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Bio |
03 Oct 2005
The truth is I don't think of the 50's or even highschool as the "good old days". In many ways my own life began after highschool when I was free or more free of parental expectations and could explore. The politics of the 50's makes me feel nauseous even now, Senator McCarthy and his witch hunt for communists that reached deep into Northampton's academia and made people afraid, inform on one another etc. The McCarthy hearings were a great drama for me to watch, and because we did not have TV at home I was able to go after school with someone -- forgive me for not remembering who -- who let me watch the hearings with her. The election between Ike and Stevenson pushed me even further into a minority at our highschool, where I was conscious of all the "I love Ike" buttons, but remembered only 3 Adlai Stevenson buttons, including my own. Not until Agnes Thoms gave me a lead role in one of our plays did I feel "accepted" -- sort of. I transferred after freshman year to the highschool, begging my mother to let me leave Northampton School for Girls (now part of Williston) which I loathed and was almost expelled for suggesting The Catcher in the Rye for summer reading. So I joined you all late, as a sophomore.
How to summarize 5 decades? Probably best to begin with the present and go backwards. I live in a bit of paradise with my true love and best friend, Cristobal - who I have been married to for an unbelievable 43 years. We live on land that was once a dairy farm, now the foundation of an old barn we could not save is a garden dedicated to the memory of my mother, and there are endless perennial gardens, orchards, herb garden, ornamental trees and shrubs planted by an obsessive and passionate gardener who would rather buy hundreds of daffodils to bury in the earth each autumn then go to the grocery store. Our home,- once a farmhouse, originally the home of Conway's first doctor who built it in the late 1700's with a fireplace in every room - has been lovingly restored over the past 20 years since we moved here from the Philadelphia area where we were living when our two children were growing up.
Our greatest achievement: bringing those two children to a certain threshold so they could continue the journey on their own. We are immensely proud of both of them. Margarita was born in Africa, in a place called Asmara now in Eritrea not far from the Red Sea, while we were living in Khartoum, Sudan. Cristobal was working for Unesco, and we had to fly off to then Ethiopia, a month before Margarita was born, because there were no facilities for women to give birth except at home and at the time the UN had housing shortage, we did not have a home nor was it advisable to have midwife there for first child. So we went to a US Army base hospital (since vanished ) who accepted me because we were living in a "hardship area". Far more of a hardship now.Margarita is a beloved, much sought after teacher of drama at the Junior High in Amherst, having earned her Masters at Smith. John is a lawyer, like Cristobal, who lives in Boston with his wife. He was a recepient the MacArthur award for his work in public service. John started the National Voting Rights Institute shortly after graduating from Harvard Law, and if I google his name it totally exhausts me to keep up with everything he is doing, all his cases, including a case that is now going to the Supreme Court. Cristobal also has international fame for his work on a particular case against Texaco, the corporation swallowed up by Chevron, that devastated the rainforest in Ecuador's Amazon region destroying the water and land for many indigenous tribes.
When we returned from Africa I was working for UNICEF, for Head Start as a teacher, being an activist for Civil Rights an activist against the Vietnam War, and then in the early 70's I started an arts organization. Called Artisans Cooperative it became a life line for jobless communities in rural areas like Appalachia, the Deep South, Native American reservations where traditional handskills were endangered. We operated 5 craft galleries (Faneuil Hall when it first opened invited us to come, Nantucket, and the Philadelphia area) and received generous grants for providing technical assistance to the field from The Ford Foundation, etc. That increasingly devoured almost 20 years of my life. Since we moved to New England I have extricated myself from juggling all that, I have become a writer (no more foundation grants & reports) and had something published in a collection of pieces first presented at Smith in a symposium about Exiles and Refugees. The book, called The Dispossessed: An Anatomy of Exile with a forward by Liv Ullmann was published by the University of Massachusetts press last fall. I had been asked to write a piece about the famous refugees (writers, artists, poets) who escaped the Naziis and came to stay with my family in West Whately when I was 7 and WWII still raging. They were people who made an immense impression on me. Now I am working on a book about my maternal grandmother who came with her family to the Lower East Side of New York City, escaping the pogroms of Eastern Europe in 1900, and I TRY to work at my desk a few hours every morning, although that discipline sometimes crumbles.
I find it very hard to believe I've just celebrated my 68th year, now beginning! Perhaps because I am not yet a grandmother I am in denial and don't connect with that number, that age. If I am able to go to the reunion this month - scheduled for the busiest weekend of autumn in New England! - I may be confronted with the age we have all become. I've promised Bill Bailey - who in my mind is the dear family patriarch of our class of 1955 - to join you for some part of the festivities. In the meantime I leave you with this glimpse, and will be interested to read about the people I remember. My warmest greetings to all of you, I hope you have a wonderful reunion weekend!
Deirdre
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