Life Story Date

Dear Readers, I am working on completing my memoir this year. This is a chapter about me at age twenty-two:

LIFE STORY DATE

I graduated college in 1966 with both a cum laude liberal arts degree and a devastating romantic breakup to my credit. I didn’t want to return home to my parents in Linden, so I stayed in my college town and rented a room in a Victorian house with other young singles in transition. My Siamese kitty, Miss Deeds, accompanied me.

I had arrived after class to the apartment my boyfriend and I shared to find it stripped without warning of furniture and belongings. Electrical wires dangled from where our prized red and white leaded fixture hung from the ceiling over our two person breakfast table, also gone. The violation I felt when entering the room shook me to the core. Yet I managed to complete the school year, take exams, and receive my degree. Feeling numb saved me.

After graduation, I met this guy Nick* who graduated from Rutgers the year before. He lived in a dilapidated but operational houseboat that he docked on the Raritan River. He was open and personable, politically radical and personally adventurous. I can’t recall how we’d met, and I wasn’t looking for a romantic liaison, but young people managed to find each other without the benefit of computer dating. I could’ve been walking along the river and he waved “hi” while cleaning his boat. That actually sounds about right.

In April 1967, we took the train to New York City for the Peace March to protest the Vietnam War. When we were just hanging around New Brunswick, he’d take me to his favorite watering hole, the Hunters Inn, patronized almost exclusively by African-Americans. I remember the huge oval bar in the center, the well-dressed couples at tables along the wall in semi-darkness, the anisette on ice for me and the shot of whiskey for Nick.

He told me of his plans to travel to China where I imagined he’d find another boat and sail the South China Sea, stopping in at ports of call for a shot with the locals. He did sell his boat and leave the vicinity, but whether it was to China, I’ll never know.

I had moved with my kitty from the bare apartment into the furnished Victorian rooming house. My post-academic routine was a daily commute to a desk job with a federal agency in Newark, surrounded by career bureaucrats and performing repetitive and unrewarding work alongside them. I was living through an intensely depressing letdown from the academic momentum and promise I felt I owned outright while in school.

A guy who lived in the house eventually asked me out. On our first date, we walked around the city until dawn, talking non-stop about our lives, like in the Ethan Hawke/Julie Delpy movie, Before Sunrise. Jesse and Celine first meet on a train to Vienna and then walk and talk the night away.

Mark* and I also let the night work its dark magic as we revealed our secrets to each other. I recounted my eight year high school almost through college relationship culminating in “playing house” for what turned out to be a disastrous final year. I had given up on graduate school even though nominated for a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship by my history professor. My life and my resolve had fallen apart during the painful breakup. I felt like a zombie walking to the podium to claim my diploma. Photos show me smiling. I didn’t want to ruin the day for my parents.

During the long, quiet hours after midnight, Mark told me how he had married after college and that he and his wife served in the Peace Corps in a Central American country. During their stint, they lost a child in infancy, then divorced when they returned to the States. He was now moving on as best he could and studying for a graduate degree in psychology.

As Mark shared his tragic circumstances of the collapse of his marriage and family, a loud danger signal screeched inside me. His devastating experience of loss frightened me. All of this was too adult for me. I saw our combined life experiences amounting to a hellish brew that I feared would swallow me up and control the future of our relationship.

That night of revelation was not the start of anything between us, although Mark wanted it to be. It was the beginning and end all wrapped into one. I felt the sadness of his unspeakable loss and he was sympathetic to my hurtful life experiences. But I was just twenty-two (he was two or three years older). I didn’t want to identify my life and join my fate with another bereft and broken soul.

I couldn’t even reconstruct or reimagine my own dreams. But I did know that I didn’t fit into the empty place he needed to refill in his own life.

Mark was a caring and sensitive guy with a strong social conscience. But I felt overwhelmed by the thought of the direction we would take as a couple. Healing would have to be a big part of it, each taking in the other’s pain on top of our own. I had very little, if any, leeway to be generous. My own emotions had taken a big hit after an obsessive relationship that shaped and consumed my entire teen-aged and young adult life.

I needed light to reveal my true self and air to heal my wounds.

Soon afterwards (in fall of 1967), I told Mark that I planned to transfer to Boston. I found a home for Miss Deeds, signed the necessary paperwork at the office, and gave notice to the landlord. I packed my suitcase and not much else, as I was living pretty minimally in my single room after the apartment contents had disappeared.

Looking back, I think I might have gained the necessary courage to move on by channeling some of Nick’s free and wild spirit.

I took the bus to Newark airport and succeeded in scoring a standby seat on the Eastern shuttle.  The excitement of the new state, the new city—the blank slate—felt wonderful and right to the newly twenty-three year old me. I breathed a sigh of relief as my plane touched down in new territory. I needed some time and space to grow up on my own terms.

And it was going to be here, in Boston.

*real name not used

**Cover photo by Sean Pierce on Unsplash.com