thank you, thank you, for loving me. I keep smiling until The Reluctant Hero in Modern Fiction jumps off the stage and hits me in the head.
And as usual, that's when I wake up.
Thanks, Jack. You always ruin this happy dream. I'm sorry. I didn't mean that, my darling. I must explain that I'm referring to the first Jack, Jack Milton Gold, the love of my life, the man I married when I was twenty. He of the glorious light brown curly hair and hazel eyes and infectious smile and love of everything and everybody.
I met him in college five years after the end of World War II. Those were the happy days, that era of my most intense reading. I went to college and discovered I wasn't an alien from another planet after all. There were actually others like me.
He was getting his master's in literature; I, my B.A. in library science. We met in Chaucer, fell in love in Shakespeare, and decided to get married halfway through the Romantic poets.
Could anyone have been happier? Living in New York in the fifties, the home of everything artistic and exciting. We had our very own, very small three-room apartment near the Hudson River. Jack taught at Columbia University. I was a happy housewife, learning to cook and trying to study at the same time. Fanny Farmer in one hand, the Dewey decimal system in the other.
And then our beautiful baby, Emily, arrived.
I was blessed.
And then I was cursed.
The Reluctant Hero in Modern Fiction. That was the title of the textbook Jack wrote and used in his classes. And it always hit me in the head at the end of every Dancing Books dream.
Once, during one of our all-night study/lovemaking sessions, I asked him to tell me about his war. I remember him saying that, yes, war had been hell, but afterwards, if you survived, life went on with or without your participation. "You have two choices," he told me. "You can wallow in what you can't change or you can fall in love with the miracle of every single day."
Jack Gold was my hero. He chose to fall in love with me and with life.
When the fairy tales I read as a child told me I'd find a hero to love, they were right. They also promised I'd live happily ever after. I didn't know "ever after" was only eleven more years.
I distract myself from dredging up the past by rereading a few pages from an old favorite, Gone with the Wind . (Is that a boring title, or what? I guess all the good biblical titles had been taken.)
Is it eight a.m. already? I see the girls out my window gathering for our morning workout and I close the book.
Like Scarlett, I'll think about the bad stuff tomorrow.
14
A New Job
I t's eleven a.m. and the mail has arrived. Front doors open, people stroll over. For many, this is the big event of the day.
Evvie is already at the mailboxes. It's also the day her weekly Lanai Gardens Free Press is delivered, and she's graciously handing them out to her admirers. There's something for everyone in this newspaper my sister started years ago because, as she said, she desperately missed the Daily News and the New York Post. She covers everything from Hadassah meetings, clubhouse events, and religious services to garage sales. Everybody reads her reviews of plays, movies, lectures, and concerts, written in her own highly individualistic style.
Sophie is down early, a minor miracle. The pile of Bingo Bugle s is there and she can't wait to see the photos of this week's big winners from all over the country. Sophie's flavor today is lemon and she's dressed head to toe in that confection.
I open my mailbox to find letters from my grandchildren in New York. Bless them, they write me every week, with a little urging from my daughter, Emily. I look around to make sure Ida isn't here. She never gets mail from her family. It breaks her heart, and I don't like to read mine in front of her. This week's offerings are
And as usual, that's when I wake up.
Thanks, Jack. You always ruin this happy dream. I'm sorry. I didn't mean that, my darling. I must explain that I'm referring to the first Jack, Jack Milton Gold, the love of my life, the man I married when I was twenty. He of the glorious light brown curly hair and hazel eyes and infectious smile and love of everything and everybody.
I met him in college five years after the end of World War II. Those were the happy days, that era of my most intense reading. I went to college and discovered I wasn't an alien from another planet after all. There were actually others like me.
He was getting his master's in literature; I, my B.A. in library science. We met in Chaucer, fell in love in Shakespeare, and decided to get married halfway through the Romantic poets.
Could anyone have been happier? Living in New York in the fifties, the home of everything artistic and exciting. We had our very own, very small three-room apartment near the Hudson River. Jack taught at Columbia University. I was a happy housewife, learning to cook and trying to study at the same time. Fanny Farmer in one hand, the Dewey decimal system in the other.
And then our beautiful baby, Emily, arrived.
I was blessed.
And then I was cursed.
The Reluctant Hero in Modern Fiction. That was the title of the textbook Jack wrote and used in his classes. And it always hit me in the head at the end of every Dancing Books dream.
Once, during one of our all-night study/lovemaking sessions, I asked him to tell me about his war. I remember him saying that, yes, war had been hell, but afterwards, if you survived, life went on with or without your participation. "You have two choices," he told me. "You can wallow in what you can't change or you can fall in love with the miracle of every single day."
Jack Gold was my hero. He chose to fall in love with me and with life.
When the fairy tales I read as a child told me I'd find a hero to love, they were right. They also promised I'd live happily ever after. I didn't know "ever after" was only eleven more years.
I distract myself from dredging up the past by rereading a few pages from an old favorite, Gone with the Wind . (Is that a boring title, or what? I guess all the good biblical titles had been taken.)
Is it eight a.m. already? I see the girls out my window gathering for our morning workout and I close the book.
Like Scarlett, I'll think about the bad stuff tomorrow.
14
A New Job
I t's eleven a.m. and the mail has arrived. Front doors open, people stroll over. For many, this is the big event of the day.
Evvie is already at the mailboxes. It's also the day her weekly Lanai Gardens Free Press is delivered, and she's graciously handing them out to her admirers. There's something for everyone in this newspaper my sister started years ago because, as she said, she desperately missed the Daily News and the New York Post. She covers everything from Hadassah meetings, clubhouse events, and religious services to garage sales. Everybody reads her reviews of plays, movies, lectures, and concerts, written in her own highly individualistic style.
Sophie is down early, a minor miracle. The pile of Bingo Bugle s is there and she can't wait to see the photos of this week's big winners from all over the country. Sophie's flavor today is lemon and she's dressed head to toe in that confection.
I open my mailbox to find letters from my grandchildren in New York. Bless them, they write me every week, with a little urging from my daughter, Emily. I look around to make sure Ida isn't here. She never gets mail from her family. It breaks her heart, and I don't like to read mine in front of her. This week's offerings are
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