lives.
When I was a young teenager -- interested in all sorts of young men -- my aunts and cousins would assure me, with that intense certainty of women throughout history, that this brief time would pass and I, too, would be accepted as a wife in the world of men. "You will be married before you are eighteen," they repeated solemnly. It was a promise and at the same time a benediction; it was one's entire and only reason for living.
I remember with absolute clarity how I would look them straight in the eye and say, quietly and respectfully but slowly and stubbornly, "I will not!"
But then I had always been extremely willful and often blindly determined. When I was a baby, I in effect named myself. They would say to me, "Georgie ..." and I would say back, "Gee Gee," and that was the name that always stayed with me.
Perhaps it all never would have happened if the women around me--women I loved very deeply--when asked their opinions on something, even something domestic, wouldn't have always said with such resigned submission, "I only think what Joe thinks." Or Jim, or Bob, or Louie, or whichever "good provider" they had opted for. I remember lying awake at night, not brooding but repeating to myself with a deep obstinacy, "They won't get me." It was T. S. Eliot's "Music heard so deeply that it's not heard at all."
Despite the fact that I was born in 1935 in the midst of the Depression and that my parents did not have the fifty dollars to pay the doctor, I was always what one would now call, like some bogus FBI poster, a "wanted child." My adored brother, Glen, was ten years old at the time, so I came as rather a surprise into a difficult world. The country was collapsing into bits, and our family was not spared. Relatives moved in with parents or with the one person in the family who had work. We were lucky because my father had his own business and helped everyone else in quite extraordinarily generous ways. Across the ocean, darkness was settling over Europe and my brother would soon almost be killed in the near-sunset of Western civilization, but our immediate world remained solid. There was always about our family, and inside us, like a hard rock of certainty, a strong sense of good and evil, of white and black, of sureness about the world and the generosity that comes from that. Moreover, in concert with this was the absolute assurance that the United States was not just "a" country--the United States of America was the lodestone, the central planet from which the rest of the world spun off.
Our house, too, was the center of everything, and this does certain very special things for a child. It was just a little house, a simple dark brick bungalow no different physically from the endless streets of bungalows and big comforting trees on the Far South Side, but it was very different inside. Everyone came to us. We did virtually all of the entertaining, and in the summer everyone came to our Wisconsin summer home. It seemed quite natural, and it also gave me a strong, secure sense of "being" very early on. Because of an odd mixture of personalities in the family--a mixture that could have been as disastrous as it was creative--we were the first ones to try everything. Much, much later, when we were both adults and he had children of his own, my first boyfriend, Richard Siegle, said to me, "Your family did everything first. You water-skied first. You were the first to slice open the hot dogs before you barbecued them." Big, important things like that!
When my mother died in 1979, handing me the one unsustainable blow in life that I never quite believed would or could come, the minister praised her so correctly as a "woman who created neighborhoods" wherever she went. This was so true; it was a gift of God that was hers. But we were also infinitely blessed in our neighbors, who became--and still are--our real extended family. There were the Siegle family next door, the Lengeriches across the alley (we had real alleys in
When I was a young teenager -- interested in all sorts of young men -- my aunts and cousins would assure me, with that intense certainty of women throughout history, that this brief time would pass and I, too, would be accepted as a wife in the world of men. "You will be married before you are eighteen," they repeated solemnly. It was a promise and at the same time a benediction; it was one's entire and only reason for living.
I remember with absolute clarity how I would look them straight in the eye and say, quietly and respectfully but slowly and stubbornly, "I will not!"
But then I had always been extremely willful and often blindly determined. When I was a baby, I in effect named myself. They would say to me, "Georgie ..." and I would say back, "Gee Gee," and that was the name that always stayed with me.
Perhaps it all never would have happened if the women around me--women I loved very deeply--when asked their opinions on something, even something domestic, wouldn't have always said with such resigned submission, "I only think what Joe thinks." Or Jim, or Bob, or Louie, or whichever "good provider" they had opted for. I remember lying awake at night, not brooding but repeating to myself with a deep obstinacy, "They won't get me." It was T. S. Eliot's "Music heard so deeply that it's not heard at all."
Despite the fact that I was born in 1935 in the midst of the Depression and that my parents did not have the fifty dollars to pay the doctor, I was always what one would now call, like some bogus FBI poster, a "wanted child." My adored brother, Glen, was ten years old at the time, so I came as rather a surprise into a difficult world. The country was collapsing into bits, and our family was not spared. Relatives moved in with parents or with the one person in the family who had work. We were lucky because my father had his own business and helped everyone else in quite extraordinarily generous ways. Across the ocean, darkness was settling over Europe and my brother would soon almost be killed in the near-sunset of Western civilization, but our immediate world remained solid. There was always about our family, and inside us, like a hard rock of certainty, a strong sense of good and evil, of white and black, of sureness about the world and the generosity that comes from that. Moreover, in concert with this was the absolute assurance that the United States was not just "a" country--the United States of America was the lodestone, the central planet from which the rest of the world spun off.
Our house, too, was the center of everything, and this does certain very special things for a child. It was just a little house, a simple dark brick bungalow no different physically from the endless streets of bungalows and big comforting trees on the Far South Side, but it was very different inside. Everyone came to us. We did virtually all of the entertaining, and in the summer everyone came to our Wisconsin summer home. It seemed quite natural, and it also gave me a strong, secure sense of "being" very early on. Because of an odd mixture of personalities in the family--a mixture that could have been as disastrous as it was creative--we were the first ones to try everything. Much, much later, when we were both adults and he had children of his own, my first boyfriend, Richard Siegle, said to me, "Your family did everything first. You water-skied first. You were the first to slice open the hot dogs before you barbecued them." Big, important things like that!
When my mother died in 1979, handing me the one unsustainable blow in life that I never quite believed would or could come, the minister praised her so correctly as a "woman who created neighborhoods" wherever she went. This was so true; it was a gift of God that was hers. But we were also infinitely blessed in our neighbors, who became--and still are--our real extended family. There were the Siegle family next door, the Lengeriches across the alley (we had real alleys in
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