I had a Scottish nurse when I was a baby. She called me her “wee little treasure” and gave me dolls that said, “Frae Bonnie Scotland” on them. Her name was Jean James but I called her Jean-Jean. I loved the way she spoke and the way she cared for me and my brother. Because of her, I always dreamed of going to Scotland. It seemed so romantic and fit perfectly with my interests in Tudor England, given the connection with Mary, Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I.

Exactly three years ago at this time we took a very fancy golf cruise to Ireland and Scotland. I don’t play golf at all, but never mind that, there was wonderful touring for those dozen of us who didn’t golf and we formed a close bond. Of course Scotland is where golf was invented and has some of the most famous and difficult courses in the world. We sailed on the Sea Cloud II, a larger, luxurious reproduction of the original yacht, built by E. F Hutton for his wife, Marjorie Merriweather Post. There were 79 passengers with a crew of 65. We felt quite pampered.

We boarded in Dublin, after our group saw the Book of Kells and continued on to Belfast, seeing where the Titanic was built and the memorial to those who lost their lives. Then on to Antrim along the rugged coast where we hiked. A day spent at sea, the high point included a wonderful demonstration of the crew setting the sails as the captain explained the name and use of each. The British Open was in full swing on this day and was picked up on satellite in the lounge during the day, so many watched that. We were allowed to tour the entire ship including the engine room. We mostly sailed under power, as we had tight schedules each day and the tour was run like clock-work.

We arrived in the Scottish Highlands the next morning and were greeted by a lone piper. I was so excited, I videotaped his performance. While the majority of the group went off to play a challenging golf course, we few ladies went to the Inverness Highland Games. We saw a lovely demonstration of Highland dancing, wandered around the equivalent of a state fair, saw some very rough men in orange-hued kilts. I started to speak to them until I noticed all the curse words on their tee-shirts, realized they were drunk and from the Netherlands. These guys took caber-tossing seriously! Our group decided to shop in town.

Over the next several days, the ship would go from port to port while we slept and we would tour during the day, seeing incredible estates and country towns. One notable estate was the ancestral home of the Sutherland clan. The gardens were magnificent, the carpet was their clan tartan, photos of the royal family in silver frames were sprinkled around the rooms. We had a private luncheon in a large room of salmon, caught on the estate. I started having salmon at every breakfast. There is nothing like salmon from Scotland! In the afternoon, we had the most fantastic exhibition of falconry, as wild birds with huge wing spans swooping overhead.

Our last day was spent in St. Andrews, the birthplace of golf. We saw the university. Our guide pointed out the apartment that Prince William and Kate Middleton had shared as undergrads. We saw Old Tom Morris’s grave. He laid out the St. Andrews golf course and made many improvements to the game, as did his son “Young Tom” Morris, who is buried beside him. Baby Prince George was born that day, and we were in the spot where his parents had met and wooed. How perfect. We spent the night in a room over-looking St. Andrews, the most famous, oldest golf course in the world, though our tour didn’t play it. Still, Dan and I walked part of it and looked at some of the famous sites as the sun set. I later learned that the famous running scene in “Chariots of Fire” had been shot on the shore just beyond the course. The place has romance about it.

On our own, Dan and I spent a few extra days touring Edinburgh, as I wanted to see everything I could that had to do with Mary, Queen of Scots. We visited Holyrood House Palace, still a functioning home to the Queen when she comes to Scotland, and Edinburgh Castle. We walked the “Royal Mile” and visited other museums. We soaked it all in, as I do not know if I will ever return. One museum had an exhibit devoted to Mary, Queen of Scots and included the famous “Armada” portrait of Elizabeth I. I couldn’t believe that I was seeing it in person, as I’ve seen it so many times in so many of the biographies I’ve read of her.

Scotland did not disappoint and the trip lived up to all my expectations. It may be golf mecca, but it had all the charm and history that I sought as well.

 

 

My sister and I might not have a relationship you can write a great story about, but I bet we'd both read that book!
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“Sisters, sisters, there were never such devoted sisters.” This 1954 Irving Berlin song was sung by Rosemary Clooney in the movie White Christmas, and my sisters and I learned to sing it at an early age. And we are devoted, it’s not just a song lyric. I feel incredibly lucky to have my two sisters. As I write this, I have just returned from a weeklong family reunion, and am still basking in the glow of it. Apparently it is rare for extended families to get together for a week every year and all get along, but we have been doing it for at least 30 years. Certainly in childhood the three of us weren’t always so close, but as adults we have a very strong bond. Even though we live in three different parts of the country – New York, Colorado, and California – we keep in close touch by phone, email, and facebook, and see each other at least once a year, if not more often.

They were seven and five when I was born, both in elementary school already, and had a pretty good rhythm established between them. Being so much younger had some advantages when I was very little – they liked to teach me things, so I was reading and writing and counting when I was three or four – but it was sometimes frustrating as I got older, because I wanted to tag along with them and their friends. This was not that appealing to them when I was around 10 and they were 15 and 17. I couldn’t understand why they didn’t want me to be part of their group. I did get to entertain the boys who came over to pick them up for dates, since the customs of the time dictated that the girl was never supposed to be ready when the boy arrived at her house. As a result, I was pretty comfortable chatting with older boys, and I’m sure I had crushes on some of them.

We are all musical, and when we are together we are usually singing. Like Betsy and her brother, we all went to National Music Camp in Interlochen, Michigan, but my first year was their last. They were in High School Division and I was in Junior, so we barely saw each other except when my parents came to visit, but at least I had two chaperones for the long flight from New Jersey to Michigan. I continued to go to NMC for two more years without them, but that first year was the best.

By the time I was in high school, they were both off at college, and both of them married during college, so I had the benefits of being an only child for those years. I was going to high school in another town about 20 minutes away, and my mother was always available to drive me to and from school, to classmates’ houses, to parties and dances, or whatever I needed. I think my sisters thought I was terribly spoiled, but they were only watching from afar as they started their own adult lives.

My oldest sister went to Radcliffe, and so I decided I wanted to go there too. I even requested to live in the same dorm she had lived in. (As an aside, the 10 years between when she started in 1962 and when I graduated in 1972 were times of such phenomenal change that when we compare our college experiences, it is as if we had been at different schools.) We only discovered recently that we took some of the same courses. In retrospect I realize that I should have asked her advice about courses, but it didn’t occur to me at the time. After college she went to law school, and that probably influenced my decision to become a lawyer as well. While she was at Georgetown Law School I lived with her and her husband for two summers, the first year working for the McCarthy for President campaign, and the second year for Planned Parenthood at their national headquarters. It was great to have the experience of being independent of my parents, and yet having my sister and brother-in-law to rely on if I needed them.

My middle sister went to a different college and had a different career path. She probably wasn’t as influential on me in those college and law school years, although I did take my first trip to Europe with her and her husband, during winter vacation of my sophomore year of college. However, her huge impact on me came in May of my last year of law school when she had a baby, the first baby in our family in 25 years (since me). I had never been at all interested in babies, and didn’t think I wanted to have any. But that fall, when the baby was 4 months old, they had a gap in their childcare arrangements, and I was unemployed and awaiting bar results, so I went to stay with them in Colorado to take care of my niece while they both went to work. I fell in love with that baby! I had never experienced anything like the intensity of emotion I felt for this little creature. I felt like a child who had seen someone else’s amazing new toy, and I wanted one too! It was because of my sister’s baby that I decided to have children, and I have told my kids many times that they owe their existence to their cousin!

Fast forward thirty-some years, and my middle sister invited me to go with her on a yoga retreat in Mexico led by her Colorado yoga teacher. We stayed together in a casita, did yoga twice a day, went to the beach, and had a fabulous time. It was the first time we had spent a significant amount of time alone together since we were kids, and it made us feel really connected to each other. We hope to do it again when our schedules allow. My oldest sister doesn’t do yoga, but we connect with her in other ways. Now that all of our kids are grown, there may be more opportunities for the three of us to do things together, and I am excited about that.

Our mother is 95 years old, so lately when the three of us talk it is often about her. A year ago we moved her from her own house to a continuing care community. It was so wonderful to be able to share the decision-making, and also the actual labor of the move, among the three of us. I could not imagine doing it alone. I know that whatever the future may bring, in any aspect of life, my two sisters will be there for me as reliable partners and trusted friends.

 

 

“When someone says he’s God and tells you to kill somebody,” my brother counsels me, “don’t listen to him.”
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Rick was alone with our mother for almost 5 years. I was not welcome when I came along. I was a hairless creature. He thought girls should have hair, so I must be a boy, right? He called me “boop-de-boy” and tripped me as I learned to walk. But as I became more fun to play with, and a little less of a threat, he was kinder, in a way. The featured image is on my 3rd birthday. I looked up to my brother in every way and wanted to tag along on everything he did. I was a pest. We had a window seat in the den of our little house in Detroit, which we both liked to play on. I used it as theater for my dolls, he used it as a desk for drawing cartoons. When I was just a little girl of 3, he pushed me out of the way so he could draw. I was furious, tried unsuccessfully to push back against his much larger 8-year-old self, so I walked around behind and bit him where I could reach…in the behind! I had a temper.

But we had more and more in common as we grew older. We both loved to sing and are very musical. I am a good singer, he has perfect pitch and is a much better musician. We would stage musicals with the whole neighborhood in our backyard. We played games until the streetlights came on, running around on summer nights, the streets full of friends. I ached for him when he went away to overnight camp. He preceded me at the National Music Camp in Interlochen, Michigan. His elementary school music teacher had recommended it. I loved to go visit and couldn’t wait until I could also attend, which I did, finally, in 1964. He was in High School Division by then, I only a lowly Junior and he didn’t want to be bothered by me, until I wound up in the infirmary with the flu (I threw up during Sunday morning services; I was infamous – the kid who threw up during The Lord’s Prayer). I missed seeing him in a leading role in the Gilbert & Sullivan operetta. He finally came to visit me.

 

We moved to a near suburb of Detroit in 1963 and we were both miserable; smart, gawky misfits. He was half-way through high school, I was entering 6th grade which was the oldest grade in the elementary school. I had skipped part of 5th grade due to a complicated system in Detroit, so I was also the youngest in my class. He tried to fit in, I had almost no friends and the gulf between us at that age was huge. Our mother had a nervous break-down and took to her bed. An aunt came in to care for us. Rick did the best he could and in two years, he left for Brandeis. Our father hand-picked that school for him. I think back on the decision with some amazement. Brandeis (like my brother), was 18 years old at the time. Founded by Abram Sacher of St. Louis in the ashes of WWII, Abe had gone to Washington University with my dad’s oldest sister and knew the Sarason family well. Few people in the mid-West had heard of Brandeis in those days. It was a bold and successful choice.

Now I was alone with our increasingly fragile mother. I eagerly waited for Rick to return on vacation and we would sit up half the night to talk about her and us and “why us?”, and how to survive her (we both have survived her, by the way). I decided I didn’t want to follow in my brother’s footsteps and almost didn’t apply to Brandeis. A parent at our temple talked me out of that. I didn’t get into Yale (only the second year they took women and, though outstanding along many dimensions, my board scores were merely average) and I decided against Northwestern when I learned that the Greek system was a strong component of life on campus. I’d had enough of cliques already. So follow Rick to Brandeis I did, though he was already a year out by the time I got there.

Rick and I look nothing alike. He is tall and thin, I am tiny. We both are near-sighted, but I got contact lenses at 13, had to give them up when my eyes dried out more than 20 years ago. He started wearing them fairly late in life. Our coloring is entirely different. No one would take us as brother and sister. He majored in Economics at Brandeis; I, in Theatre Arts. He was Phi Beta Kappa. I was not. We both were magna cum lauda with honors; he was so highly recommended that he received an honor from the Economics Honors Society and a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. But he had spent the semester, right after the 1967 war, studying in Israel. He sent home incredible letters. He decided he wanted to be a rabbi, so turned down the fellowship and continued his studies at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. He went off to Israel for two years of study (the second year was spent at Hebrew University). Having not seen him in two years, I visited during the summer of 1972. I stayed in his (all male) dorm, which was rather hair-raising. No one believed we were related. Most students were gone by that time so I had my own room, but Rick had to guard the door when I used the shower or facilities and I think there is one guy who will never be the same, as he walked in on me while I shaved my legs in the sink!

Two years later, Rick was ordained and I was married. Rick continued his studies at Brown University where he received a PhD in Rabbinics. He taught there for a year, then went back to HUC in Cincinnati, where he has taught ever since. He met a wonderful woman there and they were married on his 35th birthday. They have two terrific sons. Rick is a mensch and a respected member of his community.

I worked for 11 years, also have two sons, retired when I was pregnant with the second and have done various types of volunteer work since, mostly in the arts. We don’t get to see each other nearly as often as we like, but we consider ourselves very close.

 

There were games and water balloon fights. I think of scenes from The Music Man, when I remember those holiday picnics.
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Get paid to blow things up?? He was in!
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I had just returned from a tour of Alaska with a rock and roll band. It was June, 1980 and we were about to descend into the Reagan Era. The glow of the late 1960s had contracted into the dire and apocalyptic 70s and promised to flow headlong into Iran Contra.

Our friend Carmelita, one of our theater partners, had won a trip to Hawaii for four in a lottery. None of us had any money worth mentioning; we were embroiled in getting grants to support our theater and putting up shows. Not much dough there so…

A trip to Hawaii with our Gang of Four — Lily and me, Bob and Carmelita — sounded like a hoot. Cool, I thought, one week I’m in Alaska rocking out and the next week I’m on a flight to the Big Island.

A little background: Carmelita was an actress with a wicked penchant for organizing things, and her guy Bob hailed from Fresno. Bob collected his identity largely from a Great American Heritage ,was smart as hell, well-educated and with a bit of a flat spot when it came to social graces. He played self-conscious chop-heavy piano and could sing like Hogey Carmichael. He remains a good friend, despite what was to follow.

As with any theater partnership, exasperation formed a large part of our vocabulary. But we loved each other and thought a trip to Hawaii would make a great break. And the tickets were free.

We landed in Oahu but island-hopped to Hawaii where we shacked up at an odd set of bungalows constructed largely of bamboo and woven palm mats. Large green leafy things lurked everywhere and moss lurked under the large green leafy things.

Joel, an old friend of Bob’s, had arranged for our weird bungalow domicile. Joel, a philosophy professor, had left a tenured position at UC Santa Cruz to become an itinerant blacksmith on Hawaii. Once each month, for a week, he and his wife Susanna, a lovely local women with six toes on each foot, and their child, Lola, would circle the island, while Joel repaired broken metal things for Hawaii’s ranchers.

The next morning, we hit the rental car place in Hilo and picked up a tiny Chevy econo rental. Again, cool, but Bob is six foot four and the rest of us never graduated out of the five-foot range. Sometimes Hawaii feels like California only it’s Hawaii, and renting a car there in 1980 was all different, like crazy lazy and mildly hallucinogenic.

We cram into the car, excited to begin our off-the-beaten-path, around-the-island tour, mapped out by Joel the blacksmith philosopher. We would hit all the non-tourist places, hidden waterfalls and hot springs, ancient indigenous power places; we would visit with hand-picked friends of Joel and Susanna and come as close as possible to shedding our unmistakable essence of haole.

We’re eating our first breakfast on the road When Carmelita says, “We have to go to the courthouse.”

“What?” we ask.

“We have to go to the courthouse.” Carmelita turned around, looking quite purposeful. “We need to file some documents.”

“What kind of documents?” Lily grows wary. She knows Carmelita very well and this isn’t Carmelita.

“Bob and I are getting married,” Carmelita announces.

Silence. We’re sitting in the back seat of an econo Chevy, knees jammed to our chins and the couple sitting in the front seat, our theater partners, have just announced they’re getting married. Here. Now. The Hawaiian sun beams down upon the Hawaiian greenery.

“There!” Carmelita points to a courthouse sign. Bob turns right.

More silence.

“It’ll be fun,” Bob says.

“Aren’t you happy for us?” Carmelita asks.

“Wow. Cool. Congratulations.” I crank out the suitable responses. “Congratulations!”

“Here,” Carmelita says, pointing to a courthouse sign.

Bob turns right.

“Here?” Lily asks. “Now? You’re going to do this now? Why didn’t you say something before? Jesus, Carmelita!” But people who are in phase three of a relationship can be unpredictable.

Bob and Carmelita were in phase three. Phase one 90 days: You want to bottle it, keep it to inhale forever. Phase two, six months to a year: Exciting, weird, even annoying but still curious. Phase three: We’re still here? Okay. How are we going to make this thing work?

During phase three, the marriage thing appears. It’s not always the best option but one of many possibilities. So what the hell.

We sat in the sun outside the courthouse cursing, musing, and shrugging while Bob and Carmelita spent an interminable time in Hilo’s hallowed halls, procuring their marriage license.

The date was set, three days from now. Until then, we would continue our island trek. We would be their witnesses at the wedding so we said yay, let’s have a good time. Oh, but first…

Carmelita needed a wedding dress. Joel wasn’t much help, but Susanna knew hippie designers, even on the Big Island, which still largely resembled a WW II naval airbase a la “South Pacific.”

While the women shopped for a dress, Bob and I decided to climb Mauna Kea. The mountain took us through each ecosphere on the planet, from rain forest to barren volcanic rock, spotted with red arctic lichen. If you measured Mauna Kea from the sea floor, it’s the tallest mountain in the world. We descended exhausted but the day wasn’t over yet. I had to throw Bob a stag party.

We found a Quonset hut turned saloon near the airport and, within three beers apiece, had launched a profound conversation on some now-forgotten topic. I do remember reaching a pivotal point in the dialog when a giant cockroach sauntered across my forearm. They were everywhere, these cockroaches, and we had already grown casual about their presence. The bar was made of bamboo.

We did make it around the island, switching from front to back seat. Whoever sat in the back became instantaneously cranky but we managed to create equity. It was a beautiful experience. I’d never felt as powerful and distinct an indigenous presence and its history than I did during that drive around Hawaii.

We ended our excursion at Joel and Susanna’s homebuilt ranchero, built entirely of junk. Their recycled dwelling felt wide-open, with charming verandas and breezy hallways and a dirt floor.

That night, Joel and Susanna’s floor came alive with large cockroaches. Two nylon net hammocks hung over our sleeping area. There was no question as to who would ascend to the peace and insularity of the hammocks. The only interjection to our unmitigated laughter were recriminations from Lily and Carmelita, hanging above us unsullied. Somehow, this was all our fault, Bob and me. More laughter.

Bob and Carmelita were married on a lovely point of land overlooking a Pacific sunset. The breeze blew balmy. The marriage was officiated by a friend of Joel’s, licensed by the Universal Life Church to marry anybody. Joel and Susanna brought a fresh-caught Bonita as a wedding gift. Everyone was as happy as could be.

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Charles Degelman