“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.

# # #

Charles Degelman

Don't miss the show-stopper, "Molasses to Rum to Slaves," about Northern complicity in the slave trade. Seriously.
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I was not nearly as concerned with the minutiae of planning my wedding as I was with the marriage that would follow.  In 1975, I married the love of my life (Don) following an almost three year engagement.  Three years in which we finished college degrees, endured parents on both sides who did not want to let go of us, and tried to forge our way through it as a couple.  Our parents did not observe our couple hood, however….because the wedding had not actually happened, and until it did they all tried in various ways to keep us from making what they all thought was a mistake.

Our day was not about us so much as it was about what our parents did or did not want, what they would or would not wear or do.  At least that’s what my attention seemed to be unwillingly drawn to.  Our ceremony was, however, a lovely, meaningful moment we savored just for us.  No video in those days, but we do have an original reel to reel audio tape which has since been reproduced to cassette, and later to the computer. Our friend Randy Lambert sang the Lord’s Prayer and it brought tears to our eyes.  Randy eventually became an opera singer until he lost his life to AIDS in 1986.

Today we are married almost 41 years, and I am so grateful that I have this wonderful man who is my husband, partner, my friend, my lover, the father of our sons.

it wasn’t about the wedding at all.  It was the marriage we made together.

The Honorable James L. Oakes and his wife Mara lived next to me on Martha’s Vineyard until his death in 2007. He was kind, patient, brilliant and I adored him. Mara, with whom I remain close, shared this article on citizenhood, reprinted from the Brattleboro Reformer, on July 4, 2010. She gave me permission to share it with this community last week.

What it means to be an American citizen

Editor’s note: This is a draft of a speech to new citizens during a naturalization ceremony in Vermont on May 11, 1970 by the late Honorable James L. Oakes when he was United Sates District Judge. It is offered to you in honor of Independence Day.

Today and at this hour each of you is about to perform the last act of your life as an alien and the first act of your life as an American citizen. This is a happy occasion, to be sure, and we are pleased to welcome you and your loved ones, not just to the the United States District Court for the District of Vermont but also to United States citizenship.

This is also a solemn occasion, however, and it is the duty of the Court, and a very pleasant duty it is, to remark upon the meaning of citizenship – the meaning of being an American citizen.

I said this was both a last and a first for each of you. It is also a first for the Court – the first naturalization ceremony which I have been privileged to conduct.

This being a first, I have had the opportunity to review in my own mind some of the rights that go with being an American citizen, and to think about the responsibilities that go with those rights.

For — make no mistake about it – in a democracy such as ours, for the government to work, for every individual to be able fully to enjoy his rights as a citizen, requires that each of us also performs his obligations, his duties, his responsibilities to other citizens.

And, if I may, I would express the hope that this brief restatement of American rights and responsibilities may serve to remind them to some of us who have not been required to work so hard to become citizens, in other words, who have been citizens by the fortune of birth here. The gift of citizenship is sometimes taken all too much for granted by those of us who have acquired it without the work or sacrifice on our part that each of you has made to come here today. As Judge Ernest Gibson has said from time to time in similar proceedings, “We look to you here to bring us new strength, new vigor and greater understanding.”

We American citizens – all of us, those of us who have chosen America as our land of adoption and those of us who come from those who did so – have the right to speak freely, to express our views, to think as we choose. But we also have the duty and responsibility to let other American citizens speak, to tolerate the views of others, to listen. We may disagree with another man’s views, but we will, in the works of the French philosopher, defend to the death, his right to speak them, or to print them.

We citizens of the United States have the right to worship freely and as we see fit, but we have the duty to respect the religious views, or lack of them, on the part of others, no matter how unenlightened these fellow human beings may seem to us. In the brotherhood of man, in America, there in no room for religious intolerance.

We have the right as a people, also guaranteed to us by the First Amendment to our Constitution, peacefully to assemble – a right that in recent years has been used more often, particularly by young people and particularly by people seeking equality of citizenship for all. But we have the duty, if we exercise this right, to exercise it peacefully, not to injure or harm the person or the property of others, in short, to tolerate all the right of other American citizens. Democracy carries with it an obligation to restrain from the use of force or violence whether in the expression or the denial of a point of view.

We have the right, as citizens, to vote and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. But we have the duty to educate ourselves as voters and petitioners, to learn about the issues, to get the facts, and we also have a duty to become involved in the business and affairs of our community, our state, our nation. Education is both the strength and the weakness of Democracy; the extent to which our Government works well depends in the largest part upon the extent to which we as citizens and voters concern ourselves with the work of Government.

We have any number of rights when we come into a court of law, whether as citizens in civil controversy with another individual, or more particularly when we are faced with charges in a court of criminal law – such rights as those to a speedy, public trial, by an impartial jury after being informed of the charges against us, a right to counsel, regardless of our financial means, the important right not to be compelled to be a witness against one’s self – all these precious rights which are among the first to be undermined and ultimately destroyed in totalitarian countries, under a Hitler or a Stalin. But we have the duty as ordinary citizens to make the sacrifice of time and money to take our turn in serving as jurors (something which many of you will be asked to do from time to time). Beyond this we have the duty as citizens to respect the Law, and to uphold it, and to respect the Courts, to conduct ourselves properly in the courtroom, and to recognize the basic aim of a Government of Laws, not Men, and the basic principle of American justice that every man is presumed innocent until proven guilty. Justice denied to one man is justice denied to all, for in our American Democracy the rights of each citizen are dependent upon, and tied inseparably to, the rights of every other individual.

There are many other rights we have as Americans, rights which are inalienable, that is, which cannot be taken away from us by any other man or group of men – the rights to Life and to Liberty and indeed the right to the pursuit of happiness, a happy phrase that Thomas Jefferson used in penning the Declaration of Independence. He used this phrase to mean a whole bundle of rights to enjoy this wonderful country of ours and the wonderful people in it, without interference, oppression, or annoyance by others – the bundle of rights that includes the rights to clean air, pure water, economic opportunity for our children, peace in the neighborhood, safety in the streets.

All of these rights – those enumerated in the Bill of Rights, those implied in the Declaration – are protected and preserved to us by the Constitution and the Laws and the Courts of this great country of ours; they cannot be denied to us on account of race, color or creed. But these precious rights ultimately rest, as a great philosopher-judge has said, not in constitutions, laws and court. “Liberty,” Judge Learned Hand has said, “lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can ever do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.” Liberty can be lost to us by inaction, by failure on our part – by the failure to do our duties as citizens, by the failure or omission to meet our citizens’ responsibilities.

This oath that you take today carries with it many precious rites – the rights of an American citizen. It also, as you see, carries with it many duties and responsibilities, responsibilities that can be met by each of us American citizens being deeply concerned with our Government, dedicated to work to preserve our heritage, committed to struggle always to keep the torch of Liberty burning brightly with all of the rights and all of the responsibilities on which the light of that torch shines.

That torch must be kept burning not just for us, not just for our children, but for future generations of mankind. I know that you will help to keep it burning bright. I know that you will do your duties as American citizens even as you exercise, preserve and cherish your rights as American citizens.

I welcome you to citizenship in this, still the greatest country in the world, which with, but only with, the dedication and commitment of each of us has a glorious future, a magnificent destiny.

James L. Oakes was a longtime resident of Brattleboro. He served as a member of the Vermont Sate Senate from 1961-65, and as Attorney General of Vermont from 1967-69. In 1970, President Richard Nixon nominated Oakes to fill the seat on the United Sates District Court for District of Vermont. A year later, in 1971, Nixon elevated Oakes to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. He was quickly confirmed, and served as a judge for 35 years, including as Chief Judge of the Second Circuit from 1988 to 1992.