May 7th, 2020
So you want
to know about me?
Well, the
first thing you need to know is that I was a pampered little girl, the apple of
my father’s eye, the first girl after he had waited many years and seeing the
arrival of three big boys. Number one, Charles Justin was a great feat and even
named after his father Justin, number two, Stevenson, Steve, named after my
mother’s family and number three, Thomas Cresap also named after a
Revolutionary war hero coming again from my mother’s golden genealogical line.
He, my
father adored me, but he was only a party of one. My mother sided with her
sons, every one of them except Charles who was raised in my grandmother’s house
while my father was away in World War Two and my mother had to return home
while Daddy was away to live with her Grand Dame of a Mother who equally adored
my father and his first-born son. So Charles had never been hers, she felt,
Charles equally adored his grandmother who, being Margaretta the first, was a
powerful woman who could have been a Duchess or even a dignitary in her own
right. She got a stroke when I was five so I never really knew her. But she was
either a president, regent or lady Chair of any and every worthy organization
to which she belonged.
Mother Helm
(as she was later referred to after she was gone) was president of the Evanston
Women’s Club when I was just four and called upon to go on the Club’s elevated
stage to select some winning number (out of a hat) on behalf of my grandmother
and some worthy cause that she’d endorsed. All I knew was that I was special
because I was Mrs Helm’s granddaughter and name-sake. That was enough for me.
That was historic! After that, the story
went dark and for another chapter, one that will delve into my sweet mama’s
agonizing silver-spooned upbringing that explains for me why she didn’t like me
much. Or rather, she didn’t like women much, didn’t trust them after having an
older sister, Virginia, who was so jealous of her that she would try on several
occasions to literally bump her off: throw her down stairs or try to strangle
her, for example. And when she didn’t have physical access to her, she would
call our house and tell me stories about how my mother was a thief, how she had
stolen her birthright in the form of jewelry and whatnot.
That story
is a novel unto itself. But it figures into understanding why I wasn’t close to
my mother until much later in life. Oh, I loved her but I never felt she had
much interest in me. If I was loved more by Dr. Verne, my dad, then she would
pour her affections on to the other boys.
But frankly,
Marjorie, my mum was miserable in ways I didn’t understand until many years
later. A brilliant woman but the last born of Margaretta and Wilbur whose very
birth was enough to set off Virginia who loved being an only child for many
years. She held that status for six or seven years until my Uncle Standiford
aka Stan was born. That was okay since he wasn’t serious competition for her
father’s affections which she wanted to hold onto most. Stan stuttered and had
a gentleness that his mother loved but didn’t impress his father much. Stan
went to Princeton University as did Wilbur who first met my grandmother during
his undergraduate years at DePauw University where Margaretta was a luminary, a
leading light at the country’s first and number one Greek sorority, Kappa Alpha
Theta. Wilbur went to Princeton for his Masters degree in the Classics, Latin
and Greek and was ongoing towards getting a ph.d when he realized he would lose
his chance to win the hand of Margaretta so he rushed back to Indiana to
complete the wooing process and win the hand of the woman he knew was the ‘best
catch’ he would ever get. So Wilbur sacrificed his doctorate for Margaretta,
but he still became a Latin teacher at the prestigious East Coast prep school
Philips Exeter Academy before returning the the Mid-West where he became
Headmaster at the Northwestern Academy (like the Lab School affiliated to the
University of Chicago today). Wilbur actually took Margaretta to Japan where he
taught English (I guess) and both he and Margaretta became fluent in Japanese.
But they only stayed there one year because she got a hook worm or some such
worm that compelled them to return for medical treatment.
Perhaps that
is why Margaretta encouraged her son to become a doctor. In any case, after
Princeton, Stan returned to the Mid-West to attend Northwestern Medical School
as did Verne. The story goes that before the war, both Stan and Verne, who were
buddies by then, used to ride horses (apparently military steeds who needed the
exercise) at an amphitheater downtown in the City. My grandmother and mother
went one day to watch Stan ride and his riding partner caught the eye of my
mother and he was hooked after that.
Another
version of the story is that my grandmother spotted Verne and decided she,
having been an equestrian growing up on a farm with horses in Indiana, spotted
Verne and decided that this handsome athletic chap ought to marry her daughter.
He would make a good match, was her view apparently. Either way, my mother was
stuck in between two very strong individuals who had it in for her. Meanwhile,
she had other ideas. At the time, she was still an honors student in languages
at Northwestern. But because her family was still emerging from the Depression
years, she hadn’t been able to go away to university, despite having been
accepted at Radcliffe, the women’s version of Harvard. She had to sacrifice and
only stay at the hometown university, which despite being a good school, wasn’t
Ivy League as was Radcliffe. The family apparently had to pick between keeping
Stan at Princeton or letting her go to Radcliffe. Obviously, the boy won the
day.
Marjorie was
never a fighter so she acquiesced to her mother’s wishes despite the fact that
there was Frank Cooper who had already given her his golden ring and she was
already betrothed to him in her heart. But once my grandmother met Verne and
also realized my mother’s affections lay elsewhere, Frank was banned from the
house on 720 Colfax Street.
My mother
married at age 23, after graduating highest honors from Northwestern and
majoring in French, English, Italian and Latin. The couple had one good year
together after their honeymoon in humble Ephraim, Wisconsin where I hear she
had a severe asthma attack and had to spend the night in the bathroom. Verne
hadn’t finished his internship and residency, both of which are essential for
his becoming a specialist (not a GP, General Practitioner) in Internal
Medicine. So they went to Boston, where my mother had entries through her
mother into Bostonian high society. I don’t know how high was high, but at
least she knew lovely families who welcomed her and her new husband into their
social worlds and guided my mother into her native element which was the arts.
My mother used to tell me of her blissful years spending days in the Boston
Museum of Fine Art and other galleries and gardens. Her ‘job’ was translating
medical journal articles for my father that were in any of the multiple
languages that she knew. She would also proofread and edit his papers and
helped him immensely since he basically wasn’t a big city boy. He like my
grandmother was brought up in farm country where he was a big fish in a small
pond. He like Margaretta were from families that we were led to believe lived
like landed gentry since they were ‘landed’. Myon the other hand was far more
sophisticated and urbanized. Her mother had even taken the whole family on a
‘grand tour’ for three months in Europe when she was 13 so she had literally seen
the world where Verne had not.
That all
changed after they came back to Chicago and to Evanston at Margaretta’s
insistence. She had wanted Verne to come set up a medical practice with her
dear stuttering Stan. My father had a natural charm and elicited trust on the
part of his patients whereas Stan’s demeanor was discomfiting so Mother Helm
knew that Verne would improve Stan’s ability to establish a successful private
practice. However, Margaretta had a latent cut-throat character as do many
mothers who are prone to fighting for the survival and success of their
children. After Verne and Marjorie came back to town, another partner was
procured by Margaretta who she apparently felt would be a better fit for Stan
than my father. She cut the two of them loose, left to their own resources
without the family connections which the grannie could otherwise have afforded
to Verne. She could have called upon her myriad contacts to come become clients
of Verne. Instead, she called them to come sign up with Stan. I don’t know the
politics of the practice. What I do know is that my mother felt betrayed once
again by her mother who once again confirmed that she, the girl, could be
sacrificed if Mother had to choose between Stan or her. It was a bitter
realization for Marjorie especially as she adored her mother. But her mother
had little time for her. Either Margaretta would be leading some organization
or spending time with her older sister Mary who was always coming up from
Indiana to stay in Marjorie’s home and spending time with Margaretta, precious
time that should have been hers. Ironically, my mother did something similar in
my case. She would always be on the phone with Helen Nahl or Annabel or Imogene
or any one of a dozen other girl friends that she had. To compensate she put a
private phone in my bedroom which was a big mistake since I would naturally
emulate her. I wasted hours talking to silly girlfriends whose names I can
hardly recall today.
Anyway, the
one thing our family of six did together growing up was eating dinner together.
We often ate late because my father would be visiting patients in hospital or
making house calls (as MDs no longer do today). So my mother would prepare food
and then knit sweaters upon sweaters, never wasting a moment while she quietly
waited.
We lived in
a four story red brick house (the fourth floor is the basement downstairs where
we had lots of storage for bicycles as well as my mother’s washer and dryer as
well as Charlie’s tool room and another room where we had a ping pong table.)
My brothers lived on the top floor, an area that Charlie claimed was off-limits
to me since I was ‘a girl’. This effective meant that I learned about gender
inequality early on. Yet the irony is that I fought them on this issue all the
time. The two older brothers’ (though mainly bossy Charles) wouldn’t let me
play chess since it wasn’t for girls, they said. If I was playing with my
brother Tom (who is just a year and a half older than me), they would boot us
off the chess table so they both could play. Boy did that make me mad. But I
made up for it but being a tomboy, climbing trees and playing baseball and
running faster than all the girls in school except one, Emel Cambel, who became
my best friend. Emel was half Turkish, her father taught mathematics at
Northwestern while her mother was a Quaker and a Democrat while my parents were
Goldwater republicans. It was to Emel’s house that I wrote to when I was ten
and just learning to ride a bicycle. That bicycle would become my key to
freedom and my escape from the oppressive low expectations of my mother who
didn’t want to teach me much other than how to polish silver and iron men’s
shirts perfectly. I wanted to do bigger
things, learned larger lessons and the Cambels gave me that opportunity for a
while.
May 9, 2020
But long
before I met the Cambels and broke out of the family cocoon, I learned there
were complications to being my father’s only daughter. For as much as he cared
for me especially, he was also an MD who defined caring as taking care of his
patients, making me both a daughter and a patient. In fact, he had little time
for anyone who wasn’t a patient. It’s not too much to say that he lived for his
family and his patients, and possibly his patients came first. Because of his
commitment to them, he was much loved and trusted by his patients. In fact,
they often seemed to treat him like a semi-god, a super-hero whose word meant
everything to them. He deserved that status since Dr Verne was one of those
old-time MDs who still made house—calls, a phenomenon that hardly exists among
medical professionals in America at least. I grew up feeling I was living in
the home of a high priest of sorts since medics in America at that time
occupied the peak of the professional pyramid. As such, he was held in high
esteem and that status was meant to rub off on me. This was especially true as
this was a time, post-world war two, when genetics were in vogue even though
Hitler had popularized genetics for all the wrong reasons. Genes seemed to me
to be a fatalistic way of viewing the world whereby people were defined by
their DNA, not by their character or contribution to society. Genes were
something you were supposed born with so if your blood predecessors had ‘good
genes’, they were said to pass them on to their offspring who were bound to
inherit who knew what. Certain traits manifest by one’s forefathers. To me, it
seemed to be a limiting way of looking at life since genes were thought of as
predetermining what kind of person a babe would become. For instance, if
someone knew there had been thieves, murderers and generally low-class human
beings in one’s background, the probability of that person turning out to
reflect similar characteristics would be reckoned as easily understood. If
one’s relative had allergies, then it was probable that that one would have
allergies as well. And if one’s ancestors had been scholars and scientists,
then one was expected to succeed intellectually as well.
To me, it
always seemed too facile an explanation for the explaining why people did what
they did. It was also too predetermined for my liking, which is why I took
little interest in my father’s attention to our family genes.
My mother’s
family was well known for having ‘good genes’. That had been determined and
documented by my grandmother, the Grand Dame Margaretta. She had inherited quite a bit of funds from
her father James who had been a lawyer and a scion in a family closely
affiliated with the founder of the university in their hometown, Greencastle,
Indiana. Anyway, Margaretta hired a genealogist to research her family and
trace them back to their early arrival in North America before the American
Revolution. The family took pride in those blood lines, unearthed by
Margaretta. But I secretly felt as if I came into the world rather like a race
horse, bred specifically embody good genes from both sides of my family since
my father also had a history and claimed all sorts of connections with royal
Swedes and noble Prussians.
One of my
grandmother’s organizations which she headed was the DAR, the Daughters of the
American Revolution, an organization founded on genealogical and historical
ties to the founding fathers (and mothers) who’d fought on the revolutionary
side of the American revolution. The DAR was in trouble for most of the time I
was growing up. Accused of being a racist organization because something had
happened when they were supposed to have a famous African American opera
singer, (Miriam Anderson I think) perform in their great hall in Washington,
DC, but at the last minute, it got postponed. The DAR has yet to leave that
racist label behind despite the fact that they are one organization that funds
scholarships for girls from Native American backgrounds. Anyway, Mother Helm
was often the president or regent of the DAR and she ensured my mother was a
member. But my mother grew up in her mother’s shadow and never saw herself as
anything like Margaretta. Instead, she chose to accept membership but only
serve as the organization’s Treasurer. She was great at Math and held that
positions as long as she was active in the group. In turn, my mother made Tom
and me become CARs, Children of the American Revolution. That meant every year,
we had to be in the 4th of July parade, sitting in a slow-moving car
waving at the people as if we were royalty. We both got out of it as soon as we
could. But later in life, I agreed to be a member since it meant a lot to my
mother.
Ironically,
she didn’t make me a lifetime member so I haven’t paid my dues in years. But
she did make me a lifetime member of the Colonial Dames, another genealogical
and historical body of women who also traced their bloodlines back to the
American Revolution. On the big difference between them was that the Dames were
related to men who fought for the British against the American renegades. They
fought for King George III, and I believe to this day, they believe the United
States should never have split from the UK. We know people in other former
colonies of Great Britain who also feel this way. But frankly, I have never
been to a single Dames meeting. I gather it’s considered quite prestigious
among certain circles, but I frankly wouldn’t know.
Nonetheless,
genetics and blood the bane of my existence for many years. Of course, there’s
a part of me that is humbled to know I am related to three of the governors of
the first thirteen colonies. And I don’t mind telling people when asked where I
come from, that I am a mongrel. On my mother’s side, I am Scotish, English,
French and Dutch and on my father’s side I am Swedish and German. But normally
it is not a topic of discussion since most people I know don’t care about
genes. Ironically, I do love watching crime movies in which the murderer’s
identity is discovered as a consequence of getting a sample of his DNA. I know
how many ‘cold cases’ of unsolved crimes have been solved since DNA testing
became an integral part of forensic science. Nonetheless, by the time I’d
nearly completed university, I had studied enough philosophy and religion to
believe that one’s mental faculties meant more than one’s genes and the mind
was not determined by genes but by study, observation, education and even by a
higher power that opened up infinite possibilities to the individual who was
open to listening to and learning from that higher concept of mind.
I was bound
to take that spiritual route out of the genealogical fatalism that claimed my
life was preordained by the blood that ran through veins of people long gone.
That whole story must wait for a later chapter. Suffice it to say that for as
long as I was under the shadow of genetics in my parents’ home, I was
constrained from doing many things that I had wanted to do. In fact, the number
of ‘no’s’ that I heard from my father anytime I asked if I could do this or
that were so innumerable that I learned the art of stealth at an early age.
The art of
stealth.
The art of
stealth was a skill I cultivated early on once I realized there were too many
things I was not allowed to do. That not being ‘allowed’ to go to Girls Scout
camp, to sleep over at friends’ home as other girls did and not allowed to do
many things that were prohibited mainly by Verne but also by Marjorie my mom
taught me lessons related to the value of liberation. It was probably why I so
early identify with oppressed people today, be they Palestinians, African
Americans, Africans and even vulnerable women.
I wasn’t
very good at breaking out too far from the parameters set for me by my parents.
But I definitely found their conservative attitudes were alien to my instincts.
May 10th,
2020
Color had never been an issue as I grew up
although as I reflect back on my early years, I realize the few people that
assisted my mother were only black people. There was Jean who came once a
fortnight to help her vacuum the house, but it wasn’t as if she left him to do
all the work. She did all the cooking, clothes washing, drying and ironing
while he let himself into our house every other Tuesday through the basement
door, came upstairs into the kitchen carrying our heavy vacuum and climbing
stairs to get to work. I was in school when he left so I never got to know him.
Then there was Charlotte, a young black woman who would look after me before I
was five while I was taking my nap-time and my mother was either ironing or
heading off to some meeting or doing I never knew what. Charlotte was a gentle
lovely woman who I also didn’t know well, but our family stayed in touch with
her till she passed on several years ago. And then there was Leo, sweet Leo
would stuck with my mother for many years. Leo had been a chauffeur to some old
millionaire from the North Shore, Kenilworth I believe who was so highly
respected by his boss that he’d go with him to trips abroad. He’d even go
golfing with his boss, so he had probably seen more of the world than anyone in
our family, except my father who went off to World War two before I was born
and traveled all over Europe, working to save lives but never telling us much
about those awful war years.
It might
sound odd to say that Leo was my mother’s best friend, but he was the one
person who was with her during her darkest days. Like when her mother died and
her sister locked her elderly father out of his own house, and like when my
brother Steve was sent to a mental institution by my father who wouldn’t
‘allow’ her to go and see him, and when her own sister tried to toss her down
the family stairs and later lunge at her aggressively when her father was
deathly ill. Fortunately, my father had been there at the hospital when Aunt
Virginia tried to let my mother have it. But the one to comfort my mother when
she rehearse all those incredible stories was Leo.
In fact, my
mother had been brought up by a black woman since as I said, my grandmother was
the Grand Dame of Evanston and had little time to bring up her last born child,
Marjorie. Roxie was a gem as my mother told me about this wonderfully wise and
loving black woman who’d left her four kids in the South to come North to earn
a living so as to educate her own. My mom was the beneficiary and was she
blessed for having this soulful woman who gave so much sweet love to my mother
and taught her much about humility and grace and laughter and humor.
May 11th,
2020
The one who
has taught me the most about humility and laughter with grace is my dear friend
Sarah who I only met many years after my mother told me stories about Roxie and
the unconditional affection that she shared with my mother. Sarah’s story is
long and only begins after I had gone to Africa with my Rotary fellowship and
returned to see family and friends in Chicago. It was an instantaneous spark of
friendship that we struck as her light-hearted humor hit my rib-cage more
quickly than anyone had ever affected me in that way before. I have come and
gone from Chicago many times since that first encounter with her and her
hilarious roommate, the East Coast pianist and puppeteer Gale Freeman. All this
is meant to be a Segway to lead me to last night after Sarah and I had met
during the COVID-19 pandemic to watch ‘World of Fire’, ‘Press’ and ‘Baptiste’
at her new flat on Elmwood and Main in South Evanston. Sarah had reminded me to
make sure I had everything before I departed from her place as she was about to
take her ancient pitbull Zorro out for a late night walk. She said that because
she knows I have had too many instances of leaving one item behind at almost
every venue where I go. I have tried to correct that ‘habit’ but it often seems
to plague me. So when I woke up this morning and got a photo call from Kenya, I
felt I needed my ear phones so I wouldn’t waken the Freeman family after maria
had invited me to come stay at her home. But I couldn’t find the earphones. I
remembered I specifically had left them in my purse, but as I couldn’t find the
purse, I couldn’t find the earphones and just turned the volume down on my
iphone and tried to also keep my voice down.
After I
finished speaking to Stuart Nash, founder and artistic director of the Nairobi
Performing Arts Studio, I looked for my purse again. Nope, I looked under the
sofa bed which had become my home during the self-quarantining required by the
pandemic-fighters. Stuart invited me to attend his zoom class on theatre
Production which I happily agreed to do for over an hour. And after that, it
took me a moment to recall that I had also received a what’s app message early
the same morning from Sakina Mildred Miriichi to attend her film production
presentation that she was giving via zoom to the Rotary club of muthaiga. Of
course, I had to go!!
Finally,
after all that zooming was done (with Stuart, around 20 of us got linked via
Google-Meet, a whole other interactive zoom-like platform that I quickly got
used to), I got serious about looking for my purse: I went out to check my car
three times. I might have left it there; no I apparently hadn’t. after that, I
checked under my sofa bed since that’s where I have found the most effective
storage space, and I even ripped up my sofa bed since I’d been known to bury
one of my two phones in the bedding before. No purse. I called Sarah who hadn’t
seen it either and I asked Maria to pray that I would find it. Then I got to
work finally on my Swahili since I was taking my first class in a few hours on
Tuesday morning.
The bag
contained my passport, debit card, drivers license and even my Kenyan credit
card. I had called the bank to ask them to put my card on hold. They gave my 48
hours, then they would cancel the card altogether.
But at a few
minutes after 5pm, soon after I had gotten a call from Ritesh, my Rotary club
mentor, I was busy on my Swahili prep, when the phone rang.
“Hallo, is
this Margaret?” the man asked in a thick Spanish accent. “Yes, this is
margaretta. May I help you?’ I replied. “My name is Pablo and I have your bag,”
he said abruptly. I nearly howled right there and then! I was elated and
thrilled and also slightly disbelieving. Is God truly this good! He must be!!
“Where are
you? Can I come? How did you find it?” all those questions came flooding out of
my mouth. “Where should I come to find you?” “My wife found it near Jerome and
California Streets. We also live on Jerome,” Pablo said. “What!!” I was now
incredulous. “I also live on Jerome street. I can come to you right now. Where
on Jerome are you?” I asked. He specified a house number.
I jumped
into my car and drove right past Pablo and his wife Maria Elena. Before I left
the house, I asked Maria if I could borrow some money to give to them. $10 or
maybe $20. My gratitude knew no bounds.
So I drove
and only saw them waving out of the corner of my eye as I sped past them.
Quickly I stopped and turned around into one of the few drive ways on this
street that had many small houses planted close to each other with minimal
front and back yards. Then I jumped out
of my car, having double parked in the middle of the street. The Grandosa’s
home was just one short city street block from Maria’s.
There was my
little baggalini that I had gotten from Sue for Christmas two years before.
“Everything is there,” Pablo said confidently as he stood next to his wife.
Maria Elena could not speak English but she did have a job in a Korean factory
just down the road across McCormick Blvd, getting pennies for her service no
doubt. Pablo explained that she had found it early this morning around 7am in
the middle of the street. How it got to California street is a mystery to me as
I came straight from Sarah’s house and parked carefully so as to not bump any
of my neighbors. Perhaps Maria Elena was mistaken about location. I had only
been on Jerome street for the block when I had driven from McCormick to Kedzie
and turned left onto Jerome. As there was no parking on the right hand side of
the road, I remember that I did do a U-turn on Jerome and Albany but I don’t recall
the car door swinging open. Perhaps there was a hole in the car floor and the
bag fell out of that. Otherwise, I cant imagine how it landed in the street.
Pablo was
right. There was nothing missing. My passport, credit/debit cards and driver/s
license were all there. I had Maria’s $10 bill in hand and I handed it to pretty
little (she was probably 4’10”) Maria Elena. Then I started looking in my
zippers and found another $10 bill. What to do? I pulled it out and handed it
again to my petite ‘finder’. I was so grateful to them. She hesitated to take
it. I pushed it forward towards her and gestured that I wanted to hug her and
him too for what they had done for me. Their selfless effort was wonderful.
Then I asked
them how they knew how to call me. They pointed to the T-mobile receipt I had
put into my phone when I bought my month-long phone contract. The shop lady had
printed the number on a yellow post-it and taped it to the receipt so he
pointed to the post-it. There was the number and the receipt had my name. I
asked for their names, phone number and address! I must send them a Christmas
card or something. I will never forget Maria Elena and Pablo. They didn’t need
to go to all this trouble for me. They told me they were from Mexico and had
lived in that house for four years. They have three kids and I don’t know what
kind of work he does. How can I ever repay such kindness? How can I also thank
Maria sufficiently because I also know that her prayers were effective in
helping me retrieve that beautiful bag.
May 13, 2020
Wednesday
We are in
the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic which is why I finally got persuaded by a
dear friend to start writing my story. He advised me not to worry about being
to chronological or lineal in my development of thought. Just write a minimum
of 500 words a day. I have been relatively good at that. But there are so many
distractions, despite our living in a ‘lockdown’, previously known as a
self-quarantining status. I won’t identify them all since I am staying with a
dear friend whose family has gathered to play croquet in their backyard and may
happen in on my writing anytime. Interruptions tend to be a big distraction,
but then we love to be distracted in these times when boredom is the bane of
the many. I don’t have that problem as I have too many things to do and read
and listen to and watch and pray about.
Today I
thought I would get on with my story and respond to a question I am often
asked. People wonder what my background is for having become a so-called
‘legendary’ art critic. First off, I try to dispel the belief that I am both a
legend which I am not as far as I am concerned although I have been writing
about theatre and visual arts in kenya since the late 1979s and here we are in
the early 2020s and I am still at it. Neither am I a so called critic. I hate
that notion of the critic as ‘the authority’ to be judge and jury over the
arts. I first saw the fallacy of believing that the critic was either
all-knowing or more important, more authoritative than the artist in question
him or herself. The critic is a subsidiary and a parasite which/who can only
exist by virtue of the artist’s creative process. What’s more, most people
believe ‘the critic’ is supposed to be negatively critic rather than be
analytical and appraising of elements found in the artwork. I am of the view
that my role is to be insightful and analytical, not necessarily negative but
appraising broader implications of the artwork, be it the context in which is
to be found, the artist and his or her role in society or the impact of their
art on the local or regional or global scene.
Anyway, when
I think about writing about theatre, I realize my experience is from childhood
where I grew up surrounded by theatrical characters in my family. All were
highly intelligent and interesting to watch. But my mother was the master of
comedy and warmth and sensitivity. My father wielded the knife, being a living
warrior against bacteria and roast beef and my three brothers kicking one
another under the dinner table and telling wild stories every night. But my
first opportunity to be on stage was at age four when I had to play the
granddaughter of the Grand Dame of Evanston, picking the winning Bingo ticket
at the Evanston Women’s Club. I was also in the primary school’s dance company
(which I had totally forgotten about) with Miss Omler who taught us dance once
a week from the time I think I was in kindergarden. I was the last girl to drop
out of her dance class. We had performances every year and while it wasn’t
ballet, it was my shot at being a dancer. I guess I never took it seriously,
never really took myself seriously at anything much since it was always my big
brothers who were the stars. But in junior high school I did land a role in
Elinor Rice’s production of Winnie the Pooh. I played Rabbit as I recall, and I
was scared to death of Miss Rice. She had actually been my mother’s drama
teacher when she attended Roycemore Girls School. Yes, that is how old Elinor
Rice was. But she was a living legend in my mother’s eyes. Miss Rice had loved
my mother’s performances which were usually comedic. I was a comedian and I
never would think of competing with my mother for Miss Rice’s favor. I knew I
could never compare and I felt that Miss Rice felt that too. Yes I felt intimidated,
so I never got rave reviews at that show. But I did meet a nice boy, Stuart
Lauderbach who worked back stage and we became telephone friends and spoke
evenings for many months after Pooh. Because I didn’t take myself seriously, I
didn’t enroll in high school theatre which was very big at Evanston Township
High School. Nor did I act at university, although by the time I met Joan
Smutny and accepted her invitation to join her master’s degree classes in
Education, I got into the spirit. Joan was and still is all about Creativity as
a Godly expression of divinity and thus, she helped me to learn about my own
true godly character which had the capacity to express God-like creative
qualities in any field. The freedom she taught me is what truly allowed me to
go forward in my life and identify with all creative and cultural expressions.
Creativity is what gave me the courage to apply for a fellowship with the
Rotary International, for its Ambassadorial fellowship, which I amazingly got!!
Divine creativity also gave me the power to go to Africa and enroll in
University of Nairobi where I had the freedom to select the course of study I
really wanted to pursue which was literature. My mother had been a literature
major having received highest honors (Phi Beta Kappa) in Languages from
Northwestern University. And since I had grown up intimated by most of the
brilliant people in my family, including my mother (who was a specialist in
playing dumb or at least playing low key and being humble, though quite a snob
in reality), I hadn’t read as much as I should have. Books had been the great
intimidators since we all knew that my second brother Steve read through one of
the two sets of Encyclopedia for fun one summer. But now, living far away from
my people I could start afresh and become the best of myself. I savored various
departments since most students who had received the fellowship were in the
middle of their academic studies and thus went straight into the Kenyan
equivalent without a second thought. But as I had completed a master’s degree
in Teaching at National Louis University with Joan, I felt free to select
whatever I wanted. It wasn’t that easy however since I was told off my the
history department star Dr Atieno Odhiambo that he didn’t want fly-by-night
American passers-by in his class. He was the first one to alert me that
Americans like me wouldn’t be taken at all seriously unless they distinguished
themselves in some way. I was already feeling I wanted to be in Kenya as i was
among brilliant individuals at the university and I realized I had much to
learn and an opportunity of a lifetime. I settled on the Literature Department
where Ngugi wa Thiong’o was Chair but he rejected my application since my
undergraduate studies had been in sociology, philosophy and religion and lastly
education. None of that was Literature. And his British academic background
(coming from Makerere University (which was considered the Oxford of east
Africa at the time), he could not accept anyone who didn’t have a bachelor’s
degree in at least English lit. I had wanted to enroll in a master’s degree
program since I already had a BA from DePauw University and the Med from
National Louis, but that was out of the question.
So what did
I do? I enrolled in the undergrad program in literature and took all the
undergrad course with Ngugi and Micere Mugo and John Ruganda and even Chris
Wanjala in one year. After that I took all the exams and got into the master’s
program at last. But even getting into the undergrad program was a tussle. It
only happened after the students’ five-month strike had come to an end, and I
request Dr Micere to speak to Ngugi on my behalf, which enabled me to get in.
for that I am infinitely grateful to her. After that I spent another two years
with Ngugi and took all his MA courses, however he assigned me Dr Kimani Gecau
to be my academic advisor which was disappointing to say the least. My master’s
thesis was meant to be a panAfrican study of novelists from West, South and
East Africa. But Kimani wanted me to write on African American literature since
that was his field. So I ended up using Malcom X’s framework of the dialectic
between the House Nigger and the Field Nigger and specifically analyzed Ralph
Ellison’s Invisible Man. I was pissed at Ellison for playing that House Nigger
role, being so obsequious towards to white man. But I understand why he did it.
It was his means of survival in a savage white supremacist America.
Anyway,
while in the MA program, Ruganda invited me to be in the University’ Free
Traveling Theatre which had just started the week before. That was in 1975,
between my going into the MA program. I had initially refused to joint FTT as I
knew I would be treated like the token white girl, emblematic of all the ills
that white people had ever inflicted on blacks. But my housemate, a lovely
Australian woman married to a black Zimbabwean physics lecturer told me I had
to do it. Serena zwangobani said it was an opportunity of a lifetime which I
must not miss. So I went and performed in two plays that traveled all around
Kenya, performing more than 100 times in a month. Details of that excruciating
month will be revealed on another occasion. Not now, it was too painful.
But while in
the master’s program, Ngugi invited me to be in his debut production of The
Trial of Dedan Kimathi which he co-wrote with Micere and in which she starred.
That was the opportunity of a lifetime. First, it was being asked by Ngugi to
do anything. This time it was to play the ugly white colonial memsab in the
courtroom scene where Kimathi was standing trial. It was also an amazing
opportunity since it again gave me an opportunity to see what theatre really
mean in a national production since we performed at Kenya National Theatre. And
finally, it was my time to meet three wonderful Asian men, all of whom played
the parts of white people since no whites other than me would be a part of
Ngugi’s revolutionary production. (His kamiriithu production of Ngai hika Ndeda
would come two years later). The production ultimately went to FESTAC (the
Festival of the Second PanAfrican Theatre…) together with Francis Imbuga’s
Betrayal in the City. But I refused to go. I knew that money for air tickets
would be limited so why would the kenya government pay for a white American
woman when i would be depriving a Kenyan the opportunity to be there. I never
gave it a second thought although I know it was a big deal for me to have been
there. Always in the three years that I was in class with Ngugi, I kept a low
profile, being the only conspicuously white person in the class. I attended all
his lectures, workshops, and chats that he held for his students. But I never
distinguished myself except in academic or in apparently putting myself forward
or seeming to claim the white privilege that was still running rampant in the
country and indeed around the world.
That
experience at University of Nairobi is what gave me the grounding to be a
so-called theatre and film critic for several papers including The Nairobi
Times, Target (of NCCK), Kenya Times, Men Only and Nation Media Group. I also
took a theatre class with John Ruganda which is where I later discovered
Gacheru had taken note of my presence in the same theatre class. “we used to
call you Miss Drama” Gacheru told me much later because by then I wasn’t shy
about what I appreciated about plays. Ruganda was a complicated character and
sadly, an alcoholic, but he was a brilliant lecturer and a genius theatre
director who inspired all of his cast members who remained loyal to him and his
legacy up until now. Those of us who had the privilege to be on stage under
Ruganda’s directorship know one another and know what an honor it was to have
been shown how to express the passion of real theatre by a man whose first love
and passion was the stage.
May 14, 2020
Sunday
I began
doing music when I took my first piano lesson when I was five years old. I had
lessons until I was 12, but most of them were with Mrs Lee. She would come once
a week and all I can recall of her teaching was that she always poked my
fingers with her pencil. I learned little from her and I did not learn to love
the piano. I did love the fact that my older brother Steve played the piano
very well. I also loved that we had a baby grand piano in our living room which
suffered a trauma when the ceiling fell in on the baby grand and damaged some
of the strings. But those were repaired and it was fun seeing that it wasn’t I
who made the living room messing. The living room was a big deal as it was
filled with antiques, some belonging to my my mother, others that had belonged
to her mother which she obtained after she and Alice Strom, my mother’s friend
purchased my mother’s childhood home rather than it being sold including all
the valuable artwork and antiques in it.
Having all
those antiques inside the house made the living room look quite cluttered but
my mother didn’t mind. The tragedy was that when after my father passed on and
she decided to sell our family home on 811 Monticello Place, she got a hustler
in to ‘help’ her have an estate sale in our house where most of the best
antiques went for a song.
The hustler
had a good friend who was an antique art collector so he and the guy made deals
that my mother was oblivious to. I on the other hand, tried to tell her she was
being robbed, but she wouldn’t listen to me. I guess that is how much she
valued my opinion, but I guess she was also fluttered. She had such low
self-esteem that she was prepared to have a Man take charge, not caring if he
was a crook or not. My mother always preferred men, which I do understand since
she learned early that women could be dangerous, deadly and malicious at the
drop of a hat. She didn’t look as if she was on her guard all the time. Instead
she was always gracious, charming and delightfully amusing in public. But I
being the only other female in her home guess this is why I never felt
especially devoted to her as so many daughters usually are. That changed after
the men in her life passed. That included her father Wilbur who had been under
the thumb of Virginia, my mother’s deranged sister, for most of his life. It
also included Daddy who passed in the mid-1980, 1986 I think, who was a loving
autocrat. It was also after her heart was broken when her second son Steve died
under the most horrific circumstances. It is so hard to describe. Suffice it to
say he passed alone, in a mental institution where he starved himself literally
to death. Their relationship was a bonding that was probably the dearest of her
with all four of her children, but it was the most difficult. He was the
genius, the high school National Science foundation winner, the Harvard
University Phi Beta Kappa and winner of a Ford Foundation fellowship and a
Rockefellor Foundation fellowship which took him to Latin America where he got
very ill and nearly died. Believing the Morman’s god had saved his life, he
became a fanatical Morman who had the nerve to tell our hardworking father that
he (Daddy) was not his father; God was his father. That hurt my father so much,
he never forgave Steve. But he had already strikes against that son since he
was supposed to follow in his footsteps and become a brilliant physician. Steve
refused and instead became a brilliant anthropologist. That was too much for
Daddy so after Steve got sick in Latin America (Argentina), he refused my
mother’s visiting him in hospital. The stories of Steve’s unfortunate
adventures in and out of hospitals and out of marriage became fable in our
home. He married a Morman girl Kay, who looked almost like a carbon copy of my
mother in her heyday. But steve was always searching for truth. At the same
time, he was also trying to ‘be normal’. He was such a sensitive, lovely man.
My few
memories of Steve are seminal in my life. In fourth grade I remember coming
home from Sunday School after being laughed at by children because I did not
know the Lord’s Prayer. Somehow I found my way up to the third floor (where
only boys were ‘allowed’) and presented my weepy self to Steve who
immediately took me in hand and taught
me the Lord’s Prayer then and there.
Another
time, while Steve was going through his marathon running phase, I recall I used
to spot him as he ran and I road my bicycle. That was so much fun and quite a
contrast since he also went through a slovenly phase (I think he was terribly
depressed) when he got very fat. Steve was always my hero and I recall I used
to periodically look into the drawer where my mother kept the beautiful
drawings that he did when he was in high school (or maybe primary school). In
the part of the house, she also kept one sculpture that he had created out of
clay which had clearly been fired. I knew that steve who taught everything from
Latin to Mathematics when he needed a job, could do anything, including making
sweet music. In fact, in high school he was First Chair for the oboe in the
ETHS orchestra which was a big achievement since it was one of the best musical
groups in the state. He could have also been First Chair for flute but he had
to choose one. He used to always walk around the house, when he descended from
the Third Floor with his oboe reed in his mouth. Apparently, there was
something about needing to keep the reed moist as a way of getting the best
sound.
Anyway, I
was in Kenya when Steve died. Nobody told me until I came home that summer for
my annual church’s association meeting. I was devastated not just because he
had passed but because I hadn’t been told. That is how close our family was, I
guess. My father used to lambast me as being just as horrible as Steve so I
guess he didn’t care one way or the other. I always had felt that was a
compliment since being a bastard like Steve was like equating me with a smart
person. I learned to forgive my father, especially after I went to Africa and
more or less refused to come except for those church meetings. And especially
after he called me a nigger lover and tried to strangle me after he learned
that I had married Gacheru. He had been drinking that night and chased me
around the dining room table. He did manage to grab me, but fortunately my
mother was there and managed to intervene and made him release his grip. I
understand he came from Iowa which was pearly white and Republican. He had
never known people of color until he came to medical school at Northwestern. He
did have Black patients who he treated equitably I know. He even billed them
according to a sliding scale since most of them did not have a high living
standard compared to the white folk in town.
In any case,
after my learning of Steve’s passing on and their cremating his body without
any sort of service, I insisted that we hold a memorial service for steve. My
father wasn’t keen but I didn’t care. I had defied him many times before, even
when I got serious about a religion that understood God as a loving Father who
had the power to heal the sick, raise the dead, etc. I even defied his family
ban on any of us going to visit him in the first mental institution that he had
been put into. When I went there, I gave a copy of Science and Health by Mary
baker Eddy and he read it cover to cover. Steve used to give me books like
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring long before it became a kind of bible for
environmentalists. I even took a bus and train to reach Steve another time when
he had been moved to Manteno Mental Hospital down state. My father never knew
about that either but I wish I had gone to see him more. I knew he was not mad,
only different. So different that his wife threw him out of his own house for
not living up to her expectations of having married a big deal Harvard grad.
Their one daughter Kay never knew Steve. I think he got booted out when she was
like 8 months old. But she could have been an intellectual carbon copy of
Steve. I don’t know where she went for undergrad. But she got a ph.d in
bio-genetics from the University of Chicago and a post-doctorate from MIT. He
would have been so proud of her.
Anyway, I
wish Steve had stuck with his music and his oboe. Every time I hear an oboe on
the radio or at a concert, I feel he is with me. In my prayer, I know he is
alive and making music wherever he is.
May 27, 2020
I think it
all started with the eye patch. The transgressive behavior I mean. To
transgress (the verb) according to Google means ‘to infringe or go beyond the
bounds of … an established standard of behavior’. Yep, that’s what I have been
doing for much of my life.
Transgression
(the noun) is even more precisely defined as ‘an act that goes against a law,
rule or code of conduct; an offense’. Yep, that defines me pretty clearly as an
outlaw, which I can easily relate to. More politely, I think I was known as a
rebel although I didn’t practice my acts of rebellion openly. Mostly I
specialized in stealthy behavior. But not always. I think there were times as
in junior high school when I wanted to fit in. But that was never a very big
deal for me.
In fact, it
was while I was in primary school that I made my first best friend. It was
actually in the process of transgressing. It was the first time I got on my
brother’s bicycle (which I had just ‘bought’ for a dollar—where I got that
dollar I don’t know). The rule that I had broken wasn’t clearly defined but I
rode that bike way beyond any place I had ventured with my older brother Tom
who was a year and a half older than me. I rode all the way to Long Field which
was a one-square city block of grass used for local sporting events by mainly
kids. It was there that I met my friend Emel and then rode to her house,
another block away. That was when I discovered a whole other world of human
beings. They were Democrats; my parents were staunch Goldwater Republicans.
They were Unitarians; my parents hardly went to church but when they did, it
was to the Methodist church. Plus the dad was a Turk and Northwestern
University professor while my parents were purely mid-western. My father was
from Iowa and his parents were Swedish and German, while my mom was a born and
bred Evanstonian with blood from the English, Scots, Dutch and French Huguenots.
And finally, they read Superman comic
books. That was my first taste of Superman who I had only know on Sunday
morning TV when George Reeve was the original one who could leap tall buildings
with a single bound!
But back to
the eye patch. I was born with an eye problem or set of problems. My father
said I was born cross-eyed, a problem which apparently got corrected with an
eye operation when I was four. But I also was born seeing two of everything and
one eye would see far, the other eye was near sighted. So the idea of my
wearing an eye patch was for some reason, to strength my far-sighted eye. But
now as I think about it, the patch made no sense. Of course, it sounds
confusing and it has never been corrected fully. A few years ago, I had laser
surgery on my right eye which was the short-sighted one. Now I can see much
farther with it, but I can no longer use it to read. I must use magnifiers or
reading glasses or else I am stuck. In short, my eyes have been a central issue
in my life. My parents used to take me periodically to see eye specialists and
ultimately had three eye operations but none could fix the double vision or the
duo-sight thing. So as I reflect back, I can see why a four year old me
rebelled against wearing the eye patch. Why cover up the one eye that enabled
me to see even if it was to only see close up. I intuitively saw that it made
no sense.
What was transgressive
was my making Tom wear the patch instead of me. I used to gleefully pick on him
and one way I did it was to make him wear my patch. I don’t know that it
happened more than once. But it went down in family history. The naughty little
girl who twisted her sweet brother around her finger. Tom of course rebelled
and learned to keep a distance from me, but I still used to follow him to the
community golf course near our house when he wanted to practice by himself. I
loved Tom dearly but the poor guy was stuck getting less of my father’s
adoration and much more of my mom’s. I guess boys need father’s appreciation
and Tom didn’t get much until much later in life, after my father retired from
a busy medical practice and both of our older brothers, Charlie and Steve were
gone literally.
The
transgressive behavior was compounded by my father who didn’t realize how his
being over-protective of me would have a negative effect on his daughter. Both
medically and paternally, he was an autocrat of the first order. Whatever I
wanted to do, he seemed not to let me out of his control so he would say no. no
my desire would be bad for my health or no, my wish was socially unacceptable.
No was the word I came to expect from him whenever I asked to pursue something
I wanted to do, like go to girl scout camp or go out with girls to a school
evening event. The consequence was that I stopped asking and started doing
things scrumptiously. Not always the smartest thing to do as it meant I wasn’t
always straight forward with the parents, but it also allowed me to find out
about things that I never would have discovered if I hadn’t been a rebellious
child.
May 30, 2020
One thing I
discovered much later on is that my mother would have probably been a rebel as
well if she had lived in another time period and say, lived in my generation or
even younger. If she had lived in a time when brilliant women were encouraged
to blossom and express themselves, she could have been just about anything. I
always think she could have been CEO of General Motors or the Governor of the
Federal Reserve or an actress who was a leading light on the world stage since
she had the latent theatrical gene and charming sense of humor that made her
such a loveable and adaptable human being.
How I know
for sure that she would have been a rebel too if only…. is an event that
happened to me after I completed my first university degree at DePauw, a
liberal arts school started by my great-great grandfather Reverend Cyrus Nutt,
the Methodist minister sent out by the church to start a school in the mid-19th
century in the hinterlands which back then was what is now the Midwest, in the
place now known as Greencastle, Indiana. Cyrus was the first teacher at Indiana
Asbury as DePauw was called initially. His achievement should have been a
source of pride for me, but I never told anyone, all four years that I was
there that I was the great-great granddaughter of the university’s founding
father.
Anyway, I
was slightly at loose ends after graduation. I had applied to graduate schools
and gotten into The New School of Social Research in New York and into Yale
Divinity School, mostly on the recommendations of great university lecturers. I
didn’t have the money to pay the school fees and had already been conditioned
by my father to expect a no from him if I asked if he could pay me tuition etc.
So I got a job at the Chicago Sun Times in the most menial position of a
classified ad taker (Ironically, I found out much later that my
mother had been hired for a similar position nearly forty years earlier only at
the Chicago Tribune.) I had been hanging out with radical feminists in the city
and only moved back home after I realized I was deeply disturbed by some women
in the women’s movement who had issues with me. Suffice it to say, I was
verging on a nervous breakdown but my mother chose to send me down to stay with
her favorite relatives in Tucson, Arizona, which was the best thing she could
have done for me. Her cousin Paul Miller and his wife Marie were the coolest
people I could have gone to. He was a trained engineer and lawyer, retired from
both those fields and was now into theatre. Marie, meanwhile, was a good buddy
of my mom who had been shipped down to Tucson to stay with Paul and Marie’s
place ten years earlier when my father couldn’t handle her mental crisis; he
thought she was going mad. But once she got together with far-out down to earth
people like the millers, she came into herself. That’s also what happened to
me. I stopped being so paranoid and began to regain a sense of balance; but I
also realized I didn’t really have a clue who I was or what I was doing with my
life. I was 21, but I felt like an old soul who felt nothing made much sense,
least of all myself.
I found my
way back to Chicago nonetheless, and essentially swore off all of my freaky
feminist buddies and foes that I previously couldn’t cope with. Soon
thereafter, I remembered something my aunt Katherine had shared with me about
God that got me back on track. That story is for another chapter. All I can say
is that I had been searching for a higher sense of purpose and reason for being
alive for several years. I hadn’t found an answer but that malaise was the
source of my feeling of alienation before I went to Arisona, and the base of
why I felt I was in the thick of an existential crisis after my return. It was
that malaise, that thirst for a higher purpose, that feeling that if there was
no higher purpose there was no good
reason for my being alive either. I had just begun to get my bearings and
had entered graduate school at National Louis University. I was going for a
master’s degree in teaching (an MAT) when my mother walked into my bedroom and
handed me a document and told me to fill it out immediately. I had no idea what
it was. It was an application for a fellowship from the Rotary International. I
hadn’t applied for anything of that kind before but here she was. If she had
been my age, meaning if she had been me, she would have applied. That was when
I realized there was a side of my mom that I really didn’t understand. We were
not so different, although it wouldn’t be until many years later that I would
realize how similar we were.
In any case,
I filled it out the form and started grad school with the tuition fee being
covered by my oldest brother Charlie (who I have so much to thank him for since
that was a big turning point in my life). A few months later, I got a call from
RI for an interview and when I went, I prayed a lot before hand and then was
confronted by nine older men, seated around one long table, each asking me
questions for a good half an hour. In the waiting room, prior to my going in to
meet the nine men, I was joined by a fellow who had just flown in from Harvard
for his interview for the same fellowship. Apparently I got it and he did not. My
interview with the men was very favorable. I was calm and cool. I felt totally
at peace and unafraid with them, in part because I asked for spiritual support
from a dear friend who was a healer, and in part because I had grown up surrounded
by brilliant older men, my brothers and their friends as well as my father who
made me feel I could do almost anything and his patients who I met often and
was treated like a little princess by him. After that, I didn’t give it another
thought. I implicitly felt assured that if the fellowship was mine, I would
receive it, and I did.
The point
was my mother was in a sense prepared to live through me since she wasn’t able
to do all the things she wanted to since she deferred to my dad who needed her
by his side and not traveling the world as she seriously wanted to do. So I
would be doing it for her.
June 18,
2020
It was a far
cry from climbing the foothills of Mount Kenya and playing baseball with my
junior high all-girls baseball team, the Ruthless Babes or climbing mulberry
trees near my home and picking the ripe berries before they splashed the city
sidewalk just next to my primary school, Orrington School. But I made that
journey, and as unlikely as it might seem, I never grew up in the process. I
feel forever 16 since I somehow came to the view that everyone over 16 was
‘old’ and I guess I’d acquired a Peter Pan mentality of never wanting to grow
up.
I think of
those steep hills in Murang’a now because the friend who took me there, Gacheru,
was just buried not far from the Equator and the ancestral mountain of the
Kikuyu people. On a sunny day, Gacheru said he could see the snowy peaks of the
mountain from his front steps. Those steps and that house was where he spent
his last days, happily, taking care of his cows, sheep, goats and fish and
previously spent time keeping chicken, pigs and even geese and turkey. When we
lived in Thika in the Seventies, we actually had the geese, chicks and two
turkey. That is when I discovered geese could bite and chicken were messy. I
loved the turkey but that time is when I first was first struck with the notion
that eating animals was borderline cannibalistic. It is criminal in the US
where there is factory farming and the inhumane conditions of keeping domestic animals
like cows and hens is cruel punishment. But it was with Gacheru that I began to
learn so many new facets of life that were challenging and beautiful to me. I
wasn’t sure I could be sustained if I stayed in rural areas forever. But Thika
itself was on the verge of becoming an urban industrial area, the first one
outside Nairobi in the whole country. That is a whole other chapter of my life
that is too large a leap to delve into just now. But it is strange how human
beings are so multifaceted that they can land in a foreign land and meet people
who don’t know your past but who can intuit your being in the present and be
satisfied to begin a friendship from there. Gacheru was so marvelously
different from me, I found it exciting just to take hold of strands of
commonality that we shared and go with those feelings. We were both at
University of Nairobi together, both in Literature classes with Ngugi wa
Thiong’o. it turned out we were both in Drama class with John Ruganda, the
Ugandan playwright, stage director and charismatic lecturer. (Gacheru told me
much later that he and his buddy Watahi [Wangethi Mwangi] used to call me Miss
Drama since I was always the one in class who would raise my hand to answer
Ruganda’s questions. I had loved that class so much, but as the few other women
there were silent and the rest were not terribly responsive to the prof’s
queries, I was a woman of note. In fact, I was virtually the only white woman
on the whole campus so to say my presence at UoN was conspicuous. I tried to keep
a low profile, but that was impossible. I was stalked by more men than I had
imagined would be attracted to me. It wasn’t fun, especially I had cultivated a
strictly feminist perspective in my last days at my first university, DePauw
and had spent time with radical feminists in Chicago who had no time to be
involved emotionally with men. But I did make friends with quite a number of
guys: Jerry Okungu, the great novelist George Lamming, the East African book
publisher Henry Chakava, and my wonderful historian Mosonik Kipkorir. There
were more who ‘tried’ me but it got tedious and in fact, the reason I got into
journalism and into writing is because I confessed to my dear Sister Janice
McLaughton, a Maryknoll sister, that I was tired of men seeing women only as
sexual beings and not allowing them to be simply friends without the term
‘friend’ having a sexual connotation. She told me I had to write about my
concern. She would put it into the paper that she had connections with, Target
of the National Christian council of Kenya. The paper had a cultural section
and a woman’s section which she felt could use some spicing up. So I wrote and
that first publication led to a whole career as a feature writer with the Kenya
papers.
But back to
the slopes of Mount Kenya, the journey from Evanston Illinois and from Evanston
Township High School to University of Nairobi isn’t brilliant. It was
circuitous and involved with my stopping off at several schools in between:
DePauw, National Louis University, Northwestern University, Loyola University
and UoNairobi. It also involved my teaching at several schools, everywhere from
Wilmette Junior School and DePauw (where was a tutor for the ‘Basic Beliefs of
Modern Man’ in the Philosophy Department and where I met Jim Sidebotham ‘Side’
who was a whole other story, my entry into the East Coast of America,
everywhere from White Plains and New York to Vermont). But I also taught at
Loyala as well as at Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman Community Colleges which I
loved. I also taught at Kenya Methodist University but I couldn’t stay long
since I had to come to Chicago every June for my Christian Science Association
gathering and that was squarely in the center of students’ semester. I couldn’t
stand teaching them long-distance (which ironically is the only way people are
teaching right now during this epoch of Coronavirus or COVID-19). In fact,
academia is actually my fertile ground but I chose to be more of a public
intellectual in Kenya, becoming a journalist so I could have a job and also
enjoy my life on a daily basis since journalism is all about discovering and
writing about new things. That is what it was when I got there in the late
Seventies through Sister Janice, Okite Odhiambo and Hilary Ng’weno all of whom
were instrumental in my moving into the most unlikely position of becoming a so
called cultural ‘legend’, gaining that status simply because I have been
writing for so many moons, days and decades.
I had
already met Gacheru on campus when I began writing. In fact, we had already
gotten together and shared a similar proclivity toward Marxism. In fact, we
read Marx’s writings together and were never at a loss for discussions about
politics, ideology and the local corrupt politicians. I didn’t know Gacheru
when I arrived in kenya at the end of June and started classes July 1st.
but his impact on my life began almost from the moment I got there since he was
among the rebels who led the university protest against one racist professor in
the Architecture Department. That protest led to the GSU coming to campus and
teargassing us all, including me. It also led to the shutting down of the
school for five months, meaning I didn’t start classes officially until half of
my one year’s fellowship was already up.
I had come
to Kenya on a Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Fellowship. My local club was the
one my brother Tom belongs to, the Evanston Rotary Club and the one that I went
to, the Rotary club of Nairobi is the one I belong to today. But back then, the
Nairobi ‘club took pity on me and asked ‘Rotary International to give me more
funds to complete my one year of study which they did. They also gave me a
Vespa motor scooter which I loved driving. But that stopped once I began going
out with Gacheru who insisted I stop. I often wonder what would have happened
if I hadn’t relented and put away that bike since it had been my key to
freedom, my means of whipping across the city, flying from Westlands, the
affluent side of town where I lived briefly with Lady Elisabeth Erskine’s
friend, Gloria hagberg and over to Eastlands, to estates like Ofafa-Jericho
where I visited my friend Mosonik at the Ofafa police station since his uncle
worked there. I was frankly charmed by Makadara where Gacheru came from and by
Shauri Moyo where the YMCA would become a place that briefly produced local
artists like Wanyu Brush and Boniface Maina. But by the time I got to Makadara
with Gacheru, I was taking Number 7 bus since the bike had gotten stored at
Gacheru’s brother Moses’ place in Bahati, that fateful Bahati. Once I began
spending time at Bahati, our relationship became ‘a fait accompli’.
June 23,
2020
From the
time I was a little girl, I can recall that I never wanted to have children of
my own. I never wanted to get married either. It wasn’t because my own family
was a miserable one. On the contrary, my parents were stellar as far as they
could be. We would sit down to dinner together every night, no matter how late
we had to wait for my father to come home from his house calls and tours around
Evanston Hospitals to check on his patients. No one complained as we all had
homework to do and my mother had put a phone in my room which was a bad idea
since I waited too much time talking to girlfriends and to Stuart Lauderbach
who I met in junior high school when I was in the play, Winnie the Pooh. He had
worked backstage and I had played the part of ----. He called me almost every
night during junior after the play and while I didn’t pay too much attention, I
guess he was quite fond of me. His parents were Democrats contrary to mine who
were Goldwater Republicans, but in later years, his mother became a bosom buddy
of my mom’s and politics did not enter into the equation of their friendship. My
mother never had much time for me after school since she was the one forever on
the phone speaking to either Helen Nahl or Francis Alderson, two ladies who
kept her fully occupied. But as to why I knew I never wanted to get married, I
think it had to do with seeing how smart my mother was but at the same time how
stuck she was under my father’s thumb. He left her to her own resources during
the day and even gave her an allowance for shopping; but while she aspired to
travel and see the world, he had no time for such frivolity. His patients and
his practice came first. We were always second and only went on ‘holiday’ to
Key Biscayne in Florida when one of us was sick. Then my father would take us
south to enjoy the fresh air, I guess. But my mother could never go out of town
without him. Nor could she get a job that earned her any financial
independence. It wasn’t done for a woman of her class I gathered. I always knew
she could have been the CEO of General Motors or its financial manager since
she took charge of finances for all the women organizations that she belonged
to. She never aspired to any higher ranking she said since it was her mother
who would always be called upon to be president of this or that club and she
accepted working behind the scenes. I think I also saw that if I was going to
have any impact in my life, if I was going to do anything of significance other
than becoming a ‘good wife’ and dutiful parent, I would have to be on my own. I
had seen how my brothers were always favored and understood how strong women
had to find their own ways of operating to be anything other than a pretty
face, cute figure and charming flirt of a girl. I was okay at all of those
things. Starting young, my big brother Charlie used to bring friends home from
Princeton when he was an undergraduate, meaning I was around eight or nine or ten.
I used to love to show off by cooking them breakfast and listening to their fun
discussions. Our dinner table had always been a source of lively discourse and
debate, especially when Charlie and Steve where still there: Charlie left when
I was turning eight and Steve left for Harvard when I was turning ten. So in
those early years, whether we had visitors at our dinner table or not, our
family was a lively place. And that was at least up until I was 10. My mother
would preside over the discussions and many a night, one of us would have to
run for a dictionary or an volume from one of our encyclopedia to get details
about some subject under discussion. So I knew my mom, who had been a Phi Beta
Kappa (winning highest honors in languages) from Northwestern University, was
brilliant. But I could feel her frustration and I never wanted to be like her
in that regard. I especially didn’t feel she was teaching me worthwhile things
when she insisted on showing me how to polish silver and iron men’s shirts. But
of course, I did learn how to set a table for visitors using my mother’s finest
sterling silver. But intellectually, she never seemed to challenge me. She did
encourage me to take piano lessons from age five. But Mrs Lee was no fun and
all I can remember from years of her teaching me is the way she used to poke my
fingers with her pencil. I used to take part in music recitals but I was never
wholehearted about it. When years later, I suggested I learn to play the flute
like my brother Steve, my mom said no, I wouldn’t take it any more seriously
than I had the piano.
In any case,
I seemed to make friends with boys very easily and had a lot of them calling on
me. Never anything serious, but in junior high through my church group, there
was a nice Mexican boy name Manuel who was very sweet. Another boy named Colin
was also cute. But it was when I was 14 that I went bowling on a Saturday
afternoon with several of my girlfriends, including Laurie Meyers, my sort of
best friend, and Gale Sanders who lived down the street from me. I had never
bowled before and once I let the ball fly behind my back which made my
girlfriends laugh and a group of boys who’d been bowling in the alley next to
ours also take note. I had no idea I had drawn so much attention but my mishap
became a rally excuse for the guys to come over to see if we were all okay.
There was Web and there was David and two other guys. Web fell for Laurie and
David decided there and then that I was the girl for him. What I did to
convince of this was never to be known by me, but I could not be rid of David
after that for many years. In fact, David even intended to marry me, which was
the last thing on my mind at age 17 when he proposed. My mother would have been
delighted since David was from a wealthy family who lived in Kenilworth, a
Chicago suburb having the highest per capita income of any other suburb of the
whole North Shore (so named for being on the shores of Lake Michigan and being
considered upper-middle class). David was two years older than I and he had a
little Blue Volkswagon Beatle which he drove me around in everywhere. Without
David I might never have gotten out of my parent’s house in high school since
they disapproved of just about everything I wanted to do or everywhere I wanted
to go. But with David, I traveled to see other schools since he was a sports
lover. This meant I saw scads of basketball games, which I also loved,
especially as my ETHS had some of the best black basketballers in the state of
Illinois. Because my mother trusted David impeccably, I even got to go with him
on a school sky trip (he went to New Trier, the high school up the Shore from
ETHS and which had the best facilities of any public school in the state) to
Aspen, Colorado. Of course, it was very well chaperoned and my mother had
nothing to fear. But it wasn’t my favorite experience since I hadn’t been
terribly athletic since primary school and had never skied in my life, so I
made quite a scene. I even won a pin for being the most un-athletic of the
group. But no matter. In any case, David occupied too much of my secondary
school years and when he asked me to marry him when I was only a junior in high
school, I was adamant. No way. He claimed he had our lives worked out for us.
We would join the Peace Corps and go abroad. Yada yada. First of all, he was
the one going away to university not me. He had gone to one of the best private
schools that money could buy for secondary but dropped out for some reason. New
Trier was a come down for his family. One thing I did enjoy and learn about
with David was music since he was obsessed with it. But otherwise, I was happy
when he went off to university. It was the time when The Draft had arrived and
young people his age were being called to fight in Vietnam. It would be a time
when many young people would be wrestling with their conscience and trying to
understand the meaning of war, the meaning of being a Conscientious Objector
and being finally a Draft Dodger like Donald Trump and David. David managed to
dodge the draft by getting academic deferments. I was too ignorant at the time
to fully grasp what the War was about. That wouldn’t come until I got to
university myself several years later and we would protest in Washington, DC
against Richard Nixon bombing Cambodia and generally picking on peasants in
Southeast Asia, for what. I wouldn’t start thinking seriously or politically
until I got to DePauw. But before that, I was still in high school, trying to
decide if I would ever be as smart as my big brothers which I knew I would
never be. What I did want to do was emulate my father, so I took Chemistry and
loved it, took math courses and always got A’s and even volunteered at Evanston
Hospital serving as a ‘Candy Striper’, meaning I had a special red and white
striped uniform and I helped the nurses on weekends. That is where I met Jack
Clarkson, a football Quarterback from Northwestern who had done damage to his
knee. Jack was half American Indian and was from Detroit or Motor City also
known for the music of Motown. It was Jack who introduced me to Motown sounds
and taught me how to dance! I had gone to Ballroom Dancing classes from Fifth
grade with Mr Giordano, from fifth through eighth grade, every week. But I
hadn’t learned how to boogaloo or do any sort of funky steps that would be in
step with The Temptations, The Miracles, The Supremes or The Four Tops (who
performed at my DePauw University graduation prom). But Jack did and I loved
him for it. But Jack loved Bonnie, his hometown girl. Besides, he met David one
weekend when the guy came home from his university (he went to several) and
stormed in onto my family’s living room to act as if the space belonged to him.
I escorted David out quicky but Jack said he got the hint. He wasn’t going to
mess with David’s girlfriend. I felt jilted and annoyed with the rich kid who
thought he owned me. Anyway, candy striping was only one task I practiced at
Evanston Hospital, a place that did not yet have carpets on its floors and one
could easily hear the rapid footsteps of Dr. Swigert whenever he was making his
‘rounds’. One tasks I learned was how to drawn blood from patients. Yes, an odd
practice to perfect but I did it for a time then moved on to other things. But
I also used to work at my father’s office where I would learn from his
nurse-secretary Rita Madden, how to read patients’ blood tests and their urine
analyses. Then when Rita would go on holiday, I would take charge for the
Doctor and could eocyniphiles and other blood cells. I can’t remember much of
that stuff now, but I took a course in Bacteriology at DePauw thinking I might
one day become a Bacteriologist (not a nurse) which was somehow in line with my
did who had studied biochemistry and had two masters degrees in Pathology as
well as having specialized in Internal Medicine. I gave up that who line of
study by the time I got to DePauw where I met Dr. Saad Ibrahim, my Sociology
professor who could occupy a whole chapter for me to tell all that I learned
from him. Suffice it to say, he opened my eyes to the global, to the Middle
East and to contemporary Drug culture which he had me research first hand. It
was he who encouraged me to try marijuana (pot, bhangi, weed, whatever name you
give it). I wrote a paper on my drug research and got an A. That was the start
of a long four year relationship that ended partially when I didn’t marry him
but my classmate Barbara Leitham did. Barbara was perfect for him, but we had
always been close, from the time he was in love with my girlfriend Penny to his
meeting my father’s second nurse-secretary to our studying the PLO and
revolutions together. Saad taught me what it meant to be a public intellectual
and we met many years later, after he had been sentenced by the Mubarak regime
to seven years of hard labor for speaking franking on television about how the
president was grooming his son to become the next head of state. Saad had
taught the wife of Mubarak as well as the wife of the Egyptian president who
got assassinated, Sadat, for making a peace agreement with the Israelis. But
Saad was finally released in 2003 after we his former DePauw students went to
Washington, DC to protest for his release at the Egyptian counselate.
Coincidentally, that was the same weekend that protestors were marching on the
White House, telling George W. Bush not to go to war with Iraq and Saddam
Hussein. Some of us, like me, knew in our bones, that it was already a fait
accompli, Bush had already set the ball in motion despite his public
proclamations that it was not a done deal. It wasn’t long after that weekend
that not only did America go into Baghdad, but Dr Saad was freed and considered
a fully-fledged Human Rights advocate who had won world acclaim for his stand
against the repressive Mubarak regime. I wouldn’t have married Saad, although
he and I both expressed our deep affections and mutual understanding which I
will never despute. But by my third year, it was already clear I was on a
different path, especially after I chose to take the 3rd year ‘Urban
Plunge’ and take one semester off to work and study in Philadelphia on the East
Coast. I was supposed to be under the DePauw umbrella but I felt I had to chart
my own path. Thus, I would with anti-war people and lived in a commune in
Germantown. And I ended up getting involved with a wonderful feminist project
to travel to assorted colleges along the East Coast and address the way
Advertising exploited the woman’s image, objectifying her as a commodity. Our
project challenged that stereotype and raised important issues that would
become one of the central threads of debate during the early days of the
Women’s Movement. I felt I had found my niche with the feminists who had not
yet claimed that name. But one reason I loved those early days of feminism was
because they confirmed my view that women had to break out of old myths and
conventional practices and challenge traditions in order to discover new
dimensions of their own beings. These were heady days when I also confirmed
that marriage was not my thing, nor was making babies. I preferred thinking
about making a revolution, being part of a women’s revolution.
July 10,
2020
there was a
time not long after the tree fell on our house during an especially windy storm
that my mother disappeared from home for a while. I think I was still in
primary school because I was at a pajama party with a bunch of other sixth
grade girls at Laura Robbins’ house on Noyes Street. I’d never gotten to attend
a sleep-over with a bunch of little girls before so it was an exciting event
for me. But the fun was short-lived when I got a phone call at Laura’s and told
my big brother was going to pick me up shortly. I guess somebody thought the
storm was going to do damage on Laura;s house as well as
July 15,
2020
Listening to
Susan Rice, Barack Obama’s National Security Advisor, speak on a Washington
Post podcast about her lineage and background, coming from brilliant parents
whose families came out of slavery and other hardships, I feel I want to speak
of my parents as well. I was so privileged to have been assigned the two human
beings I was given to by some higher power -- if that is the way I ended up
appearing in the arms of Marjorie Helm and Verne Swigert. Being the baby and
the last born, I wonder whether I was an accident since my oldest brother is
ten years older and I feel my mother was done with babies after her first two,
Charlie and Steve. At the same time, I
know I was sought after by my father who yearned for a daughter, my mother not
so much. She had been soured by her older sister at an early age. She had been
the object of dislike (need I say hatred) on the part of Virginia from the
moment she came into this world back in the 19-teens. (If Charlie was born in
1939 and she was 23 when she married my father, you figure subtracting 24 from
39 and coming up with 15. Was she really born that early in the 20th
century? I guess so! Then again my father was eight years older than her so he
would have been born November 14, 1907. Really? That is remarkable. Funny how
we don’t often consider the age of our parents since mindlessly, we may assume
they are just ‘there’. Or in my privileged position, I did have two parents who
were conscientious enough to be ‘there’ for their kids. I have little doubt
that my mother would have left any number of times, especially as the two of
them were of such a different temperament: he was born of German (on his
father’s side) and Swedish (on his mother’s) extraction while she came from
more Anglo-Saxon blood. Blood was such a big deal in my family, it was always
being discussed, especially as my father was often speaking about ‘good
breeding’ as if we were precious pedigree horses that had been planned (bred)
specificaslly, like the Nazi-brand of eugenics. Her family came over to the New
World early on, from Holland, England, France and Scotland or so the story
goes. My grandmother even commissioned a professional genealogist to do the
research (the sort that Henry Louis Gates, Jr is now doing for mainly African
Americans). But apart from breeding and
blood lines, my mother’s early American connections meant they were around for
the American Revolution and supposedly, we have three of the first governors of
the first 13 colonies of America in our line. Of course, I was signed up to be
a DAR, Daughter of the American Revolution from an early age. Me and my brother
Tom were CARs, Children of the Revolution. But I was also signed up by my
mother to be a life-long member of the Colonial Dames, a similar genealogical
group to the DAR only they were said to have sympathies for Great Britain. I
have to find out details on that group since I believe that ‘Black Lives
Matter’ and I need not support a group that supports traitors to the cause of
the Union. Of course, most of those early Americans had slaves, but I don’t
know whether any in my family had them. It would be of interest to know,
especially as the so called War Heroes in those early days who men who went out
and fought the indigenous people of the land. Meanwhile, they were considered
great for shattering individual civilizations. But let me not condemn my past
before I learn more about it. What I do know is that my great great grandfather
on my mother’s and grandmother’s side was a Methodist Minister who had been
sent by the Church to pioneer in the ‘frontier’ of Indiana and start a school,
which he did. Reverand Cyrus Nutt was the first teacher and thus the founder of
Indiana-Asbury which later became DePauw University where I would eventually go
to university. Cyrus’s son James was a lawyer and a successful one apparently.
He also seems to have had land since his daughter, my grandmother Margaretta
was considered quite a wealthy woman. She was in fact. So much so that once
Wilbur Helm snagged her, leaving his doctoral studies in the Western Classics
of Latin and Greek at Princeton University to propose and wed the woman, she
had three kids, all of whom she took for a three month Grand Tour of Europe
when my mother was 12 and Uncle Stan was 19 and Virginia must have been 24 or
25 and unmarried. Mother Helm (she was called Mother by everyone in our family…
for reasons I may explain lateer) was
wealthy enough to pay for a chauffer to drive the family, including Wilbur all
over Europe. As the story goes, my grandfather didn’t know Italian but he led
the family through Italy with his speaking Latin and was largely understood.
When I was a little girl, I knew that jewelry was not only my mother’s thing
but also my grandmother’s big deal. Before my mother passed she gave me several
exquisite cameos, hand-carved by artists who used the Greco-Roman themes of
myth, such as the Three Graces to etch into the cameo material. When my mom,
Marjorie gave me the cameos, she told a story which I wrote down as a note to
accompany the gems. Apparently, Mother Helm considered these cameos such a good
bargain that she bought several to take back to Evanston (where my grandfather
had come to be the Headmaster of the Northwestern Academy, high school private
school formerly affiliated with NU). Her plan was to have them set in gold and
then she would give them to her friends!!! I am incredulous as I think about
Margaretta’s generosity and style of friendship. Apparently she didn’t fulfill
her plan however since I have several with only one of which was indeed set in
gold. Anyway, it was Margaretta who I gather fell for Verne, a handsome, young
medical students who was a friend and classmate of Uncle Stan. One day, as the
story goes, Mother and Marjorie went down to the City to watch Stan ride
military horses which required regular workouts. He and Verne both rode the
horses, not as a frivolous venture but as a service in the 1930s when both were
students at Northwestern Medical School and my mother was still a university
student at Northwestern. My mother had gone to Roycemore, a private girls
school just down the block from her home on 720 Colfax Street. She had done so
well she was accepted at Wellsley, one of the prestigious Seven Sister Schools.
But since it was in the thick of the Depression and Wilbur could supposedly
only afford to send one of his children out East, Marjories was stuck at home,
attending Northwestern where she
admirably earned a Phi Beta Kappa key for having obtained highest honors
for her studies in languages, including Italian, French, and English. One would
have never known my mother was a genius
since she had such a self-deprecating and humorous way about her. Her
wish was to set everyone at ease which she invariably did. Whether she was so
laid back because she was resigned to her lot in life, having married a man her
mother adored but she had a preference for Frank Cooper (who gave her his solid
gold ring before he saw her for the last time). My mother was banned from
seeing Frank since my grandmother was quite willful and my mother didn’t seem
to have the strength to defy her. No one cared to defy Margaretta Helm since
she was a natural born leader of women and a charming, gracious and generous
member of Evanston Society. She took on the presidency of every women
organization in town from the Evanston Women’s Club to the DAR to the Kings
Daughters and who knows whatever else. I doubt if my father ever heard about
Frank since my mother was the epitome of discretion. She wouldn’t have wanted
to offend him; she really didn’t have a malicious bone in her body. In fact, as
we were growing up she made very clear that mortal weaknesses like jealousy and
envy were to have no part in her children’s mentality. At least that was true
in my case. She never wanted her kids to envy each other. I don’t know how
successful she was since Charlie seemed to be a bit jealous of Steve who won
all sorts of genius awards like the National Science Foundation prize in his
senior year in High School. Both boys went to Ivy League school (even though
they were not prep school graduates like most of those who go Ivy League).
Steve also may have envied Charlie since he was the apple of our Mother Helm’s
eye and as the first born, Charlie was also the star in my father’s eyes. Tom may have despised me since I think I
wasn’t very nice to him. He was a big boy and got called all kinds of fat-boy
names in school so I kept my distance from him, which looking back, I now feel
that was horrible of me. I did love Tom however and as we got older we got to
be better friends.
Anyway, as I
said, my parents came from backgrounds every different from each other and very
different from Susan Rice’s. My fahter’s family had a lot of land in Iowa where
they grew lots of soy beans and corn. My father’s Swedish grandfather was a
successful banker who adored my father. Only my father made the big mistake of
not coming at my grandfather wilson’s final hour when he had planned to hand
over his wealth to my father (so the story goes). Daddy chose to take his final
medical exams which were sa dly scheduled to coincide with grandfather Wilson’s
call. So Daddy missed out. His cousin got ahold of the bank and cleaned it out
apparently, leaving only a shell. I never got the full story, but what I know
is that right before my father passed on, he was visited by the son of that
cousin, an Episcopalian minister who came to see him in Evanston Hospital. My
father told him off royally and accused him of coming from a family of thieves.
Apparently Daddy felt there should have been a sharing of the spoils. In any
case, my father’s birthright was lost and he had to struggle financially to
achieve the lifestyle he felt my mother was accustomed to. In any case, what I
do know is that my parents’ first year of marriage was their most blissful and
busy. They had no children and they went to Boston where my father did his
residency at the Harvard Medical School and my mother split her time between
translating foreign medical documents into English (when they were in Italian
or French), typing up the papers he had to write for med school and visiting
her well connected Society friends of my grandmother Helm who took her all
around Boston, especially to the galleries and museums that she loved so very
much. She had done a minor degree in Art History so she was familiar with most
of the masterpieces she was able to visit during that first year. After that,
they went back to the Midwest, again at the behest of Mother Helm. But Chicago
and the Helm family could hardly compare to the freedom my mother had when
living in that highly civilized society of Boston and Cambridge..
