I grew up in Linden, New Jersey in the 1950s. My dad Julius worked as a machinist at Purolator Oil Filters and my mom Rose sold World Book encyclopedias door to door. My younger brother Stuart was the mischievous kid and I was the quiet, studious one. I was blessed with many aunts, uncles and cousins, and two pairs of loving grandparents (in Elizabeth, NJ and Glen Cove, LI, NY).
During my college years, President Kennedy was shot and killed and Betty Friedan spoke to a packed auditorium. After graduating with a liberal arts degree from Douglass in 1966 (women’s division of Rutgers University), I relocated to Boston a year later at age 23.
There, I figured out how to grow up in the vortex of political and social upheaval—the women’s liberation and civil rights movements, anti-Vietnam War protest, the sexual revolution, the assassinations of Senator Robert Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., violence at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, and the shootings at Kent State, ending the tumultuous decade in 1970.
I received my Juris Doctor Degree from Boston College Law School in 1971 and married Paul Levine under a weeping willow tree in our backyard in 1972. We moved to the North Shore to begin the marriage and family life that would be ours until his death in 2013, at age 78.
I practiced family law and divorce mediation. Paul owned and operated a hairdressing salon, Bravissimo. We raised his two boys and our son and daughter at our family homestead in Essex, around the corner from Camp Menorah, a day camp where our children spent idyllic summers on Lake Chebacco.
In 1989, along with a group of other parents, Paul and I founded the Children’s Montessori School in Ipswich MA (later Stoneridge Montessori, K-8), an experiment and an experience that changed our lives and created lifelong friendships for the parents and children alike.
We did this without internet, mobile phones, or any funding—our passions at that moment in time pushed us to find a building, renovate and paint it with our own hands, hire a Montessori faculty and Head of School, form a Board of Trustees, promote the new school, obtain local and state approval, and more.
Then, at age 69, life became mine alone to live, reluctantly at first. I did everything in my power to avoid celebrating my 70th birthday—my first as a widow.
I began to write, starting with Paul’s eulogy: “You only need to be loved completely once in your life.” I moved on to daily notes, then memory pieces, essays, and poetry dealing with caregiving, grief, loss, and eventually, healing.
Through writing, I honored the past, made sense of the present, and began to shape my future.
I express my immense gratitude to a special person who came into my life, David Bookbinder, writer, photographer, and psychotherapist. He supported my writing endeavors, and most importantly, recognized that my writing would benefit from, and was ready for, publication to readers. He generously put in long hours and technical expertise to create and launch this blog for me.
At this point in my life, I could not write About Me without including him.