It’s very hard to pick a final topic out of the untold number of as yet untold stories. But I can’t really end the month without at least mentioning Gabrielle, Maia and their mother Kathy.
Gabrielle and I were fellow math students in Baltimore. We tooled around the city throughout our twenties, quite inseparable. We had met as fellow students in the decidedly male world of a math department with no female professors at all. The two of us constituted the English-speaking half of the four female graduate students. So we had a lot in common right away. We spent quite a bit more of our time together pursuing enjoyable ends than we ever spent doing any mathematics. We went to the library, cooked, walked her dog, made spiderwebs out of string and shopped at k-mart. But mostly, we sat for endless hours telling stories about past and present over tea. Despite all these distractions, or perhaps because of them, we both eventually earned our degrees.
The picture is of me and Audree listening to Kathy tell stories. Kathy had an outfit called Closed Circuit Theater, and she gave acting lessons. She still does even though now she works in schools and gets kids up on stage under the auspices of speech language pathology, which in her practice is quite a bit more than learning to say your r’s properly. I took some classes with her. Participating and then watching our improvised exercises unfold on CCT’s video-tapes profoundly changed my life. Without really making any effort to do so, I found myself speaking out in all kinds of situations both in and out of the family. It’s fun to hear your own voice. And, interestingly, speaking gives others a chance to respond … usually in ways you could not have predicted. Though perhaps I should have known that telling everyone my brother should immediately divorce his wife of two months would not be a good beginning to a relationship with a sister-in-law. At a cousin’s wedding, she had certainly let me know all of my brother’s failings. I thought, if they are that unhappy, separate now! My new-found acting wisdom told me simultaneously that family secrets don’t really exist and that they are highly destructive. So tell everyone in the family everything. My pronouncements probably extended their marriage by four or five years, however. (Despite their eventual divorce, Patty is still my sister-in-law, btw, and we are good friends despite that rocky start.)
Kathy and her girls are definitely in the family of my heart (as they say in French). When I returned traumatized from Switzerland, Maia took me in and we spent seven years sharing a house. We spent hours and hours telling stories about past and present. Then, about five years ago, I fell in love with the man next door, which is about a mile down the road from Maia’s. She’s coming over for dinner tomorrow evening before she heads off for a trip to Turkey. I can’t wait to hear her stories when she returns.
a great story. cool picture and I bet that plant is still alive, they're so hard to kill.
...in the decidedly male world of math. This reminded me of my great aunt, Tecla. She was a teacher of engineering at Ohio State University until her untimely death in 1925 at the age of 30.
Sounds like a wonderful friendship for two adventurous women. I have never really been drawn to public speaking, but I think you're right to say any training that borders on the theater arts prepares you for it (although you might not realize it at the time). My little dabbles in it introduced me to some techniques that give folks the impression that I'm not nervous at all. Little do they know what's going on inside! You look quite engrossed in the story here- it must have been good!
...in the decidedly male world of math. This reminded me of my great aunt, Tecla. She was a teacher of engineering at Ohio State University until her untimely death in 1925 at the age of 30.