Life can be so serendipitous. Way back in the late summer of 1970, when I was beginning my junior year of college, my friend Maurine and I moved into our first apartment together. Maurine and I were friends through both elementary and high school and had consistently maintained our relationship. She was transferring from Wisconsin to Illinois for our third year. Back in the old days, the university required students to live in the dorms until the end of sophomore year, unless you pledged a sorority or fraternity and could move into that house. So this was my first apartment, although Maurine had already experienced that lifestyle in Madison. That little place on Armory Street, basically two bedrooms, a kitchen and a bath was the beginning of a new adventure together. I don’t have any photos of our apartment but it was memorable. A remodeled house, it was located on the west side of campus, stashed between fraternities, big apartment buildings and other converted older homes like ours. Only $150 per month, we barely looked at it during our one hour fast pass through the place on one dark afternoon during the summer before we moved in. The price was definitely right which at that point was our primary consideration. When we later saw it in daylight on moving-in day, we were stunned. The walls were painted black with purple accents. The rooms were hopping with fleas left behind by cats – my mattress was so full of fleas I required treatment at the local hospital. Our landlords, twin brothers in their 50’s named Earl and Pearl Kelsey, must’ve painted that room with five coats of white paint before the darkness was finally concealed. They also kept spraying the place with insecticide, so powerful I thought I might die from the toxicity. We wound up pitching that infested mattress into the garbage, then heisting a still wrapped one from a nearby construction site so I could sleep in peace. Wild, wild days. In any event, after our first year experience in that dingy spot, we shifted neighborhoods, moving in 1971 into what was commonly called liberated territory.
We had good friends who lived in the home next door to our new apartment. The Gemini Drug Counseling house was located right across the street from us. One block to the west was Earthworks, an alternative community center, a gathering place which had a store, a garage, a bike shop and a restaurant called Metamorphosis. Other divergent businesses and organizations sprouted up to offer services with a political conscience. That neighborhood was a safe haven for those of us who felt so alienated from mainstream America. To the east was the Print Shop where mostly self-taught printers produced the protest literature and art of the times. At any moment, our street was home to any number of dogs, our pets who roamed around without leashes, as unrestrained as we were back then. Those moments and spaces in time were the most significant in shaping my evolution into adult life.
This lengthy preamble is actually part of the background for how I met Joanne, who lived in the house behind ours on Main Street. She was one of the neighbors whose social lives, classes and political interests overlapped with ours. Even more interesting was the fact that Joanne went to the same high school as Michael, who I would meet shortly after my move to my new apartment. The two of them were friendly with each other but not close. I became more connected to both of them than almost any of the other new people I met during that time. It’s fair to say that beginning of these powerful relationships figured significantly in the emotional foundations of my life. I was twenty years old when I met those two – we all grew up together. Maurine, my old friend moved back home to Chicago after finishing college. Our long friendship has lasted for more than six decades. But I wound up staying permanently in my college community, ultimately moving in with Michael about nine months after we met. Joanne stayed around too and just a few years down the road, was elected assessor of the city. Because I’d had some managerial experience with several hundred campus apartments by that time, she hired me to manage manage commercial property assessments. I became a certified specialist in that area and spent most of my adult career working with Joanne.
So these two people who played such critical roles in my life had a lot more in common than simply attending the same high school and college. Their personal styles were also quite similar. Unlike me, a person who has always been willing to discuss virtually any topic, regardless of societal taboos, they both had clear boundaries about what they were and were not willing to share. And although, I think both of them would have been described as friendly, neither of them had what for me, was the pretty regular experience of being approached by total strangers, who within minutes, were confiding astonishingly intimate details of their lives to me. After many years of being with me during episodes like this, they would routinely admonish me, especially when going somewhere that would likely afford someone the opportunity to approach me for those conversations, to “make no eye contact with anyone.” They felt that if I never looked directly at an individual, the odds of me getting involved with some lengthy conversation which had nothing to do with whatever or wherever we were going, would definitely be reduced. The fact is that I could be standing with them in a line at the grocery store, be seated with them at a table in a restaurant, or be waiting to board a plane, when some person would make a beeline right toward me and immediately begin confiding a stunning tale or other to me, as if I was their best friend. Or maybe, an on-site therapist…
Throughout our long lives together, these incidents happened frequently. Michael in particular, especially as years passed, would always remind me that our lives would be perfect if I’d only stop talking to everyone. I would remind him that I wasn’t usually the person starting these interactions, although in truth, once they’d begun, I had a hard time extracting myself from the sometimes truly interfering episodes. I honestly had no idea what silent signals I must be emitting, that for some reason, were received by a stranger with a profound need to talk. But these situations were always part of my life.
I’ve always wondered if there would ever be a scientific foundation for these kinds of experiences I have which don’t happen to everyone. Our brains remain mysterious on multiple fronts and are constantly being studied. Or is it not the brain, but rather a genetic reason that makes me more inclined to be approached? How about a mysterious communication pheromone? No scientific evidence suggests a messaging system for my issues. But who knows? I’ve wondered as I’ve definitely aged and that my social world is no longer as expansive as it used to be, if I’d lose this mysterious personality component of being a receptor to total strangers. But no. Recently, on a trip to Colorado to visit my son and his family, I had two really random moments with a couple of different people in very different locations. One was Kim, a 70-year-old library volunteer and the other, Sheila, a pharmacist’s assistant and a mom, watching her daughter play in the park.
One morning I took my book-loving granddaughter to her local library. I was just standing near her, watching her read, when a pleasant woman approached me and asked if I’d found everything I needed. I replied that I had. She then asked me about my granddaughter. I explained that I was visiting from Illinois and that this little one and her parents had only recently moved far away from me and the rest of our family. Within minutes, she started explaining how she was estranged from her eldest son and had never seen her granddaughter. Kim, (I asked for her name) began crying, explaining that she wasn’t really sure what had gone wrong between them. We talked about how time felt so different as we got older, with windows of opportunity to fix family issues growing smaller with each passing year. But the time we were finished, she said she felt better and was motivated to try repairing her relationship with her son at least one more time. So much for an innocent trip to the library.
I met Sheila at a little park near my kids’ house. One afternoon, my son and I had walked over there with the baby so she could use the slide. She was interested in the girls playing there, however, girls who kindly included this little toddler in their game. Sheila, the mom, then struck up a conversation with us, pointing out her nearby home and describing the city to us, as she was a lifelong resident. Within minutes, I knew she’d been divorced, had one older child from a former marriage, and knew where both she and her husband were employed. But what she really wanted to talk about was the fact that her dad had died a month earlier, that her mother couldn’t sleep by herself in her home and that she was the only one of her siblings close enough to spend the nights with her mother. Apparently her mom and dad did everything together during their retirement, rarely leaving each other’s side, not even to run a quick errand. She wanted to know what to do to help her mother establish some independence while still struggling with her own grief over her dad’s death. That was a lot for a casual chat in the park. When our talk ended I gave Sheila, the total stranger, a hug and walked away. My son, who wound up participating in some of the interaction, shook his head and remembered the “don’t make eye contact with anyone” admonition from his father.
I’ve thought about Kim and Sheila several times during the past few weeks since I returned home. Although for the most part, I feel these incidents are probably just an easy way to spread a little human kindness, I’m still not sure why they happen. At this point in my life, I’m really concentrating on my own inner thoughts most of the time, which somehow, hasn’t quelled whatever makes me continue to have these random exchanges. Just today, I was leaving a store, pushing a cart, which in addition to groceries, held several pots of flowers I bought for my garden. As I exited, a woman walked right up to me and started a conversation about how anxious she’d been recently, as she was just returned from traveling and was afraid she’d missed all the spring colors. As she bent her head to catch a whiff of the blossoms, she prattled on about how she needed the comfort of new life from nature to keep her spirits up in these challenging times. I could totally relate to that. We spoke for a few minutes. Why me, I thought? As I walked away, I realized I didn’t ask her name. I thought about Kim and Sheila once more and added this woman to the random people who will all, and have all, ultimately vanished from my consciousness.
I’m soaking in my own spring pleasures right now. I don’t know whether anyone else will be entering my personal space as the season progresses. I do know I’ll be thinking of Michael and Joanne, those two who spent so much time watching me navigate through all the soon-to-be-forgotten people. I’ll be thinking of Maurine, too. Unlike the vanished …they’re always on my mind, along with the memories of our long life together.