Connection is the lifeblood of civilization, I think. It has become more apparent in the past year when we have been so separated from one another because of the pandemic. Loneliness, grief, depression have made life all but intolerable for so many of us.

I am someone who enjoys her own company, but I do need touch points with others. I live in a high rise building in Oakland, California with beautiful 180 degree views of Lake Merritt and the city. There are 100 or so units in the building. I’ve lived here for 22 years during which I had pretty much kept to myself except for the neighbors I ran into in the gym. I saw clients during the day in one unit, and came home, across the hall, at the end of the day to enjoy my solitude, sitting on my couch looking out the windows. A pretty sweet commute.

When I retired a couple of years ago, I started to realize that it was pretty odd to live somewhere for this long and to not know the names of more than a handful of my neighbors. I’d say hi to people in the elevator and they to me, but I didn’t really know them, or their names. A few months before the pandemic hit, I was moved to start a women’s group for women over 60 in my building. I sent an email out and received tremendous response. Over 40 women wanted to connect! They, too, were looking for community. Here we were living so close and yet we were strangers to one another. So we started meeting in person in the Club Room, sharing our stories, many of which were fascinating. I started getting thank you letters daily in my inbox. People felt less alone. When the pandemic hit, we moved our meetings to Zoom. I became known as ‘The Convener.’ From that group, a book group evolved, and a political action group. We reached out to one another for check-ins. We wrote thousands of postcards last year to get voters out to vote. We raised a nice chunk of money to go to a project that helps previously-incarcerated women with children find housing. The men in the building started making noises about being left out and wanting to start their own group. All in all it’s been very satisfying.

Still, the most important connections for me, my lifeblood, are the ones that have lasted over the years. My daughter and grandsons, of course, who are waiting out the pandemic in Israel. My high school friends who I visit every summer for a month in New Hampshire. And my very closest high school friend, Jane, who lives in upstate New York. If we don’t talk for an hour every few days we both begin to fade. My mother used to ask me what we could possibly have to talk about after being together all day after school. The other day Jane and I were trying to define our special friendship. She said, “The way I see it, nothing in our lives is ever complete until we have shared it with each other.” That is a special connection.

“She finds trouble wherever she goes,” my younger brother said of me back in the 1980’s. It was meant as a compliment. At least I chose to take it as such. He said this after I had led (or participated in–I can’t recall for sure) a walkout of reporters at the East Bay weekly paper, The Montclarion. It was the right thing to do. The publisher who owned the paper had fired the editor for running a perfectly good, well-researched article accusing the Emeryville police chief (who happened to be a friend of the publisher) of gambling the city’s money at a local card club. What were we supposed to do? Allow  the publisher, without objecting, to ignore the public’s right to know? So we had a meeting and decided to walk out, believing that all the local media outlets would cheer us on. Which they did. Until it was clear that he would fire us en masse, and some of them could have our jobs. Oh well. I only regretted losing that job for a few years. (I got over it last year.)

My brother was right. I did seem to be wherever trouble brewed. Prior to my dream job reporting for the Montclarion, I worked for a small business consulting firm in marketing. But I was always trying to convince the boss to let me write a newsletter for them. So he finally relented. He asked me to write an internal bulletin about the company to hype the company for employees. He was a real salesman, and was intent on selling franchise prototypes of his company to anyone who would buy one. They were, in fact, selling like hotcakes. (Perhaps more like Gamestop shares last week, if you’ve been following.) Anyway, as I watched these franchises selling far and wide across California as he gave his spiel in one city after another, I realized we were going to be hard-pressed to teach all these folks how to make their purchases profitable. So I wrote the front page story of the bulletin, starting with the line, “The MTC is going to have to do some fast dancing to keep up with the speed at which Michael can sell these franchises.” I thought it was a great opening. He didn’t. He called me into his office and gave me hell. I started looking for a new career shortly thereafter.

And even before that, when I was in college marching against the Viet Nam war, my photo was on the front page of the Michigan Daily, causing my father to disown me. I had my work cut out for me, trying to get back into his good graces so I could finish college, and also convincing him that he, in fact, had taught me to speak out for what I believed in. Eventually he came around and became outspoken about the lies we were told.

At the end of my junior year of high school I was ready to step into the job of editor of next year’s yearbook. I’d worked hard the previous three years to earn that position and everyone expected it would be mine. So when the faculty advisor walked into our yearbook office to introduce a boy to our staff, a boy we all knew, a boy who he said would be a great editor-in-chief for next year’s yearbook, I was not having it. I fought loud and hard to retain my position. Remember, this was 1964. It was considered much more important for a boy to have something like “editor” on his resume for college than it was for a girl. But my father had taught me to fight for what was by rights mine. I could be whatever I wanted (as long as I didn’t beat the boys at bowling) if I worked hard for it, he’d said. So I made my case. I wasn’t settling for the booby prize of some minor editorship. But I did end up having to negotiate a co-editorship. Which didn’t turn out to be too bad. We created a great yearbook, we both got into good colleges, and we fell in love.

So I guess my troublemaking goes way back. Have I mellowed with age? Probably not. I march and speak out– in smaller venues, perhaps– but once a troublemaker, always a troublemaker, I guess.

I’ve always loved a man in a fedora, a boy in a baseball cap, a lady in a floppy, big-brimmed hat. My dad was a handsome Mad Man-type in the 1950s and ’60s. He never left the house without wearing a felt fedora to match whatever fine suit or overcoat he had on. There’s something about the way a man wears his fedora  that says something about the kind of man he is. I love seeing pictures of the old Yankee Stadium, stands filled to the brim with men dressed up in suits and fedoras with a tiny feather in their hatband.

But that’s all changed now. Everyone, players and fans alike, wears a  baseball cap. Which isn’t a bad thing. Almost everybody looks good in a baseball cap. In fact, a young friend of mine says when she sees a man she’s eyeing take off his baseball cap and his appearance loses something in the translation, she and her friends say among themselves, H.O.P. (Hats on, please.) I love baseball. I love baseball players. And I love baseball caps. But I can’t wear one. I have way too much hair. When I put one on I look like Clarabell the clown, if you remember him. Although my hair isn’t red like his, it’s big and curly and sticks out on both sides. The cap just sits way up on top of the thick curls waiting for the wind to take it away.

There are, however, some hats I can wear. In college I would buy a new hat whenever I got depressed. Not like really depressed, depressed. Just one of those moods I liked to indulge in. Play the blues, puff on a cigarette, let myself feel sorry for myself in a way that only a young woman knows how to enjoy. But then when I’d had enough of that, I’d go buy myself some fashionable floppy hat. I had a nice collection. My favorite was a deep blue felt hat with a really wide brim. I wore it way into my hippie-ish days, with jeans and a leather jacket and boots. Very hip. Or sometimes with an elegant princess style dress. I don’t know what happened to that hat. Maybe one of my ex-husbands got it in the divorce.

But I hadn’t worn another since. Until, a few years back, I was walking in Harlem with a boyfriend who bought me a red-brimmed floppy straw hat that we passed on our way downtown. An ambitious young woman had set up shop along 5th Avenue and all her hats were attached to the chain-link fence behind her little card table. There were church-lady hats, and Easter bonnets–Oh! I had one of those once, too! White straw with a navy ribbon streaming behind it! My daddy bought it for me!–and there were cloches and there was my red straw hat. When I put it on, one of the men who was hanging around the hat lady grabbed my iphone and said, “I’m taking your picture in that! You need that! It’s good!” When I saw the picture, I decided he was right. I had to have the hat. So my boyfriend bought it for me for $5.00. No kidding! I wore it the rest of the way down 5th Avenue and every time I caught my reflection in a window, it made me smile. Sadly, it didn’t save the romance. But a few years later after we’d broken up, I wore it to a coffee date with another man I’d met online. He recognized me by my hat because I’d posted a picture of me wearing it. We’ll see if this hat brings me better luck this time! Hard to say, since he doesn’t wear a fedora.

I’ve never considered myself much of a binger. Unless, of course, you’re referring to my addiction to very dark, bittersweet chocolate. Or to Hagan Daz Belgian chocolate or coffee ice cream. I guess you could call me a binger if you put a quart of that in front of me with a spoon.

My ice cream habit started with the Good Humor man. When he came around ringing his bell in his spiffy white uniform and shiny silver coin belt I would run in the house to get a quarter and run back out, waiting for him to climb out of his clean white truck with the dark brown ice cream pop-on-a-stick painted on its side. He’d open one of the little doors in the back, and I’d watch the cold mysterious steam escape. He’d reach his long arm inside and find– what?!– a fudge or coconut or toasted almond pop for one of the many kids who clamored, along with me, for this treat. When he rang his bell, it rang my bell. I can still feel the visceral charge of hearing the Good Humor man’s bell. It was foreplay. Though I was too young to recognize it. God how I looked forward to its arrival. I was Pavlov’s best dog.

On Friday nights Dad used to take us to Carvel where they filled my cone with that yummy soft swirl of vanilla and chocolate cream. I’d run my tongue around the cool, sweet dessert to keep it from dripping. Eventually I’d get down to the bottom of the cone where a tiny bit of ice cream remained in a tiny little cone. Good to the last drip. What a treat!

And then there was the thrill of Baskin Robbins 31 Flavors opening near my house on Long Island. I was a teenager by then. I could go into their store whenever I wanted, eye all the  flavors and inevitably walk out with a cone of Jamoca Almond Fudge. I was in heaven. I guess I’d outgrown the Good Humor man, or I was looking for a something different.

But now I think there’s no Good Humor man driving around in a spiffy white Chevy ringing a bell. You can find something called Good Humor ice cream in some Stop n Shops, maybe. But it doesn’t ring my bell. You may be able to find Carvel somewhere back East, but out here there’s just mediocre Dairy Queen, and I don’t even know if that exists anymore. And as for BRobbins, they closed the store near us a few years back. I don’t know if there are any left. But I know where to find Hagan Daz! RIght in my freezer! I’m gonna binge tonight!

I used to hate the short, dark days of December. I’d sink into them. Sulk. Play the Blues. Then I spent one New Years in Iceland. It was dark but for two hours of twilight midday. Two white swans floated on the placid pond in Reykjavik. Time passed slowly. We sipped Scotch at 6. Huddled before the fire. I’ve switched it around now, in my head, so today, the shortest day of the year, I almost feel regret as the days grow longer, the light comes back and I begin counting the days till the light again begins to wane.

Retroflash/100

I’ve always loved going for interviews.  I know how to shine at an interview. And I almost always get the job or the date. I like the rush of ‘winning.” But I don’t always want what I get.

Fresh out of U of Michigan nursing school, I followed my med school grad husband to Oakland, California for his internship at Kaiser. He was going to earn so much money ($6,000/year) that I could take my time finding the perfect job. So I interviewed here and there. I was a nurse who hated being around sick people but enjoyed being around ‘crazy’ people, so I looked for jobs as a psych therapist. I interviewed at a child psych center and got that job. Also at Kaiser, at Herrick, and at the West Oakland Health Center. I got them all. But the last one interested me the most. West Oakland was the heart of the Black Panther action in the early 1970’s. I’d been an activist in college, so working in the Black community at a federally funded community health center where I might be in the middle of some kind of action sounded like fun. I was the only white Jewish girl working there. The shrink I worked with was a big, Black dude named Isaac. He saw clients on the other side of the wall from my office, so one day when I was trying to hang some pictures on my wall, he walked in and asked me what I was doing. I told him I was looking for a stud. Duh. I still remember his grin as he informed me I’d found one!

Soon thereafter a couple of Panthers dropped in to see what was up. They sat across from me, put their feet up on my desk. Rubbed their cigarettes out on my desk. And asked me what a white, honky bitch could do for their community. That was my real interview.

Some years later, I convinced the editor of the Montclarion, a weekly paper here in Oakland, to hire me as her education reporter. My interview there was actually a year’s long series of freelance articles I kept sending her, which she kept running in the paper! So when she asked if I’d cover for the vacationing education reporter during the Board of Education budget hearings, I said yes, though I knew zip about budgets. I wasn’t going to pass up that opportunity. I suffered through those hearings, straining to understand what they were talking about, what their priorities were and how they were going to ever balance their budget. And I wrote the articles, explaining to the public exactly what I had learned. At the end of the two weeks I was hired to be the education reporter who was moved to cover City Hall. Honestly, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. A full time job as a reporter was my absolute dream. And I did that for a few years. But once an activist, always an activist. I helped organize a walkout against the publisher for firing the editor (who had hired me) because she ran a story that exposed the local police chief for gambling the city’s money away at a local card casino. There was nothing wrong with the story. Unfortunately, the police chief was a friend of the publisher who fired us all.

After that, when I interviewed for full-time positions at the Bay Area daily papers, even when I thought the position had my name on it, they weren’t interested in hiring me. Not then, when unions were strong and it was hard to fire a reporter. But they were happy to run my stories. So for a while I freelanced stories for them. But then I decided I needed a job that paid me a salary. So I applied for anything that looked like a writing job.

I read an ad that sounded interesting. It was for a marketing job. I thought that might be the same as advertising. I could write advertising, I thought. So I went to the interview. It turned out to be a group interview. Maybe 25 people were in the room. The small business consulting company wanted to hire us all. I think they call that throwing ‘mud’ on the wall. They took us aside for private interviews. The manager who interviewed me told me as I sat there with my giant Jew-fro, my embroidered Mexican blouse and my finest blue jeans, that I would have to get my hair cut, buy a navy blue wool suit, a white blouse and a red tie, shave my legs (how did he know?) and learn to put makeup on. Then I’d have to memorize a script and say it to 100 business owners a week. I was about to walk out when he said if I did what they asked I would make at least $40,000 a year! Wow! 1978. I’d made $18,000 as a reporter. So I did it. For a year. I learned a lot about sales, about business and about budgets. I realized all the people we consulted with had every penny of their savings tied up in their small businesses. They had no security for themselves and their families unless they worked every day for the rest of their lives.

So I started thinking about learning financial planning. I went for interviews. It was a man’s world, back then. There were few women in the field. The men who interviewed me asked me how many friends I had, how many clubs I belonged to, how many sports figures I knew. I took a profile test in each office. They wanted to know if I was a man with two cars in the garage and a wife at home to cook for me and raise the kids. They asked questions like, “Is it ever okay to lie?”  I failed miserably. But I found an office with a woman manager who had hired a whole lot of formerly politically active women. She interviewed me. She told me how to answer the questions on the same profile test so her male ‘superiors’ would let her hire me. She knew I’d be great, she said.  For the next 32 years I built a terrific practice working with people like myself who didn’t trust people who worked in the field I was in or for the companies I represented. But they trusted me. They knew I had their best interest in mind because I felt the same as they did. But I did continue to wear that navy blue wool suit with the white blouse and a little touch of red above the waist when I interviewed them.

Autocorrect makes me crazy, always trying to improve on my pretty-perfect spelling. Like substituting the word ‘ass’ for ‘asp.’ Now why would it even bother?! Does it think I picked the wrong animal? And how will children ever learn to spell when Autocorrect cleans up after them? I have an editor’s eye for misspellings though I’ve never been an editor. And I used to be a pretty-great speller, though I never entered a spelling bee. But lately I find myself reverting to old mnemonics like “i before e, except after c…” before I risk putting pen to paper.

Retroflash 100 words

My first Thanksgiving as a married woman, I invited my in-laws to our tiny apartment. I bought a Ready-to-Cook turkey, unwrapped it and stuck it in the oven, as instructed. I folded up the couch-bed and readied the living room to receive guests. I made the stuffing, cooked the yams, opened the cranberry sauce and sliced it nicely onto a platter. After a couple of hours, my husband came back from his medical school gynecology shift and asked, “What’s that smell?” He opened the oven, slid the turkey out, reached into its crotch and pulled out the smoking giblet bag.

Retroflash-100 words

In my hippie days I lived on a communal farm in Olympia, Washington. I, of all people, a city girl from New York, somehow got the job of planting and nursing the garden. Being a relatively cooperative sort, I didn’t argue, though I knew my hair would frizz in the damp air (my biggest concern back then.)  I just got out some gardening books, bought some seed packets and a shovel and started digging. First I needed to create the garden before I could even think of planting. That meant manually digging up a patch of land about 12’x12′. Fortunately, it rained so much up there that the ground was always soft and easy to till. And I was young and strong. The soil was a delicious chocolate brown, rife with squirmy earthworms who seemed not all that happy about being unearthed. You couldn’t wait for a sunny day to dig or plant in Washington, so I’d pull on my rubber boots and rain parka and go to work. I can still feel the weight of the mud and water on my jeans when I got up to move from spot to spot. It didn’t occur to me to wear gloves; I just dug my hands into the ground. The damp earth and I became as one. I planted the seeds in semi-straight lines and grew excited as my three-year-old daughter and I watched the  seedlings poke up through the surface and begin to look like the pictures on the seed packets. Lettuce, tomatoes, squash, peas, green beans, strawberries, nasturtiums, calendula–I pored over the gardening books in the evenings looking for ways to mulch and for natural methods to keep critters out of my garden. Unfortunately for them, they found their way into my rich Garden of Eden anyway. And when I saw the little black slimy things eating my strawberries and the big fat ugly yellow slugs sliming around my romaine, I immediately set out pie plates of beer and a border wall of salt (oops! That sounds a little Trump-y, doesn’t it!) which put an end to their evil encroachments and left the yummy vegetables to flourish and fill the plates of our families. My daughter, however, has never forgiven me for dehydrating the slugs and snails. But being as she has long been a vegetarian, I hold out hope that she will someday forgive me.

Last week I looked at the hula hoop leaning lazily against my bedroom door. I looked at myself in my floor length mirror, sucked my belly in and was saddened to see that my once-slim waist was still pinchable. I decided it was time to begin a hula hoop regimen to take care of that. A half hour a day, I thought, should do the trick. Fifteen minutes in each direction. I turned on the tv to watch a lithe Nicole Kidman in some movie, as motivation. A half hour later I felt great! But the next day, not so much. I’d forgotten that my back was 74 years old. I’m afraid that fad is for kids.