, but it really wasn’t. I was loving my work again, enjoying motherhood, and dating from time to time; life was good just as it was. And the world in the late ‘60s was producing enough fodder to serve as a feast for any student of world history or political junkie such as myself.

*. *. *

When JFK was assassinated on November 22, 1963, the full weight of the presidency passed immediately and seamlessly to LBJ — Lyndon Baines Johnson — when he took the oath of office in an airplane on the ground in Dallas, Texas, with the widow of the late President Kennedy standing by his side in a pink suit freshly stained with her husband’s blood. A Boston Brahmin had been replaced by a Texas cowboy . . . and the entire character of the White House was transformed once more.

But personal differences aside, Johnson wasted no time jumping into his new role with Texas-sized gusto. During his time in office, from November ‘63 to January ‘69, he created his vision of a “Great Society,” concentrating on advancements in civil rights and desegregation; continuation of his predecessor’s space exploration program; implementation of Medicare and federal aid to education programs; environmental activism; and other by-products of his liberal political leanings. But for every action, we should expect an equal and opposite reaction — right? And we had them, a-plenty!

*. *. *

Regardless of your age, I know you’ve heard of a little thing called the war in Vietnam. It began in 1955 and continued to escalate for 20 long years, until the tragic fall of Saigon in 1975. In 1965, during Johnson’s presidency, the U.S. officially entered that conflict for a number of complex reasons, the most palatable of which was the fight against the ever-increasing spread of communism. It was the war that no one really wanted, and it spun off massive protests on university campuses like Yale and Berkeley, and in dozens of major cities in the U.S.

They say it’s an ill wind that blows no one good; and the folk song writers and performers of the ‘60s — such as Barry McGuire (“Eve of Destruction”) and Bob Dylan (“Blowin’ in the Wind”) — profited nicely from that one. The youth of America had found a cause they believed in and began to make themselves heard. Young men burned their draft cards, and many fled to Canada to avoid being called into the war they considered illegal and immoral. And not to be left out of the fun, young women began burning their bras in support of women’s rights — or perhaps simply the right of their bosoms to be truly free. Just an interesting side note.

In 1966, my sister Merna was working for a U.S. research and development company that had a contract with the military to produce technology — I have no idea what kind — in Vietnam. They needed to send a team to Saigon, and Merna quickly volunteered. I had returned home with two babies and a pending divorce, and here was her golden opportunity to escape the resulting chaos. But she knew if she told our mother where she was going, the worry might easily bring about a second heart attack, the first one having occurred just months earlier. So we cooked up a story and told her Merna would be going to Bangkok, which wasn’t a total lie. The team actually would be spending time there first, and while there she could buy up a lifetime supply of postcards and souvenirs, which she then could mail to us from Saigon with an A.P.O. postmark that could have been from anywhere.

I also had to learn to lie to my mother with a straight face, and not to get tripped up by those lies. Merna would write letters addressed to both my mother and me at home, and separate letters to me with the true story of conditions in Saigon, which she would mail to my office address; so I had to remember what she had written in which letters. And my mother did wonder why I had suddenly become so intent on the news broadcasts about the war, which I explained away as being of major worldwide importance and something that she should also be more concerned about.

After about three months, Merna came home for some R&R. But the team was due to return to Saigon in a few weeks, and she decided it was time to confess. And when she did, the reaction from our mother was entirely predictable: she exploded! And exploded again when she found out that I had known the truth all along. Then — declaring that she would never trust either of us again — she proceeded to call all of her friends and brag about her brave daughter. But she never told us how proud she was — we only heard those things second-hand from friends and relatives.

*. *. *

But the war wasn’t our country’s only problem in the ‘60s. Even a cause as nobly-motivated as civil rights is going to have its detractors, and they began coming out of the woodwork. The tension built and built until, on April 4, 1968, the foremost leader of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee. And the United States began to burn. Aptly-named “race riots” erupted in Chicago, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Baltimore . . . and of course, in Washington, D.C.

I knew a couple at that time who hosted gatherings on Friday evenings for any of their friends who were available — food furnished, bring your own booze. Their apartment was on an upper floor of a high-rise building in close-in Arlington, Virginia, with a beautiful view of D.C. stretching from the Washington Monument to the U.S. Capitol. And on that Friday, April 5, 1968, a group of us sat in their living room staring out of the big picture window at the orange glow from the conflagration that began in the predominantly Black neighborhood known as the “14th Street corridor” and spread east from there. I felt like Scarlett O’Hara watching Atlanta burn, as we all sat helpless, choking back tears.

One of that group of friends arrived late that Friday and explained why he had been detained. He worked at the Veterans Administration Hospital in a not-so-good section of the city, and had to drive home through a neighborhood where some of the spill-over from the riot was taking place. A co-worker of his lived in that neighborhood, and he offered to see her safely home. But when they reached her block, they were unable to get through the crowds to her building. Instead, he dropped her off at the nearby police station, where she would remain safe until she could get to her home. In the meantime, he still had to drive through that crowd, where a group of teenagers suddenly jumped onto his car, rocking it back and forth and trying to turn it over. Terrified for his life, he instinctively hit the gas pedal, sending bodies flying from his car in all directions . . . and he never stopped until he reached Virginia. Then he came to the party; it seemed the only place he wanted to be — with friends.

The next day — a Saturday — I had an unexpected opportunity to see for myself what was going on in the city. We had recently moved to Virginia because it was a better location for my two small children who were approaching school age. My sister had returned safely from Vietnam and had an apartment in Washington, but her long-time hairdresser was in Alexandria, Virginia . . . and she would never, ever miss a Saturday appointment. She didn’t drive, so she took the bus as usual, and expected to be back at her apartment hours ahead of the 7:00 p.m. curfew that had been established for D.C. But while she was in Alexandria, it was announced that the curfew had been moved up to 3:00 p.m., and it was already nearly 2:00.

Now, ordinarily she would simply have spent the night at our place. But that happened to be the week that a friend from California was in town and staying with her, and she couldn’t leave her friend alone all night in the middle of a riot. So, of course, she called me. Could I pick her up at the beauty salon, normally a good 20 minutes away, and get her home — another 20 minutes or so — and get myself back out of D.C. before 3:00? Oh, sure, no problem. Right. But first I’d have to stop for gas because my car was almost on empty — and all the gas stations were also closing early.

So I left my children with my mother, ran out to the car — a cute little Chevy Corvair — and headed for the Beltway. Not the shortest route, but the fastest. And as I drove along, listening to the news reports on the radio, I didn’t realize that I had that baby up to 90 m.p.h. When I noticed it, I did slow down a bit, but not by much. I picked my sister up at the salon, stopped at a nearby gas station, and headed into D.C., where I let her out at her apartment building and watched until she was safely inside. It was 2:45 p.m.; I had 15 minutes to get out of the city.

I was driving down New Hampshire Avenue toward the nearest bridge leading out of D.C. — no more than ten minutes away — when a military convoy approached from the opposite direction and pulled across the road, stopping directly in front of me. I also stopped — not that I had a choice. Several very young soldiers jumped out of their vehicles, carrying bayoneted rifles, and positioned themselves across the roadway. One of them began walking toward my car.

“Excuse me, ma’am, did you know there’s a curfew at 3:00?”

He was so young, and obviously so scared. I explained, very calmly and politely, that yes, I was aware of that, which was why I was trying to get home to Virginia before the curfew. He clearly did not know what to do with me.

By the grace of some higher power, there happened to be an older D.C. police officer standing on the nearby sidewalk, observing our little standoff. He came strolling over and asked me what the problem was. I explained to him that I lived in Virginia and was trying to get out of the city before 3:00. He nodded and smiled, turned to the still-confused soldier, and said, “Listen, son. You’re supposed to stop them from coming into the city, not leaving.” The young man, clearly thrilled to have been relieved of any responsibility in the matter, thanked the police officer . . . and then saluted him. Well, at least his basic training hadn’t been a total waste. Then the soldier signaled to one of the drivers to move his vehicle and let me through, and I was on my way. Somehow, that little Corvair had me back, not just across the bridge into Virginia, but all the way to my apartment by curfew time. She must have sprouted wings and flown home.

*. *. *

As with all things, the riots eventually came to an end. And while Buzz Aldren was preparing for his historic moon landing, and Richard Nixon was settling into his first term in the White House, we found ourselves entering the ‘70s. What could we possibly have to look forward to that could eclipse the excitement of the ‘60s? Time would tell.

TTFN,
Brendochka
6/26/23

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .”

Oh, sorry — that’s already been done, thanks to Mr. Dickens. But it’s such a great opener, and descriptive of so many periods in history, including the 1960s, that I couldn’t resist borrowing it. And there I was: a young, single woman in Washington, an eyewitness to history in the making. It was indeed the best of times . . . for a while.

I was on the bus on my way to work one morning shortly before Christmas in 1960, stopped at a red light on Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown. I happened to look up from my book to glance out the window at an open convertible sitting next to us, which seemed rather odd since it was the middle of December. And there, hatless and smiling in the front passenger seat of the convertible, sat the newly-elected — but not-yet-inaugurated — 35th President of the United States: John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Young, handsome, spirited, full of hope for the future, he exemplified the era in which we were living; and I was staring straight at him, live and in person. How could you not love Washington, where such things were possible?!! Then the light changed, the convertible and my bus moved forward at different speeds, and the moment was broken. But I had seen the new President — the one I had voted for just a month earlier. It was a great day.

In fact, it had been a good year as a whole: a good job, lots of parties, dates, shows, shopping — a typical single girl’s life. Well, except for that one fainting incident . . . It was quite funny, actually. We — still the three of us, mother, sister and self — were now living in a nice eight-story apartment building in an excellent neighborhood known as Glover Park, just north of Georgetown in D.C. On the roof of the building was a sundeck where I enjoyed lounging from time to time. One summer afternoon, I had been suffering from a case of that bane of women everywhere — cramps — and decided the best cure was a shaker of whiskey sours and a little sunshine. So I mixed up my beverage of choice, grabbed a good book and some suntan lotion, and headed for the roof, where I stretched out on a chaise lounge and proceeded to bury myself in the latest John le Carre novel and lose track of time. After a couple of hours, when I finally realized how hot it was up there, I packed up my things and headed back to my air-conditioned apartment.

Of course, I was damp with sweat and suntan lotion, so I went directly to the bathroom for a nice cooling shower. As I stepped out of the shower a few minutes later, I began to feel dizzy and nauseous, so I put on my cotton robe and made a beeline for my bedroom to lie down. But I never made it to the bedroom. I did lie down, though — hard. Passed out cold, hitting the hardwood floor chin-first and splitting it (my chin, not the floor) wide open.

Now, as it happened, my sister Merna and I had had one of our classic arguments that morning and weren’t currently on speaking terms. When I took my swan dive into the hardwood, she was downstairs in the laundry room. My mother was in the living room with a friend, who happened to be legally blind and was therefore of no use whatsoever in an emergency. When my mother heard me crash, she came running. I regained consciousness after just a minute or so, and found her kneeling next to me, rocking back and forth on her heels and wailing, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God! She’s got a hole in her chin! Oh, my God!” How that woman ever managed to raise two children is still beyond my comprehension.

Just then Merna returned, took in the sight of her passed-out sister and her freaked-out mother and the blind lady in the living room calling out “What’s happening? What’s happening?” and, forgetting about our earlier tiff, instantly dove into action. She put a pillow under my head, got a cold compress for my chin, and called for an ambulance. And off we went to the Emergency Room at Georgetown Hospital, where I was given a tetanus shot and a local anesthetic, stitched up, and sent on my way, by now feeling just fine.

But how to get home? I was barefoot and wearing a light cotton robe over . . . well . . . nothing. So we called for a taxi, and when we walked into the lobby of our building — where a few people were still buzzing around the desk trying to find out who had been taken out in the ambulance — I held my head high, pointed to the big white dressing on my chin, and said, “You should see the other guy,” as I sashayed toward the elevator leaving them still wondering why I was barefoot and barely covered. I might have a scar on my chin for the rest of my life; but I saw no reason to sacrifice my dignity . . . or my sense of humor.

But enough about me. Washington in the ‘60s was a visually wondrous place: a city of monuments, museums, restored Colonial townhomes, mansions, parks, tree-lined streets, and wide avenues. And it still is.

But about those avenues . . .

When French engineer Pierre Charles L’Enfant created the plan for the layout of the City of Washington, he designed the streets in a grid pattern, with north-south streets being numbered and east-west streets named alphabetically. So far, so good. But then he criss-crossed those squares with diagonal avenues, and further added circles where all of those streets and avenues intersected, thus creating spaces for his vision of park-like areas for the enjoyment of the city’s residents. Sounds lovely, doesn’t it? Sort of a miniature Paris. But Monsieur L’Enfant could not, in the late 18th Century, have foreseen the invention of the motor vehicle, or the volume of 20th Century traffic that would follow.

And I haven’t yet mentioned the fact that he divided the city into four quadrants: Northwest, Northeast, Southwest, Southeast, each with its own grid of numbered and lettered streets . . . and its share of those diagonal avenues. So that the same address can appear in four different parts of the city, and when giving someone an address, you have to remember to specify which quadrant you’re talking about. So there might be, for example, a 300 K Street, N.W., N.E., S.W. and S.E. The eastern and western halves of the city are divided by the U.S. Capitol Building complex, as are the northern and southern halves; so to the east of the Capitol are First Street, N.E. and First Street, S.E.; to the north are “A” Street, N.E. and “A” Street, N.W.; to the west of the Capitol . . . Oh, what the hell! Just look at a map.

And lest I forget: some of the longer of those avenues — which, by the way, are named after the 50 U.S. states — extend from one quadrant into another, such as Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W. and Pennsylvania Avenue, S.E., which just seems to skip right over the Capitol along the way. Now, add to all of this confusion the amount of rush-hour traffic on a normal weekday, and what have you got? I’ll tell you what you’ve got . . . you’ve got
TOTAL FREAKIN’ CHAOS!!!

The invention of the traffic light was supposed to have mitigated the problem of the circles, and in most cases it did. But there are exceptions, due in large part to the fact that the D.C. Department of Transportation (DDOT ) is solely comprised of human beings — who by their very nature are fallible, and sometimes apparently also a little bit crazy. My favorite example is the light located where northbound 23rd Street, N.W. is stopped short by Washington Circle, N.W., which is also the meeting place of K Street, N.W., New Hampshire Avenue, N.W., and the infamous Pennsylvania Avenue — also N.W. at this point. That particular light mostly stays red for 23rd Street, and only turns to a flashing green right-turn arrow when — now here’s the fun part — the traffic on the circle, which always has the right of way, also has a green light at that point; so the 23rd Street traffic is trying to feed into the onrush of cars from the left, while at the same time trying to ease into the proper lane for their right turns onto Pennsylvania Avenue, or K Street, or New Hampshire Avenue, or the other half of 23rd Street northbound, or all the way around to the other side of K Street, or 23rd Street southbound, or . . .

Whew! Get my point?

But wait — I’m not finished. Take that mental image of the city streets as a whole, and superimpose on it a snow storm — not a little storm, but a nor’easter of biblical proportions. And have that storm hit the city on January 19, 1961 — the day before the scheduled Inauguration of John F. Kennedy, when half of the political, social, industrial, and financial elite of America are set to converge upon the city en masse to attend that inaugural event and the formal balls and parties that go with it. Now picture people trying to get home from work in that mess, with thousands — literally, thousands — of them having to abandon their cars when they couldn’t make it up an icy hill, or had managed to slide into a telephone pole, or each other. Can you say “total gridlock”? I can — because I was stuck in it, along with those thousands of others.

The usual ride from my office to my apartment building was about 15 to 20 minutes. My boss — my very first boss, Alvin — lived in the same direction but a little farther out, and my mother’s office was just a block from ours. So when the snow started to pile up, he offered to drive both of us home. We could have walked faster — and I actually knew someone in our apartment building who did. We left the parking garage around 5:00 p.m. By 8:00 p.m., we had made it roughly halfway home and were sitting at a dead stop in a lovely residential area (in the Northwest quadrant, if you’re interested), when Alvin suddenly realized that we were just around the corner from the home of some friends of his. Never one to be hindered by rules, he pulled out of the line of traffic onto the wrong side of the road where there were no cars, drove up the street and around the next corner and into his friends’ freshly cleared driveway. There were no cell phones in those days, so we couldn’t call ahead; instead, we simply rang the doorbell and invited ourselves in, where we spent a very pleasant couple of hours eating, drinking, laughing, and using the facilities, not necessarily in that order. When the traffic had finally cleared, we headed home, arriving around 10:30 p.m. — just 5-1/2 hours after we’d started out. And we were among the lucky ones.

*. *. *

As for the Inauguration, it took 1,000 D.C. employees, together with a contingent from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, working through the night to clear the inaugural parade route — first having towed more than 1,400 abandoned cars. But the job had to be done in order for the Constitutionally-mandated passing of the proverbial torch to take place as scheduled on the morning of January 20th, when John Fitzgerald Kennedy — the youngest person ever to have been elected to the Presidency of the United States, and the first Catholic in that office — did famously swear that oath . . . standing, once again hatless, outside the U.S. Capitol on that bitter cold January day. God bless America!

And thus began three years of exhilarating highs and demoralizing lows: the continuing fight for equal rights; the space race; the Bay of Pigs disaster; the Cuban Missile Crisis when Nikita Khrushchev finally “blinked”; Jackie Kennedy’s pillbox hats; little Caroline and John-John playing at their father’s feet in the Oval Office; a brother who became Attorney General and stood up to organized crime; a brother-in-law who founded the Peace Corps; Marilyn Monroe singing “Happy birthday, Mister President” in the White House (I’m still not sure whether that was a high or a low); a wall going up across Berlin . . .

*. *. *

And, on November 22, 1963, the assassination that brought an end to Camelot.

And for a moment the world joined hands, and wept . . .

Brendochka
6/22/23

For that whole month of July in 1952, we stayed with my aunt and uncle and their two sons: a six-year-old and a toddler. The boys had separate bedrooms, but during our stay they were moved in together, and we — all three of us — shared the other small room with a twin bed and a rented rollaway cot. We took turns sleeping on the cot, which was the prime spot because it was by the window and you got to sleep alone, while the other two had to share the twin bed against the opposite wall. I’ve already mentioned the record heat wave that hit D.C. that summer, but I haven’t yet described my aunt and uncle’s house. It was a duplex, or semi-detached, brick two-story, with a flat roof and no air-conditioning. In short, the second floor was a virtual sauna. And we were from up north. The D.C. climate was hell on earth.

But the company and the food were good, and somehow we survived the heat. Within a week, both my mother and sister had jobs, and I had made friends with some of the kids my age in the neighborhood. They had a great deal more freedom than my New Hampshire friends and I had ever had. One day we were able to take the bus downtown, where they showed me the wondrous sights of our nation’s capital: the White House, Capitol Hill, the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials . . . and the Washington Monument, where we rode the elevator up to the top, but made the gigantic mistake of walking down. All the way down — all 500 feet, all 896 steps down — because the elevator doesn’t make stops along the way so once you start walking, you’re in for the long haul. Our legs were rubbery by the time we hit bottom, and we had to find a park bench and literally hit bottom, sitting for a while before we could continue on our way home. Lesson learned: never do that again! (Also don’t do it in cute shoes.)

But I had seen my future from the top of that monument. Though I couldn’t then have predicted it, Washington was destined to become my city: the core of my universe, where I would spend most of the rest of my life reveling in the political, diplomatic, and economic activity at the axis of the world. I was on the verge of becoming a city girl. In reality, Washington in 1952 — although it seemed huge and sophisticated to me — was still a smallish city, with only a limited variety of cultural and social options unless you were a political insider. But it too was on the brink of a growth spurt, and the city and I were due to mature in tandem. My timing could not have been better.

The rest of the ‘50s sped past as we moved into our own apartment, I entered high school, hated it, graduated in 1955 at the age of 16 years and 3 months with the requisite straight A’s (except for PhysEd, at which I really stink) and a couple of awards . . .

. . . and made a deal with my mother. My sister had had to cut short her education in order to help support us, and I was feeling conflicted as to whether I should go to college when she hadn’t been able to, or to look for a job as she had done. So I said I’d postpone the decision for a couple of months and see whether I could find a job I liked over the summer. And that is when Fate took over: I interviewed for the perfect job in a small law firm. The lady at the employment agency told them I was 17; the junior partner in the firm was desperate for help; and they gave me a chance, on a three-month trial basis. I was there for seven years, learning about legal practice and procedure, and growing up the rest of the way. On my 19th birthday, I finally admitted to my real age, and no one cared.

*. *. *

The world was not idle during the decade of the ‘50s. The Korean War ended in 1953 after three bloody years in which hundreds of thousands of combatants on both sides were killed or wounded, in addition to the loss of an estimated total of two to three million civilians. To this day, there are still two Koreas — North and South — with a Demilitarized Zone separating them at the 38th Parallel. Communism continues to refuse to die.

On March 5, 1953, Iosif Vissarionovich Djugashvili — better known as Joseph Stalin, the despot who had ruled the Soviet Union with an iron fist since 1924 — breathed his last. But, despite a brief period of “glasnost” under Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin in the later part of the century, totalitarian rule in Russia has returned — and continues to refuse to die.

In 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first man-made satellite — named Sputnik 1 — into orbit, and the Space Race between the United States and the USSR began. To this day, the adversarial relationship between Russia and the United States continues to refuse to die.

In 1954, the case of Brown v. The Board of Education was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that segregation of schools was unconstitutional. Yet to this day, bigotry and racism also continue to refuse to die.

Some things just don’t want to go away; or perhaps it’s simply that we humans continue to refuse to learn.

And in 1952, King George VI of England died and the Crown passed to his elder daughter, affectionately known to her family as Lilibet. At just 26 years of age, she was officially inaugurated as Queen Elizabeth II, and reigned for a record 70 years, passing away at the age of 96 in the year 2022. “Long live the Queen,” indeed.

Inevitably, the ‘50s rolled toward the ‘60s. This was the age of Bill Haley and his Comets, the Everly Brothers, and Elvis; Alvin and the Chipmunks; JFK and Jackie; the jitterbug, the twist, and slow dancing; the T-bird and hot rods; Nikita Khrushchev banging his shoe on a desk at the United Nations; James Dean and Natalie Wood; drag racing; shirtwaist dresses with full skirts and layers of petticoats; and two-martini lunches. And for me, it was a new world of grown-up dating and a little bit of illegal drinking — they didn’t check IDs as carefully in those days. I learned to drive and my mother bought a car. And I gave up my thoughts of full-time college studies, but took night classes instead. Except for something called the Cold War, life was good, just the way it was.

In November of 1960, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was elected the 35th President of the United States. And the world began to change faster than it ever had before . . .

‘Til next time,
Brendochka
6/19/23

Do you remember when every car trip, no matter how short, was an adventure? Just the fifteen miles from our house in Woonsocket to my other grandparents’ house in Providence seemed like an endless journey. My sister and I snuggled into our respective corners of the back seat (I was always on the right side, she on the left, with a DMZ in the middle), and played counting games: who could count the most gas stations or BurmaShave signs or whatever on her side of the road. And in December, on the way home after dark, we counted lighted Christmas trees, both indoors and out, and argued over whether wreaths were included.

When we made the move to be nearer my father’s brothers and sisters in Manchester, New Hampshire — a full eighty-seven miles away! — it felt like we were crossing the entire country. Of course, there was no I-495 interstate then, so it wasn’t the quick trip it is today. But it was better, because we got to go through all the little towns along the way and count the houses with red shutters, or the schools . . . or whatever.

The house my father had rented for us was cute but tiny, and we didn’t stay there long before finding the perfect place and settling in. And here it still is, looking the same except for the paint color and the landscaping — and the SUV in front (bad timing, Google Maps). There were no SUVs in 1948; we had a dark blue Chevy, our first new car since the War. It was bullet-shaped and beautiful, with a manual transmission and windows that had to be rolled down by hand, and a cigarette lighter where now we have cell phone chargers. It was perfect, except for the infernal cigarette thing.

The summer was mostly spent making a few friends in the new neighborhood, and — miracle of miracles! — getting my first bicycle: a red Columbia two-wheeler with a bell and a basket. Soon I was tearing around the neighborhood and investigating the hot spots, such as they were. My favorite was Chris and Harry’s — the little neighborhood market, where the owners would let me hang out and read the comic books for free because I always snacked on ice cream (coffee, with chocolate sprinkles), candy, or potato chips and a Coke while I was reading, so they actually made more money than they would have if I had just bought the comic books. Years later, when I went back with my own son and daughter to visit, Chris was still there and he remembered me: I was “the smart-mouthed kid who always got straight A’s.” What a reputation! He also remembered my family, and who all of my best friends had been. You have to love a small town.

I don’t remember being nervous about moving to a new city, a new school, and all new friends. I was just nine, and it was exciting. And in September, I was enrolled as a sixth-grade student at Chandler Elementary School, just two and a half blocks down the street from our house. The New Hampshire schools had eight grades of elementary school (nine, counting kindergarten) and four of high school — no middle school at all — so while my sixth-grade classmates were only eleven or twelve years old, I was also side-by-side with upper-classmen as old as fourteen. And I hadn’t gotten much taller over the summer. But so what? I just stood as straight and tall as I could and marched right into the fray. Of course, we didn’t tolerate bullying in those days . . . so school was better then.

There was a bit of a glitch that first day, when the principal told my mother she thought a nine-year-old didn’t belong in the sixth grade with the older kids, and that the more advanced courses might also present a problem. But you didn’t mess with my mother when it came to her daughters — she was prepared. Remember that fifth-grade report card with all the “A’s” and the single “B” with the circle around it? She whipped that out of her purse, along with the official document showing that I had been promoted to sixth grade, and asked what possible benefit there could be in having me repeat a grade I had already aced. The principal finally conceded and said we’d give it a try, but no promises.

Long story short: I stayed with my class — the youngest, the shortest, but perfectly assimilated; in fact, I had even managed to be accepted into the “in” crowd. Not the pot-smoking, sex-crazed teenagers of the later part of the century, but the clean-cut, fun-loving, poodle-skirt-wearing, jitterbugging kids of the early 1950s.

We hung out at each other’s houses, went to the movies at the Palace every Saturday, and joined the YWCA (the boys were at the YMCA), where we had swimming lessons, craft classes, monthly co-ed dances, and put on shows where I first learned that I loved playing the comic roles. And we all walked home together after the dances at night, because there was no reason not to. It was safer then.

And all too soon, we graduated. Most of us went on to Central High, though a few enrolled at St. Anselm’s, the Catholic high school on the other side of town. And we took different courses, and we lost touch. I still remember them all, though: Sandy (no, not John Travolta’s “Sandy”), Patty, Mary Alice, Diana and Shirley, and the boys, David G., David H., Terry, Robert and Bobby. But I made new high school friends, and three of us — Marlene, Carolyn and I — have remained close over all these years, though we live in different parts of the country now.

*. *. *

My sister had graduated from Central High just three months before I entered as a freshman. She had an outstanding reputation among the faculty members: straight-A student (that old family requirement), active in a couple of clubs, worked in the school library . . . and pretty much an all-around teacher’s pet, or “brown-nose.” And I wasted no time ripping her hard-earned reputation to shreds.

I met my new BFFs in English class, first period, first day of high school. Marlene and Carolyn had gone to a different elementary school than I had, and were already friends. I’m not sure why they particularly noticed me . . . oh, wait — yes, I do! It seems my dear sister, Merna, had been in the same English class, and had made her mark as one of the teacher’s favorites. So as Miss Hoben was taking the roll and came to my name, she recognized the last name and exclaimed, for all the world to hear, “Not Merna’s sister??!!!” I nodded a silent “yes.”

Teacher: “No!”
Me: “Yes.”
Teacher (louder): “No!”
Me (quieter): “Yes.”
Teacher (even louder): “NO!!”
Me (losing patience now): “Yesssss!”

I was doomed. But Marlene and Carolyn were curious, and after class they asked me what that had been about. So I told them, and made it quite clear that I was nothing like my big sister. After that, we were inseparable: the fearsome threesome, who also had another memorable class together later in the day: General Science.

Mr. Tate, our science teacher, was a quiet, serious, professorial type, easily taken advantage of. As a newly-formed triumvirate, we of course chose seats next to each other, about three rows from the front: Marlene on the left, Carolyn on the right, and yours truly dead center, where I could do the most damage, and also be the one to pass the notes back and forth.

Now, I love Marlene dearly. She’s kind, fun-loving, decent, and smart. But, let’s face it — we all have our weak points, and science was hers. So when Mr. Tate would finish explaining a process or a concept to the class, and asked if anyone had any questions, invariably Marlene’s hand would be the first one in the air. He would then ask what part she didn’t understand, and she would usually reply, “All of it.” The poor man would then begin again at the beginning, pausing periodically to ask whether she understood that part, and she would always reply, “Yes.” So he would go on, item by item, until he reached the end. Then: “Do you understand now?”

And here’s where it got to be interesting. Marlene — who, I swear to you, was not being intentionally funny — would reply, “Well, not quite.” And he never learned. The next question, of course, was, “Well, what part don’t you understand?” And her answer? Anybody? Now, let’s not always see the same hands.

“All of it.” (Collective “groan” from the class.) Poor Mr. Tate.

That science class was on the ground level of the older of the two buildings that comprised Central High at that time, and of course was not air-conditioned. There were also no screens on the windows, and one warm spring day, a pigeon dropped by to see what was going on. Mr. Tate’s favorite seat was a stool located at the end of his lab bench, and as he sat there on that mild afternoon, our winged visitor perched at the end of the bench, made itself comfortable, cocked its head to one side, and stared that teacher dead in the eye. Neither moved for fully a minute as Mr. Tate also tilted his head and met that pigeon’s gaze. No one in the class made a sound . . . until I couldn’t stand it any longer. Unable to resist, I broke the silence:

“Birds of a feather . . .”

The resulting roar of laughter from the class scared the poop out of that poor pigeon — literally. Thus having relieved itself, it somehow then found its way back out the window as Mr. Tate was left to clean up the mess. For whatever reason, I was never reprimanded; I guess he had a sense of humor after all. And I still got my “A” for the semester, which was a very good thing because it would have been really difficult to explain to my mother that I’d gotten a “B” because of a peripatetic pigeon.

*. *. *

We regularly ate lunch in a booth at Marshall’s Drug Store around the corner from the school, pored over movie magazines like Photoplay and Modern Screen, collected a very young Tony Bennett’s recordings, and swooned over Marlon Brando and Kirk Douglas. We were the teens of the ‘50s, loving life.

And the school year passed all too quickly. Because that summer, my parents separated and my world fell completely apart.

Before I knew what had hit me, we were packing up — my mother, my sister and I — and moving to Washington, D.C., where my mother’s younger brother and his family lived and could help us find a new life . . . and, most importantly, jobs for my mother and sister. On July 3, 1952, we made the long train ride into the unknown, leaving behind the home, the school and the friends I loved. I was no longer that nine-year-old heading into a new adventure four years earlier; I was 13 now, and I was grief-stricken.

I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like if we had stayed in New Hampshire. On the one hand, I look at the good, more conventional lives my friends from Manchester have had, and there’s much to envy. But on the other hand — although I could not have foreseen it — Washington had a different set of opportunities and temptations and complications waiting for me when we stepped off that train . . . and into the hottest, steamiest, muggiest, most unbearable summer Washington had experienced in years. What the hell had we done??!!! Only time would tell.

To be continued . . .

Brendochka
6/15/23

Ted Kaczynski – infamously known as the Unabomber — died in prison this week at the age of 81, apparently at a time and in a manner of his own choosing. Diabolically brilliant, he seems to have found a way to commit suicide in prison. He had spent the last 27 years paying for the lives he had destroyed — three killed and 23 others seriously injured — between the years of 1978-‘95. He will not be missed.

Thinking back to those years, when people in universities, Congressional offices, and even their own homes were afraid to open packages delivered by mail, I am reminded of some of the other long-term periods of fear through which we have lived, and how those experiences have changed our collective perceptions of safety, and of what it means to live in a free society.

For those of us who can remember back to the ‘60s, there was the rash of 159 commercial plane hijackings — 85 to Cuba alone — between 1961 and 1973. These were mostly politically motivated, and not done for the purpose of taking lives. But they did have the effect of making people think twice about getting onto a plane to anywhere. I recall taking my sister to the airport to board a flight to the Bahamas via Miami. As she handed her ticket to the airline agent and walked toward the gate, I called out her name. She looked back and I waved at her, shouting, “Say hello to Fidel [Castro] for me.” Me and my big mouth! Today, of course, we both would immediately be taken into custody; but at the time, those hijackings were so commonplace and security generally so lax, hardly anyone paid attention. A couple of people did laugh. Not really funny, though.

On a more local level, there were a couple of cases that made London’s Jack the Ripper look like an amateur. One was Albert DeSalvo, charmingly dubbed the Boston Strangler. Between 1962 and ‘64, he killed 13 women in the Boston area. Though he had confessed, the evidence could not definitively tie him to the murders, and he was sentenced in 1967 to life in prison for multiple rapes; and the women of Boston could finally sleep peacefully. He had only served six years before being stabbed to death in the prison infirmary in 1973. His guilt was at last established beyond doubt by DNA evidence when his body was exhumed 40 years later, in 2013. So long, Albert.

And who can forget Jeffrey Dahmer, the “Milwaukee Cannibal,” who terrorized that area between 1978 and 1991, during which time he killed and dismembered 13 male victims. Yecchhh . . . and good riddance.

*. *. *

But when we entered the 21st Century, things really amped up. I need hardly mention the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Even those who weren’t yet born or were very young at the time are familiar with the details of that day. But it’s the personal stories that make it real.

I was on my way to work on that bright, crisp, early fall morning, heading toward the ramp that would take me from Virginia’s Arlington Boulevard to the Key Bridge and into the District of Columbia. As usual, I was listening to an all-music radio station, when the programming was interrupted by a news flash announcing that a plane had flown into one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. How on earth could that happen on such a clear day? Had the pilot fallen asleep, or been taken ill? Was it mechanical failure? Whatever the reason, it was a calamity. And then the second announcement: the other tower had been hit by yet another plane. This, then, was clearly no accident. This was terrorism on American soil.

I had just reached the place where I could either continue on into the city and my office, or take the road that would lead me back home. I did not want to be alone, and decided to go to work — a decision for which I would always be grateful. For, had I decided to head home, that road would have taken me directly past the Pentagon and into the path of the next plane to come crashing to earth.

When I arrived at the office, the scene was as I had expected — no one was working. As we stood together, talking about the possible meaning of what had just happened, my phone rang. It was a friend who was at home on maternity leave; she was watching the news unfold on TV, and needed someone to talk to. Suddenly, she screamed into the phone, “Oh, my God! Another one just hit the Pentagon!” Our offices were located on the banks of the Potomac River, facing toward Virginia. I ran to the nearest window, looked out across the river in the direction of the Pentagon on the other side, and saw a gigantic plume of smoke rising toward the sky. Time — and my heart — seemed to stop. Was this war?

Another phone line rang; it was my boss, who was still at home and calling to tell me to go home. That was unnecessary; I had already decided to do just that. But first I had to call my family to let them know I was all right. But the phone lines — both landlines and cell towers — were now jammed. I finally decided to just leave, head back to Virginia to try to get to my sister, and get us both home. She worked in suburban Arlington for the Association of the U.S. Army (not located near the Pentagon). In the meantime, I would keep trying to call from the car.

And on the way, I noticed a strange phenomenon: although the streets were gridlocked by people in their cars trying to get out of the city, there was no sense of panic or hostility. Drivers were actually yielding the right of way to other drivers, and no one was leaning on their horn or yelling. We were all in this together, and that sense of unity only grew stronger in the days, weeks and months ahead.

My son, who lived in Georgia, had been trying to call me to find out about my sister. He knew who she worked for, but didn’t know her location and feared that she might have been in the Pentagon. He somehow got through to me, and I reassured him as I continued my slow drive toward her office. When I finally got there, I found a vacant metered parking space in front of her building, and automatically pulled out change to feed the meter. But the slot was jammed by a coin, which explained why the space was vacant, and for a moment I worried that I might get a ticket if I parked there. Then I came to my senses. What police officer was going to be checking parking violations today? Didn’t they have better things to do? Duh! (Final note: I did not get a ticket.)

I found my sister in her office, relieved to see me as she too had been unable to get an open phone line. We headed home in the still jammed traffic, and finally made it — normally a ten-minute drive — in about an hour. And then began the period of disbelief and mourning.

There were so many other stories: a co-worker who was in New York and had to run for her life; another who was in her car on the road alongside the Pentagon, where I might have been, when that plane flew right above her; and some who lost family members, friends, or business associates on that day. I am grateful that no one I knew was killed. But in some sense, we all lost so much on 9-11; and on each anniversary, when the films are once more shown on news programs and documentaries, we relive the pain and disbelief as though seeing and feeling it again for the first time.

It happened that we had two family birthdays that September in 2001 — my sister’s on the 18th and my granddaughter’s on the 23rd — so my sister and I drove the 100 miles to my daughter’s home for a quiet celebration of both. As I walked into the house, my three-year-old grandson came running toward me, yelling, “Nana! Nana! Did you hear? Some bad guys blowed up a building!” And once again, my heart seemed to stop. What could I say to him? And what do you say to those innocent children who had just lost a parent? How do you ever make them feel safe again?

*. *. *

Before we even had time to begin to heal, along came the Anthrax killer one week later, on 9-18, beginning a string of mailings containing the deadly powder to U.S. Senators, members of the news media and others, killing five and infecting 17 others. We even received a suspicious letter in my office — an envelope that was leaking a powdery white substance. A nationwide protocol had been established for this type of situation. The mail room was immediately evacuated and closed off; the police were called; the mailroom employees were sent to the nearest hospital for testing; the HAZMAT team arrived, looking oddly like those guys in the white suits and masks from “E.T.”; and everyone was sent outside until we received the all-clear. It took a while, so some of us who had not been exposed went to lunch while we waited. It was ultimately determined that it was not Anthrax, but they never did tell us what it actually was.

The investigation of the crimes eventually focused on one Bruce Edward Ivins, though nothing was resolved for years. He committed suicide in 2008 — the same year that DNA evidence finally connected him to the crimes — without ever actually having been charged. The FBI case was at last closed in 2010.

*. *. *

And just five months after the 9-11 attacks, along came John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, now and forever memorialized as the D.C. Snipers, to embark on a shooting spree that would terrorize the District of Columbia and surrounding areas of Maryland and Virginia into October of 2002. Their targets were chosen so randomly and were so widespread, you never knew where a bullet with your name on it might come from. I can still see myself stooping down behind my car to pump gas or put groceries into the trunk, looking in all directions at possible places where a sniper might be hiding. People stayed home a lot more for a while.

*. *. *

So why have I suddenly veered from my tiptoe through the tulips of the 1940s and ‘50s, to focus on the macabre and frightening crimes of more recent decades? I have no idea, but I’m inclined to blame it all on Ted Kaczynski for having made the news again and brought all of this to my mind. It’s an uncertain world out there — but then again, it always has been. There is no consensus on a possible solution to our problems at this point in time, though there is no shortage of opinions. But the beauty of living in America is that we are free to differ in our opinions, and to continue seeking reasonable, humane answers to the questions that plague us.

And as we wait for those solutions, I offer you the advice of a long-ago friend of mine — who did not, however, guarantee the accuracy of the Latin version: “Illegitimi non carborundum est.” Loosely translated: “Don’t let the bastards wear you down.”

And on that note, I remain

Faithfully yours,
Brendochka
6-12-23

I have surprisingly clear memories of my earliest school years, which, unlike most kids, I actually loved. Maybe because the principal, Margaret Thompson, was my mother’s best friend so I got away with a lot of stuff.

And there it is, still standing: my elementary school until we moved away when I was nine. It’s been enlarged, with a more modern addition to the front, and I’m not sure it is still used as a school, but it’s basically the same red brick building I remember.

Our classes, by today’s standards, were, quite literally, elementary. We had Arithmetic — math was for high school and college; English — which included grammar, spelling, vocabulary, and sentence structure, as a result of which I still can’t split an infinitive or end a sentence with a preposition without experiencing major guilt; American History — when Native Americans were still referred to as Indians; Geography — we knew all 48 state capitals (Alaska and Hawaii hadn’t made it onto the flag yet); Science — mostly plants, as I recall, and we did learn the difference between an insect and an arachnid, but nothing about reproduction; and a separate course for Penmanship. Yes, I can write cursive. I can also read a non-digital clock, but that’s a whole other matter.

There were also weekly classes in Art and Music, neither of which I had any talent for (there’s one of those sneaky prepositions again!), but they were just for fun. And every day started with a recitation of the “Pledge of Allegiance” to the American flag, and the Lord’s Prayer. I guess there were no atheists then — or if there were, they didn’t talk about it. And no one paid much attention to that little Constitutional thing about separation of church and state.

Also, we didn’t have “winter break” — we had Christmas vacation. And we sang Christmas carols in music class, and drew pictures of Santa Claus and Christmas trees and the baby Jesus in art class. No one cared that I was the only Jewish kid in my class . . . least of all me. We couldn’t have a tree at home because of my grandparents, so I got my Christmas fix at school.

We didn’t have school buses in our town back then; we had neighborhood schools, and we walked. My sister was four years ahead of me in school, so until I finished second grade, she was able to walk with me; but after that, she was in junior high halfway across town. So at that point I decided I could walk to school and back by myself. Picture this little bitty six-year-old, strutting my stuff for nearly a half mile along a couple of our neighborhood’s busier streets, crossing at an intersection with no traffic lights, and refusing to let my mother come with me because I was not a baby, thank you very much. And as I rounded the last corner by the Catholic church, there she was, halfway down the block, anxiously waiting to see my little head with its curly blond hair come into view. I can’t believe she actually let me get away with doing that. But those were different times.

I clearly remember my first day of school, when my mother had to accompany me for registration. She was so sure I was going to be traumatized — what we now call having “separation anxiety” — and I’m sure she was terribly disappointed when I told her she could leave now. There was one little girl, Norma something, who was crying her eyes out, and I recall thinking how silly she was because there was nothing to be afraid of. It was just school. I have to wonder: if I hadn’t had a big sister, would I have been so brave?

*. *. *

Did you know that our female teachers — and all our elementary school teachers were women in those days — could not be married? That was the case in my school district, at least. If a teacher should happen to want a family of her own, she had to quit teaching. I guess it was because a married female teacher might become pregnant, and that would raise that whole reproduction question, and we certainly couldn’t have that, could we? As a result, most of the women teachers were — sorry to say — middle-aged and unattractive. And frequently cranky. Except for my second-grade teacher, Miss Fitzgerald, who was young and pretty and sweet. She quit teaching while I was still at that school, so I assume she had met Mr. Right and had a fairy-tale life as a housewife and mother of six screaming . . . oops, sorry . . . lived happily ever after.

*. *. *

Do we want to talk about report cards? Every child’s worst nightmare. And that was especially true for my sister and me, because — as you’ve probably gathered from the title of this chapter — anything less than an “A” was considered a criminal offense, or at the very least a family tragedy. “Bs” were fine for other people’s kids, but not for us, because anything below an “A” — even an A-minus — meant we just weren’t trying hard enough. I got a “B” once in fifth grade — in history, I think — and I can still see the disappointment on my mother’s face as she drew a big circle around that “B,” in ink so that it would never disappear. You’d have thought I had told her I was pregnant! They didn’t worry about our little psyches in those days; just applied the pressure and watched those grades come rolling in. And of course in my house it wasn’t just our parents — it was a family affair for the aunts, the uncles, and the grandparents we wouldn’t want to disappoint, not ever. But we knew, because they told us over and over again, that it was all because they loved us and just wanted us to “succeed” — whatever that meant.

As for the stuff I got away with, it was never anything major, even by the standards of the ‘40s. But I was mischievous and kept my teachers and the principal on their toes, and apparently pretty well entertained. The one episode that sticks in my mind happened when I was in second grade. Once a year, each school was visited by a dentist so that all the children could have a regular checkup — free of charge. I think there must have been a lot of poor (sorry — economically challenged) families in the town, but grownups never discussed those things in front of us kids so I don’t really know; but it was nice that the schools tried to fill the gap. (Ouch, sorry again — bad pun.)

Anyway, the dentist had come to our school and set up shop in a small office just up the hall from my classroom. It happened that our teacher — the lovely Miss Fitzgerald — was called away for some reason and left us on our honor for a few minutes. Bad move, Teach! While all the other students just giggled and threw paper wads at each other, I decided to sneak up the hall to see what was going on with the dentist in the torture chamber. My little friends tried to stop me, but I was obstinate even then, and off I went, tiptoeing as though that would make me invisible. But I had to tiptoe past the first grade classroom, and that teacher — the perpetually cranky Miss Allen — had eyes and ears like bat radar. So of course I was caught and sent to the principal’s office. That’s right: my mother’s best friend, Principal Thompson. Naturally she had to do her duty and call my mother to report my misdeed; but as I was sent back to my class with a stern reprimand, I distinctly heard the two women laughing together on the phone. If the school had given grades for sneakiness, I most certainly would have flunked — I was book-smart, not street-smart. But I worked on it, and I did get a little more proficient over time.

I remember getting an allowance to cover the cost of the little cartons of milk that we bought each day to go with our free school lunches, and the stamps we purchased at school and saved in little paper books to exchange for “war bonds” — government savings bonds given a patriotic name during The War. All of our supplies — books, paper, pencils, erasers — were provided by the school. Free education really was free, except for the milk.

*. *. *

When I was nine and my sister fourteen, our parents told us we were moving to New Hampshire. Although it meant leaving our Bubbe and the aunts and uncles behind, we were both thrilled — she, because she hated her junior high school for some reason; and I, because it was a new adventure. So off we went, heading toward the 1950s and a whole new world of friends, dances, bicycles, piano lessons, swimming classes at the “Y” . . . and puberty. But that last one’s a big one, so let’s save it for another time, shall we? Or maybe never.

Just sayin’ . . .

TTFN,
Brendochka
6/12/23

I am compelled today to interrupt my recent meanderings through the years of my youth in order to reflect upon something that’s been occupying my mind for the past several days: death.

No, this is not going to be a doleful declaration of depression. But I have recently received bad news about several old friends, friends of friends, and spouses of friends, and I’m reminded that this is one of the downsides of living long — you start losing people. And when I think of the people I’ve lost, I always think about my sister Merna, who — despite a lot of years of sibling rivalry and arguments — for the last quarter century of her life became my closest confidante, travel buddy, and all-around best friend. So it’s really a tribute to her that I offer you today.

We were exactly 5-1/2 years apart in age (she was older), so in the beginning we didn’t have much in common. But once I was able to walk and talk, she decided it was her job to be — not my babysitter — but my teacher. I’ve mentioned before how she taught me to read, write and do simple arithmetic by the time I was three. From that point on, I guess she considered me more of an equal, and we spent a lot of time together . . . much of it fighting and driving our parents crazy. But, that’s sisters for you.

Merna was always the more serious sister: well-behaved at home and in school, focused on her studies and becoming a grownup as quickly as possible. (Except for that sitting-on-the-cat episode . . . but maybe I should finally let that go.) I, on the other hand, was always the mischief-maker, determined to make Merna’s life as miserable as I could without actually causing physical damage.

But there were times we worked together. I remember when she was in 8th or 9th grade, maybe 12 or 13 years old (I would have been 7 or 8), and her class was reading Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, of all things. She had to learn Mark Antony’s soliloquy at Caesar’s funeral — a long, complicated piece of work. I was enlisted to hold the script and prompt her as she tried to memorize and recite it — over, and over, and over again. And by the time she finally had it down pat . . . so did I. And I would gleefully get on her last nerve by reciting it from memory along with her, until one day she finally threw down the script and stormed out of the room. We didn’t speak for a couple of days; but she aced that speech when the time came, just to prove to me that she could.

By the way, I still remember the first half of it: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears . . .” Okay, that’s enough.

Skipping over the rest of our school years, it’s the adult years I remember best. As young, single women in the ‘50s, we dutifully lived at home with our parents (in our case, just our mother) until we married, or until we became “fallen women,” whichever came first. Those were the days! And because our mother — who, I assure you, did have many fine qualities, was also controlling, prying, jealous, and about as puritanical as anyone I’ve ever known — Merna and I had at some point in our development decided that we needed to band together in order to remain even marginally sane. So we went shopping together, restaurant-hopping together, partying together, and exchanging typical sister-secrets behind the closed door of our shared bedroom.

Fast forward about 30 years. Merna has embarked on a successful career in human resources, while I have gone into the legal field, gotten married, had one baby, moved to California, had a second baby, awakened to the fact that the marriage was a mistake, and moved back east and — out of financial necessity — into the old homestead. Which is when Merna got smart and became that “fallen” — a.k.a. independent — woman our mother always talked about. She moved out. And over all those years, even long distance, we fought, made up, fought, made up . . . And today, I can’t for the life of me remember what we found important enough to fight about — but I do know who was to blame.

One more fast forward, this time to 1991. We’ve matured, and are now well settled. We’ve had great jobs, my son and daughter are grown, and we’ve each traveled to different parts of the world. And on September 18th — Merna’s birthday, by the way — our mother passes away after a brief illness. And as we begin to make the necessary funeral preparations, we also begin — as people in these situations often do — to reminisce. And it suddenly dawns on both of us . . . AHA! She was the cause of it all. Our own mother, wanting and needing to be the center of attention, had caused most of the rifts between us by planting the seeds of discord. And the fog lifted; we became BFFs.

Both being single, we thought about moving in together — and quickly came to our senses. You see, as much as we had in common, in so many ways we were total opposites, as is the case with many siblings. Besides the basic serious-vs.-mischievous personality difference, there were other things — each small on its own, but cumulatively deadly to potential roommates. I’m a night person; she was an early bird. I love classical music; she preferred the “golden oldies.” I’m obsessed with all things Russian; her preferences were the histories of the U.S. Civil War and the kings and queens of England. I adore ballet and opera; she was hooked on Sinatra and Streisand. I lived for a while in Prague and Moscow; she lived in Bangkok and Saigon. So we wisely continued to live separately, but just a block apart, and there was peace. We dined out together, and found common ground in the joys of the musical theater (six times to Les Miz alone). And then, we began to travel together.

Now, I’ve mentioned that I liked to yank her chain every now and then, and I saw no reason to stop doing that as we got older. Because our birthdays were exactly six months — well, five years and six months — apart, we always took each other out to dinner on our respective birthdays, celebrating both the birthday and the half-birthday. There was the year I had had a bit too much of the bubbly on an empty stomach and proceeded to pass out on my way to the ladies’ room in our favorite five-star restaurant, coming to as a waiter lifted me off the floor and onto a chair . . . at a table with two men who had been enjoying a quiet business dinner. You can imagine Merna’s reaction to that one!

And the shopping excursion to one of our favorite clothing stores, when we squeezed onto the packed elevator (there was only one), and I was the last person on, with no room to turn around. As the door slowly closed behind me, I found myself facing a squished crowd of people, all completely silent. I looked around at the uncomfortable faces, took a deep breath, and said, “You’re probably wondering why I’ve called you all here today.” As the silence dissolved into surprised laughter, Merna tried — unsuccessfully, because there was no room — to sink to the floor in embarrassment. Heh, heh, heh. Gotcha!

But the travels were the best. It all started on the first anniversary of our mother’s funeral. She was laid to rest near her family members in a cemetery in Rhode Island, so as long as we were traveling up there for that memorial, we decided also to spend a little relaxing time at “the Cape” — Cape Cod, Massachusetts — or, as I think of it, Heaven on Earth.

Rather surprisingly for two people who really didn’t care for the beach, we both immediately fell in love with this perfect peninsula of surf and sand, picturesque towns with their sea-washed shingled cottages, delightful specialty shops, incredible seafood, and super-friendly people. We found our favorite inn and returned year after year, with some interruptions for other, business-related travel and the occasional surgery for one or the other of us. And then we discovered cruising.

Wanting something different, in 2005 Merna suggested a cruise. I was hesitant because I thought I’d be bored just lounging around on the ship’s deck, but I agreed to try a one-week excursion along the Canadian east coast. And we found one more thing we had in common — a love of life at sea aboard Holland America’s “Dam” ships: the Maasdam, the Zeuderdam, and the Eurodam. Each cruise was longer and more wonderful than the last. I even managed to get up early each morning for the day’s shore excursion, and Merna stayed up late for the after-dinner shows and a bit of gambling in the ship’s casino. It’s called compromise, and we had finally figured out how to do it. Our mother would have been so pissed!

We chose our excursions in advance, agreeing on each one; shopped ‘til we dropped (another mutual passion); and ate until we could eat no more. We signed up for the spa delights (massages, beauty treatments, and foot reflexology), and played — and won — musical trivia games in the piano bar. And we toured the Canadian east coast (from Boston to Montreal, via Bar Harbor, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and down the St. Lawrence Seaway to Quebec City). In one of our stops ashore, we ate lunch at a seaside seafood restaurant, where I gave lessons to a family from the U.S. midwest on how to disassemble and eat a boiled Maine lobster, as melted butter and lobster juice ran from my wrists to my elbows, and Merna silently thought, “Oh, my God, there she goes again.” And in Montreal, following a ride through the streets of that lovely city in a horse-drawn carriage, she cringed as I fed apples (provided by our hotel doorman) to the horse named Nagano, who showed his appreciation by slobbering all over me. And when we got home after that cruise, we agreed that it had been too short and immediately began searching for the next one.

That turned out to be Alaska, the very next year — cold, rainy, outdoorsy, and absolutely wonderful. And in 2009, the final — and easily the best — cruise was along the Baltic Sea coast, from Copenhagen, Denmark to Tallinn, Estonia; Helsinki, Finland; St. Petersburg, Russia; Warnemunde (and a long train ride to Berlin), Germany; Stockholm, Sweden; and back to Copenhagen. The details don’t really matter; just suffice it to say, it too was fabulous. And then, as we were trying to decide how we would ever find something to top it, Merna began a downhill slide that took her through a series of surgeries and a final, devastating, two-year battle for her life that she ultimately lost in October of 2017. And I had lost my best friend.

That was nearly six years ago. Whenever something interesting happens — good or not so good — I still reach for the phone to call her. We used to call each other a dozen times a day, until one of us would finally declare a halt; and that’s a tough habit to break. When I can’t think of a name or other detail from the dim, distant past, I know she’ll be able to remember . . . but she’s not there to ask. And when I want to share a bit of trivia, a peeve, or a recipe, she’s the first one I think to call. But her number has been disconnected.

Sister relationships are hard to define, and impossible to replace. So I try to stay focused on the happy memories, the funny incidents, and the old family photos. Like this one, taken 20+ years ago, with my two beautiful grandbabies:

And they always make me smile.

‘Til next time,
Brendochka
6/10/23

Yes, younger readers, there are still people alive who remember the 1940s and are lucid enough to write about them. I was an infant/toddler in the earliest years of that decade, but I do remember the later half, and even parts of World War II, referred to simply as “The War.” There was no other war then, as far as I knew — or at least none that mattered because no one talked about them.

Keep in mind, as I flash back to those times, that my viewpoint was that of a little kid, so everything seemed so much bigger. Our street, for example, was considered a main thoroughfare. Returning for a visit years later as an adult, I was shocked to see that it’s just a two-lane street. And our huge front and back yards are merely little patches of green. Different perspective, now. And through the miracle of Google Maps, there it is, pictured below:

Looking at it today, it actually seems to be in better shape than it was then, and appears to have had all of the old asbestos siding shingles removed. I’m also glad to see they’ve added fire escapes, because the one narrow inside stairway made this place a death trap in case of fire. Gone are the shrubs along the front, and the lilac bushes I loved for their fragrance in the spring. My grandparents owned it, and raised their five children in the big apartment on the first floor. Later, we — my parents, older sister and I — occupied the second floor front, with an aunt and uncle in each of the rear r man who was quiet, respectful, and who we hardly knew was there most of the time. He paid his rent on time every week, minded his own business, and didn’t burn the place down; and that was all that mattered.

I remember the bedroom I shared with my sister Merna: twin beds, a night stand between them, one closet, one dresser, and flowered curtains on the window. There was one tiny bathroom for the four of us. We mostly hung out in the big kitchen with its ice box and oil stove and the table where we ate all our meals. The parlor (not grand enough to be called a living room) was for “company,” or for evenings spent around the radio listening to Jack Benny, Fibber McGee and Molly, Duffy’s Tavern, or President Roosevelt’s fireside chats. And of course, in the summer, the Boston Red Sox baseball games from Fenway Park.

My sister and I sometimes played on the floor of the parlor, which was the only room with a carpet — but only on rainy days or after dark; the rest of the time we were outside, even in the coldest of New England winters, where we were sent to “get some fresh air,” but more likely just to get us out of the way. Indoor play included Checkers, Tiddly Winks, and paper dolls, or reading our Superman or Archie comic books. I remember Merna teaching me to read, write and do simple arithmetic at a time when I was considered by the adults to be too young to learn those things. Thanks to my big sister, I was reading newspapers by the time I was three. My parents used to make me read for all of their friends, like some sort of carnival act, and everyone thought I was a genius. I’m not. I just had a big sister who didn’t know she was doing the “impossible.”

And I remember some things about The War: the flag with three stars in my grandparents’ front window, for their two sons and one son-in-law fighting overseas; the ration coupons for certain scarce food items like sugar and butter; the blackout curtains on the windows to be drawn shut during air raid drills; and the scary war newsreels in the movie theater every Saturday. And my father, rejected for military service as “4-F” because of his flat feet, doing his part for the War effort by working in the shipyard in Providence, actually helping to build the warships like the ones that landed at Normandy on D-Day. And everybody saving things— scrap metal, rubber, even newspapers — to contribute to the War Drive.

And who could forget the day The War ended in Europe? My sister and I were outside in the front yard as usual, when my mother hollered out the window, “The War is over!” I didn’t fully comprehend, but Merna did, and she let out a “Yippee!” and began dancing around the apple tree, chanting “The War is over! The War is over!” So of course I had to join in, because . . . well, because she was my big sister and if she was happy, then so was I. And the whole family was happy because all the uncles were coming home, alive. No one knew about PTSD in those days; the veterans and their families simply reunited and re-adapted, some better than others. We were lucky.

*. *. *

I remember digging a round hole in the dirt with the heel of my shoe to play marbles in the back yard. And sitting on the grass, searching for four-leaf clovers. Or playing “Red Rover, Red Rover” and “Simon Says” with our neighborhood friends. Roller skating down the sidewalk and knowing where every crack in the concrete was that we had to avoid. And sending away for our favorite movie stars’ autographed pictures, then waiting breathlessly for the mail to arrive every day. And in the winter, sledding down the same little hill where we roller-skated in the summer. Happy times indeed.

I also remember nearly every adult smoking, we kids living in a perpetual blue-gray haze of second-hand smoke, and ashtrays everywhere filled to the brim with stale cigarette butts. And being given a quarter to run to the store for a pack of Camels or Chesterfields or Lucky Strikes for one member of the family or another. There was no legal age requirement for buying carcinogens in those days, because no one knew what a carcinogen was.

*. *. *

My grandfather was a baker, with his own bakery just down the street; rye bread, challah, yeast rolls and bagels were his specialties, and Bubbe contributed her incredible “babka” coffee cakes redolent with cinnamon and raisins. Saturday was the only day Zayde didn’t work — it was the Sabbath, when he would walk to the Synagogue and spend the day in prayer. After sundown he would walk back, with a stop at the neighborhood bar to knock down a couple of whiskeys with his friends before coming home to a late supper with the entire family at the big dining room table. Sometimes he would lose track of time and linger at the bar; then my sister would be sent to fetch him and they would stroll home together, hand-in-hand. No one worried about a 12-year-old girl walking into a saloon full of men; not one of them would have dreamt of saying or doing anything improper — they were our neighbors and friends. Then, after dinner, Zayde would go back to the bakery to prepare the dough and heat the big brick oven for the next day.

Sunday was his biggest work day. Every Sunday, after he had made his usual customer deliveries in his old, beat-up truck, he would come home with two miniature, hot-from-the-oven, round rye breads — one for my sister and one for me. He would stop his truck at the front of the driveway where she and I would be waiting for him. We would jump onto the running boards on each side, hold on tight, and ride with him to the garage in the back of the house; then we would grab our very own loaves of bread and head to our grandparents’ kitchen. There, with real butter for the warm bread, and a bowl of my Bubbe’s homemade vegetable soup, we ate our Sunday lunch. When I close my eyes, I can still smell it and almost taste it. Nothing since has ever been that good. And after lunch, we would sit with him at the kitchen table and help him sort the coins he had been paid by his customers that day.

We were far from rich, but we always ate well. I remember our un-homogenized milk being delivered to the back door in glass bottles, with the cream floating at the top; my mother used to spoon it out into a glass jar to be sparingly added to her coffee. And — carrying the most practical traditions with them from the old country — my grandparents had built a chicken coop in the back yard, with one very happy rooster and a bunch of hens that kept us supplied with eggs and were destined eventually to become Sunday dinners. I even remember Baba (my great-grandmother), on some of her better days, out there gathering eggs, or scattering chicken feed on the ground.

But one day, that rooster was gone, soon to be replaced by another from a nearby farm. When I was a little older, my mother finally told me why: It seems that pompous piece of poultry hated my Baba (the feeling was apparently mutual); and one day when she happened to trip and fall while feeding the chickens, he took advantage of the opportunity, attacked her mercilessly, and was pecking away at her face and arms until my grandfather rescued her. Exacting revenge without benefit of due process, he wrung that damned rooster’s neck, right there on the spot. Apparently, Zayde had also brought with him from the old country an unequivocally Russian sense of justice!

We also had Bubbe’s vegetable garden — labeled a “victory garden” during the War years — with everything from tomatoes and cucumbers to potatoes, carrots, corn, and of course the beets for her homemade borshch. She even grew fresh dill and pickling spices for the cucumbers and green tomatoes she would put up in canning jars and stow away in the cellar until they turned so sour it hurt to bite into them.

*. *. *

When we were sick — and we did get all the childhood diseases, like mumps, measles, chicken pox, and the annual case of the “grippe,” now known as the flu — our family doctor came to the house. Everyone knew you didn’t take a sick child out to the doctor’s office to infect other kids and get sicker themselves! “What are you . . . crazy??!!!” Depending on the ailment, we were given doses of Milk of Magnesia, cough syrup, or a regular aspirin crushed and mixed with a spoonful of orange juice to try to disguise the horrible taste; and — for practically everything — Bubbe’s homemade chicken soup, otherwise known as Jewish penicillin. And there was the dreaded thermometer that didn’t go under your tongue, but got dipped in Vaseline and inserted . . . well, you know where. Oh, the indignity of it all!

You may have noticed all the references to homemade soups — vegetable, chicken, and borshch. (And by the way, that is the correctly transliterated spelling; there is no “t” at the end, and don’t ask me why we English speakers insist on adding it — possibly because we don’t have a letter pronounced “shch” in our alphabet. Spellcheck hates it, by the way, but that’s too bad.) Anyway, soup is another wonderful old-world tradition they brought with them, served at the start of every meal except breakfast, and often as a meal on its own. It’s a delicious, nutritious, filling, and economical way of feeding a crowd, and I learned to appreciate it all over again, decades later, when I spent those months living and working in Russia. (Seriously, folks — just read the first 28 chapters, okay?)

*. *. *

There are also things I don’t remember about those days, because we didn’t have them. We didn’t have central heating; the only warmth was provided by that oil stove in the kitchen, so the parlor door was kept shut in the winter, and the bedrooms were always freezing cold at night when the stove was turned way down to conserve the oil. We didn’t have a second bathroom, a second car, a second phone, or a guest bedroom. We also didn’t have a washer or dryer. I clearly recall my 98-pound mother every Monday, down on her knees, leaning over the bathtub and scrubbing our clothes, towels, sheets, everything, on a washboard; then rinsing and rinsing, and wringing it all out by hand — she had some strong hands! — then finally hanging it all on an outside clothesline to dry. In the winter, everything would freeze to the texture of cardboard, and the sheets stood up by themselves and smelled so clean and fresh. And then, of course, it all had to be ironed.

We didn’t have TV yet — not until 1950 — and the home computer was decades in the future, still the stuff of science fiction. So where did we get our information? At the library, of course — that wondrous repository of thousands of old, well-worn, musty-smelling volumes filled with knowledge and inspiration. And our news was broadcast every hour on the hour over the radio, and delivered to our little neighborhood store every morning printed on cheap paper with ink that rubbed off on our fingers. But what more could you expect for three cents?

And where did we shop? Well, there was no Amazon — no “online” at all. But we did have the neighborhood grocery, the neighborhood pharmacy, the neighborhood ice cream shop, the neighborhood hardware store, bakery, butcher shop . . . you get the picture. Stores where the proprietors greeted us by our first names, and kept us up-to-date on all the neighborhood gossip. And for those special purchases, like clothes and shoes . . . well, that required an excursion downtown to the department store; but luckily that wasn’t necessary too often because clothes got mended by Bubbe on her treadle sewing machine and handed down from generation to generation, or recycled to the younger siblings and cousins.

We also didn’t have a problem with boredom — there wasn’t time, what with all the laundry, cooking, cleaning and egg-gathering to help with, and homework to be done. And you didn’t “sass” your parents, teachers, or other adults, because if you even tried, you got smacked — hard — by all of them! And no parents went into debt to be sure their children had the latest and greatest electronic gadgets, because those things didn’t exist yet so we didn’t miss them. We learned early on to think for ourselves; there was no Siri to do it for us. We kids didn’t have house keys either, because we didn’t need them; there was always a grownup there when we got home from school. The “latchkey kid” hadn’t been conceived of yet, so there was little opportunity for us to get into serious trouble.

What we did have, though, were things like respect — for others, and for ourselves — and quality family time, and fun. And most of all, we had hope. Even during the War years, there was a certainty that it would one day end, that the good guys would win (we did), and that all would be well again (it was). Sure, there were problems — every age has its share of those. But we didn’t whine or angrily “tweet” about them; we dealt with them and worked together to solve them.

And we grew up good.

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
6/8/23

Welcome back. For those of you who have been following me for the past six months through my long-ago travels around the western hemisphere, and especially my Russian adventures, this new series will prove quite a departure. And for those who are brand new to my blog: welcome to my wonderfully weird world of wit, wisdom and winsomeness — or at least, that’s what I’m aiming for as we start out along this new road.

But as I sat down at my keyboard to begin this chapter, I realized that I was showing clear signs of withdrawal, and that I’m one of those people who probably needs to taper off gradually, like when I tried to give up sugar. So, rather than attempting to make too clean a break from all that Russian stuff at once, I thought I’d start things rolling with a little bit of Russian-related nostalgia. Just a touch — you know, so I don’t crash and burn. And here we go . . .

*. *. *

Ekaterina Alekseyevna (Katya, for short) was a delightful little lady from Moscow, who was teaching Russian at Northern Virginia Community College in 1985, when I decided that studying an impossible language might be a relaxing way to spend my evenings and weekends after working 40-plus hours a week at a super-stressful job in a high-powered Washington law firm. So now you know something about me: I am a glutton for punishment.

Our Russian 101 class started off with, as I recall, 27 students, only one of whom had ever studied the language before but needed a refresher course because he had met a Russian woman on one of his trips there and wanted to marry her. (Talk about gluttons for punishment? Sad to say, that did not work out well for him.) The rest of us were total neophytes; I, for example, knew how to say exactly three words in Russian: “yes,” “no,” and “goodbye,” which actually placed me well ahead of the rest of the class. As for the Cyrillic alphabet . . . well, judge that for yourselves:

But I am as stubborn as I am masochistic, so I dug right in, and at the end of the first semester, I was one of the 12 remaining students in our class. The high attrition rate was no surprise — just look at the freakin’ alphabet! And don’t even get me started on the grammar, or how to pronounce a word that begins with four consecutive consonants. As it turned out, though, I had something of a knack for the language, even though other, simpler languages had always eluded me. In fact, after one of our evening classes, as several of us were walking together toward the parking lot, Katya asked me if I had ever studied Russian before. I said I had not, and she asked, “Well, why do you suppose you’re so good at it?” I told her I thought it might be genetic, because all four of my grandparents had come from Russia — the part that is now Ukraine. She stopped in her tracks, pointed a finger at me (no, not that finger, silly!) and declared, “Aha! It’s in your blood.” And thus, I swear, she put a curse on me. I’ve had this Russian obsession ever since — the language, the history, the culture, even (God help me) the politics — and that was almost 40 years ago. Let me tell you, that’s a long time to be obsessed with anything!

*. *. *

Relax . . . I don’t really believe in curses. But the part about the Russian grandparents was real, and particularly my maternal grandmother, to whom I was most attached. My Bubbe was an amazing lady: sweet, warm, loving, hard-working, nurturing . . . and tough as nails when she needed to be. She came here in 1905 from the old country — a town called Zhitomir, not far from Kyiv — as a young wife with one baby. She and my Zayde (grandfather) spoke no English when they arrived in America; but they were multi-lingual, speaking Russian, Polish and Yiddish, and quickly learned to speak English without ever being able to read or write it.

They settled in Woonsocket, Rhode Island — God knows why! — and had four more children, all five finishing high school with top grades, which was quite an accomplishment in those days. By the time their first grandchildren — my sister and I — came along, my grandfather had a thriving bakery business; they owned a multi-unit house, fully paid-for, where we and two of my aunts and uncles lived and paid rent; and they were the darlings of the surrounding, predominantly French-Canadian-Catholic neighborhood.

But back then I wasn’t really interested in my heritage, though now I wish I had been. They were just my loving grandparents, and were as much of an influence on my childhood as my own parents were. So what was it like, growing up with an ever-present Russian-Ukrainian-Jewish grandmother hanging over you — watching, listening, feeding, touching, hovering, feeding, scrubbing, scolding, feeding, hugging, fussing, and — did I mention? — feeding you every hour of every day for the first nine years of your life? Sound awful? Well, you’re wrong. It was wonderful, and not only because of the food. We were cared for, looked after, taught right from wrong (and almost everything was wrong . . . right?). We were loved, and we were safe.

And we grew up good.

And God help us when we misbehaved! If a grandparent or an aunt or uncle caught us doing something we shouldn’t, they didn’t conspire with us to hide it from our parents — they ratted us out, big time. And, depending on the severity of the crime, either we were sent to our room without supper, or . . . for the worst offenses, like lying, or killing the neighbor’s cat by sitting on it (my sister actually did that)* . . . we were spanked. Bare-bottom spanked. Usually with a strap. Did anybody report our parents to Social Services? Ha! What Social Services? — they didn’t exist. Did we hate our parents? Well, yeah . . . at the moment, we did. But not for long, because then we’d get supper in bed and a big hug along with the inevitable lecture, which usually ended with the best lesson of all . . .

And we grew up good.

* Note: I was too little to remember the dead cat episode, but I’ve been told she didn’t mean to kill it; she just wanted to go for a ride. You know: “Gidyap, Kitty!” I guess it was a really big cat. I’m thinking maybe Maine Coon size.

There were dozens of pearls of wisdom that my Bubbe had brought with her from the old country, mostly cautionary, like “Stay away from that girl; she’s a kurva.” (You can probably figure that one out.) Or, “Don’t sit on the stone steps; you’ll get piles.” (I think that meant hemorrhoids). Or, “Don’t touch that frog! You’ll get warts.” And my personal favorite: “If you keep frowning, your face will freeze like that.” Well, between the “piles” and the warts, how could I not be frowning?!!

But there were no warnings about playing in the dirt; or about stuffing ourselves with huge meals made with solid Crisco or schmaltz (chicken fat) and unlimited amounts of salt; drinking from each other’s soda bottles; climbing trees; roller skating without a helmet (who had helmets?); or reading comic books filled with bad guys blasting the good guys with their deadly ray guns.

And still we grew up good.

There was one other member of my grandparents’ household: my great-grandmother (Bubbe’s mother), who was called “Baba.” She was ancient — probably not much older than I am now, though I’m not a great-grand yet. She must not have been well, because I remember her spending most of her time in her room. Or maybe it was because we were all speaking English and she had never learned how and felt left out. But there were times when she was up and about, shuffling around in a housedress, an apron, and floppy bed slippers. She always had hard candies in her apron pockets along with — for whatever reason — mothballs. (Don’t ask me why; I really don’t know.) The candies weren’t individually wrapped in those days, so when she would sneak some to my sister and me, they tasted a little like . . . what else? . . . mothballs. There was also usually a little pocket lint stuck to the candy, but we didn’t care; candy was candy. Unless it was a mothball.

And we grew up good — though sometimes I wonder how we grew up at all.

It was a household crawling with relatives — parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, second and third cousins from out of town, and of course, the ever-present old folks — all talking at once, arguing (they called it “discussing”) about anything and everything, and sharing each and every minuscule detail of their lives. It would probably drive me crazy today, but at the time it was normal, and I loved each and every one of those people — my people — with all my heart.

My Zayde and Baba both passed away when I was just eight, and my Bubbe lived another thirteen years after that. I miss them still, and when I finally get to that great shtetl in the sky, they’re the first people I want to see. Because of them, I got sucked into what my sister later dubbed “that whole Russian thing.”

And because of them, I think I grew up pretty good.

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
6/5/23