One of my favorite posters says, “If it weren’t for the LAST MINUTE, nothing would get done. So, merely days before our reunion, I will attempt forty years in one page.
Having left Weequahic a year early, I was a freshman at Boston U when JFK was shot. For my first two years at BU, I was the only biology major in a wonderful interdisciplinary liberal arts program. Boston is a terrific city, and I stayed there for a year after graduation working in a medical research lab. Although those were the heady days of student politics, and I was in the same place as leaders like Howard Zinn, I was only marginally involved in the Anti-Vietnam War demonstrations. I had been so active during our Weequahic years in SANE and CORE that I guess I had “shot my wad”, politically, at an early age.
Leaving New England in ’68, I car camped around the USA and Canada for three-months. Some of the photographs from that trip still hang in my home. Then I was off to Baltimore, to Johns Hopkins U for an MAT degree, which gave me a year of graduate work in biology and teaching certification. At Hopkins I met the PhD philosophy student who became my husband for 26 years.
My married years, mainly, were spent moving around to successfully develop my husband’s academic career. Through this effort, I got to live in many interesting places for short periods: Aix-en-Provence and Strasbourg, France; Minneapolis, MN; Colorado Springs, CO; Santa Cruz, CA and Oxford, England. Our long stays were in: Halifax, Nova Scotia (1970-’76), Syracuse, NY (’76-’86), and Riverside, CA (’86-now).
Most importantly, I gave birth to my son, Eugene, in 1976, and adopted my daughter, Adrianne, from Korea in 1986. They are as different as Mutt and Jeff and as funny too. You might notice that the years of their arrivals coincided with major household moves. How smart was THAT??
Good things have their costs, of course, and moving around made most of my jobs short term, and made it difficult to maintain long-term friendships. Since 1979 however, I have had a summer home in the Adirondacks (near skiing in North Creek and summer stuff in Lake George). So oddly enough, my summertime town has become the community to which I have been attached the longest, and Riverside is the second longest. I never expected to be “bi-coastal”, nor expected my identity to be “Upstate NY”, and surely never to be “Southern Californian”.
My first job in education was in a junior college in Baltimore, and I have been working my way down in age since then. Presently, I am an itinerant science teacher, doing hands-on lessons with 4th and 5th graders. Again, nothing I ever expected myself to do.
The new man in my life is George. You can meet him at the reunion. He is a retired engineer and is the antithesis of my “ex” in important ways. (Wayne, he worked on some of the same NASA projects that you did.) Last year we took Adrianne and her friend to live in Barcelona, Spain. Our hope was to have adventures traveling, and give the girls time to mature sufficiently before they began university. So far--fingers crossed--it looks like the scheme worked.
My life has taken a lot of turns I didn’t expect. But, I should have expected that it would!. My e-mail address is merlek46@earthlink.net
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