Coming Full Circle

I had no great expectations when I applied HILR in 1994. A year earlier I’d retired from a satisfying 16 years at Tufts, where I taught some literature and lots of expository writing and spent nine years as associate dean of undergraduate studies. I loved the job, my colleagues, and the students. But my husband Jim had already retired and was dangling the prospect of an extended European trip before my eyes. It made sense to me—after something of an inner struggle—to take advantage of our freedom and good health to cultivate those new interests retirees often mention. Jim seemed to welcome more companionship, even conceding kitchen privileges to me. He’d become a gourmet cook so I wouldn’t have to fix dinner when I got home from work. The first year flew by. We were happily busy, occupied by our middle son’s marriage, a month in Spain, several weeks in Mexico, visits to relatives in New Orleans and Los Angeles, dinner with friends, books, concerts, movies, and volunteering at various civic groups.

It wasn’t until I found myself entering the Publishers’ Clearing House Sweepstakes, rolling a jar of saved pennies to take to the bank, and signing on as a paid volunteer for various non-invasive medical experiments that I realized I needed more structure—a room of my own as it were—outside the house. So when Barbara Carlson suggested I might enjoy HILR, I was ready to give it a try. What I hadn’t expected was to encounter the ghosts of my earlier self as I walked into 51 Brattle Street and realized that it was the same building where I’d taken my two oldest children 42 years earlier for checkups with a young Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, then an emerging guru to a clutch of adoring new Cambridge mothers. Close by stood Buckingham House at 77 Brattle Street—then a shabby gray clapboard house—where even earlier I spent my first year as a graduate student, newly translated from my home city, New Orleans. It’s not as though I’d forgotten the year I lived there with six other female graduate students, sharing one bathroom, one telephone, and a makeshift kitchen. After all, Jim and I had returned to the area in l967 to buy a house in nearby Newton, and we often visited friends in Cambridge. But somehow this trip to Cambridge felt different, an odd little echo of those earlier chapters of my life. For a moment, at least, I relived the romance, the excitement of starting a new venture all on my own.

I wish I could say that HILR bloomed for me the same way the lilacs did outside the doorway at Buckingham House when Jim and I were courting, but the first days were a bit disheartening. When I walked into my first class, a study group on William James, I found seven older gentlemen lined up in seats against the wall. The study group leader greeted me with a jovial, “Well here’s our affirmative-action candidate.” The first time I ventured into the Common Room I sat down at a table where an elegantly dressed lady with a mass of spun-gold hair was deep in conversation with another woman. “Oh,” she said, “would you mind sitting somewhere else. We’re talking business.” This was, of course, before our director Leonie, before the membership committee, before Mentors and Buddies. I wasn’t really daunted, but I did wonder. It reminded me too much of high school days at the Academy of the Sacred Heart when I worried that I wouldn’t find a place at the alpha girls’ table. Alpha girls at Sacred Heart were those who’d earned blue ribbons for deportment, whose beige and brown uniforms were always perfectly pressed, and whose lisle stockings never sagged around their ankles.

Things improved gradually. One day Jackie and Harold Jacobs spotted me on the bus and began to chat with their inimitable Jacobsean friendliness. The lady with the spun-gold hair shared a class with me the next term and began to act like my new best friend. In my writing class I encountered wonderful, silver-haired Sadie Kreilcamp, who seemed to be sound asleep at the other end of the table until she opened her blue eyes and offered some trenchant suggestions about the paper I’d just read. Later she confided that she adored Nobelist Sigrid Undset’s trilogy, Kristen Lavransdatter, and was planning to go on an Elderhostel trip as a pilgrimage to Undset’s Sweden.

The real breakthrough came when I offered my first study group. Participants were articulate, enthusiastic, and generous in their enjoyment of the reading and their appreciation of my efforts. The class included former teachers, writers, editors, an art historian, two vociferous lawyers, and a nurse with impressive intellectual passion. I’d grown used to the blithe egotism of adolescent college freshmen who had more pressing concerns than clear writing, and I was bowled over when Joanne Maynard offered a terrific critical analysis of one of the stories we were reading. At lunch in the Common Room afterwards I also discovered Joanne’s bracing sense of humor when she explained that she’d spent years teaching school while raising eight children. They were all out of the house now, she explained, and she’d recently looked at her cat and told him: “You go next.”

These pleasant encounters multiplied as the years went by. I offered other classes, enjoying the fun of planning them and discovering the satisfaction of being a facilitator rather than a teacher. I was drawn into other activities at HILR: the Curriculum Committee, editing the The HILR Review, and serving on the Council. I got to know people in different contexts and came to admire their energy and dedication. I feel lucky to have made some really good friends here. They aren’t necessarily the ones I call with news of a daughter’s diagnosis of breast cancer or a son’s admission to Harvard Law School. Most of my friends here are more like colleagues or neighbors, partners in a shared enterprise, or familiar faces I’m happy to see. It’s not necessarily a place like Cheers, where “everybody knows your name.” But many people do. Others recognize your face and smile. Some can even read your nametag.

I still don’t gravitate to the Common Room. I don’t like the noise and the congestion. It gets harder and harder to hear anyone, particularly when I’m trying to chew as well as listen, but I often meet HILR friends elsewhere in the Square, so we can converse and relax into the peace of an unhurried meal served in calm surroundings. Even though I don’t linger in the Common Room, my 14 years at HILR have turned me into a joiner. I’ve always considered myself solitary by nature—perhaps because I grew up in a family where most people were strangers unless they were blood relations— or perhaps because my mother usually exhorted me to “be friendly” in the taxi on the way to family gatherings.

Now I try to understand the nature of the community that has taken me in. Certainly it has given a shape to the years, a structure reassuring to me after a life spent in academia. It’s given Jim and me new common interests, discussing the classes we take together or apart, or sharing the marvels of the HILR trip to Chicago. It has helped to counteract the sense of marginality and loss of identity that retirement brought. But beyond that it’s proved a bulwark against the surprise of growing old. I had known theoretically, of course, that I would grow old some day. But as the youngest of three sisters, I’d always felt like the youngest person in the room until I reached the age of 80 and my friend David the poet started reciting his one-line poems. “You aint seen Nothing yet” and “On Turning 80—It’s a breathtaking, near death experience.” HILR has made me more comfortable inhabiting a country I somehow never expected to live in. My cohorts at HILR seem able to take the indignities and losses of old age in stride, with calm acceptance or brisk fortitude. I’m learning from them.

Next