My Turn

In January of 1967, when I was seventeen and a senior in high school, I went with my parents and younger sister to visit my mother’s parents, my Nanny and Poppy, in Queens, in New York City. We lived in suburb of Baltimore, so it was about five hours of driving to get to their house. We were on semester break, a Friday and Monday off from school, and I had an interview set up at Columbia University for Monday. We were going to stop there on the way out of New York.

When we got to my grandparents’ house, we were surprised that my grandfather wasn’t there. He was a teacher in New York City public schools, retired at sixty, and then continued to substitute. The school board told him he could no longer sub when he turned seventy in February. He was furious. A neighbor had been to Florida and suggested to my grandfather that he check out a whitewashed, lakefront condo development, a new thing, north of Miami, and that’s where my grandfather was.

A snowstorm was coming Monday and my parents decided to go back to Baltimore Sunday to beat the weather. My grandmother, who was sixty-nine, not quite five feet tall and didn’t drive, assured my parents that she would get me to the interview at Columbia, and to Penn Station to get a train back to Baltimore.

Monday morning, Nanny and I bundled up. I was sick, but didn’t want to say anything. There were spots of blood in my underwear. We walked up 69th Avenue to Main Street in blowing snow and cold, caught a bus to Flushing, where we took the elevated train to Manhattan, and then a subway north to Columbia. Nanny waited for me while I had the interview.

The interviewer was a skinny guy with glasses and a bad attitude. He showed me the list of “Great Books” everyone had to read, and I said that  it looked interesting. My cousin Eric had gone to Western Reserve in Cleveland the year before, and told me the neighborhood where the school was located was rough, and they didn’t go off campus, leaving him bored at college. When the interviewer asked if I had questions, I asked if there activities on campus. He blinked at me, incredulous, and said “Well, we are in New York City.” The interview was finally over, thankfully. Snow was still coming down when we left Columbia’s all-concrete campus. In my memory, the snow was coming down black, but that was probably just how I felt. We went back to Grand Central, walked the tunnel to Penn Station, and Nanny got me on a train to Baltimore.I slept most of the way.

I stayed home the day after I got back. My Mom told my father about the blood in my underwear. He said “ I bet you thought you had a venereal disease, didn’t you? “ Actually, I was a virgin, still, and did not think that. I figured I had some weird cancer and I was going to die soon. Dad explained that it was my pilonidal cyst, a vestigial tail, common to men in his family. From wiping too hard, it probably got infected. We took a trip to Dr. Checket, the surgeon in Woodmoor Shopping Center near our house, and he lanced it. He suggested that my father shave my butt for me to reduce the possibility of infection. Dad did that twice, but it was too icky for both of us. Even though I went back to school, I felt sick for at least a month after that.

I didn’t get in to Columbia, but I was accepted at Johns Hopkins, an oasis in central Baltimore, where my interview on a warm December day had gone better. The interviewer asked me where I had bought my double-breasted blazer and polka dot tie, and not much else.

Nanny was sick for a month after she got home from Columbia. My grandfather bought the condo, and they sold their house and moved that fall. My mother was glad. She said it had been hard for them to deal with winter in New York the last few years.

I had terrible allergy problems in Baltimore, and they seemed to get worse every year. I would have an asthma attack if I walked from a heated building out into cold weather. At twenty-eight, I moved to Miami, where I became close with Nanny. Poppy had died a few years before I arrived there. I stayed in Miami more than six years. Nanny moved to Baltimore to stay with my mother the last year I was there, and a few months later, I took a job in Los Angeles. After twenty-one years there, I met Joe Hample, a second-career rabbinical student. When we legally married in 2008, I said I would go with him wherever he got a job. After a stint at a prison in far northern California, he was hired at Tree of Life in Morgantown, West Virginia, just over two hundred miles from where I grew up. Luckily, I have better asthma and hay fever medicine than I had in Baltimore forty years ago.

I’m sixty-eight now, and just as my grandmother couldn’t handle the cold weather in New York, I find myself much more fragile than I used to be.This year, it’s often been cold and sometimes snowy. I was elected to Morgantown’s City Council in 2017, and I go to an exhausting number of long meetings in the evenings. I haven’t been well for a month, but I’ve kept going, first with just sniffles, then coughing, which went away, then  came back. Last week, I drove to a City Council meeting in a snowstorm where the highway people had told everyone to stay home, and Thursday, I went to a commission meeting in 11 degree weather.. The cough came back, although I attended services Friday night and a political event before hand. I didn’t sleep Friday night, wracked with coughing. I saw a doctor Saturday morning, who gave me an antibiotic and cough medicine and told me not to go out for four days. People think I am young. I keep going no matter what, and, as a teacher myself in Los Angeles, I sometimes use kid ghetto slang from the 1990s, picked up from my students. I’m not young. I’m just a year younger than my grandmother was on our trip to Columbia. Like her, I want to keep going, but i need to take better care of myself.

Joe and I will probably be in Morgantown a few more years. Tree of Life is likely to  renew his contract next year, and I may run for Council again in 2019. Sooner or later, we will step down. Joe talks about going to Palm Springs, or maybe even Tel Aviv when he retires.I came to Morgantown as a retiree, not expecting to work. What I have to do now is say “No.” I can’t go to a meeting in a snowstorm or when it is bone-chilling cold. It’s hard for me to think of myself as the same age as my grandparents, but there it is. It’s time to accept my frailties and stop pretending that I’m young and healthy.