Bus Stop

While I was waiting at 86th Street for the Fifth Avenue bus the other day, a young woman, probably in her 20s,  walked up to me and asked where she could get the limited.

I told her the limited bus stop was about two blocks south,  and she thanked me and started walking down Fifth.  Then,  checking my watch,  I realized I might be late for my own appointment.

”Wait for me ”  I called out,  “I’ll take the limited too.” 

As we walked along together,  predictably,  the limited bus went rumbling past us down Fifth Avenue.

”You’re younger,” I  said,  “run for it,  and ask the driver to wait for me.”

Off she went at a brisk trot as I hurried after her at my decidedly slower pace.

When I got to the stop my young heroine was waiting for me on the steps of the bus.

She took my elbow to help me up,  and huffing and puffing a bit I climbed aboard.

I thanked the bus driver for waiting,  and turned to thank the young woman.

“No problem,”. she said,  “you remind me of my grandma.”

Well, at least I made the bus.

– Dana Susan Lehrman

College Girl – for Aunt Hannah

“One is never too old to learn.”  Hannah told us when she announced she was starting college in her 80s.

My husband’s aunt Hannah was the gentlest soul I’ve ever known.  No one in our family can remember her saying a harsh or an unkind word.

Hannah and her siblings fled Hitler’s Germany in the late 1930s for Switzerland, Palestine, and South America,  and some of them, including 24 year-old Hannah, eventually settled in New York.  Here she made a new life for herself and had a decades-long career working for the United Nations.

Hannah was a beautiful young woman with many suitors,  though she never married.  With no children of her own, she doted on her nephew, my husband Danny.  He remembers that as a kid Hannah and her boyfriends often took him out for ice cream.

Years later when her great-nephew, our son Noah was born,  Hannah became his beloved and favorite babysitter,  always arriving with chocolate bars and M&Ms in her pockets for him to ferret out. Together they went to the Central Park Zoo, all the city’s museums,  children’s shows and movies,  and never missed the St Patrick’s Day parade.

When Hannah retired after her years at the UN,  she enrolled at Fordham University’s College at 60,  a wonderful program for older adults who’d never been to college.  Classes met at the Fordham campus in the West 60s,  and by serendipity I was on a study sabbatical then taking classes just across town at Hunter College in the East 60s.  And so that year she and I became study mates!

Hannah took some wonderful social science,  literature and art history courses,  and asked for my help with her writing assignments.  And so we’d meet to work together at the Hunter College cafeteria, at a coffeeshop near Fordham, or at one of our apartments.

One of Hannah’s art history assignments was to describe her reactions to an artist whose work intrigued her, and so after spending several afternoons at the Met, Hannah choose Caravaggio.  Discussing his art and seeing his paintings through Hannah’s eyes was a delight,  and a friend of mine called Hannah “the aunt I was putting through college”!

At the end of the academic year my sabbatical was over and in the fall I went back to work.  Hannah, delighted by her new college experience, enrolled at Fordham again.  But by then her health had begun to decline,  and it soon became difficult for her to get to class.

Concerned over her absences,  Hannah’s very kind College at 60 advisor called her and offered to send home reading materials and assignments for each class.  Hannah could work at her own pace and send in her homework and papers,  and I would be her conduit.

But sadly Hannah wasn’t to finish that semester,  and she died a few weeks later.

Everyone at College at 60 had been so good to Hannah, that I wanted to tell them in person.  When I arrived with my sad news, teachers and students rushed to embrace me and together we cried for my sweet aunt Hannah.

– Dana Susan Lehrman 

Young people are using the phrase OK, boomer to indicate disdain for folks of my generation.
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