My Life Introduction and History Chapter 1 by Barbara Thompson Introduction "Once having faced the reality of the end of my life in the not too distant future, my view has undergone a permanent change. I know something now of the finiteness of our time on earth. I can never be the same person I was before January 7. I have been through the valley of the shadow of death and I have emerged. I have received support and love from family and friends to where I am deeply moved. ...... Life has become rich in ways I had not forseen." Barbara Thompson Cancer During a routine physical examination before we departed to spend Christmas with Steve and Mary in Fairbanks, blood had been found in Barbara's stool. On January 5, 1987, I took her to Sacred Heart General Hospital, in Eugene, for a colonoscopy. The colonoscopy indicated cancer of the colon, and on January 7 part of her large intestine was removed. While Barbara was still under anesthesia, her surgeon told me that metastases had occured to the lymph nodes. He said she might have a year to live, the time and the quality of her living during that time depending perhaps on her own mental attitude and activities. Therapy After five days in the hospital Barbara returned home to recuperate from the operation. She was started on chemotherapy, the drug, 5 FU. Barbara desired to establish in herself attitudes which might defeat the spread of the cancer. We read in the Register Guard a notice of a beginning support group at the hospital. When we arrived at the appointed time no one knew about it. We went with another prospective member to the room where it was scheduled. There was no notice on the locked door. When we came the next week the meeting had been moved, unannounced, to another room which we found, along with the leader and one other member. The week after that there was only the leader and us. We read about the Simonton Cancer Center, in Texas. Then we heard it had moved to Pacific Palisades, California. Beginning April 12, we attended a two-week session there. Carl Simonton and his colleagues emphasized the importance of mental attitude toward cancer, first to create a trend toward remission, and second to emphasize that success in the program didn't necessarily mean living forever. Quality of life for whatever time might be available is also important. Mind and body are one, and the proper use of mind with body can heighten the quality of living and sometimes control the wild growth of cells. Barbara was determined to make it work. On the way to the cancer center we camped among the coast redwoods along the Redwood Highway. We extended the trip to La Jolla to visit friends. Then on the return trip, to Barbara's and my great pleasure, we camped among the giants in Sequoia National Park. In July, a CAT scan indicated that the cancer in the lymph nodes had not increased, but there were now metastases to both the lungs and liver. The chemotherapy with 5 FU was to be continued, but on a different time schedule. Barbara was experiencing pains in her chest cavity which appeared to be associated with the pleura. We wanted to believe that this was an infection, not the effect of cancer. By the time of the next CAT scan, Barbara was having considerable discomfort and a hard lump in the area below her rib cage. The CAT scan indicated that the cancer in the lungs and in the liver had continued to grow. We heard of the Livingston Medical Clinic, in San Diego, and telephoned for information. Dr. Virginia Livingston had been a research worker studying cancer treatment. She claimed to have identified the cause of cancer, a bacterium which she named "progenitor cryptocides," the precursor to a hidden killer. This bacterium exists in all of us, being necessary to the process of cell division. Under circumstances which represent a strain on the immune system of the body, the division of these cells may go out of control, cancer being the result. The proposed remedy is to strengthen the immune system by various means. The main item in the program is an autogenous vaccine, cultured from one's own tissues. In addition, the patient is vaccinated with BCG, the tubercle bacillus, thought to be similar to cryptocides. Finally, these treatments are reinforced with a healthy diet and vitamins. The medical profession generally disapproves of any treatment, such as that offered by Simonton or Livingston, which departs from "the standard modalities," surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. The standard treatments apparently work for some types of cancer, but seemed to promise little for Barbara's case. Her oncologist proposed only a more intensive application of the chemotherapy, which would probably make her sick. In answer to a direct question from me, he stated that he didn't think his new treatment would work, and he had no better alternative to offer. Barbara and I told the oncologist that we had decided to discontinue his treatment, going instead to the Livingston Medical Clinic, and asked him for his support in providing any necessary information and medical checks during their program. He promised that support. We started our two-week stay at the Clinic in late September, feeling hopeful for the treatment. Our La Jolla friends loaned us one of their cars for the time we were there. After our return home from the Clinic, we were embarked on an intensive schedule of injections, which I administered, special foods including vast quantities of carrot juice from the juicer we bought, distilled water from the distiller we bought, food supplements, and megadoses of vitamins. Barbara's troubles increased. Difficulties with swallowing food because of nausea made it impossible for her to maintain the schedule set for her. The pains in her abdomen from the growing tumor were becoming worse, so that she could now lie in only one position. An additional psychological burden came from the difficulty in getting service from the Clinic by telephone to San Diego. Everyone there appeared to be overworked, and hence unavailable if needed in an emergency. A message could be left with the reception desk to have one of the doctors call after clinic hours. The reception desk appeared to be unsympathetic, and one wondered whether the message sometimes didn't get through. Because of Clinic rules, drugs could not be ordered by telephone. When ordered by mail they were a long time coming. When I questioned the shipping department about a particularly frustrating delay, I was told that some of the medicines must be approved by the nurses and doctors, who weren't always available for the purpose. The shipping department also told us they were too busy with multitudinous other orders to give special attention to ours. We received sympathetic support from our local doctor, Olin Byerly. He talked with us, prescribed a mild pain remedy, and even succeeded in communicating about our needs with the doctors at the Clinic in San Diego. Barbara continued to become weaker. Because she could no longer climb the stairs, even with my help, we located her on a day bed in the "organ room" downstairs, near the bathroom, with access to the remote controled television set. She now needed my help to go to the bathroom. I brought her food and drink, and generally took care of her. Eight-year-old Megan came most days to read to her. One evening during this period I started having chills. Soon I went to bed under the electric blanket, wrapped in my down vest and down coat, but still shivering. The next day friends from our Quaker Meeting showed up, one after another from early in the morning until late at night, to care for both of us. I don't know how the word got out to them that we needed help. On Christmas Eve, Barbara had her last fling. I took her in the car to Mike's and Bobbie's home for a Christmas party. Barbara lay on a couch in their living room, the center of attention while presents were opened, especially hers which had been made by the children, and were opened for her by them. She obviously had a fulfilling Christmas. Then she had a nose bleed, which continued for some time, and I took her home. Barbara had been working with a therapist on problems with her adjustment to what was happening to her. In December she had been persuaded to face the possibility that she might not recover from the spreading cancer. She was having increasing difficulty with eating, even liquid foods, and was eating very little. In her last days she drank less and less, and finally stopped drinking altogether. I looked at her and asked, "Do you know you're still pretty?" Her response was a smile, and the statement, "I love you." The Hospice nurse who came to make her comfortable the even-ing of December 30 said that Barbara would not last the night. She described her condition as a semi coma in which she was no longer particularly uncomfortable. She could hear us talking but probably was no longer interested. Her body was cooling down as her body processes were slowing. Barbara's breathing sounded labored. At about 10:30, as Mike and I sat with her, she stopped breathing. Bobbie and Mike woke Megan and Caitlin, and brought them over for a final goodbye to their Nena. Then the funeral director came to take away her body for cremation. Aftermath Barbara's absence left holes in my life. I found myself thinking I needed to tell her about some trivial item which would interest her. I would see a piece of note paper on the kitchen counter and think she must have left it so I'd know where she was. In cleaning up a part of the house, I would run across something of hers, and have a sudden twinge of emptiness. I sat at her computer writing about her, and was sad. Barbara's death also left tasks to be performed. She liked to acquire things, but she was reluctant to throw anything away. I found a note of hers saying that she'd rather leave a closet full of elegant clothes than of shabby ones, so she bought something elegant for herself. Fortunately for me, my family were around to help dispose of some of her possessions. Now there were boxes of notebooks filled with her writing. What should I do with those? I hated to throw them away without evaluating them, but there wasn't enough of my time and energy to do them justice. I started with her most recent writing, working my way back. During the year she had cancer she wrote a journal in which she attempted to evaluate her situation, to analyze what went wrong which led to cancer, and to learn to accept where she was. I wanted to understand as much as I could of her process. Before Barbara knew she had cancer she started to write for herself and for her family a personal and family history. On April 22, 1986, we bought her a computer. From that period I have found only six pages, two entitled, "My Life," and three entitled, "Washington Years." Then from August 22, 1986, there is a short piece about a return from our cabin on which we stopped at Salt Creek Falls. Later I found a rough draft of an autobiography of over 200 pages, written in 1955. I have included that autobiography, leaving out some sections which seemed to me redundant - my bow to Thomas Bowdler. I have saved the original, for anyone who might be interested. On February 18, 1987, a little over a month after her operation, she started typing a journal of her experiences as the cancer progressed to the point where she could no longer continue. I have included her journal, though its pessimism seems to me untypical of Barbara's outlook on life. I have also typed and included her poetry, which I found on scraps of paper. To me her poetry represents Barbara as close as anything I have of her. Stanley Thompson August 1996 My History Prelude October 5, 1982 The idea of writing a family history no longer appeals to me. If it ever did. And I suppose it did once, if only to deal with the wealth of material I have waiting for me upstairs in the attic. With the feelings and memories too, perhaps. But when I think of the pain involved, the loss of hopes, the deaths, untimely, the cutting off of young lives, the sorrow of lives twisted and wasted, the destruction of dreams, then I am not so sure. If I could write history differently...... Eleanor would live. Malcolm would live. My sister Constance would be an able, aware, productive woman. Janet would be living a normal, productive life. Marjorie would be gentler, warmer, responsive. And I? I would have got underway sooner and more effectively on a profession, avoided teaching school, concentrated on psychology, perhaps, or social work, or possibly writing. Would I have married so young? How would I have managed my relations with my family? With the humor so sadly lacking in my younger years, the forebearance, the warmth I wish I had had. I would have been less preoccupied with self-protection, and realized much sooner that I had sufficient strength to handle what came. If I have been a survivor, I would have been different if I could rewrite my history, more of an initiator, less of a resistor. I would have gone after what I wanted, rather than wait for someone to discover me, or worse, rescue me. I would have taken more risks. I would have worried less about offending someone, and championed more causes. I would have gone out to find the skills I lacked, and used them for reaching my goals. And I would have set goals, and drifted less. (Am I drifting now....?) If I could start with my own family, I would have had my parents more aware of our needs, more willing to give us the backgrounds to establish ourselves in the community, more alert to the skills we needed to make our way, more confident in us, more supportive in realistic terms. I would have liked to have sisters more like some of my friends, availabel, accepting, dependable, warm. Writing this has revived the question of why I should have gone in a direction which has turned out to be ineffective and unrewarding. At the time it seemed the only course open to me, a matter of self-preservation. Obviously I must have believed that my existence was highly doubtful, subject to the whims of others, hanging by a thread. The idea that I could take charge of my own fortunes was foreign to my preoccupation with survival. Now, as I look back, I realize that I spent much of my childhood being angry. Also - adulthood. If tears were often near the surface with anger, it may be that they were a truer symptom of my inner emotion. If the sequence went from trying to accommodate to frustration over failure ("things ought to be different") to tears, then I suppose my dark picture of the world was confirmed. The fact that my efforts to protect myself proved so consistently to be unavailing did not lead me to revise my hypothesis. Probably it seldom does. We tend instead to renew our struggle along our own lines, to try ever harder, never understanding that we doomed our project to failure at the outset. Thus the next step logically would be to trace back below the anger to what lies beneath it. And then.......? My Life August 1986 In writing about my life the question of where to begin has puzzled me. Does one start with earliest memories, or current thoughts of times long ago, or at the beginning of this sojurn in the world? No one memory stands out as the earliest among a number of often vague remembrances of my youngest years. My current thoughts about events and responses throughout my life will no doubt make themselves evident as I explore long-forgotten experiences. Starting with the beginning may have a certain plausibility. Whatever I know about my arrival in this world depends on others' accounts. For my birth, my mother had returned to her parents' home in Pelham, Massachusetts. Some eight years before, on his retirement from Amherst College, my grandfather had discovered a site in the Pelham hills, four miles from Amherst, which appealed to him as the location for a home for his retirement years. At the end of a long hill, characteristic of the Pelham hills, with a panoramic view of the Connecticut River valley, he had built a large house on some 250 acres. I think it had been used before for pasture land, but by the time I had memories of it, the land had reverted to forest, of white pines and oaks and birches, trees still young as I was growing up, but satisfactorily woodland. Years before, when he had come to Amherst as a young history professor, with his new bride, he had built a big Victorian house on Northampton Road, a few blocks from the campus. In planning a home for his retirement, again he thought in ample terms, with not only a house large enough for his children to return to with their families, but with orchards and gardens and a barn to house not only hay but stables and upstairs an appartment for the hired help and a shed for tools and equipment and a cottage along the road to the barn. My impression is that a large family was on hand [at Grey Rocks] to welcome me into the world on August 9, 1915, my parents, my grandparents, and my two older sisters, Constance and Marjorie. Perhaps other relatives may have been staying there as well. The small amount of information I can recall about the occasion suggests that I took my time in arriving. While my mother was waiting, it seems that she looked out of the window of the third story bedroom in the early dawn, and saw a rabbit nibbling grass among the junipers and granite outcroppings. It was not until many years later that I began to see it not as a limiting prediction of what my future life might be like, but as a symbol of the innate appeal of each new being. Moreover a rabbit has many qualities, speed and resourcefulness and grace and agility. I can remember watching a trio of rabbits frolicking on our lawn on a misty morning before the world had awakened, and dancing in a way that was entrancing to see. Not long after I was born, perhaps a few days, I was taken out onto the wide flat roof, like a generous terrace, adjacent to the upstairs bedroom. The picture shows me in a long white dress, lying in a basket in front of the stone chimney. I seem to be observing the world with half-open, thoughtful eyes. I was the third child, the third daughter. My mother had found a continuing satisfaction with my oldest sister, Constance, whose interest in nature and imaginative turn of mind appealed to her own sympathies. My father, who was himself a second child, felt an especial closeness with his second daughter, Marjorie, who accepted and embodied many of his values. By the time I came along, the setting was right for a son. When I proved to be another daughter, it must have been a disappointment for both of my parents. Once in a while, as I grew up, I wondered what it would be like to have a family of all girls. Was my mother disappointed? It did not occur to me to ask my father. My mother reassured me, saying that while she had hoped to have a son, when each daughter arrived, she changed her mind, and was delighted to have a girl. Norman In 1913, almost three years before I was born, my parents moved to Norman, Oklahoma. Before that, my father had had an assistantship at Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts, and after he received his PhD, he spent two years as an instructor in physiology at the Harvard Medical School. When he joined the staff of the University of Oklahoma, it was as a full Professor of Physiology. When my parents first moved to Norman with my older sisters, Constance who was three, and Marjorie almost one, Norman was a prairie town. Situated in the midst of flat, prairie land, wildflowers bloomed where its streets ended, and three miles away the wide, sandy bed of the South Canadian River, with its meandering channel which changed its course each season, wound across the prairie in an apparently aimless manner. The river and its banks became a source of endless interest and pleasure for our family, not only in the first years of living in Norman, but particularly after my mother became engaged seriously in her studies of birds. In beginning an account of my personal history, it may be appropriate to start with earliest memories. For me the house at 445 College Avenue in Norman, Oklahoma was the first home I remember. Others talked about a house which had preceded it, a few blocks away, one which my mother had dubbed the Yellow Pumpkin, and while I had lived my first year there, I have now no recollection of it. From all accounts, it had been more imposing, two-storied and more spacious, than the brown bungalow we now lived in, and I gathered that our bungalow was something of a come-down after it. But for me, this bungalow was the house I knew, the center of my life. My father had built it, as well as the bungalow next to it, long, narrow houses on what must have been long, narrow lots. In fact they were so close together that he had built a common garage where each family could keep a car on its side, and a common driveway. I expect the common garage summed up a view that things, material possessions, were not of such importance that they could not be shared, even by neighbors. Whether this attitude had its origins in his having grown up in a large family or whether it was part of a general disregard for things, which he shared with my mother, I am not sure, but it affected our lives in numerous ways. A room of one's own, even less a bed of one's own, was an idea that did not merit consideration during the years in Oklahoma. My sisters and I, four for a time, and finally five of us, grew up in the house on College Avenue, and climbed the big mulberry tree in the front yard, and played games in the vacant yard, on Elm Street. When we first moved there, our street had not been paved. Cars were rare in Norman in those days. Once, when family friends drove up in their new car, it was an event. The car, as I picture it, stood tall and black, with wheels that seemed my height, and a running board so high and narrow that I wasn't sure I dould manage it. I believe we were taken for a short ride. Perhaps my older sisters went with us, but I only recall that my youngest sister, Eleanor, who could have been only about two at the time, somehow slipped and fell under the car. The driver, possibly still unfamiliar with the gears, drove forward and then reversed, so that Eleanor's leg was driven over twice. Although her leg was bruised, she was not otherwise injured. But the whole event was one of great panic and drama for our family. Farther down our street fairly good sized trees grew, locusts probably, but by the sidewalk in front of our house young trees had been planted, catalpas I was told. For years I had a rather low opinion of catalpas. I saw them as spindly trees, with a few flowers followed by dangling beans for pods, trees without much use because they were too small to be climbed. Not till many years later did I marvel over the sight of large trees covered with creamy blossoms, in Indiana in early June, and learn to my astonishment that they were catalpas. The big mulberry in our front yard, however, provided a satisfactory tree for climbing. It was fruitless and its leaves so thick it kept the right side of the yard free of all vegetation. Although there were other trees in our back yard, which extended through the block to Elm street behind us, the front mulberry was the only tree which offered proper climbing. An elm by the store house branched too high for us to reach, and another mulberry on the north line, which had white, insipid fruit, branched in a way to be unaccommodating to climbers. Still farther back a smaller mulberry grew on the part of the lot that faced Elm Street. This was, I should think, actually two lots. Though each was narrow, together they formed a space large enough for occasional games. Although too small and bushy to be a climbing tree, this mulberry bore delectable dark fruit, and in its season our hands and faces were stained purple from the juice. On the other side of the far lot a thicket of lilacs had grown up into a tangle around an old cherry tree, with an occasional passageway beneath the shrubs through which one could walk or sometimes, of necessity, crawl. Growing at the edge of the lilacs, a few large bush roses produced round pink blooms with a wonderful fragrance. I can remember each June picking a rose every morning to take to a favorite teacher. Front yards along our street tended to be fairly small. Ours was no exception. It was overhung on the right by the mulberry tree, while on the left a young tree planted by my father, hardly more than a sappling, rose out of the grass. Across one half the front of the house spirea bushes grew, and along the side edged by the common driveway, forsythia trailed their branches, both customary plants for foundation planting in Norman. What lawn we had consisted of the stretch on the left in the front, and a limited area directly behind the house. Beyond the elm tree and on both sides of the store house a large vegetable garden each year took up all the space before one reached the vacant lot at the far rear. Although the lot may have been the only one still vacant in that block of Elm Street, as far as I remember it was allowed to grow up as a meadow. Across the street from that end of our property a woman in a small brown house kept a cow, so that the idea of grass left to grow long might not have been too unusual in Norman in those days. The cow, pale colored and probably a Jersey, had a baleful look to my youthful mind, and once when I was returning home, I had to pass between the houses, far too close to the cow for my comfort. As I edged along, keeping an eye on the cow, which was lying down by the corner of the house and chewing her cud, she suddenly got up. Convinced that she was heading directly for me, I took off in terror and raced all the way through the street and through the back lot to the safety of our house. In retrospect, I am sure she was tethered by a rope to a stake in the grass, and her getting up at the time I passed likely to have been a coincidence. Each spring the urge to plant a garden overtook my father, with his background of growing up on a farm. No one as far as I know shared in his seasonal enthusiasm to the same extent. Although my maternal grandfather had been an ardent horticulturist in his Amherst garden, with an extensive garden bordered by raspberry bushes, a number of succulent fruit trees, and a large greenhouse attached to the back of the house, my mother never displayed any interest in gardening. Once, years later, when I asked her about the subject of gardeners, in view of the fact that not only her father had been an enthusiast but also all three of her brothers throughout their lives, as well as both sisters, she told me that any interest she might have developed was extinguished by hours of laborious weeding in her family's garden. Her recompense for one hundred weeds was, it seems to me, a penny. Each spring early a man arrived with a plow to till the space beyond the storehouse, moving across the yard and leaving behind him chocolate-colored furrows of uptilted earth. Of all the probable seeds that were planted, I only remember potatoes and beans and peas. Another picture that comes to my mind is of picking beans along an endless row in the hot Oklahoma sun. Gathering potatoes from the upturned, crumbly soil when my father dug them later in the season with his long-tined fork held more satisfaction. With each probing and lifting of the fork, the rounded surfaces of potatoes might be uncovered, and it was a kind of treasure hunt as we waited, then searched for the tubers, and dropped them into our buckets. One year each of us was given a small portion of newly tilled garden to plant for ourselves. My portion lay immediately behind the garage. In the big family garden, rows invariably ran the entire length, a convenience for my father, who later on cultivated between the rows with a wooden-handled cultivator with three tines to turn the earth. Perhaps my first garden drew inspiration from pictures I had seen, for I was quite sure I wanted something different from our customary garden pattern, which seemed to do well enough for my sisters. In my mind's eye I saw paths dividing the garden into neat portions, with flourishing plants filling each section. Doubtless, had I had access to such an unlikely item, I would have placed a sundial in the center of my tiny garden. But by the time I had drawn paths in the soft, freshly turned earth, it was evident that something had gone amiss with my plan. Disconcerted to see how small the planting areas left on each side of the path were, I wondered how to accommodate my new packets of radishes and carrots and lettuce. In the end I abandoned my idea of a perfect garden and, obligated to use up my seeds, planted them in the usual way. It was, perhaps, my earliest experience with the discrepancy between dream and reality, and the difficulty in translating one's intentions into concrete form. Our house, with its rooms strung out in a sequence from front to back, was not an unusual type to be seen in Norman in those days. While other bungalows varied somewhat in aspect and design, in general they followed much the same pattern. One entered through a front porch into a living room, and from there one passed into the dining room and kitchen, while three bedrooms and a bathroom were tucked behind. Two items in our house differed from the others that I knew. At the front of the house and just off the living room, my father's study occupied the corner nearest the street. And after some years in our house, a sleeping porch was added across the back, linked to both back bedrooms. At that time, little or no thought was given to connecting the indoor space with the surrounding area. When I was older, an adolescent in Ohio, and word of such novelties as "outdoor living rooms" reached public awareness, I grew excited at the thought of such an appealing concept. Perhaps, like my early garden design, it was more a hint of later interests than a realistic possibility. As far as my parents were concerned, the separation of outdoor and indoor spheres was definite and unquestioned. Two steps divided the house from the land about it - many houses had short flights of four or five steps leading up to the porch - and we could be out the back door from the kitchen, opening onto the side, and off to the back yard quickly. Near the kitchen door a water spigot emerged from the side of the house. At one time my oldest sister, Constance, kept an old dish pan under it, full of polywogs which she had collected in early spring from an outlying pond. The polywogs grew in size, to our fascination, and at least some of them matured into frogs. Some other enterprises, such as her attempt to grow watercress in the dish pan, were less successful. What flowers we had were located along this same side of the house, and in the small space between the front porch and the sidewalk in front, a band of annuals, larkspur and cosmos and perhaps others, against the house from the front to the kitchen door. The portion of yard extending along the side was narrow, and our neighbors'house, a bungalow not dissimilar from ours, was separated from our house only by a row of shrubs. Not all houses conformed to the bungalow pattern. Across the street, my best friend, Mary Oella Tappan, lived in a two-story house with a considerably larger yard. In back of their house, the Tappans had a real lawn, with flower beds surrounding it. Her mother, an avid gardener, collected iris, and in May the garden was alight with bloom. One spring she sent over by Mary Oella some canna bulbs, a favorite in Norman in those days, and with considerable expectation, I planted them in a carefully chosen spot beside the storehouse. While I was impressed by their scarlet blooms in summer, later on, when I realized they needed to be dug and stored and replanted each season, I was not so sure about cannas. Front porches in our neighborhood, a common feature on most houses, were not that I recall used for sitting. Ours, which stretched across two-thirds of the front of the house, the other third being occupied by my father's study, was floored in cement, and aside from two brick pillars, was without rails. About halfway between the two corner pillars on the right as one stepped up on the porch, stood a kind of pedestal. It was about table height, of brick with a large, square, cement top. In winter, seeds scattered over the surface brought birds to feed, and in summer we found it made a fine spot for playing jacks. Once mother took our picture as Hallowe'en ghosts, decked out in old pillow cases with slits cut in them so we could see out, seated on the pedestal flanked by a jack-o-lantern. The front door, which opened directly into the living room, in my view was massive. It was pierced by three small, high windows at a diagonal, much too high for me to see through, though I assume my parents could look through them. A fireplace of brick occupied most of the wall directly opposite the front door. In all the years of my growing up, and as long as my parents lived, the tall, antique clock always referred to as the Seth Thomas clock, with the peaceful village scene painted on the glass, stood in the middle of the mantel piece. Through my childhood, and whenever I was again in my parents' home, a background sound was the melodious striking of the hour by the Seth Thomas clock. Two walls of the living room held windows, three overlooking the porch and another three on the side yard. The fourth wall, on the left as one entered, consisted largely of doors; almost immediately, the door to my father's study, then a door to the closet, which held all our outdoor clothing and an assortment of shoes and rubbers and leggings, the bane of my existence when my mother insisted on my wearing them to school - they were army surplus leggings from the first World War, highly practical from my mother's point of view for a stormy day, but I was mortified to arrive in my classroom wearing leggings, and at least once a boy in my class pointed and snickered at my unorthodox clothing. The final door in that wall was actually a wide doorway leading into the dining room. Like most of the rooms in our house, the dining room was squarish in shape. On the left as one entered stood a massive sideboard in the center of the wall, its surface covered in a dark mahogany veneer. Over it hung a large, mahogany-framed copy of Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, and I recall puzzling over the curious figure floating on a cloud, beard drifting behind, reaching out with a long finger to barely touch the finger of another curious figure stretched out on the ground, while smaller figures peered out from unlikely positions around the edges of the picture. When many years later in Rome I visited the Sistine Chapel, I felt a certain familiarity, for a portion of the ceiling paintings had served as background for innumerable meals during my childhood. Our dining room windows gave us a view of the driveway and the side of the neighbors' house. On the remaining wall, glass doors allowed one to see a dish closet at waist level, a deep closet set back into the wall over the cellar stairs below, where dishes were not so much displayed as kept. My mother's wedding gifts were here, some of them so far back on the shelves that only someone older than I could be trusted to reach them on the occasions when they were brought out for company, delicate china dessert plates strewn with cerise roses, silver-edged glass dishes for bonbons or nuts, a large brass tray from India engraved with a rotund Hindu god with an elephant head and six arms, and a tall pitcher for hot chocolate with lavender irises on its sides, which I especially loved. While our rooms, the study, living room, dining room, the three bedrooms, had a box-like quality, the kitchen, which opened from the dining room, differed in shape, being long and a bit narrow. From today's perspective on kitchen design, it was inconvenient and inefficient, with the sink tucked away in a corner, a three-burner kerosene stove along the same wall which housed the chimney flu for the living room fireplace, across from it a table where we sometimes ate, though in general we ate in the dining room; beyond it, a pantry, and next to the pantry door and under the window, a long metal chest which served as a fireless cooker, and the ice chest next to the back door. I am not sure where food was prepared, for the kitchen seems to me now short of working spaces. Aside from an enamel drain to the left of the sink, usually occupied by a metal dish drainer, the only surface I can recall is the table. Storage for kitchen utensils and food was provided by some high cupboards over the sink and the pantry shelves. When my mother, who had grown up in a household where there had always been a cook, was faced with the necessity of managing on a simpler scale, she devised various shortcuts and methods for handling needed tasks. By the time my older sisters had reached an age to cook, she gladly allowed them to take whatever meal preparation they wished, and took her turn in washing dishes. Housework in our family was considered a necessary evil, an impediment to having time free for accomplishing something "worthwhile." Order in itself occupied a low level of value. From the dining room, one could go into the kitchen, or down a hall which led past the cellar door and the bathroom door, on the left, to the bedrooms. Directly ahead was our parents' room, and to the right, opening from a short diagonal extension of the hall, was my older sisters' room. From it my sister, Eleanor, and I entered our room, the last room on the end of the house. Later on, when the sleeping porch was added, two doors opened onto it, one from my parents' room and one from ours. Fresh air at night was considered to be advantageous, and the sleeping porch was built large enough to accommodate all of us. The one part of the house which is largely a blank to me now is the cellar. I don't recall its being called anything but a cellar. The lower regions were my father's domain, and every morning in the winter time he disappeared down the stairs, almost opposite the door into the kitchen, to stir up the big coal-burning furnace. In the corner toward the street and driveway a coal bin had been built, and once a year a truck arrived, and with a great clatter and cloud of coal dust, our supply of fuel for the winter rattled down the chute into the bin. Because the cellar was considered a place full of coal dust, we were not expected to spend much time there. Along one wall my father had a sort of work bench for his tools, but while he handled tools with what seemed to all of us great competence and confidence, he had no great attachment to them, and they lay on the table surface in disarray. Only he could locate the one tool he needed amidst the jumble of pliers and wrenches and bolts and pipe fittings, as only he had the skill to use it effectively. As children we were not encouraged to become familiar with tools, and when we made some attempt, generally to help him in a task, he grew impatient with the ineptness of our effort, and took over the job himself. To me his abilities with saw and hammer and drill were a source of mystery and admiration. When he was working on the garage which was to serve both houses, I can remember watching him nailing on the roof, his hammer rising and falling rythmically. As far as I know, no area large enough for storage existed in the crawl space under the roof. Because the cellar was obviously not a spot to store things of value, and because my family had a tendency to accumulate possessions, the storehouse out in the back yard must have served the function of an attic in another kind of house. It stood in the middle of the back yard, a medium-sized building in my eyes, which had a steep peaked roof, its sides painted brown like the house. As the door was always kept locked, and I rarely was allowed to enter, it had something of the element of secrecy about it. Once, I remember, when my father had occasion to unlock the door and go in, I accompanied him. In the gloom of the interior, various objects gradually became clear enough to make out. The room seemed crowded with things. Some of them looked like lumber stored for later use; there were bee hives which my father once had filled with bees, only to have them contract some strange, fatal disease, and a massive piece of furniture something like a sideboard, and leaning up against it, my father's bicycle. Over all, a curious odor hung, composed, it seemed, of dust and old paint and something else perhaps, peculiarly storehouse. When we emerged into the light again, I was relieved, and not anxious to return. The playhouse, on the other hand, belonged to us. Once a chicken house when my father had kept chickens for a year in an unsuccessful economic venture at the Yellow Pumpkin, now it stood a short distance behind the house next to the garage. While it still preserved the general size and shape of a chicken house, the evidence of their occupation had long since disappeared, and we were free to devise whatever uses we might wish for it. It was a small structure in the middle of the back yard with a sloping roof, the sides painted brown like the house and garage and storehouse. The interior consisted of nothing more than four walls, two small, high windows without glass, and a door. No floor had been added. When we grew ambitious, we would clean it. This largely meant sweeping the dirt floor, and at least once we strewed sand over it as was customary, my older sister, Marjorie, explained, in houses in medieval days. Our various teddy bears and dolls were brought in, and we undertook hopefully to make it into a proper playhouse. But our attempts at converting it into the sort of playhouse that one reads about in books tended to lose momentum shortly. Marjorie had more interest in it than Constance, and it was usually Constance who had the greatest fund of ideas for projects and plans. Often her projects took us afield and into places it would not have occurred to me to think of by myself. Norman, Oklahoma, lies approximately in the middle of the state. When I lived there, fields surrounded the town, stretching out toward the horizon. Some of the fields grew cotton, and I had classmates who came late to school in the fall and left before summer, to pick cotton. Norman itself had a population of five thousand. In the part of town where I lived, the University was the largest feature, occupying a number of blocks. Houses clustered about it, most of them modest, as on our street, but a few more imposing, with turrets or gables, particularly the University president's house, which occupied almost a block of sweeping lawns. Throughout my childhood, the University was a pivotal part. Not only did my father walk every day to his office in the Physiology Building, but my mother, when we were very small, took us with her while studying birds. Still later, my sisters and I included the campus in the radius of our explorations. Beyond the University, Norman extended some distance, with streets laid out on a customary grid. Downtown, though quite some blocks away, was within possible walking distance. A railroad bisected the town, and I recall standing by the platform with its great burlapped cotton bales, while a train chugged by. We waved to the engineer, who to our delighted surprise lifted his hand to us as he passed. Both my father and my mother spent considerable time out of doors. In order to reach the University, my father either walked, or in the early days rode his bicycle. My mother not only took long walks, usually with birds in mind, often to a small brook on the outskirts of Norman which she had named Snail Brook. She believed so strongly in the benefits of fresh air that on a dreary day in winter, she would insist that we go outside for a while, admonishing us not to be "a house cat." Nobody in our family was into sports, either as spectator or as participant. But family expeditions, both before and after we acquired a car, took us on frequaent trips into the countryside. By the time I was six and a car was at last part of our equipment, Mother was embarked on research for the first book on Oklahoma birds to be published, and a new era in our lives began. From then on there were wondrous trips to faraway places in the state, toward McCurtain County near the southwest border, and to the Wichita Mountains, and once to the Panhandle with its mesas and arid land. Grey Rocks For a long time during my childhood, an area of my life was dominated by a dream of a place far away. At any moment I could conjure up a picture of it, the large grey house at the crest of a long hill, rising out of the woodland of white pines and cedars. Sometimes in the summer, if we were lucky, we might make the long journey to Grey Rocks, and find that it was still as I remembered, intact and waiting for our rediscovery of its varying pleasures. When I was very young and lived in Oklahoma, planning a trip all the way to Massachusetts and my grandmother's home in the hills above Amherst was not to be undertaken lightly. For a number of years, my parents took the train across the country each summer, packing a large black trunk full of the clothes we would need and sending it on ahead. It never arrived before we did, and I can recall once being on the big porch at Grey Rocks when the trunk was delivered. As it was unpacked and the familiar clothes appeared, I felt a warm sense of being settled in for more than a brief stay. About the time I was three, train fares rose sharply, and our journeys no longer were an annual event, but a rare occasion of every third year. The thing I noticed first when I came in the front door of my grandmother's house, after not having been there for a long time, was the smell of the wallpaper. In no other part of my life had I encountered that particular smell. We called it grasspaper, and it was nubby and uneven, so that when we went up the broad shallow steps to the landing, we could feel its texture on the wall, and see that over the years some of the grey-green grass-like pattern had come off. We had been told not to assist it in the process, but it was a temptation to finger the paper when we were next to it, and touch it where it was starting to shred. Describing the smell of the grasspaper is difficult. To me it suggested rare, unfomiliar spices - I think I had heard someone say it came from Japan. Yet it had a freshness about it, an aromatic quality that hinted at open spaces and sunlight slanting across a hillside. Looking back, it seems to me it held something of the essence of the sweetfern that clothed the slope to the north of the house - a fragrance both poignant and entrancing at the same time. When I think of being at my grandmother's place, I find myself recalling experiences in terms of smells. What makes it strange is that I can't remember my own home in Oklahoma as having any smells at all. Yet at Grey Rocks there was a whole series of experiences with accompanying smells of their own. The cedars, the white pines, the sweetfern on the open hillside, particularly under a hot afternoon sun - stiff, unyielding, but oh so fragrant, the low junipers which lined the path down to the old east garden, with their blue-grey waxy berries, the damp smell of moss and ferns along the brook, the fresh early morning smell while the dew was heavy on the tall grass and spangled fairy cobwebs caught the first rays of the sun, the heady smell of ripe blackberries clustered on tangled, prickly canes in the old orchard. Always at Grey Rocks there were cousins, sometimes only two or three, but frequently more, and I could usually find a companion for some project or other. When it rained, we could go down to the big, empty barn, with its long unused stables below, and the hugh space on the main floor where once hay had been stored, and the rooms upstairs where in earlier years a hired man and his family had lived. Or there were bookshelves along the walls in the house, and one in particular, on the lowest floor, where I could find copies of St. Nicholas magazines, bound in leather, and dating from the 1880's and 90's. Best of all for me was the sense of freedom I had when I spent a summer at Grey Rocks. In a house of such space, it was not difficult to evade the eye of a grown-up. My parents stayed in one of the two bedrooms on the top floor, and at least two of my sisters in the other. Once I was past the stage of needing to be housed near my parents, I could choose some other spot to sleep. On the main floor, with its generous rooms, my grandfather's study was located at the far end, looking just as it must have when he died long ago. Some summers I could have a cot on the sunporch just outside the study. More often the sleeping porch off my grandmother's bedroom directly below the study on the lowest floor held an unoccupied cot or two, and I shared the area with my cousin Florence, who generally slept on the porch hammock. With my parents settled on the top floor, two flights above, a comfortable distance existed between their sleeping quarters and mine. Waking in the New England morning, often misty, and with the sound of bird calls from the woods, was not at all like waking up in Norman. No school to interfere with arranging the day. If I were enterprising, I might have time before breakfast to slip down to the empty barn, or even to the brook, but early morning held so much moisture from the dew that it was better to wait till the grass had dried before going far afield. At eight, we were expected to be seated at the long table in the big dining room. My grandmother always presided at the end of the table; I think it was the foot, and whatever eldest son happened to be present sat at the head. Only when none of her three surviving sons happened to be at Grey Rocks did my father sit there. Yet it was my grandmother who was the key figure, among her children and her grandchildren. Once, I remember, she overslept, and came up to breakfast late, and was irritable at finding herself not on her schedule. My cousin Alfred, in a gesture of appeasment, hoping, I expect, to ease things a little, offered her a slice of toast, still hot from the big wood stove in the kitchen. While she thanked him, she was up in a moment, and off to the kitchen, supervising and fussing, and by the time she came back, the toast, I noticed, was long since cold. Somehow that day never came right again for her after her late start. All the time I knew her, it was important that schedules be followed promptly. One year, the year that I was eight, instead of traveling from Oklahoma to Massachusetts by train, the decision was to drive. In those days a journey half-way across the country by car was considered novel, if not downright foolhardy. Moreover we had a new little sister, scarcely six months old. I can remember letters of concern from my grandmother, which my mother read at the dinner table. Yet even though Janet was not very well at the time, plans went ahead. One suitcase was packed for my mother and baby sister, in case she got worse, and they needed to go ahead on the train. The rest of us packed what we needed for the trip in duffel bags. What I recall of the journey, aside from the eventful final part, seems more tranquil than it must have been for my parents. The car, I think it was a Dodge, proved not to be entirely reliable, and various breakdowns occurred. Once when a portion of the steering mechanism had to be repaired and we had a long wait by a dusty roadside in Missouri while my father was having the repairs done in a town some distance away, my sisters and I discovered a tiny spring in a grove nearby. Hours passed while we constructed a small dam to deepen the miniature pool just below the spring. My mother, whenever in a wood or field, could be found with her bird glasses and notebook in hand. Despite the trip, my sister Janet improved, and if she refused to use the new car bed provided for her in preference to my mother's lap, she seemed to have traveling inclinations. I don't remember discomfort from being crowded in the back seat, although I don't believe that the quarters could have been anything but close. Each day held something new, and besides each day brought Grey Rocks nearer. Whatever the projected time of our arrival, my father tended to be early. He had, I think, a deepseater dislike for tardiness. In any case, the closer we got to a destination, the more eager he became to reach it. Around supper time, the day before we were expected to reach Grey Rocks, we crossed the Massachusetts state line. In the front seat, my parents held a discussion about the wisdom of finding a place to stay before attempting the long drive along the Mohawk Valley. My father held out for continuing, my mother reminded him how late it would get if we went on. A long drive remained ahead, it would be dark long before we could reach our destination, the children would be tired, her mother was not expecting us until tomorrow. We drove on. Along the Mohawk Valley, as it grew steadily darker, the moon came up, and shown on the river down below. I see it in my mind as a wild and lonely place, with vast cliffs and distant water, and pine trees silhoutted against the night sky, and overall a full moon, all silver. Was it the sense of adventure in traveling so late, or the strangeness of the countryside, so unlike what I was used to, or the realization that I was staying awake long after any time I had stayed awake before, or the knowledge that we were moving through the darkness closer and closer to Grey Rocks that accounted for the excitement I felt? My sisters fell asleep in the back seat, but I sat by the window and watched the scene outside. After a while I made a resolve that I would not allow myself to fall asleep and miss the extraordinary experience of traveling through the night, alone it seemed, on the road toward the place I dreamed of during the years elsewhere. I am not sure if my mother dozed off for a while during that night journey, but she was so quiet that it seemed as if she slept too. What I felt was an awareness of my father, a sense of his intention, his resolve to do what I longed for. When I looked forward, his head and shoulders showed clearly against the light of our headlights, upright, solid, and I was convinced that at this time we shared the sense of urgency. Finally he turned the car off the highway, and I could feel that we were climbing, and that the road was bumpy. Trees leaned overhead. Then the way became level again, and I knew that we were on the last mile to Grey Rocks. We passed the only house along the road, the Harris farm, and in the moonlight I could see the low house and long barn huddled together. Then the road led straight along the ridge, past the Harris orchard, and past the meadows, and suddenly into the woods and shadows. Grey Rocks woods, I knew, and that we had gone between the stone pillars of the low stone wall, and then the road wound up in the never-to-be-forgotten curves and bends the last short distance to the top of the hill. Already the smell of pines came through the window. Then the car emerged into the moonlight once again, and there, at last, Grey Rocks stood, silent and dark against the night sky. When my father stopped the car at the foot of the steps to the porch, my mother stirred, and after looking for a moment, opened the door and stepped out. The full impact of the air, cool, scented with the resinous woods, reached me as I climbed out, over the running board and down onto the ground. My mother walked down the slope, past the porch, till she came to my grandmother's room. I followed her, and waited as she rapped on the window, and called softly. It seemed a long, long time before my grandmother finally appeared at the window. She was wearing her nightgown, I could see by the moonlight that spilled over the side of the house, and her hair was disarrayed, and her eyes seemed to me puzzled and somewhat alarmed. Then suddenly she exclaimed, "Margie!" and the puzzlement and alarm disappeared, and the familiar welcoming radiance took over her entire face. "We weren't expecting you until tomorrow!" "I know," my mother said. "And you're here now! I can hardly believe it." My grandmother turned toward where I knew her night table would be with its candle, already fumbling to strike a light. "I'll be upstairs in a minute, to let you in. Here already." "I know we came sooner than expected," my mother said. "We were on our way, and nearer than we had thought we would be..." My grandmother had the light now, and the candle flickered, and then threw out a steady glow. "And you're all here, safe and sound. I'll unlock the door." When we retraced our steps around the side of the house, and went up the steps to the porch, all of us now, though not all very awake, we could hear the sound of the lock turning. The big heavy door opened, and there was my grandmother with the welcome that was always to be counted on. I stepped into the wide front hall, and all of a sudden, the smell of the grasspaper met me. I took a deep breath. Books Reading. Curiously enough, considering what an important role reading had in my life, I do not remember the period when I was being read to. Many families establish a pattern of reading aloud, often at bedtime. At this time, I have no memory of a regular time for reading aloud. Yet I am sure I heard Mother Goose Rhymes from an early age. A book that stands out in any recall of tales of significance to me in my young years is Chicken World. A wonderfully illustrated book of a sedate black hen hatching and tending a brood of chicks, it followed the daily adventures the chicks encountered in growing month by month into mature hens in a well-arranged compound. Probably English, as the yard afforded glimpses of surrounding orchards and walks, season by season, with fruit trees gradually putting forth spring blossoms as the small chicks grew from fluffy balls to scrawny adolescents to well-feathered adults, each page contained details of chicken yard life. If my experience included no knowledge of such a country garden, the characters had a familiar element. The worried mother hen, checking her chicks as they hatched, complaining when once again a couple of eggs turned out to contain ducklings - such a concern, no prudence with regard to getting wet, reminded me of people in my own life. Her gloomy assessment of the hazards of raising children, especially impulsive small ducks, was not altogether different from some women I knew. And the preeminence of the rooster, eyeing the newly-hatched newcomers through the fence that separated the growing family for some time from the main chicken yard, the rambunctious young chicks, especially a fledgling rooster, the heedless exuberance of the two little ducklings as they splashed in a downpour while the chicks ran, dripping and miserable, for shelter in their box, all fascinated me. For a number of years I must have listened to the story, as I followed the pictures, and later on read it to myself, time after time. In our house there were other books full of pictures. Among them I particularly enjoyed the story of Becassine, a good-natured young girl from Brittany, who came to a Parisian household as a maid, and continuously complicated anything she attempted to do to help. In her Breton costume, her white cap that curled around toward her face, her full skirts and apron, her striped stockings (red and white, I believe), and wooden shoes, she clumped through her Parisian family's affairs making endless errors in her cheerful way. While we could look at the pictures, we had to depend on our mother to translate the text into English for us. Later on another French book joined Becassine, this time a lean and wiry rabbit named Gedeon. Where Becassine was incapable of comprehending the complex urban life about her, Gedeon possessed extraordinary powers for surmounting any difficulty. [These books are still in our library] Grandparents Of my four grandparents, only my mother's mother was of vital importance to me as I grew up. My mother's father died when I was six months old. My father's mother, who to him had been a compelling and deeply loved figure of the greatest significance in his life, had become a frail and wasted woman by the time I came to know her. My paternal grandfather, still hearty, was surrounded by other grandchildren, and only for a brief time weemed aware of me. In fact, for a short while I made him into the grandfather I wanted, and we even exchanged letters - probably not many. Later on, when we visited him in Ohio, I wasn't at all sure he could distinguish me from my sisters. My Maternal Grandmother My grandmother, a woman who rebelled in no way from the spirit of her time, lived genteely in a house on East 26th Street in New York as a girl, and later no less genteely in a large mustard-yellow house on two acres of ground in the village of Amherst, Massachusetts. For her father, whose prosperous business involved among other matters the shipment of tea from China, she felt a dutiful affection and admiration. Her mother, grave and quiet and acquiescent to her husband's will, had a quality of saintliness about her, and gave with a certain lavishness, unlike the reservation of her nature in her round of domestic duties, to the Ladies Missionary Society and other appropriate outlets for charitable concern. A son had preceded the arrival of my grandmother into the family, and two younger daughters followed her after a few years. A fifth child, a son, died after a few precarious months of life. Her two younger sisters grew up in a closeness and gaiety of spirit unshared by my grandmother. A picture of her when she was nineteen or so shows her with large dark eyes, brown hair smoothed back, a candid, grave young face, not eager or expectant as most girls might be. Indeed as a child I found it hard to believe my grandmother was really young then; she was my grandmother, only lacking the two deep lines beside her mouth, and with dark hair instead of grey. At that time she had decided on her future; without visible regrets she had resolved to be, as she told us later, the daughter at home, and care for her parents. Her parents, concerned with their son, temperamentally too gentle for the business life his father had arranged for him, and with the two younger and high-spirited daughters, were gratified by the arrangement. But when she was 23, and comfortably settled in a life of routine and good works, a scholarly young man, of uncertain health and intense ideals, was brought as a dinner guest by a friend of the family. Within a year she was married, and had moved to Amherst, where her husband was to teach history at the college for the next forty years. Presently they built the enormous house on Northampton Road, a house expressive of their day, with both a parlor and a sitting room, numerous bedrooms including a nursery and maids' rooms, a huge kitchen with what we later called a secret staircase so the cook could reach tahe upstairs quickly, and encrusted with a number of porches and small balconies. Scarcely was the house finished when her first child, a son, was born. The next year a daughter followed, and in another a second son. My mother was born a year or two later, and within two years, her very special brother and companion arrived, and later on, another daughter and a final son. The house, despite its size, was amply filled, and later my grandfather built an ell across the back, to hold a book-lined library for his own use, and above it, another bedroom. Each morning they gathered, all seven children, in the sitting room, for morning prayers, kneeling beside their parents. Each Sunday everyone assembled for the walk to church, and home again for dinner and the sedate occupation of the afternoon, reading approved and improving literature or taking a quiet walk along the country roads. My grandmother expanded in her role as the years went by. Her husband regarded her with the warmest consideration and devotion, and if he could expect no mental challenge in his studies, he was content with her and their life. She managed the large household with diligence, was solicitous for his health and comfort, insisted on conformity to family standards of conduct on the part of their children, and following the example of her mother, gave her time to a number of worthy causes. One of these causes was the plight of the American Indian, one in which later on we sympathized enthusiastically, for she had collected all sorts of Indian crafts, and in a cabinet with glass doors in my grandfather's library had arranged a display of Indian baskets and small pots and beaded quivers to delight any child's heart. When my mother was ten, her beloved younger brother was drowned in a stream not far from Amherst. My grandmother sought refuge in her religion, finding solace in her literal trust. But to my grandfather the loss confronted him with the realization of earthly opportunities forever missed. "If only I had got down on the floor and played with him." My grandmother's love and reassurance brought resignation, although I am not sure he ever could forgive himself for time's severance of his knowledge of his son. Always thereafter, in the family singing of hymns each Sunday night, "Now the day is over," his favorite, was sung in memory of the small son. My grandmother lacked, almost as completely as anyone I have known, a sense of humor. Her duties, her children, her community responsibilities, herself, she took with the greatest seriousness. She wrote countless letters, in an almost undecipherable cramped handwriting, to whatever children might be away from home. My mother used to read them aloud to us at the supper table, and we listened, though not alertly, for each letter contained only a recital of events attended, a lecture, a visit to an old family friend, a drive with some of her grandchildren. There was no portion of herself in her letters, no indication of her feelings. Once, when I suddenly realized that my grandmother had lived in the same town with Emily Dickinson, whose existence had become a matter of utmost excitement, I asked her somewhat tentatively what it had been like then. My grandmother was casual. " I used to send a cake to Lavinia now and then. She was such a dear woman. Of course nobody ever saw her sister." I waited, hoping for more, a crumb for my adolescent devotion. My grandmother picked up her mending. That was all. When it came time for their children to leave home, both of my grandparents showed an extreme reluctance. Partly perhaps it was the day in which they lived, when the danger of over-protection had not been expressed with the ardor and conviction of more recent years. Part of it surely came from an inner image of family solidarity. While my grandfather still lived, most of the children stayed at home; first in the big house on Northampton Road, and later in the equally large place my grandfather built for his retirement years in the hills East of Amherst. After the death of my grandfather, my grandmother picked up the threads of her life. A strong fabric she wove, living twenty four more years, making a home for her second son whose wife died and raising his infant son, bringing together each summer all those children and grandchildren she could prevail upon to make the trip to Amherst. She was happiest when sitting at the long table in the dining room, with children and grandchildren gathered in formidable array about her. It was my mother's mother who remained an influence in my life from my earliest memories. As it happened, I was born in her house, in the Pelham hills in Massachusetts. Although we lived half a continent away, in Oklahoma, my mother returned to her home for all of her children's births, with the exception of my youngest sister, who was born in a hospital in Oklahoma City. My grandmother, in some ways, fulfilled a child's image of a grandmother, ever welcoming, ever loving, ever present, even though we only saw her once in every three years. Letters from her arrived weekly, full of small events of the day, chronicling the activities of various uncles and aunts and cousins, never gossipy. Summers she spent in the big house on the hilltop in Pelham overlooking the Connecticut Valley, and it was there that I spent those infrequent and happy summers. All of us, with the exception of my father, who soon grew restless with the quiet pace of life at Grey Rocks, looked forward to the months spent there. My grandmother directed the household, a small, indomitable figure. My Paternal Grandfather When my grandfather was twenty, he married a girl of eighteen named Almina Rowena Allen from the farm down the road a way, and moved onto a piece of hilly, forested land in southern Ohio. This was in 1878, when woodland was still virgin, and both oil and coal lay just beneath the surface of the yet untouched earth. My grandfather, Frederick Robert Nice, was of no great stature, but he could outlast any man in Athens County ploughing his fields or sawing timber. With his young bride he moved into a one-room house he had built on the slope above the creek, and began to push and prod and coax the land into providing them a living. Because my grandmother, when I was a small girl, was no longer the brisk, swift woman she had been for so many years, but was frail and worn with disease, it was my grandfather whom I came to know best. As Ohio was too far from Oklahoma for frequent trips, the occasions on which we were together became special events. The clearest memory I have of my grandfather is on a summer day at the State Fair in Oklahoma City, when he had joined us on one of his rare visits to us. During the morning we had walked endless barn lengths between rows of of full-fed cattle, wool-burdened sheep, enormous hogs. After years of attending State Fairs each August, I found the sheer size of the hogs each year a matter for disbelief. When we went to a Fair, we felt obligated to see the contents of every barn; there was a kind of implied ingratitude to the planners of all this munificence for our benefit if we slighted a single exhibit. By lunchtime my sisters and my mother had seen enough, and only my father and grandfather, with me trailing at their heels, were indefatigably maintaining their pace, stopping now and then to study and discuss the relative merits of China Poland and Berkshire hogs. My father at this time was an advocate of diversified farming. My grandfather on the other hand had firm views on which livestock were paying propositions. He was not, I see now, a farmer to put much stock in theories; he knew what had done well on his farm, and if the market for beef had dropped recently, he had got good returns before on whiteface cattle raised on the cleared acreage up near the old oil well, and would again, when the market just got straightened out. As we left the vast shadowed pig barn, we crossed a blinding strip of sunlight to reach the sheep barn ahead. "Sheep would do well up on your hills," my father said. "Sheep," my grandfather said, as we plunged into the recesses of the sheep barn. Even though it took a few moments to grow accustomed to the dimmer light, there was no question where we were. While not so richly assailing our nostrils as in the barn just left, odors of distinctive quality reached us, odors compounded of unsheared wool replete with natural oil, and the dry, dusty, soothing smell of straw, and feed of a mixture to suit sheep tastes, with molasses maybe, and oats, and something unfamiliar. I was too preoccupied with poking my fingers down into the deep spongey wool, whenever I could find a sheep conveniently within reach, to listen closely enough to learn what my grandfather had against sheep. My mother's voice came from behind, tentatively. "I wonder whether it isn't time to have lunch." Oklahoma's new governor, Ike Walton, had announced a barbecue to be held that opening day of the fair. By virtue of being residents of Oklahoma, we were all invited. My memory does not hold much in the way of details about the barbecue, but I do remember promises of enormous amounts of meat, whole sides of beef to be roasted in pits. For weeks my sisters and I had anticipated this feast of gargantuan proportions. None of us had ever been to a barbecue. In spite of the summer heat, the dust, the smell of barnyards multiplied beyond anything we had experienced, we were instantaneously revived. With sudden purpose, we set off with mounting hopes to find the barbecue. Alas for our expectations. The response to Governor Ike Walton's invitation to dinner proved to be so overwhelming that hopeful guests by the hundred had to be turned away. So it was that a considerable time later we found ourselves some distance from the fairgrounds, seated at two tables in a small restaurant on a side street of the city. The tables, in the soda fountain style, were round on central wire pedestals, surrounded by spidery wire-backed chairs. As only four chairs came to a table, my sisters and my mother filled up one table, and my grandfather and father and I found a table a few steps away. There was not an empty table in the room. A waitress in a limp white dress jounced my chair, slapping three menu cards down on the table in front of us, then disappeared as though swallowed up by the waiting customers at other tables. My sister Eleanor raised her voice in a wail of frustration, and my father left for a few minutes to settle her. I was left with just my grandfather. My grandfather fished around in his pocket, took out his glasses case, balanced his glasses on his nose, picked up his menu card, and studied it. I picked mine up, and looked at the columns of choices. I had never chosen anything from a printed menu. My grandfather looked over the top of his menu at me. "What are you going to have?" he asked. For a minute I could not think what to answer. I had only learned to read the year before, and not too well at that. To relate the unfamiliar words to satisfying my actual hunger seemed a task of altogether enormous size. My grandfather placed his menu on the table and put his finger on an item halfway down the column. "I'm having baked pork chops. How would you like to have the same?" "I would," I said. "I certainly would." Suddenly I knew this was even better than the barbecue. My grandfather did not visit us again in Oklahoma, and most of my memories of him are at the farm in the Ohio hills. With its steep hills and pasturelands and creek winding through the long valley, it was a place for exploration in good weather, and on rainy days there were the barn and the big white house. My father, when I asked where he had been born, showed me where once the one-room house my grandfather had built had stood in the north pasture above the creek. My grandparents had lived in this first home for a year when the first of their children was born, a healthy boy whom they named Willard Wayne, and called Wayne. In another year a second boy arrived. It was the year James G. Blaine made his unsuccessful bid for the presidency of the United States, and the new baby was given the name of Leonard Blaine, and would be known thereafter as Blaine. In due course there followed Rile, and Madge, and Clara, and Grace, and Ethel, and Edward who caught measles from the older children and died when only four months old, and finally Ray. In developing the farm it was fortunate for my grandfather that his first three children were boys. All three put on stature and strength. Blaine, who was to become my father, while he never grew to great size could be counted on to drive the team with the lumber to the sawmill and be home by nightfall without mishap. All the boys had chores before and after school, and Blaine could get his done without slackening or forgetting. Like his father, he had a vision of what the farm could be; he'd lie in the bed he shared with Wayne up the ladder in the loft, and listen to his parents talking; how many acres of oats should be planted next year, and whether they should get a new horse to ease the load on old Prince during harvest and have to feed him over the winter, or wait till spring plowing time. My grandfather was a man of firm principles, and not one to push around. At one time or another his fiery temper kept him busy with litigations with two or three of his neighbors, particularly the neighbor down the valley, Possum Howes. I never understood just what the basis of his differences with Possum Howes was, but as property lines had been surveyed in a casual manner when the country was still almost all in timber, a large part of the trouble stemmed from boundary disputes. My grandfather inspired a fierce loyalty among his family partisans. Along the road that wound through the valley it was clear enough which was Possum Howes' land, and my father and his brothers had a favorite spot along the fence where they heaved useless or discarded objects. Once they tossed a dead cat over the fence and departed with a renewed sense of justice done. While the children were growing up, there were some years of prosperity. My grandfather built a new house, down around the bend of the creek from the first cabin. In the style of the early century, it had two ells at right angles to each other, a large downstairs with a parlor, sitting room, one bedroom, and kitchen, a real staircase leading to a second story with four bedrooms. My grandfather and his almost grown sons painted the house white, and set up a fence all around the yard to keep the chickens from wandering at will across the lawn. In the middle of the front yard a pipe rose almost to man height, and at night my grandfather would put a match to its open end and a flame would leap up and burn furiously in the darkness. To me it was a thing of mystery, but to my grandfather natural gas from beneath his earth was only a sign of the abundance of the farm. In those days my grandmother was strong and vigorous, her red hair scarcely touched with grey. With a little more weight she would still have been a handsome woman. My grandfather said, "She was such a scrawny little thing when I married her." My grandmother took care of the children and the house and the chickens and the vegetable garden, and sent Blaine to markey with eggs and produce every now and then. One day when Blaine had finished all the schooling he could get at the one-room schoolhouse on Fowler's Ridge, he told his parents that he planned to go to college. Ohio University was twenty miles away. My grandmother had felt for a long time that Blaine would be leaving for something different out in the world. My grandfather, who had expected all his boys to farm, was surprised at first to think of a son of his at college. But then Blaine had always been the one to drive himself, ever since he had been a small boy. How would he manage? He had a scholarship, and a part time job waiting on table to help with expenses. My grandfather believed a man should stand on his own two feet, but he lent Blaine money to help with his four years at college. When Blaine came to leave for college that September, my grandfather drove him in the buggy the twenty miles to Ohio University. As he left him in front of his dormitory he said, "You'll get along. You've got two things; you're healthy and you know how to work." Blaine did get along, and later on he helped his brother Rile to study for the dentistry, and his youngest sister Ethel to study education at the University of Oklahoma where he was teaching physiology. Wayne worked for a while as a miner in the coal mines of southern Ohio, and later went to Oklahoma to plant the rich prairie sod to wheat. Clara married a farmer near home, and a year later died in childbirth. Madge moved to Akron with her husband, who worked in the rubber factories. Marrying a boy she had known most of her life, Grace settled on a farm in Indiana. All of the children left except the youngest boy Ray, who stayed to work the farm. My grandmother's health began to fail when I was a small girl. I remember her best, sitting in her chair in the darkened parlor, which had become her room when she grew seriously ill. At that time she was so thin and frail she made me think of a paper doll, propped up in her chair, and reaching out a papery hand to me when I came near, and asking me in her whispery voice how I was. The next time I saw her, a year later, she was in her bed, and we only tiptoed in to see her, and left again. More than anything else, especially in the years after my grandmother's death, my grandfather loved little children. Ray married early, a girl from down toward Fayetteville, and all the years I knew him there was always a little child or two and a baby in the house. When we would go into the sitting room after supper in the big kitchen, my grandfather would rock in his tall-backed rocking chair, with Elmo or Henry or Mary in his lap, whichever was the right age then. And sing. I don't know whether my grandfather had a really fine voice or not, but he could sing true, and knew verse after verse of old ballads. One of them, about a little boy who was motherless and fatherless, waiting in the shadows while all the other boys and girls went home to their families, was the saddest song I had ever heard. I would sit in the corner listening, while my grandfather sang and the boy's plight became more and more desperate with each verse, and when the inevitable tragic end was reached, I could only wish he would sing all night. He never did; he was a farmer, and bedtime came early, and all too soon he would get up and carry a drowsing little grandchild off to bed in his room next to the sitting room. When we visited him, we did not expect to spend much time in conversation with him. Words were not commodities to be thrown around carelessly; he used them where they would count the most. My father and he talked at length, but that was different; that was man-talk and farm-talk. Where his visiting granddaughters were concerned, words were unnecessary. Once we took black mud out of the creek bottom and fashioned it into small pots and bowls. Somewhere my oldest sister had read that Indians baked their pottery in earth ovens. While we had no ovens of earth, there was a massive, black, wood-burning stove over which our aunt Marguerite cooked in our grandfather's house. Could we, sometime when she was making bread, add a few things? As it happened, she was baking the next day, and along with the redolent smell of fresh bread baking was mingled a curious and mildly musty odor. When my sister took our pottery out at last, every carefully molded piece had cracked and collapsed into fragments. My grandfather came in from the barn just then, looked at the tray with its brown bits of hardened mud, and commented,"Hm." It was a reassuring tone; this, he seemed to say, is the nature of creek bottom clay, and this is how we find out. At my grandfather's farm there were two broad-beamed, solid, almost black horses to work the fields. As far back as I can remember there were always the same two, but I imagine that it was a matter not so much of their remarkable longevity as that like most girls I was passionately interested in horses for only a few years. One of the highest thrills of the visit was to ride Ted or Fred in a jogging walk along the valley road. An evidence of my grandfather's strong-mindedness was his indifference to the fact that one of his horses bore his own name; this was the name that came with the horse when he acquired him, and I think he felt that a horse had as much right to his given name as a man. Because Fred had a way of rolling his eyes till you could see the whites we were convinced that he would be ornery if driven too far. Ted on the other hand possessed the calmest, quietest, most imperturbable nature imaginable, and as though this were not sufficient good fortune, he was moreover distinctly sway-backed. When my younger sister Eleanor rode on his back, her legs extended almost horizontally on each side, and more than once, when he broke into a rare and labored trot, she jogged right off, having no way to grip his sides. As there were no saddles on the farm, what riding we did was bareback, and after the sharpness of Fred's spine, I can remember Ted's smooth rounded back with gratitude. As long as the horses were not needed in the field, my grandfather allowed us to take them out for rides. One summer when I was about twelve, we contrived a fanciful aerial pathway in the top of the barn. My grandfather's barn was built with two matching haylofts high on either side of an open center through which he could drive his team and lift the hay by a system of ropes and pulleys and an immense fork up into the lofts. Unlike some farmers we had heard about, my grandfather never minded our playing in his hay. Usually we swung from one side of the loft to the other by means of a long rope attached to the highest point of the roof. Out of endless games of tag with our older cousins we had devised more than one way of crossing the yawning space between the lofts. From various lengths of boards we had found here and there we had constructed two or three runways across each end of the open space. In the middle of one of our most frenzied games, my grandfather entered the barn with a bag of chicken feed. When you are young, grown-ups are sometimes neutral and sometimes a threat, but almost always they don't know when to trust you. We stopped running immediately, but it was too late to pretend we had been doing anything except race across high-flung pathways. My sister, Connie, who had the most presence of mind, broke the silence. "Hi, Grandpa," she said, balancing in the middle of one of the walks. My grandfather eyed us, perched like so many pigeons in the rafters. "You'll be riling Ted with your ruckus," he said, and dropped the bag of feed down by the slant-topped bin out of which we dipped feed for the chickens. "Herman, you up there?" My cousin Herman poked his head over the big beam hear the top of the hay mow. "Herman, when you come down, empty this feed into the bin, you hear?" "Sure, Grandpa." My grandfather walked out of the barn. Our game shot into action where it had left off. My grandfather was not like other grown-ups. He knew when to trust people younger than himself. After my grandmother's death, my grandfather continued working the farm with his son Ray. The house lacked the scrubbed look of my grandmother's housekeeping, and the vegetable garden sprouted weeds along with the vegetables. The hills were lumbered over, the oil well yielded only a trickle of oil. My grandfather remained convinced that the farm would produce big returns again, and he made plans to raise more cattle and put more acreage in oats. My grandfather did not look back. He took a small grandchild in his lap and rocked him to sleep. [The following account was written in 1955. I have left out parts of it which seemed to me redundant expressions of Barbara's mood.] Columbus When I was just 12, my parents, without warning as far as I was concerned, made arrangements to move from Norman to Columbus, Ohio, where my father was to be on the faculty at Ohio State. The move had something to do with plans to transfer the Physiology Department to Oklahoma City along with the Medical School; I expect there were personalities involved; actuallyy the Oklahoma City move never came off, but at that time it seemed that it would. That summer we had at Grey Rocks, and laater went west as far as Ohio, where we stayed at my granpa Nice's farm, while our parents made arrangements in Columbus, finding a house to rent, and then my father left for Oklahoma, where he packed and moved all our possessions while we remained with Mother at the farm. A tremendous blow. I had never dreamed of moving away, from Norman, from Mary. She and I had been studying that summer, to skip a grade; we would both go into the eighth grade if plans worked out. We sent letters full of despair when we learned of the separation to come. I lay on the floor in the one room we had at the farm, under the window; my bed was a mattress - and shed tears of sorrow, the night I knew, over Mary's loss. Our clossness, our devotion, could never be the same. Mary was the dearest person to me; we walked to school together, we shared our thoughts, our hopes, our dreams of what was to come. Her mother was extremely strict and rather alarming, and our out-of-school time together was limited. But we had school, and the hours we walked together - perhaps one hour, with all our walking back and forth. One summer we put on some plays in her backyard, in which I more or less starred. She learned skills I was not expected to; sewingin a serious manner so she made many clothes, practicing piano two hours a day from the time she was six, and later on adding violin practice. We shared in a new Campfire Girls program, but I was somewhat at a disadvantage, not bringing much confidence to handiwork (beadwork for headbands; I dont recall what happened; whether about that time I left, or whether something happened to the Campfire Girls). We went to her Sunday School at the large Presbyterian Church; my parents had no church affiliation; so I happily accompanied her. There were sorrows in Columbus. The loss of all I had known in Norman. I hadn't suspected moving - not ever - at least not till I was grown and a hero carried me away. In Columbus we lived in a dark frumpy house on the fringe of town. The street was hardly more than an alley, disappearing into weeds and a path along a sort of dike leading down to the Scioto River. Broad fields of weeds between our house and the river - perhaps two blocks distance. Three houses on our cinder street - tucked behind other people's backyards. The Scioto River was slow and greyish and polluted. Nobody was supposed to swim in it; there were potholes besides pollution. Boys did however. Once we returned from a picnic and found cars on the street, and a crowd down by the river. A boy, swimming in the river, had drowned. The fire department had been working over him - and had given up. Only partly covered by a blanket, he lay upon the ground, his skin with a cold grey look, unutterably lonely. First contact with death outside my family. In the first fall, I had to make my way to that old Indianola School, far across the city, past street after street of stiff ungainly sooty houses, many of them two-family. A depressing walk, and one which I lightened by weaving long tales to myself, out of material I had just been reading, of Germany in the days of the barons - my heroine was named Ilsa. Then I met Virginia, or rather one day she asked me if I was going home her way. Reluctantly I gave up my prospect of a story to walk beside this rather grave short girl (I was tall in those days, about as tall as I am now) whom I had scarcely noticed in class. Little did I suspect - the closeness to grow from this momentarily unwelcome intrusion. In late December my sister Eleanor died. She had a persistent cough, following a cold. She seemed well, except for the cough. After Christmas when many Nice relatives came for dinner, with Aunt Grace and her family, I believe others, she went skating on a frozen pond in the middle of the weeds below our house. Then pneumonia. I don't suppose she was sick more than a week. I never believed God could be so cruel as to cause her actually to die. Close perhaps to death - we would remember afterward the dangerous time when she hovered between life and death. But then she grew steadily worse, and finally my father called us to see her "before she dies." Lying in the bed in Marjorie's room, breath;ing in heavy gasps. A funeral on a bitter cold bleak day - driving in a black car supplied by the funeral company to the cemetary in Athens. Grandma with us - she came when Mother wired her about Eleanor. Before in the funeral home - last sight of her - nine years old, fair, in a light dress. I put sweet peas aroynd her. Eyes closed (violet look to them - she was the only one of us with truly eyes). One remembers it with a sense of stoniness; it was not believable. And yet - The grave upon the hillside of the cemetary. Where my grandmother Nice, whom I could hardly remember, was burried, and three stillborn daughters of my aunt Grace. Cedars against the grey sky. Raw earth opened. Last time to see her. Weeping on winter air. The casket closed - that fragile summery look, the little fairhaired girl. Dust to dust. But so cold. The world at its most forbidding. So homeward. Long drive to Columbus. In that unfamiliar funereal car. Janet was home - with Aunt Madge, who had come to help (my father's sister). Ill with an infected ear - gravely ill. But slowly she recovered. I was not able to accept Eleanor's death. Nights without dreams seemed wasted; I sought earnestly for dreams of her. Any way to get her back. I felt that to have her once more - I should be willing to pay a huge price. My writing? all of it? and never be able to write again? In other words, my life. For her? Would God ask that? Could I give it? How could a twelve year old give her entire life (her essence, her writing) for a price, for a younger sister with whom she had often quarreled? Time after time I would debate this within myself. I should be able to give it up for her. But what would I have left? But one ought to be willing, so as to have her back. No sustaining religion during this period. Devastating to experience parents' grief before - once just before her death, my father in the dining room - "she's going to die. God, I know it." And mother in tears. And my sisters; frightened. I too, but unbelieving. God wouldn't let it happen. Things like this didn't happen to us. We weren't evil or conspicuous. But it did. The universe was without direction. One went on, numbed. But emotion displayed could be overpowering; not for every day. One owed something to one's grief-ravaged parents. So one went on. Covering up. Not able to talk any longer about it. About her. A week before, Virginia was to have come to visit me, but Eleanor was sick (only beginning - no fear yet) and V's mother said no. Afterward I said to V, "You never got to see her." Our friendship remained close for nearly three years, then v cooled. I was lost - for a long time I resolved not to marry; my belief in my capacity to hold love had been shaken too deeply. My sisters would ask me why wouldn't I marry? and I said I wouldn't tell them, I just wasn't going to marry, ever. Other friends - a few: Martha, Betty Jones. Crushes an a boy or two. Particularly on my history teacher. He encouraged my literary efforts (my English teachers were all duds, it seems to me, scarcely alive at all). Such a giving of my heart. And what a shock to realize later on - in eighth grade? that he was married - and had three little girls. Some pleasures in junior high school. Writing for the Echo. In 9th grade, an assistant editorship, with Martha. Virginia was editor-in-chief. Even then it was well that I was not given large responsibilities. Still flighty. Preferring swift, brief attacks on a problem. Writing imaginatively in those days (derivatively too). Enthusiasms: history. Art in a lesser way. English because of teachers was a loss. Civics worse. Latin - a fussy old-maid teacher, a man, Mr. Leopold; also homeroom teacher, alas. Sat next to this boy and that - interest mildly (ah much too mildly) reciprocated). A sense of loss when Virginia said her best friend, who was to be a real writer some day, now editor of the Echo, was Lois Atkinson, an 11th grader. Came to admire Lois too (apparently V's basis for friendship was also admiration) - a cool, remote, rather boyish girl. What became of her? I went on feeling, almost bursting with inner urgency for life. But on the outside I was stiff and reserved and stilted and cold. Meanwhile I had another life. I had been writing since junior high. Much happened - and satisfying in its completeness. None of the array of almost-occurrences in my outer world. Things happened. Yet I knew in a way that they were substitutes. I dropped my writing later, when life grew more engrossing. And too, I suppose I began to realize my stories wouldn't do now - too far from reality. And reality I could not put into my stories. It had been too painful for me to experience, and I could not interpret and understand it out of my own bewilderingly anguished living. During high school there were numerous boys I had a passing interest in, which was definitely not reciprocated. In those days I had black-rimmed glasses (four-eyes) and a spotty face and I suppose a solemn manner. I used to plan to meet Don, one of the earlier, in the hall, merely to say hello; we met in passing from one class to another, and I planned for some time before just what I would say in the one or two sentences I should have time for. Don was longer-lasting than some of the others, perhaps because I met him in junior high and he was around for a long time. There was John, for whom I didn't care too much, but who began to emerge as more of an individual as time went on. Not for me though. I was choosy, if solitary. Another boy was Norman, who was handsome too, in a studious, too-old-for-his-years sort of way, and who was wholly absorbed in dramatics, and had a deep, mature voice. He directed plays over the local radio station, while still in high school, and once I played some music for a play, "Lady Windermere's Fan" I believe it was, but that was all. I should have loved to have had something to do with acting, but I had no idea where to start, nor did he say at any time that he had just been waiting for me to appear and here was a part for me. Much later I ran across his name as an announcer at a New Jersey station, and once in New York contemplated writing him a note, but only wrote it and didn't send it. With all my impulses toward doing things, I had no idea how to go about any of them. In my senior year I wrote a little for the school paper, but I arrived a month late, after Europe, and all the regular jobs were taken. So I just did a little of this and that, without any real feeling of participation. I went on with my piano practice, but while I joined one music club, just starting up, and which met on the far east side of town, when I tried to join another, the Saturday Mucic Club, I was turned down. This was a staggering blow, for I had assumed I could play (without really listening to myself, or checking on my playing) well enough, after all these years of practice, to be acceptable. What would have released me from my imprisonment to some extent would have been to have brushed up on two selections, checked them with my teacher, Mr. Nichols, and then returned to the fray. Unfortunately I couldn't bring myself to do anything so realistic. I hated the stuffy old women who had sat to listen to me in that bleak room downtown. I swallowed the bitterness of my defeat, my rejection. I ignored the notices in the paper about the doings of the Saturday Music Club. It was another example of the callousness of the world. I nursed my wound and could not expose it to the healing air. Another failure. Out of this experience I learned the priceless lesson that one must not attempt anything where failure was possible. Only what was sure. Another blow fell somewhere around this time. I had been going to a faculty children's dancing class, in which I dutifully went through the motions of learning to dance. At the end of it there was to be a dance. I asked Don to go with me. He accepted, and I was in a kind of fearful elation until the final day, almost the final hour, as I remember, when he called to say he couldn't come. His girl, a somewhat sophisticated and lovely girl, had made up and said she would go out with him (all of this I learned from her a year or two later, when we were in college). Anyway this was more than I could bear, I was convinced; such tears of grief and humiliation I shed up in my room. Tears were a problem; there were no appropriate times or occasions or even places where they could be shed. They overcame one, and it was ghastly indeed, to feel indignant over something and find tears in one'w voice, and about to engulf one; it put one so appallingly at the mercy of one's feelings. Better to have no feelings. Difficult times all during those years. An ugly duckling outer covering is a hard thing to bear, especially when one has no concept of why. The why of life. It seemed to me utter confusion. I had all kinds of aspirations, but I had not the slightest notion as to how they could be realized. I was not sure they were justifiable aspirations; indeed I felt mostly distrust in the whole affair of living. Books said one thing; Mother had noble hopes and standards; Daddy had expectations and demands. It was almost as though there were nothing for a child to hold to. At this time my oldest sister was experiencing protracted defeat. I am not sure what she expected, but she had reached a state of discouragement which was blighting. My other sister found considerable satisfaction in her college work and friends and her (to me) restricted ideals. She hoped to do graduate work in history, teach possibly, preferably marry a college professor in a small town and have four children. She was, it seemed to me, unaware of numerous complexities of life which surrounded us. Her relationship with our father was better that that of any of the rest of us. She was conscientious, diligent, reliable; she had a few friends; she had suffered a defeat in connection with a sorority at college but went on as though it wasn't of too great importance; she received recognition for her excellent work at college. Later she won a scholarship at Columbia; received her M.A. after two years; found that hard work and high standards achieved her ends and fortified her convictions that her aims and rules were sound; married her professor, and while they didn't live in a small town, she was able to use the libraries at Columbia and finally she had her four children. All boys, but then girls are harder to bring successfully through adolescence, she believed. Was reality the disillusionment of my oldest sister? The narrow rules of my second sister? The sense of duty of Marjorie. The blighting frustration of Connie. Meanwhile Mother it seemed to me didn't know what went on in the world, particularly my adolescent world. Perhaps it was as though she expected me to grow up, willy nilly. As for the surroundings which would make the process of growing up more plausible - - none of that in our family. We had food to eat, clothes upon our backs, shelter over our heads. What more could one wish? One confusing element at this time was a strong sense of our family's being right. We didn't do things like other people, not because we didn't know that there were other standards, but because our way was, somehow or other, better. It was not for me to discover on what basis our way was better; only to accept. To have questioned was to threaten my little world, so precarious, with disaster. What did I have except the belief that, vaguely but undoubtedly, we were on the path to success? I did not know what success might be. However our family had the key. That Connie had not been able to use the key was somehow irrelevant. The rest of us were not to have the standards relaxed for us because of her. Rather was she to be made to feel all the more strongly her failure. To accomplish something. To be a success. I think it was the "to be" which was especially confusing. Material evidences of success of course were admirable. A medal for an essay. One's name on the editorial list. The honor society. One was supposed to be a success. Since the ideal was undefined, one could never achieve it, but had instead a sense of frustration and confusion, for having failed in various ways. Other things went on. Year after year, and nothing seemed to make a big change. When it was time to buy a new dress, my mother would be likely to send my father with me, and we bought the first thing which didn't look to bad on me. Once I remember it was a rust knit dress, with small pockets in the jacket. Most unbecoming. But I wore it a long time. Getting money for clothes was a problem; one attacked it by explaining to daddy that we really had to have such and such, stockings perhaps; one didn't have anything decent left. Mother was not only not interested in clothes, she was at this time embarked on her monumentsl study of the songsparrows of Interpont. She would say that we were her avocation, her birds were her vocation. Coming home from school I would find her on the study porch if the weather were warm, in the dining room if it were cold, at work at a table covered by a multitude of papers. Her attention was hard to hold; one had the impression she had slipped a finger in her book or notebook and was generously listening only until she could get back at her work. When I asked her specifically for advice , in connection with a boy and whether I should ask him to go riding with me she answere without the knowledge of the world ;which I was hoping to find, but as I think about it now, more as she thought I wanted to be answered. So I went ahead with my small project, and it didn't work out at all well. Later I felt stupid and unaware of what were the accepted paths for people my age. I wanted to conform, but conformity came hard; I didn't know how to go about it. Meanwhile life surged inside, and I tried diligently to curb it on the outside. One summer we all except Janet, who was eight and spent the summer at Grey Rocks, went to Europe. It was a curious summer, with much seen and something experienced. We were all receptive to some extent to the impact of an old culture, and all the material evidences of earlier ages. I can remember exploring along the Norman coast, and the dankness in the of dungeons of Mt. St. Michel, and the light melodic voices of French girls walking along the top of the wall, and our pension in Paris, and the flowers by the Madeleine, and reading Bad Girl in our room, and meeting my French correspondent Paul and being horrifying inept and stiff and frightened so that although he talked good English, I declined to visit his home (a real opportunity), and the little town of Rothenburg and bumping along third class on a German train, and staying on the steep hillside in Austria and seeing goats nibbling at leaves on a tree, and the "gruss Gott" of the people and an accordion player in a tavern there; and Italy, with St. Peter's in which I scarcely entered for I was wearing socks that day and the guard declined to allow me to go in, and lying on benches in the Sistine Chapel to make out the paintings on the ceiling, and chatting with a solitary visitor +at the Forum, alone like me, and I believe a German, and the taste of a lemon ice from a milk bar, whatever it was called, in Bologna, and Marjorie arguing about fare with a gondolier in Venice, and the stuffy pensione in Naples where I met two or three ancient Englishwomen and a lean dark slight English boy only a year older than myself with whom I went to Capri, and spent an utterly heavenly day, upon the ferry, climbing over the hump, swimming (and burning) in rented bathing suits, taking a boat ride with an old and a young rower, to see two or three little grottos shot through with emerald color; and eating; I'm sure we must have had lunch, but whatever was it? And coming home late, and sitting around the pensione worrying about my sisters who had not returned from an excursion to Paestum, and feeling disgruntled after my fabulous day to be waiting with the old ladies, only to have them arrive late and in high spirits after an eventful trip. Douglas and I walked up the slope above our pensione and looked down upon the city through old gnarled pines, and out across the harbor. Later we met again in London, and he took me to Windsor Castle and to a play Casanova with the others, and I suppose perhaps there was a little more time together, although it was brief for he had to go back to his school. I can remember having lunch with him at a corner Lyons, about three in the afternoon, where he was concerned because I had eaten nothing all day. His concern was a strange and wonderful thing to me; I had not known before what it was like to have a man truly solicitous. There was an air of foreordained tragedy about this tenuous drawing together. I had thought, if I considered it, that the brevity of our time accounted rfor it. But then after he had left, and I had seen him off at Paddington or one of the stations - I only remember that we were in a station and he asked me for my picture, and I said perhaps, and the last thing he said was to send the picture - anyway it came over me with appalling suddenness, perhaps the next morning, that I should never see him again, that his name, his father being in India, his dark coloring, that he was Indian (half Indian and half English might as well have been entirely Indian) and that I should not be allowed to marry h;im. My parents, "They," public opinion, and the climate in which I had lived, my own lack of courage and knowledge of the world; I should never be able to be with him. It was unadulterated tragedy; I wept in my room downstairs; my father sent for me tocome to their rooms upstairs. Even then, in the depth of my grief, I could not think of disregarding his summons. I went, and I no longer remember what occurred, but I found that I had the sympathy of my father (as I knew I should have my mother's). The basic situation was not changed, and I don't suppose we really talked about it. Feelings for once however were respected. That was new, yet I was in no position to explore such a strange point of view. (Feelings? I had no right to have any, at least if they interfered at all with others' equanimity. When we reached tour boat at Southampton, there was a letter from Douglas for me. Less than I wished. But more than I had anticipated. I tried to soothe my anguish with his letter, in green ink, and sealed with a good big blob of sealing wax. Over a year or two he still wrote. He grew, and I suspect I stayed as young, as unwilling to change, as unable to break from my casing. He went to Oxford, and to Germany for vacations, and to a drama festival at Malvern. I went to college, and was confronted right away with as severe a blow as any I had suffered; one small insignificant little sorority asked me to come to their house during rushing. That was that. I managed to survive. I made pleasant grades. I expanded a little with friends, partly through the choir, partly through college. Not too much; extreme caution. No joining a cause, or finding a passionate interest in anything. Vulnerable then, and above all I seemed to be bent on self-protection. I met at least two boys with whom I went out. The first was pleasant enough and after he dropped out because of strep throat (critical in those days) his friend Orin took me out, and I discovered that he hadn't learned to dance, so most of the time we sat out in the amphitheatre. Anyway we made the best of the evening, and later on Orin learned to dance, and we saw a great deal of each other. Reassuring to have one person who accepted me, and was eager to spend time with me, and was uncritical, and pleasant to have for an escort for various functions. I have no idea what we could have found to talk about. Orin did well enough in a plodding fashion, learning civil engineering, going on field trips in the summer when he would come back to school with his blond hair even lighter and his eyebrows bleached half white by the summer sun. That year had its compensations, with Orin faithful and available; a stabilizing experience for a girl. He was attractive, with a wave in his hair which I could only envy and admire; his voice however, was one of the most monotonous I can remember hearing, Ohio flatness at its extreme. I can recall his having Thanksgiving dinner with us that year, and when the choir went on trips, he and I rode with an older couple in the back of their car, and we met at the library to study, especially after my father suddenly discovered that I was going out too often, so I limited my dates to Friday and Saturday, and walked home with Orin after church on Sunday nights - a kind of abbreviated date. Once we went to Fossil Canyon on a picnic, probably just before the end of the year. Only the two of us, which had its potentials I suppose; It was the first time I realized that men could respond as men, to me; I was aware suddenly that perhaps it was as well that we should go on home. No words; no outward recognition; later on it occurred to me that it might be interesting to realize that I could have something to do with a man's reaction; this had not, in my sheltered life, really dawned on me before. My father had attempted to teach my older sisters to drive, and had managed to demoralize them and himselff in all his efforts (usually when we were all on our way to some spot or other; Mother sat nervously by, the rest of us suffered; after a few moments of false calm, something went wrong, and he descended - ascended - into fury, and Connie lost control, and Dad took over once more, smoldering the while). During these painful periods I observed, and although I can't remember much about learning, learn I apparently did, and presently was able to be trusted with the car. No licenses in Ohio in those days. Then along came another miserable experience. Once when I had driven some girls to a meeting of some sort in Upper Arlington, I drove fast on the way back, and was overtaken by two policemen on motorcycles. They insisted I had to go to jail with them; I left my passengers, except for one girl who rode with me for moral support, and followed one of the cops to the jail. By that time I was in tears. The girl went back when it was apparent there was nothing she could do (and of course I never relished seeing her again, reminder of the humiliation). It must have been at night; the matron I recall asked me how could I have driven sixty miles an hour with all those girls in the car? My father was called, or I called him, I forget; he had to raise $50 bail, or I should have to stay overnight in jail; he sputtered. How could he raise so much at that hour of the night? While I waited in the outer room I could hear a colored girl, barred in further down the hall, wailing in a weird and haunting kind of way. A deep disgrace. My trial was set for some time later on, and Dad and I attended. We listened to a number of trials, and found to our horror that those found guilty (and there was no question of my having exceeded the speed limit) were fined about $35 and kept a week or two in jail. So he decided to forfeit our bail, and we walked out. I had planned to take what small amount of funds I had in the Amherst bank to pay for the bail, but somehow I never did. One of the first times I recall using tears to ward off disaster was on Dad when he came down to the jail with bail. Tears seemed at the time a justifiable means to cushion the shock of his wrath, added to the harsh treatment by the police officers and matron. As years later I was in Columbus for the last time, on the street car ready to leave (forever ane ever) for New York in a few hours, I looked out the window and saw that same policeman, big and burly and brutish, on a motorcycle. I had hoped fervently that he would have an accident and be killed. My wishes were obviously not successful, and I: was visited by an alarming thought; could this seeing him be an evil omen for the future? Authority in its most cruel and callous form? (For me it was; he typified all the feared, unmanageable aspects of authority which had threatened me as a child and in growing up.) I suppose now if one wished to use his presence on my conscious view, one could feel that it was a reminder of the necessity of being related to reality. He was, driving along High Street on his motorcycle, a figure of protectiveness, defender of law and order. Only when I had violated the rules of safety, by driving for no adequate reason (of course I got a momentary sense of power, of capability from speed - here was the one place where I could achieve, I could experience success) beyond a safe limit, was he obligated to move in, and interfere with my course. A sound reminder, from another point of view. When I was eighteen, we spent part of the summer at Grey Rocks, and through my cousin Duncan I met Stan, who was working at the college to earn money for the next year. He had two years of college behind him, and I had it all ahead of me. I found him fearfully impressive, not only an Amherst junior, but also a swimmer (he had a blue bathing suit with a life-saving insignia on it) and owning, or coowning, a motorcycle. That was the final attraction. A number of us went on picnics, meeting him fairly late at the Fishrod Factory after his work at the college was over. During the year I sent him a note or two, the first enclosing a clipping I had seen about an Amherst football game or something of the sort. He dutifully answered, but I knew his attention was elsewhere. That next summer he worked on the switchboard, and I was at Grey Rocks all summer. Marjorie was there too, I think, and Connie, and of course Janet, who was so young that she was in a sense on the fringe of our awareness. Stan had a Model-T that year, and we took a few trips around Amherst, and swimming; and we had quite a satisfactory summer. Marjorie went out some with John Andrews, a grave scholarly young man, and once we all four walked the length - or half the length, I forget - of the Holyoke Range. Marjorie turned her ankle, and Stan and John helped her along. I managed by myself. But Stan made a point at other times of carrying me over any patch of poison ivy we might encounter. It was a change, to have someone make an asset out of one of my weaknesses. One forgets the joys of days together. I saw him from time to time at the college and sat with him at the switchboard, where I was impressed anew at his capability, in handling that intricate apparatus, and answering when it was necessary to answer in a calm, unhurried voice; realms of adequacy to handle anything at all that might come up, all in that voice. He was what I had dreamed of; strength and unruffled confidence in a world no more complicated than switchboards, swimming, keeping a Model-T running. At Grey Rocks he was less at ease, and I: sensed unsureness in social situations. I should have liked him to be everything; adequate on all levels; not only adequate but extremely able. All the things I had not found, or accomplished in myself, he was to supply. Sometimes I got our car, and we went off togeth;er. Once my father clamped down, crudely and inexcusably it seemed to me; I had called up the stair well to ask, with Stan on the phone, whether I could have the car that evening, and Dad, busy with something or other, there were papers as I recall in his h;and, came to life, aware suddenly of me. He said something about not going all alone with that boy all the time. That was that; I returned to the phone burning with indignation, but those damnable tears again. How could I ever feel indignant appropriately when tears choked my voice? I hung up quietly, without speaking (my voice was impossible). Mother came down to the sleeping porch to assuage me; I recall her concerned as I told her (after all she was a safe audience) that she could tell Daddy I would leave home just as soon as I could. Later I think we did go. I believe something was said about Dad's opposition between us, and I said he hadn't wanted me to go off all alone with that boy all the time, words "which I don't pay any attention to" and Stan said seriously "You should." I chose to ignore any implication I was not prepared to face, and off we went on our picnic. One night he and I and John Willard and Julie took a late swim in South Hadley. Much fun, and a little daring. Later he woke me by scratching on my screen (I was in the end room downstairs); it seemed we had driven in our car and one of them had left a wet pair of shorts in it inadvertently. I gave him the keys of the car, and he went down to the barn to remove the shorts. It seemed funny at the time, and exciting to have a secret expedition the knowledge of which we could share. The summer that I was first aware of being at Grey Rocks without extra reaources, when I had an entire summer and no Stan to occupy my time, when I had just finished my sophomore year, I promptly involved myself in taking courses at Mass State. Both courses were well worth studying, and I might have made some progress in