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All The Best

2/24/2021

We had moved from the city to Westchester two years earlier, and my editing job at the Big Apple Parents’ Paper had gone remote. I was occasionally contributing freelance articles – there was one about Lyme disease, I recall – and also writing for a local publication called The Pet Gazette (a round-up of doggie daycares, another of animal trainers). Sofie was 11, Ariel 8. I had just started seeing a therapist named Allison.

During one session I was bemoaning the banal subjects I wrote about and the small-time caliber of the publications. Would I ever be published in something more reputable, I asked? To which Allison replied: “Have you ever taken a writing class?”

Upon arriving home, I picked up the mail and found a catalogue from the Northern Westchester Center for the Arts. I flipped to the literary section and found a memoir class starting the next week. Allison’s words in my mind, I signed up. The teacher? One Joan Potter.

Before we moved, I had spent a two-year stint as the Parents’ Paper’s editor-in-chief, during which time I wrote a monthly column. I wrote about raising Sofie and Ariel; I told stories that were funny, or scary, or ridiculous – but always they were heartfelt. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was writing memoir.

The first piece I wrote in Joan’s class was about spending weekends at my grandparents’ apartment as a child. I described opening the drawer in the night table between my grandparents’ twin beds and finding tangles of multicolored ribbons. I wrote it in third person. “Why are you calling yourself ‘she?’” Joan asked.

I rewrote it using “I,” and then I wrote a piece about weather, and another about eating potato chips in the back seat of my parents’ car, my father fuming as we sat in traffic on the way to Cape Cod. The stories flowed from me, and they felt good. Although looking back at them now, I see they needed work. But I loved the class, and I loved sharing my stories with others.

I thrive on encouragement, and Joan was encouraging. “You should take my class at the Hudson Valley Writers Center,” she said one day. “The writers there are great.”

So I did, and I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. Now, more than two decades later – from classes, to our writing group, to “Still Here Thinking Of You,” all interspersed with regular sushi lunches – here we are. Thank you, Joan, and Happy Birthday!

~Susan Hodara

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Two Perspectives on Goodbye

7/15/2019

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To Kiss or Not To Kiss

“Bye. See you next week.”

“Yup, bye bye.”

My friend Joan and I are parting after an hour-and-a-half long lunch in a local sushi restaurant. We’ve had many such lunches over the years, our conversations running from what to watch on Netflix, to the angst of family crises.

Joan and I know a lot about each other’s lives – and not just from our lunches. We met nearly two decades ago when I signed up for a weekly memoir workshop she was teaching at a nearby arts center. It was the first writing class I’d taken since high school creative writing.

Joan was petite, her straight white hair cut short, with the front falling gracefully across her forehead. She often wore Oxford shirts and cardigans with jeans and delicate earrings. In class, each student read their writing aloud and the rest of us offered feedback. Joan’s suggestions always impressed me, and I wondered how she knew so intuitively just what each student’s piece needed.

The stories of my life poured easily from me, and I re-enrolled for the workshop again and again. I wrote about my childhood, my old boyfriends, my daughters, my husband, Paul – my persistent goal to find the precise phrases that captured the truths of my experiences. I never thought about what I was revealing of myself. I never felt judged.

I don’t remember when Joan and I began chatting after class, or when I learned that she lived in the same town as I, or when we first met for lunch. I do remember Paul and I bumping into Joan at the opening of a Mexican restaurant and realizing, when she met him, that she knew far more about him than he knew about her.

After a few years I stopped taking Joan’s class. Then she stopped teaching it, and I had the privilege of becoming her replacement. Meanwhile, she and I formed a weekly writing group with Lori and Vicki, who’d been in the workshop, and before long, the four of us decided to collaborate on a book about our mothers.

Through it all, Joan and I continued to get together and keep each other apprised of our lives – from weddings and separations, to illnesses and injuries, to lots of petty gossip. Many things changed over the long course of our friendship, including the restaurants we favored. But our lunches remained constant, and as I stared across whatever table we shared, so did Joan’s face, with its attentive eyes, wry smile and blush of lipstick, seemingly untouched by time.

I have friends whose cheeks I peck when we say hello or goodbye, but not Joan’s. We don’t kiss. We don’t hug. “Hi,” we say, and “Bye, see you soon.” Then we go our separate ways.

But today is different. In the instant of our parting, my feet already swiveling to go, is a tiny melee of overlapping instincts. A kiss goodbye? No, we don’t kiss. But why not?

“Wait,” I say, and swivel back toward her as she turns around. I think I say, “Let me give you a kiss goodbye.” And then I lean forward and touch my lips to her soft cheek.

There is a tinge of awkwardness, of embarrassment, but they dissolve as we both smile and head into the rest of our days.

~ Susan Hodara

* * *

Hugs or Kisses

People are hugging more and more lately. Really long, tight hugs, with sometimes a cheek kiss or two. I see this in movies and on television. But not in my real life.

There are a few demonstrative women friends who give me a quick hug when they run into me on the street or in the grocery store, but that doesn’t happen often. I used to sometimes encounter a man who engulfed me in creepily lengthy hugs while proclaiming, “You’re the best.” Another man I’ve known for years likes to greet me with a wet kiss; when I see him coming I’m careful to quickly turn my head so his smooch lands on my cheek.

Among my four grown children, two are huggers and two are not. The two seldom-huggers, a son and a daughter, seem to like me well enough and will sometimes grant me a quick kiss. The other daughter is a warm hugger and kisser. The second son is also physically affectionate, but he’s six-foot-six and I’m five-two, and our hugs, although I love them, can be awkward.

Three of my closest women friends are fellow writers. We’ve known one another for twenty years and meet every two weeks to read aloud and comment on our writings, much of which are memoir. Over the years we’ve shared many experiences – illnesses, both physical and mental; deaths – human and animal.

We truly care about one another, we listen carefully and offer words of support, but we’ve never enfolded the others in those weepy, consoling hugs I see on my television screen. When we meet, we smile and say, “Hi.” When departing, we say, “Bye, see you later, enjoy the weekend.” No touching.

Just recently, I met one of our group, Susan, for sushi at a local restaurant. We always have plenty to talk about – our kids’ problems, our health, and, of course, books and writing. We finished lunch, paid our check, and stood to leave. Susan was going out the front door and I had parked in back.

There was a moment before saying goodbye when we didn’t seem to know what to do with our hands. We leaned slightly forward in a possible lead-in to a hug or cheek kiss. Then we pulled away, laughed, and headed in our separate directions.

Why did this happen? What does it portend? What should I do next time we meet? I’m hoping we can forget about it and return to the good old days of a smile and a wave and “So long, see you next week.”

~ Joan Potter

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Annoyed

9/19/2016

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When you’re hovering between a nervous breakdown and suicide, being forced to chat with a bubbly woman can push you over the edge. I’m in my eye doctor’s waiting room for my yearly checkup. I didn’t sleep well last night and today I’m so depressed that I’d rather be here than in my apartment full of chores to be done and a grouchy husband to tend to.

I sit down and open my book. “Mrs. Potter, it’s so good to see you again,” chirps the receptionist, who seems unduly excited by my presence. “It’s been a while.” She takes a breath. “What are you reading?”

My head is pounding. “It’s just a book,” I say.

Her voice lowers a pitch. “Oh, I see.”

I had a choice. I could have said, “I’m reading Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen.”

Then she would have squealed, “Oh, a comma queen. That sounds so interesting. What’s
it about?”

A response was something I couldn’t handle. I lowered my eyes to my book, feeling a twinge of guilt that quickly dissipated.

~ Joan Potter

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When Pinto Got Paroled

1/15/2016

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The last of the barred doors clanged shut behind me and soon I was standing in front of Sing Sing’s huge stone administration building, the prison’s main entrance. I was carrying a cardboard carton that held Pinto – a half-grown black-and-white cat – and his cellmate, Missy, an all-black little male named by prisoners confused about his gender.

As I turned to head for my car, I heard the voices of prisoners behind the bars on an upper level. “Goodbye, Pinto,” they called.

I was a freelancer for the New York Times, and also a volunteer in a Sing Sing writing workshop. The Times had assigned me an article about how inmates at two Westchester County prisons not far from my home – women at Bedford Hills and men at Sing Sing – were able to humanize their lives within the confines of a maximum security prison.

It was 1977, six years after the Attica rebellion, when prisons started opening their doors to reporters and volunteers. Restrictions had been loosened, and the media became more interested in what was happening inside the walls. The Bedford Hills women told me about how they altered their drab green uniforms to make them more stylish, how they rubbed Vaseline on red and blue magazine photographs and spread the colors on their lips and eyelids.

Some men at Sing Sing said they made paintings, kept fish tanks in their cells, and had pet cats. The cats had found their way into the prison yard through holes in the old stone walls, and eventually into the cell blocks, where prisoners lured them to their cells by offering tidbits of food. One prisoner mentioned he begged gefilte fish from the Jewish chaplain.

After I finished the article, the paper sent a photographer to Sing Sing, and when my story appeared it was accompanied by a picture of a young prisoner standing in front of the bars of his cell holding a small black-and-white cat. Coincidentally, this prisoner – the owner of two cats – was also in the writing workshop.

A few days later I received a letter from him saying he’d heard on the grapevine that a cat purge was in the works. “They say they will give the cats to the SPCA,” he wrote, “but we know they’ll put them in burlap bags and toss them into the Hudson.”

I got on the phone to the warden. “Are you getting rid of the cats because of my article?” I asked. He said no, the article had nothing to do with it. Cats had begun to overrun the cellblocks, creating a nuisance and unsanitary conditions. They had to go.

After more back-and-forth with the warden over the next few days, he finally said that I could take the prisoner’s two cats out of the prison after the next writing workshop.

Toward the end of the session, as the inmates and I sat in a circle of folding chairs discussing that week’s readings, the cat-owning prisoner left the room and came back carrying a medium-sized cardboard carton with the top closed. When the workshop ended he placed the box in my arms. The inmates filed down the corridor, back to their cells. I walked the other way, escorted by a guard. When we reached the locked bars at the end of the hallway the guard shouted, “On the gate, two cats, out on parole,” and the lock clicked open. One more gate and I was in the lobby and out the door.

I settled the box in my car’s passenger seat and drove the twenty minutes to my house, where I tipped the cats out of the carton and led them to their food, water, and litter box. Pinto was wearing a brown leather collar embossed with his name, which must have been created by his owner in the prison crafts shop. I went to bed, and in the morning the cats were nowhere to be seen. After my teenage sons had left for school and my husband went to work, I searched the house, and finally found the two crouched together behind the television set in the living room.

They gradually relaxed and we began letting them outdoors during the day. But a few months later, when my sons were returning from school, they discovered Missy’s body on the street in front of our house. He’d been hit by a car. From then on, when Pinto went outside he seemed more cautious; he spent his time relaxing under a rhododendron bush in front of the house, and we kept a close eye on him.

He grew into a solid, beautiful cat, loving, intelligent, and sweet-natured. But whenever a visiting man with a heavy tread walked into the house, Pinto cowered in fear, no doubt recalling the prison guards who had stomped around the cellblocks.

When Pinto was fifteen, my husband, Roy, and I retired from our jobs, sold our suburban home, and moved to a log cabin in the Adirondacks. We worried about letting our cat outdoors, fearing he would wander into the woods and disappear – captured by a coyote or becoming hopelessly lost as he tried to make his way back.

But he figured things out and seemed content with his rural existence. In summer, he sat under the pine trees and among the wildflowers, watching chipmunks and red squirrels speed past. On cold winter days he sprawled on the tile hearth in front of the woodstove. He was making a better adjustment than I was.

I often felt lonely and isolated, especially when summer ended and our downstate family and friends stopped visiting. I felt out of place in our small town, where the residents had lived for generations. Sometimes I cried with frustration, railing at my husband about our ill-conceived move.

Pinto was my comfort. When I sat at the kitchen table with my morning coffee, he hopped onto my lap and stayed there until it was time for me to start my day. In the evening, as I lay on the couch reading or watching TV, he curled up on my stomach. In bed, he stretched his warm body next to mine and purred me to sleep.

Two years after our move, Pinto developed a malignant tumor on his side. His vets, Diane and David, removed it and he recovered, but before long another tumor appeared, this time inoperable. He gradually became thinner and weaker. When we let him outdoors, he seemed bewildered. One day he wandered in the wrong direction, and I discovered him crouched on a fallen tree.

From then on when I let him out I followed him as he moved slowly across the grass, stopping now and then to rest in a sunny spot. Then I’d pick him up and carry him back into the house. In the evening I’d carry him to the couch, sit down, and gently lower him onto a soft blanket I’d folded on my lap. Soon even that made him uncomfortable; he chose to spend his days lying on a towel behind the open bathroom door.

Roy and I could see that he was suffering, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to choose to end his life. Some mornings as we watched him trudge into the kitchen for a few bites of breakfast, one of us would say, “He seems to look better today,” and the other would agree. But of course we were fooling ourselves.

The vets would only lay out our options, leaving us with the final decision. But one day David said,” Pinto has been kind and loving to you for eighteen years. Now you can do something kind for him.”

The next day, David and Diane helped Pinto die. Afterward, I wrapped his body in a soft cloth, placed it in a box, and buried it at the top of a small rise that overlooked the cabin. I collected smooth, grey stones from the woods and built a cairn to mark the grave. When our young granddaughters came to visit, they painted bright flowers on the stones, and on the biggest one they printed in brilliant red letters: PINTO.

A few years later we sold our log cabin and moved back to the suburbs. We left behind the chipmunks that ate sunflower seeds from our hands and the hummingbirds that darted past our faces on the way to their feeders. And we left Pinto’s decorated grave.
On trips to the Adirondacks to visit friends, I could never bring myself to return to our cabin to see if the new owners had preserved the grave or had dismantled the colorful stones and tossed them into the woods.

~Joan Potter
Memoir reprinted from Celebrating Animal Rescue,
  Splattered Ink Press, available on Amazon

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In the Eye of the Beholder

10/8/2013

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“I have a problem with any memoir about a person who is no longer alive to defend themselves or tell their side of the story,” wrote a family member who was displeased with my section of our book.

“First of all,” I wrote in a reply to the e-mail, “if people could only write memoirs about those who are still alive, there wouldn’t be many memoirs.”

But the comment led me to review each of my stories to assure myself that they were fair. I had written about my impressions of my mother when I was a child, my memories of times she had supported and helped me, her independent spirit, and events of her life as she had related them. In only one story was I critical of her actions.

Knowing my mother – who was proud of my writing career – I think she would pretty much agree with what I wrote about her. Perhaps her memories would be a little different, but not so much that she would need to defend herself. Even in the story that criticized her, I believe she might say, “Maybe you’re right, Joan. Maybe I should have acted differently.”

In my e-mail to the family member, I pointed out that all but one of my stories were positive, thus implying that they did not require a defense. The family member has not yet responded.

~Joan Potter

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The True Line

5/22/2013

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As I recall the scene, my two sisters and I are standing side by side on a ridge overlooking red cliffs and desert sands in an Arizona recreation area close to the border of Nevada, where my sister Abby lives with her husband. We are there to spread our mother’s ashes, which Abby had been holding on to until the three of us decided what to do with them.

In my memory, we open the bag of ashes and take turns flinging them over the ridge, but the breeze blows some back to us, where they settle on our faces and clothing. I can hear my sister Linda saying something kind of mystical about this being a signal from our mother, and that’s what I related in the story I wrote in our book.

But after Abby read the story, she told me Linda hadn’t said that at all, that what she did say was a piece of ash had gotten under her contact lens. I like that remark. It’s more specific than my vague spiritual recollection, and it reflects Linda’s self-absorption. If I’d remembered the line—and if Linda actually said it—I’d have used it in my story.

My sister Abby has a different memory of the same event. She believes what I remember didn’t happen. I can’t change what seems true to me; I can’t adopt someone else’s memory because it would make a better story. So the contact lens line will be lost to history, only to appear in the deleted e-mail I got from Abby when she questioned my version of the incident.
~Joan Potter

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Thursday Mornings: "Missing Our Mothers"

4/24/2013

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There was a period when we were working on our book that we recorded conversations about different aspects of our experience together. We called them “Thursday Mornings at Ten.” Here’s one titled “Missing Our Mothers.”

Lori: I’ve found that when something’s going wrong, when something feels very dramatic in my life, or if I’m sad, I want to call my mother.

Joan: I know what you mean. When Roy was in the hospital after his cancer surgery, my mother was on my mind all the time. It was like she was hovering there, which was really weird. I wished I had been able to talk to her about it, and gotten her support.

Susan: Even though my mother is still alive, I already know what I will miss. It’s not so much her advice, but there’s something about her responses, the way she’ll say, “Oh yes, things can be hard,” or, “Time will make it better” — they’re clichés, but I know I can count on her to say something nice, completely judgment-free. That unquestioning acceptance — it’s so simple and kind.

Joan: I’m sorry my mother isn’t here to see some of the good things. She knew her first great-grandchild, Julia, when she was a toddler. Julia was such a terror, and my mother would say, “Oh my goodness, what is going to become of that child?” I would love for her to see Julia now, singing and playing her guitar.

Vicki: Yes, there are all those things they’ll never know. I remember moving into my house in 2001. I loved the house, but I had such a hard time when I moved in. Then my sister said to me, “You know, this is the first place you’ve lived in since Mommy died.” And she was right. I was making my home in a place that my mother would never be a part of.

Lori: I have no illusions that my mother would have changed. She would have continued to want attention, be difficult and demanding. But I think now I could have served her better, and that would have made her happier. That’s what I was always looking for: to make her happy, to see that smile.

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Having My Way

3/9/2013

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I recently met a friend for lunch at an Indian restaurant in town. It’s a small space with about ten tables placed close together. We chose a table in the center of the room, but I was tempted by a nearby spot near a sunny window. So we moved. But once there, we realized the sun was so glaring through the window that we had to squint to read the menu. Apologizing to the server, we returned to our original seats.

I thought of my mother, who was never pleased with her first choice of a restaurant table. In a piece called “Having Her Way” in Still Here Thinking of You, I recall the ways in which she would – calmly but firmly – get what she wanted in certain situations, even once encouraging a group to give up their table so our family could sit there.

Her habits of persuasion appear in me from time to time. The other day, my daughter Kathy and I were reminiscing about a Richie Havens concert we’d attended a couple of years before. While he was singing a particularly gentle song, accompanied only by his guitar, a man and woman sitting directly in front of us decided to have a chat. I poked the woman on the back and told her to be quiet.

“You sounded so severe,” Kathy said. “It was kind of scary.”

“Well, they shut up didn’t they?” I said. “And don’t forget, I’m my mother’s daughter.”

~Joan Potter

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All The Best

Two Perspectives on Goodbye

Annoyed

When Pinto Got Paroled

In the Eye of the Beholder

The True Line

Thursday Mornings: "Missing Our Mothers"

Having My Way

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