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My Teacher, My Car

April 29, 2010 - View Single Entry

Malvina Forester isn't the first Subaru with which I've shared my life. That honor belongs to a 1980 wagon that came into my life in 1985. Here's the story. An earlier version appeared in the Martha's Vineyard Times in October 1989, accompanied by the cartoon at the end, drawn by my then girlfriend, the capable Maggie MacCarty. It's from To Be Rather Than to Seem, of course.

Never mind that I grew up in the suburbs; until I reached the relatively mature age of thirty-seven, I had never had a car of my own. I lived in cities; I didn't need a car. That was my public explanation. Privately I was convinced that only a crazy person would risk owning a car without full certification in automotive mechanics. What if the car broke down in the middle of nowhere? What would I do?

When I moved to Martha's Vineyard, during the summer of 1985, I intended to live on a shoestring, write, and get around as I had for twenty years as an occasional visitor: by bicycle, foot, and thumb. Then Linda, my father's ex-girlfriend who was now living abroad, offered me the use of her sturdy 1980 Subaru wagon. Freedom from cold, freedom from rain, freedom from expeditions up-island or to Edgartown that took half a day! My cluelessness about cars notwithstanding, I accepted.

In early October, the car came to live with me at my winter rental on Beach Road in Vineyard Haven. The very next day I slung backpack over shoulder, grabbed the keys, and headed downstairs, anticipating a leisurely drive to Alley's General Store, which in those days still housed the West Tisbury post office, for mail and a cup of coffee.

My mode of effortless transportation had a flat tire on the driver's side.

I walked counterclockwise around the car, checking each wheel in turn. Three tires were properly plump. The left front was still definitely, implacably flat.

My dire assumptions were confirmed. I'd never changed a tire and I didn't know where to start. This treacherous, unreliable creature could sit right where it was until Linda came back to the island in May.

When my heart stopped pounding, I saw Courtesy Motors right across the street, next to the convenience store cum gas station. Compounding my usual reluctance to ask for help was the embarrassment of being a stereotypical woman incapable of dealing with cars. But the only alternative -- leaving the flat untended until spring -- would have meant total humiliation.

Within twenty minutes, for the modest sum of $5, I was on my way up-island. The guys at the garage did not treat me like an idiot. They lent me an air can and showed me how to use it; I put air in the flat tire (this was no more complicated than inflating my bike tires) and drove around to the back of the garage, where my flat was duly replaced with the spare. Larry and the crew at Courtesy Motors have been my mechanics ever since.

"When the student is ready, the teacher appears," goes the axiom. Did I suspect then that this burgundy Subaru was going to be one of my mentors? I knew it for sure that winter. Someone swiped the grille off the front end, I don't know when and I don't know where. The grille's absence caught my eye in the parking lot of Cronig's supermarket. I walked around the car three times, half convinced that I was hallucinating and the grille would be back in place when I came round again. I went into the store, bought my groceries, and returned to the car. The grille was still gone.

As I drove home, my eyes scoured the side of the road. Maybe the grille had fallen off when I wasn't looking? I searched the cramped parking lot that my apartment shared with the boatyard and the health food store. Nothing.

This time I didn't fantasize waiting till spring. Anger propelled me down the hitherto-unfamiliar road of police reports, insurance adjusters, and body shops. I glowered suspiciously at every Subaru on the road with grille in place: maybe one of them was mine? Maybe the island was playing Musical Grilles behind my back: when one person's grille was stolen, he stole one from someone else. Before my replacement grille came in, I was terrified that sand would blow in, clog the radiator, and destroy Linda's car. This new worst-case scenario replaced my old favorite -- two tires blowing out simultaneously on Old County Road.

One bright Labor Day weekend, late for a supper party, I ran to the car, turned the key -- nothing. The parking lights were switched on; the battery was quite, quite dead. In miraculous time I hitched from my summer digs (near West Tisbury village) to the party (off County Road in Oak Bluffs). A friend lent me her plug-in battery charger. By morning The Kid was juiced up and starting, no problem.

One night barely three weeks later, I was pulling into Lambert's Cove Road after a fall equinox celebration and the world went so suddenly, totally dark that I feared for my eyes. Panicky fumbling with the controls yielded the answer: my headlights were gone. By the flash of my hazards I backed to the safety of the shoulder of the road.

The next morning I was back at Courtesy Motors, learning about fuses, automobile division.

Apparently my trickster car had more than fuses on her mind. The casual acquaintance who gave me a ride home the night the headlights failed shortly thereafter became my accomplice in what is euphemistically called a "serious relationship."

Before the Subaru and I went our separate ways, I killed the battery one more time: having mastered the recharger, I was now introduced to jumper cables. Not long after, on a night so cold that metal rattled hollow, the fuse blew again, this time on Beach Road near the hospital, fortunately the best-lit stretch of road on Martha's Vineyard. The next day I bought a pack of fuses and fixed it myself.

Late in the third off-season of my apprenticeship, The Kid realized that I was ready to fly. Linda's eldest daughter and her husband would be spending the next winter on the island; they would need the car. I now knew that you didn't have to be an auto mechanic to own a motor vehicle, but knowing a good one was a definite plus. By the end of the summer I was able to lay money down on a new, blue Toyota pickup with four-wheel drive: my first very own vehicle, the first for which I alone was responsible. I named her Tesah, after the state-of-the-art starship in R. M. Meluch's first novel, Sovereign.

Why a pickup? I'd moved eight times in the previous three years, and in my circle moving twice a year was a fact of many people's lives. Pickups came in handy. Besides, pickups were cool -- and pickups were very Martha's Vineyard. I was still playing the island by ear: If I can find work and housing, I told myself, I'll stick around. When I bought Tesah in August 1988, I had two reliable part-time jobs: proofreader at the Martha's Vineyard Times and chambermaid at the Lambert's Cove Inn. I had a girlfriend, I belonged to a women's group whose regular meetings offered camaraderie and discussion, and I'd just started putting my theater experience to good use as the Times's regular theater reviewer. I didn't move again until the spring of 1992. I was beginning to put down roots.

Why I Moved to Martha's Vineyard

April 22, 2010 - View Single Entry

Another piece from (of?) To Be Rather Than to Seem. I've been describing my memoir's process and structure as quilt-like: like a quilt or an afghan, the book comprises many squares that eventually I'll stitch together. This gets the idea across well enough. Some of the squares are reasonably self-contained, like a paddock or a fenced-in yard. Others open into paths than lead out and beyond. This is one of the latter. The tale of why I moved to Martha's Vineyard in 1985 starts in 1965 and it's not over yet.

In the summer of 1984, my writer friend Tina crocheted me an amulet bag in royal blue, then my favorite color. A few weeks later I headed for Martha's Vineyard, looking forward to my semiannual break from my bookstore job and the D.C. women's community. Around my neck was the amulet bag, still empty. Walking on South Beach one afternoon, I was caught by an oblong piece of clamshell, characteristically purple and cream and almost two-thirds the length of my pinky. I slipped it into my amulet bag. I continued to wear it when I returned to D.C. Within weeks I'd decided to move to Martha's Vineyard. The decision was so crazy I didn't tell anybody about it for months.

I make the small decisions of my life consciously: Shall I go to the concert? Can I put grocery shopping off for another day? If I don't finish entering my checkbook data into Quicken, I'll never get my taxes done on time. But the big decisions make themselves. My subconscious mind absorbs information, assimilates it in some mysterious way, and decides what I should do. It's like making bread: throw in the ingredients, stir them up, push them around, then leave them alone to combine and ferment and rise. My job is to figure out how to manage what my mind has settled on.

Moving to Martha's Vineyard was like that. When I tell people I'm a cautious, even fearful person, they usually don't believe it. Looking at the trajectory of my life, I don't believe it either. No really cautious person would have done any of it. You know how some people teach their dogs or their kids how to swim by tossing them into deep water? I toss myself.

No, I don't believe that bit of clamshell hijacked my brain and made me move. But if I'd left it on the beach, would early July of 1985 have found me driving north from D.C. with all my belongings packed into a 14-foot U-Haul truck? I doubt it. Being a more-or-less rational person, I'll venture a somewhat rational explanation: Picking up the cream-and-purple shell, tucking it into the blue amulet bag, wearing it close to my heart -- these unobtrusively, subconsciously expanded my realm of possibility.

If you'd asked me in early 1984 if I was thinking of leaving the city, I would have responded with an unequivocal no. I loved my bookstore job, I liked where I was living; my reviews, essays, feature stories, and poems were starting to be published in feminist, lesbian, and gay publications. To the best of my conscious knowledge that "no" was true, but as usual my writing from the time yields many hints that my D.C. roots were tenuous and that I was looking north, toward New England, Massachusetts, home. My essay "Azalea: A Short Meditation on Letting Go" was published in the autumn 1984 issue of the quarterly Common Lives / Lesbian Lives. In it I wrote about my reluctance to put down roots in D.C. even though I'd lived there for ten years, and about my feeling that the Boston area, where I'd grown up, had become unfamiliar. What comes through most clearly a quarter century later is my longing for home.

"Azalea" referred to a turbulent, mostly unrequited non-affair that had gone on for several years and had finally come to an end. This was the subject of a series of poems I wrote between 1982 and 1984, self-published in 1989 as Leaving the Island. Yeah, that island. The first stanza of the first poem, "Merry Meet Again (Leaving the Island)," ended with the lines "loving you, island, fiercely / leaving." The novel I was then trying to write featured Jamie, a thirtyish woman who chucks her publishing job and moves to Martha's Vineyard to manage a small horse farm. My subconscious can be as subtle as a semi barreling down the interstate and I still won't get it.

Meanwhile, being chronically parsimonious, I had saved almost enough money to live frugally for a year and buy myself a PC. Not only did I have the longing, I had the means to indulge it -- on trial, of course. For a year, I told myself. I was taking a year off to write and regroup. By the end of July 1985 I was on the Vineyard, minus most of my books and belongings, which were stowed in my parents' basement.

When I met Martha's Vineyard, I was fourteen. It was not love at first sight. My parents had decided that we were spending the summer there, and I was there under protest. I had bred my grade mare, Kelly, to a young Arab stallion. We thought she hadn't "taken," so my father had arranged to bring her with us and board her at a nearby farm. She turned out to be in foal after all, and due in early July; trailering a mare that close to her due date was out of the question. I wanted to be there when she foaled, even though she was at Mainstone Farm, owned by Grandma's friend E. L. Hamlen, and would be well taken care of whether I was there or not.

We'd never gone away as a family before. Tony Lewis, who in the late 1940s was a colleague of my father's on the Harvard Crimson, had been assigned to the London bureau of the New York Times. He and his family were moving to England; their Martha's Vineyard summer house was available for rent, and was my father interested? The house was on Deep Bottom Cove of Tisbury Great Pond, with water, water in almost every direction and the ocean not far away by canoe, dinghy, or sailboat. Dad loved the water and small-boat sailing: you bet he was.

My parents said I had to come with the rest of the family, but after two weeks I could go home and live at Grandma's for the rest of the summer. My relationship with Martha's Vineyard might have taken a very different course had Kelly come too. In those days the Vineyard had a lively horse community, where horsegirls hung around barns all day, helped with the chores, and rode whenever and whever they could, the way I and my 4-H friends did at home. I probably would have made friends and maybe maintained relationships with them over the years; I might have moved to the Vineyard earlier, or known more people when I did move, or got the Vineyard out of my system and never have moved at all.

I got back to Weston eight hours after Kelly's colt was born. The birth was uneventful, the foal was healthy, and I named him Kelarabi, Rabi for short.

Through high school the pattern continued: I'd come to the Vineyard with my family, stay a short while, then return to the horses. My summer job was as a farmhand for the family that owned the 4-H barn where Kelly and Rabi lived. They hayed not only their own fields but several belonging to other people. My younger brother and sister eventually found a gang of Vineyard summer kids around their ages to pal around with; my sister worked a succession of island summer jobs. I didn't make such connections -- mainly because I wasn't looking. My friends and my job were somewhere else.

In 1969 I graduated from high school. That was the year my brother Roger totaled the family station wagon on the Edgartown–West Tisbury Road; the story was that it would have been front-page news in the Vineyard Gazette if only Teddy Kennedy hadn't gone off that bridge on Chappaquiddick. I was getting in my last summer of horse showing before leaving for college; while the rest of the family went to my father's 25th Harvard class reunion, I went to a 4-H horse show in Lexington. So I wasn't around when my brother crashed the car, and "Chappaquiddick" didn't take on real significance for me until I met a college classmate who interned on Capitol Hill and had met Mary Jo Kopechne.

Once I went off to college and became a city girl, Martha's Vineyard offered a respite from the intensity and hard surfaces of urban life. No longer was I itching to leave as soon as I got there. Finally I learned to sail a Sunfish. While mastering the jibe, I capsized so often that I left my glasses onshore so they wouldn't sink to the bottom when they went overboard. I became pretty adept at righting the boat once I'd gone over, but once it turned turtle and the top of the mast got so stuck in the Deep Bottom mud that only a neighbor with his small outboard could pull it out.

I still didn't develop my own circle of friends; my family's connections offered all the social life I needed or wanted, which wasn't much. This was part of the island's magic. Back in Weston, my siblings and I spent as little time at home as we could. As soon as we were old enough to be somewhat independent, each of us improvised a life that enabled us to avoid our mother's alcoholism and our parents' failed marriage: mine revolved around school and the barn. On Deep Bottom Cove -- where in the early 1970s my father had bought a piece of land not far from the Lewises' house and built an old-style Vineyard camp, sans electricity -- we hung out together and shared chores and actually acted like a family. Spending time with family on Deep Bottom was usually pleasant; going back to Weston, especially for holidays and other fraught occasions, never was.

Deep Bottom wasn't free of family drama, however. Throughout the 1970s, my father carried on an affair with Linda Lewis, our near neighbor on the pond, who with her husband had moved back to the U.S., to Cambridge. Tony, I figured, was married to his work, which made my mother the odd one out. When she got drunk, which was often, we heard what she thought about Dad, Linda, and us for having anything to do with the Lewises, but we'd all long since developed Teflon shields against my mother's tirades. Sturgises and Lewises, in various configurations, swam, sailed, went to the movies, and generally hung out together.

One of my clearest memories from those years is watching Richard Nixon resign. August Tony Lewis had rented a small battery-powered TV -- all the lights and utilities on our side of Deep Bottom Cove were powered by propane, and you couldn't plug a TV into a gas line -- and we gathered round the coffee table in the Lewises' sunny living room to watch. No one wanted to miss anything, but of course the lead-up coverage went on and on. As the TV's battery wore down, darkness closed in on the already small picture from all four sides. In between the cheers and jeers, we cajoled the battery to carry on till the speech was over. It obliged; we heard and saw the whole thing. It was thrilling, not to mention hilarious, to be watching this historic event in the company of someone who had made Nixon's famous "enemies list."

Dad's affair with Linda had the effect of expanding my family, both blood-related and not. By strange coincidence, during their years in London the Lewises had become friends with Tim and Jean Sturgis and their five children. We met the English Sturgises when they visited the Lewises on Deep Bottom; they were our third cousins once removed, and we had known nothing about them. Not long after Nixon left the White House, I left the U.S. for a year's graduate study at Sussex University. Linda gave me introductions to several of her friends; the English Sturgises issued a standing invitation to come visit; and Liza, the eldest of the three Lewis kids, was at London University.

When I moved to Martha's Vineyard, a decade had passed. Linda and Tony had divorced; Linda was remarried, to an Englishman, and living in Oxford. I didn't own a car. Linda offered me the use of her sturdy 1980 Subaru wagon for the off-season; she'd keep it registered and insured, I'd cover running expenses and basic maintenance, and all I had to do was let the Lewis kids use the car when they came to the island, which in the off-season wasn't often. I drove that car for three off-seasons, till I bought my very first own vehicle, a Toyota pickup, in 1988.

Baggage Dreams

April 15, 2010 - View Single Entry

Generally I remember only snatches of dreams, and they fade quickly if I don't write them down, which I don't. Sometimes, though, dreams recur enough to make an impression. Like these, from the early 1980s. When I talk about metaphorical baggage, the unwanted, unwieldy mental or emotional stuff that's so hard to get rid of, my images are quite literal.

Yes, this is from To Be Rather Than to Seem. The project's working subtitle is A Writer's Education, but so far it hasn't been much about my writing. That's starting to change. Working on a piece about how I moved to Martha's Vineyard, I pulled an old essay of mine off the shelf: "Azalea: A Short Meditation on Letting Go," published in the autumn 1984 issue of the quarterly journal Common Lives / Lesbian Lives (no. 13). Wow. I remembered "Azalea" as being about letting go of my New Englander-in-exile identity by acknowledging that I really did live in D.C. What comes through most strongly now is the writer's longing for home. As it turned out, she got rid of her exile identity by returning to Massachusetts.

I'd been meaning to write about my baggage dreams, and wonder of wonders, here they are in "Azalea," more vivid and detailed than I remember them now. Here they are, slightly revised.

I am on a bus with my father and my sister. Outside it is spring, light green, sunny, brisk, beautiful. It's a city bus we're on, and what we're rolling down looks like D.C.'s Constitution Avenue, but there are overhead racks and they're full of our luggage. I get up, tell them I'm getting off here, and, leaving my bags behind, get out. Another bus pulls up behind. I head for it.

I am outside a train station. My train is coming soon. I have an enormous trunk, but it is in a nearby building. My father and my sister were with me, but they have disappeared. I am frantic. I can't manage the trunk by myself. I have to get on the train. I wake up, sweating.

I am outside a train station with an enormous trunk. My train is approaching the station. I can hear it. My father and my sister are nowhere to be found. I am frantic. Who will help me with my huge trunk? I have to get on the train. I open the trunk, pick out what I need, and stow it in my backpack. I run for the train.

Green Thumb

April 11, 2010 - View Single Entry

Another one from To Be Rather Than to Seem, my memoir in progress. It's even got a hyperlink in it!

Grandma, said my mother, had a green thumb. This was true. Flowers, vegetables, shrubs, plants of all kinds flourished in and around Grandma's house.

My mother -- according to my mother -- did not have a green thumb.

For years I believed this. Grandma had a green thumb. My mother didn't.

Somewhere along the line, probably when I'd been away from 5 Doublet Hill Road long enough to see it with fresh eyes on my infrequent visits, I noticed that the house I grew up in was home to an array of healthy houseplants, including a couple of tall, glossy avocados that my mother had started from seed.

Still, Grandma had a green thumb and Mummie didn't. In my mother's view, either you had a green thumb or you didn't, and if you didn't, a houseful of growing green things weren't admissible as evidence to the contrary. If you did have a green thumb, your plants flourished without effort. If you didn't have a green thumb, your plants might flourish anyway but it was due to dumb luck.

Green thumbs were, as I understood it, inborn. Affinity for the water I wasn't sure about. My father loved swimming and sailing, and my brothers, sister, and I all took to the water from an early age, learning to swim in the small brook-fed pond on Grandma's property. Then we graduated to the "town pool" -- a large town-run pond adjacent to one of the elementary schools, maintained with tons of sand trucked in from Crane's Beach in Ipswich -- which included a shallow end for the little kids and a deep end complete with diving board that was open to older kids who had passed a "deep end test." When we were still too young to bike there on our own, Mummie would drive us, but though she might wear a bathing suit, she rarely got more than her feet wet. She sat on the sandy shore, reading or knitting or talking with the other mothers while keeping an eye on us.

In a family of water rats, my mother was the odd one out. This was because, as a girl of about ten, when her family was living in Alicante, Spain, she was caught in an undertow and pulled under. Ever since she had been afraid of putting her head underwater. This story was told over and over again. Until I was well into adulthood, it seemed an adequate explanation for her lifelong, incapacitating fear. We're at the mercy of our bad experiences, as well as the color of our thumbs.

Deep down my mother believed that either you had it or you didn't -- and she didn't. Her mother did have it, of course: her father hammered that message home over the years. My mother thought she was marrying someone kinder and more supportive than her father had been, but in one of those all-too-familiar ironies of intimate relationships, my father turned out to have a few things in common with her father, and one of them was a perfectionism that went for the jugular of anything less than perfect.

My elementary school report cards frequently noted that I didn't "ask for help when needed." This confused me. But I didn't need help: didn't all those A's prove that?

I stopped singing after eighth grade because another girl in the St. Peter's Episcopal Church junior choir told me I was always off-key. The choir director never said that, none of my music teachers in school had ever said that, but I took to heart that one snippy remark by a girl I didn't even like: What if she was right and the others were just being polite? Freshman year of high school the choral director urged me to try out for Glee Club. I didn't. Over the years I dropped piano and cornet, French, Spanish, and Arabic, all when I was on the verge of being able to actually use my new skills. I'd start projects, get mired in complications, then drop them. Meanwhile I was creating and spending a lot of time in a fantasy world where the young and powerless found mentors who didn't destroy them for their vulnerability.

Eventually I put it all together. I didn't ask for help when needed because it wasn't safe to need help. There was safety in perfection, but you had to get there on your own. I inherited my parents' genes, true, but I don't believe that perfectionism is transmitted in DNA. Year after year after year I assimilated through all my senses the unhappy dynamic that my parents played out. Like my father, I wouldn't tolerate anything less than perfection. Like my mother, I was sure I didn't have it in me. You can't get there from here, warned my subconscious, intensely self-protective self. You'll make a fool of yourself trying. The jugular I kept going for was my own.

I was luckier than my mother. Fate and the muses offered me -- not resolution and relief, but a path leading in that general direction. The grassroots feminism I fell into in the mid-1970s insisted on the importance of process. My antiwar movement experiences had already persuaded me that even the noblest of ends didn't justify the use of ignoble means because ignoble means had a way of generating ignoble ends, no matter what people claimed to be fighting for. The means/end dichotomy was false. Second-wave feminism put this into practice. We encouraged each other to develop new skills and do things we'd never done before. It was OK to fumble along and make mistakes, and there were often people around to show me the ropes, whether I asked for help or not.

A few years later the 12 steps developed by Alcoholics Anonymous gave me a practical framework for getting from here to there, when "here" was a swamp from which escape seemed impossible. The principles underlying the 12 steps were common to various spiritual traditions; most important to me, they kept the channels to my creativity open. When I strayed from the steps, the writing got sludgy and I'd buy boxes of cookies and eat them at one sitting. To the rational mind, it seems a no-brainer, doesn't it? The subconscious mind, though, never stopped whispering, Watch it! You can't get there from here, you're going to make a fool of yourself, there's really no point in trying.

In 1988 my siblings and I organized an intervention and persuaded our mother to enter a thirty-day residential treatment program for alcoholism. She stopped drinking, she completed the program, and as far as I know she never drank another alcoholic beverage; she died in February 1996. She didn't follow up with AA or any other recovery program; her involvement with her church was, I think, what enabled her to keep putting one foot in front of the other. How she managed to live almost eight years in that very unhappy marriage without the anaesthesia of alcohol I can't imagine. If only that strength of will had been directed toward something more than survival.

My father attended my mother's intervention but didn't play an active role. The residential treatment program included a day of seminars and discussion groups for family members; my siblings and I attended, but our father declined to have anything to do with what he called "criticism/self-criticism." He never saw anything wrong with perfectionism. For him it was an abstract concept, close kin to high expectations; I saw it as it played out at the family dinner table, and in my own head. A perfectionism that won't tolerate imperfection won't tolerate mistakes, and without mistakes there's no way to get from here to there. Perfectionism means Athena has to be born full-grown from the head of Zeus, and if you aren't Athena you get no credit for being wise.

Once in my newspaper days my boss told me I was a "natural writer." I wanted to take his head off, but I just said, probably a little brusquely, that I'd been working at it for a long time. My writing ability is no more or less natural than Grandma's green thumb; whatever she started with, plenty of trial-and-error experience went into my grandmother's gardens. My mother didn't believe her thumb had any special qualities, but her plants grew anyway. If she'd believed in her thumb, who knows how her life might have been different.

Triptych

April 09, 2010 - View Single Entry

Three things to braid, twine, blend together --

Thirty-four years ago today Phil Ochs committed suicide. He was 35. Phil looms large on the soundtrack of my life. I remember being smooshed into a friend's tiny Fiat with several antiwar colleagues, en route to a meeting somewhere near Capitol Hill, listening to Tape from California, which was new or nearly new at the time. It probably wasn't the first time I heard Ochs, or an Ochs song, but it was such a perfect way to hear Ochs that it's imprinted in memory as My First Time.

I wish Phil could know how well his songs have held up over time. OK, partly it's depressing that "I Ain't Marching Anymore" and "There But for Fortune" are still current, and that "The Marines Have Landed on the Shores of Santo Domingo" is news to some people, but Macbeth and Hamlet aren't dated either and they're a few centuries older. I listen to "The Marines Have Landed" and "Changes" and "The Crucifixion" and "Hands" (as sung by Pat Humphries -- I don't think Phil ever recorded it) and think how beautiful and moving they are, how I've been listening to them for years and years and still hear something new each time.

This morning my favorite radio station, WUMB-FM, played Billy Bragg singing "I Dreamed I Saw Phil Ochs Last Night," to the tune of the similarly named song about Joe Hill. You can find it on YouTube, among other places. It's about words, music, and work living on, and it was very good to hear.

In the Boston Globe this morning was another story about Phoebe Prince. She's the second part of my triptych. Like Phil she committed suicide. She was 15, and according to the story that's emerged so far she was ruthlessly bullied by some of her high school classmates and could see no way out. The administrators at South Hadley High, in Massachusetts, claimed at first that they knew nothing about it, but as more and more evidence comes to light -- thanks mainly to the district attorney's office that is prosecuting several of the students involved -- the ground the school officials are standing on has been looking shakier and shakier.

I ache for this girl. Her family had just moved to Massachusetts from Ireland; she started at South Hadley High last September. To have been caught in this miserable situation, to have sought help and not found enough, to have seen no way out -- the worst kind of nightmare, because there should have been a way out. "There but for fortune go you or I," sang Phil Ochs, and I doubt I'm the only female former teenager who's been thinking that about Phoebe Prince. During high school I often wanted to be dead; I thought plenty about suicide but didn't know how to do it or have the nerve to find out. I probably saved my own life by getting fat instead. A few years later, I was sitting on a floor at Georgetown University's Healy Building along with several sister students, and one of them said, "Every day I thank God that I wasn't born beautiful." Yeah. I and most of the young women I knew in college knew that we were survivors, that we'd managed to get through adolescence not pregnant and with our brains intact..

The last part of the triptych is Nancy Luedeman. Nancy died last Sunday night, age 89, which means she must have been about 65 when I first met her 24 years ago. She was Mary Payne's partner and deeply involved in island theater. She was a friend of Bill W.'s by the time I met her, and remained so for the rest of her life, so you know that she was sunk pretty deep in the swamp but managed to work her way out of it. She worked as a paralegal and was well-known and -respected around the courthouse; at age 70 or so she went off to law school. She didn't finish, but her chutzpah in giving it a try was inspiring. Mary died in 1996, the same year as my mother and Gerry Kelly, my Martha's Vineyard Times colleague.

I went to Nancy's memorial service at Grace Episcopal Church on Wednesday. The papers hadn't yet come out with news of her death, but word got around and the place was packed. The service was high-churchy -- it even included communion -- and Nancy was more in evidence in the pews than around the altar, but that was OK. I particularly liked it that some of those present had to be about 60 years younger than Nancy was, so her name will be remembered for a good long time.