In the summer of 1961, I left my job in Harlem where I was working with gang members as a community worker, for a student life at Yale that catapulted me from clamorous chaos to hushed academia.
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Yale: Studies, Romances, Escape
Dorothy
We used to have round robin ball-room dances in gym back then.
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A Kid With A Grown Up Heart
There are nights
when the dreams of that house
break through these bedroom walls,
as the ringing in my ears
becomes the sound of my own name,
echoing through that third floor stairway
into the open pocket doors
of the dining room,
through the nine windows in the sun parlor,
finally escaping into the gravel stones
of the backyard.
An old house
built in the 1920’s,
when building houses was an art-form,
When carpenters carried photographs
of their craftsmanship,
and carved their service into honor
with their hands.
There were so much wood in that house
Wooden beams on the ceiling,
Wooden pillars between rooms,
a wooden mantel above the fireplace,
parquet floors, mahogany furniture.
As a child I’d imagine faces
staring at me in the lines of the wood
ready to leap alive to capture me.
Beautiful carnival glass adorned
the bronze chandeliers in the living room.
From the same room
a stained glass window
looked down upon us from the staircase,
its green stems and red roses
so vibrant in the afternoon light.
I came back home at the age of 50
Divorced, two sons fully grown and gone,
I had to decide my next living arrangement
since my landlord wanted to sell,
I chose to move to the 3rd floor apartment
of my parent’s house.
‘In Retrospect’
these became the best years of my life.
Being back at home with mom and dad
bought an everyday wonder,
a magical presence of my old life
mingling with the new.
I felt like a kid with a grown up heart
who knew exactly where she was.
(to be continued)
Where are you from?
When people ask me where I’m from, it gets complicated. I say, “Well, we moved around a lot. I grew up mostly in Michigan.” However, Michigan was just where my nuclear family lived on and off when not overseas, there were no relatives nearby, and we moved away before I finished high school. In fact, the place that felt most like home to me was the San Francisco Bay Area, my chosen home as an adult for over twenty years; it was so eclectic that I fit in. And then I moved to Canada.
It is hard to return home if you don’t know where that is. Home becomes wherever you have the personal connections of family and friends—and that changes over time.
It is possible to investigate genealogy though. My own roots in America are part of mass European migrations in the 1800’s—my great-grandparents came from the Netherlands, Sweden, Scotland and Germany. My grandparents were born in Minnesota, Colorado, Ontario and Chicago and grew up speaking English. My parents were born in Chicago and Colorado, moved to New York and California, and met each other in China. By the time I came along, the origin stories and traditions were distant history and there were no connections to Europe.
My partner Sally’s brother was keen on genealogy and managed to connect with relatives on the Mosel River who turned out to be wine makers with a long and interesting history—and who greeted her and her brother with a brass band parade when they returned to the valley. Hard to beat that for a homecoming.
She prodded me to look into my own roots, and within a decade or so we had figured out where my great-grandparents had emigrated from, and even visited. There were no parades, but we did meet a few people from the family tree, saw old houses and farms, and visited small towns I had never heard of before. It was curiously satisfying to see those places and feel the presence of history. It made my own moving around seem less unusual.
In fact, the more I learn about the movements of people throughout the world–even back to Neanderthals, Denisovans and Homo sapiens roots in Africa–the more it seems that migration is the norm, not the exception. It also strengthens my understanding that, in a deep sense, home is this earth for all of us. It doesn’t answer how we can continue to live here.
The Smell of the Greasepaint
The Smell of the Greasepaint
As a girl coming of age in the early 60’s I was enamored of the theater and dreamt of a life on the stage. I’ve written about my glamorous and talented great aunt Miriam who performed in grand theaters and music halls in Europe and America, and inspired me. And I’ve also written about my own acting and directing chops honed in community, camp, and college theater. (See Aunt Miriam, Diva, Theater Dreams and Piano Man – Remembering Herb)
But when it was time to think seriously about career choices I rejected a thespian’s life as an unrealistic, unattainable goal, and trained instead to become a high school librarian.
Retired now for more than a decade, I can look back on many happy and rewarding years working with kids in libraries. And yet sometimes I wonder if – like the Dustin Hoffman character in The Graduate – I should have chucked the conventional and followed the dream.
For in my mind’s eye I can still see myself up on the stage taking my final curtain call to the roar of the crowd!
– Dana Susan Lehrman
Finding a New Home Town
If home is the place “where everybody knows your name,” where you have friends that date back over 50 years, Evanston is my home town.
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Three-Dimensional Chess. Players: Taiwan’s Martial Law, United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, Me
From 1965-67, I studied Chinese in Taiwan, Republic of China. Although I was a dedicated student, I found myself more involved in human rights opposing martial law.
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A Twice-Told Tale
I could no longer feel my cold hands and had to visually place them on holds.
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Ozymandias in Kingston
It took some looking, but we found an intersection where Mom remembered the roads.
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Thunder and Lightning
This ole house is afraid of thunder
This ole house is afraid of storms
This ole house just groans and trembles
When the night wind flings its arms
Lightning (and thunder) figure in two of my earliest memories — one that formed the foundation of my respect for the tough nature of my grandmother; the other that spoke to the more powerful and elemental strength of lightning and the earliest scary memory of my life.
First, about my grandmother. She had to be tough to survive on the North Dakota prairie after being abandoned by her then husband with two small girls before my father was born. She did what she had to do, and took a job cooking for the crew of a cattle ranch. Her day began at three in the morning, making bread for the men to eat before they went out to work with the cattle. It ended late at night setting up for the next day. Sometimes there were only a few hands working with the ranch. But during the high seasons with birthing, branding, and moving the cattle toward the railroad, there could be several dozen men to attend to, all needing bread, food, and whatever else was called for.
There are two incidents attesting to her resilience, only one related to lightning. First, while chopping firewood for the cooking stove, a rattlesnake got in the way (or from the snake’s point of view, she got in the snake’s way) and it bit her. She wrapped up her hand and kept working. Wasn’t much else she could do. And second, years later, after she’d remarried and moved to Wyoming with my grandfather and gave birth to my father, she was baking again (a single loaf, no doubt). But during the baking process, she opened the oven door, only to find herself picked up, knocked unconscious, and groggy from a bolt of lightning that came down the flue to the stove and exited through the path created by the open door. Family lore is that — just like the snake bite — It was no big deal. She put the bread on the counter, took a brief rest and continued with her day.
My lightning experience is less dramatic, but influenced by hers. Years later, we lived in Rapid City where my father was an Air Force Lieutenant. A tremendous (for me at least) storm blew in where my twin brother and I were visiting in the house next door. My mother was back at our house taking care of our older brother. It was windy and noisy, and although we liked the people next door, we cried and begged to go home. Too dangerous and rainy, we were told. We were lucky to have stayed with the neighbor as a tremulous crack and flash of light lit up the house, leaving a tremendous crack in the driveway separating the two houses. Although scared, no one
was hurt. And we learned first hand to take thunder storms seriously.
And I never forgot the few lines from “This Ole House” from the early ‘50s.
