L on Wheels

This morning's Silver Sneakers class was a blast, for some reason. Oh, there was the usual bitching and moaning, cheating and snoozing, and the like. But today, our resident Dennis the Menace, Mr. Robert, showed up and proceeded to fake his way through the entire hour by heckling Greta, our thirty-something instructor. You can tell it's a class for people older than 55 because anyone who isn't Greta gets an honorific in front of his or her first name, a la Miss Pat, Mr. James, Ms. Lezlie.


Somehow, while we were doing eleventy-seven senior style jumping jacks, we started talking about wheels. Hey, don't ask me. You had to be there. It seems that Greta, the young smartass, had never owned a tricycle. From there the banter morphed to Big Wheels, metal roller skates, homemade scooters made with metal roller skate wheels... You get the idea. It was a riot.


On the way home I was thinking how unusually fast today's class went when I had the idea to write my personal history on wheels. No, not write it while I was ON wheels, but about the wheels in my life.
I decided to dispense with wheels that had to be pushed by someone other than myself, so I started with Betsy, my big-girl trike. Why Betsy? That's what Grandpa called all his cars, so it was good enough for mine.

Betsy circa 1948

I started with gigantic blocks strapped to the pedals so I could reach them, but soon I grew enough to ditch those sissy blocks and go careening up and down the neighbor's rare-for-our-street's driveway. Loved that beauty.



After I learned to ride a two-wheeler on the cast-off small version that once belonged to the doctor's daughter who lived next door, I begged for my own 26" bike. Imagine how wide my little eyes became when I saw the girl's model of this in front of our 1953 Christmas tree.


The 1953 Monark Super Deluxe was a top of the line objet d'art. It had a spring-loaded seat and a spring buffered front wheel fork, and mine had streamers flowing from each handlebar grip. Get a load of those whitewalls!

I was 12 when my stepfather drove up one day after work in what I thought was somebody else's car. Our car at the time had been so nondescript; I don't even remember what it was. But, man, do I remember this one:



Well, almost. Ours was actually silver. As luck would have it, this now classic masterpiece was the first car I ever drove, albeit illegally. I drove to church on Sundays and put it in the garage every evening.



There were others after the '57 Chevy Bel Air "floptop," but none were as cool as it was. So let's move to the very first car that carried my name on the registration.

Grandpa bought a new Buick every three to five years. Those were the days of "built-in obsolescence", when Detroit automakers were perceived to have built their cars to last only three years. This 1960 Buick LeSabre (exact model) stayed in his garage long enough for him to drive it to Ripon College to watch me graduate in June 1966. After the exercises, Grandpa handed me the keys. "You want me to drive?" I was shocked! Then he said, "Well, it's your car! Happy Graduation!"

It wasn't until 1968 that I actually got a car I had to make payments on. My then-husband and I ordered a brand new chocolate brown '68 Buick Skylark. It had saddle-colored pleather trim on the roof. He called it a Baby Riviera.


Husband #1 was a very, ahem, busy guy, so he spent a lot of time being gone in the Baby Riv. That's why the following year I took my buying power back to the Buick dealer to purchase what I thought was my exotic foreign car.

The 1969 Opel Kadett became "my car." It was perfect for zipping around town and sliding into tight parking spaces. Please take note of the color. It was the second blue car in a row, but this one I chose and it was a few shades darker than the LeSabre was. I was headed for the blues -- in more ways than one!


Because that marriage failed and I became a single mother of a toddler, the Opel became part of our little family and served us well for the next five years.



After I moved back to Illinois from Milwaukee, I eventually landed a public relations job at the venerable University of Chicago. My salary took a major hike, I was living in a University-owned flat in Chicago's trendy Hyde Park, so I decided I deserved a newer, sexier car.

The 1974 Cutlass Salon I ordered had white vinyl seats and I thought it was the sexiest car on the road. No, I didn't notice that I had ordered yet another blue car. And no, it never occurred to me that white seats were incompatible with a three-year-old and a 125-lb. German Shepherd Dog named Demon.

My second husband is the most generous man I have ever known. We were married in 1978, divorced in 1985, but in between, he showered me with magnificent gifts (for us). When we moved to San Francisco from Chicago two months after our wedding, the trans-continental trip in the moving van proved catastrophic for our vehicles. The mover actually dropped his Ford Mustang onto the top of the Cutlass! The damage was fixed, but the car seemed to lose its appeal after that. So, in 1980 he bought me one of these:


The '79 Fiat Spider was so cute and so much fun, but it was also pretty impractical for a busy mom who travelled a lot on business. When on the highway, air would get under the convertible top and make a lot of noise. And driving rain would penetrate the top and sprinkle my business suit with rain. But at least it wasn't blue!

So, then he bought me this for our 5th anniversary:


This time he used his head and bought a "previously owned" 1978 Mercedes Benz 240 D. Movin' on up, yes we were. It took me years to stop feeling like a poseur when I was behind the wheel, but what a great car. Ahhhhh, note the color. Uh huh.


In 1993 AT&T transferred me from San Francisco to Atlanta. I was devastated to have to leave the San Francisco Bay Area, so I soothed my broken heart by buying myself a present:

This is the exact car. After seeing the 1993 Mazda 929 at the International Auto Show in Atlanta, I had to have it. So elegant! And it wasn't blue. Well, sometimes it was, because the Mediterranean Teal Metallic paint changed colors in different light.



Although I retired from AT&T in 2000, I kept the Mazda until 2005, when the economy was chugging along nicely and I was making money on my rolled-over 401K. A Lexus has been my dream car since it was introduced, and I vowed I would own one before I die. Sooooo...

Yep. Breakwater Blue, to be precise.

Love and Alcohol Collide

Love and Alcohol Collide



My grandfather loved me so much, he had himself committed.

The feeling was definitely mutual. Grandpa had been my earliest and only father figure from the time I was born. My Coast Guard father was still deployed as World War II ground to a victorious halt. And since my mother was only two weeks beyond her 20th birthday, she was still very much the Daddy’s Girl, spoiled, indulged and protected.

Under the circumstances, we all lived in one house so that Grandpa could take care of his girls. In a way, I became more like a second and much younger daughter than a granddaughter, and he became the center of my universe.

It wasn’t until I was about four that I was able to understand the brief bursts of tension in the household. There were a lot of furtive glances between my mother and grandmother. Sometimes I noticed they would be anxious to keep me from getting too physically close to Grandpa, especially on the days that he would come home from work with a very red nose.

Eventually, it became impossible to keep the truth from me, an obnoxiously precocious smartass who missed nothing. Grandpa was an alcoholic and it was getting worse.

In a post I wrote many weeks ago, I described the horror of an alcohol-fueled family incident that very easily could have resulted in my sister, our cousins and me witnessing the death of my mother at her father’s hand. There was violence a lot of the time, but usually not in front of us kids. It would be the bruises on my beautiful grandmother’s arms and sometimes her face and neck that would tip me off.

By the time I reached age 11, much about our lives had changed. I had a little sister, 2 ½ years younger. My mother had divorced my father and remarried, divorced again and remarried again. We had moved into a tiny coach house apartment exactly one block away from my grandparents.

My body and mind had also changed dramatically. I had already begun to menstruate a year earlier and my extra slender body had started to blossom. I was becoming conscious of the concept of *image,* primarily because it was of the utmost importance to my mother. Family matters were not discussed outside the family. Ever. Grandpa’s “little problem” was most definitely a family matter and it was one that I was desperate to keep away from my young friends. Back then, being a drunk was considered a weakness of character. It evoked shame.

The next-door neighbors had a set of fraternal twin girls who were about a year older than I was. I thought they were the luckiest kids in the world. They still had their original mother and father living in their house. Their mother lavished them with stylish shoes and clothing; she took them shopping every single weekend. I have never been one to envy anyone, but if I were going to, it might have been the twins.

One sweltering summer day the four of us decided to cool off by turning on the lawn sprinkler and running through it in our bathing suits. We had spent an hour or so romping in the twins’ front yard and were now just standing around talking. Two boys who were classmates of the twins at the public school happened to be walking by and stopped to talk.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Grandpa come staggering up the front walk toward us.

“Hi, Grandpa. What are you doing here?” I murmured as I tried to cut him off and meet him half way.

“Where’s your mother? I need fifty cents to go to the liquor store.” He was quite drunk already.

“Well, she’s not home from work yet. It’s only 5 o’clock.” Grandpa took a step back and looked at me as if for the first time.

“What the hell are you doing out here in your bathing suit entertaining these knuckleheads? Get in the house and put some clothes on.”

Mortified, I did as I was told after mumbling an embarrassed apology to my friends and vowing mentally to never step foot out of my house again. As I passed by my beloved grandfather I hissed, “Don’t you ever speak to me again, Grandpa. You have embarrassed me in front of my friends and I will never forgive you for it. I hate you.”

The next day Granny called and asked that my mother come to their house immediately. When she got there she found a tearful Grandpa sitting in his usual kitchen chair with his head in his hands.

“Daddy, what’s the matter?” Mama asked.

“Punkin told me she would never speak to me again. She said she hates me. I don’t blame her, but I can’t bear to think I have hurt that child. She is my heart and you know that. I want you to take me somewhere. Right now. Take me to Manteno.”

Manteno, Illinois was the location of the state psychiatric hospital*, the place where people went in those days to “dry out.” Within the hour Mama was behind the wheel of her parents’ Buick Roadmaster driving her miserable father to be committed to six weeks of in-hospital treatment for alcoholism.

This was 1955. There were none of today’s techniques for using drugs to ease a patient off the alcohol without suffering excruciating withdrawal symptoms. He endured it all, and six weeks later I accompanied my mother on the two-hour drive to Manteno to take him back home.

The man who walked out of that hospital was a complete stranger to me. Oh, he looked a lot like Grandpa, but he wasn’t the man I had known since birth. This man was walking straight and tall. He had gained a few pounds and his color was rosy and fresh. He seemed shy and quiet. And his eyes filled with tears when I ran to him and jumped into his arms.

It was autumn by the time Grandpa came home. Always my favorite time of year, fall gave me many opportunities to spend time with my *new* grandfather. While raking and burning leaves, we talked about everything imaginable. And every chance he got, he apologized to me for anything he had said and done while he was drinking.

As today’s experts know to expect, Grandpa relapsed during the Christmas holidays. Peer pressure at work caused him to make the fateful decision to have “just one drink.” The result was dire.

The second time Grandpa went to Manteno, he had to be transported in an ambulance. Since his relapse, the amount of alcohol he consumed had increased almost two-fold. One sad day he went into delirium tremens – DTs – slapping himself wildly while screaming that bugs were crawling all over him. I was devastated.

Another six weeks passed and we repeated the same journey to retrieve our fallen hero. He had reached hero status for all of us who were amazed at his determination to stay sober and to make amends for all the things we told him he did because he remembered none of it.

There was no need for a third trip to Manteno. For the next 20 years this gentle man of steel remained sober in his recovery. He was the gentlest, most generous and loving husband, father and grandfather for the rest of his life.

Sometimes he would listen to our stories about his past behavior and cry from shame. He showered my long-suffering grandmother with anything and everything she ever thought she wanted, and he treated her like the queen that she was.

He had fought the fight and won. He did it because of me. His courage becomes more impressive to me every day of my life. He is my hero.



*Manteno State Hospital closed in 1985

September Mourn

This was the one day I regretted my gift of empathy. I didn't want to feel what I knew they were feeling.


I had just been fingerprinted at the headquarters of the Atlanta Public Schools. It was the last step to becoming a member of the long roster of substitute teachers who stepped in when full-time teachers needed to step out. The much ballyhooed azure blue canopy gleamed above a picture-perfect September morning, gleefully absent of Atlanta's legendary humidity.

On my always-on radio, Tom Joyner's usual goofy patter was interrupted by his news reader. "An incomplete report has just come in from New York City. It appears that one of the Twin Towers has been struck by a plane." I remember slowly shaking my head in the way that means "what a shame. Somebody's day has gone horribly wrong." My eyes glanced briefly at the dashboard clock. 8:49 a.m.


As I navigated the short trip to my home, I imagined the wife of the plane's pilot going about her business at home. She had just dropped the kids off at school and was settling down at last to sip her tea and watch The Today Show. She listened as Ann Curry made a similar announcement about the plane mishap. She assumed, as I had, it was a small, probably private plane that had somehow lost its bearing and slammed into the tower. Her heart skipped a beat in fear for her mate.


When I had closed the garage door and entered my kitchen, I went straight for the remote. It's a habit I've developed to stave off the blaring silence in the house since my son had left the nest. And there it was.


I was stricken by a terror I had only felt once before, when I struggled to stay on my feet at the 1989 World Series during the catastrophic earthquake in San Francisco. I backed my way onto the sofa. I watched as a jetliner flew itself, with great purpose, into the second tower.


My stomach lurched at the same time a scream bubbled up from the depths of my being. "This is no accident. What the hell is happening?" I had said it out loud.

A camera trained on the plume of jet black smoke pouring from Tower 1 stayed there for minutes at a time. At first I thought I was seeing parts of the plane and/or the building falling to the ground. It wasn't. When I realized I was witnessing the suicide of desperate office workers, I nearly vomited.


Now I'm imagining myself being on the 96th floor of the first tower. Terrified. Coughing and gagging from the smoke and fumes from spilled jet fuel. Concluding that I was to die that day and scrambling to find a working phone. Attempting to dial my son's number and not being able to remember his number because it's programmed into all the phones I use.


Feeling the heat, hearing the screaming, smelling the stench of burning human flesh. I call my mother, who I know is watching TV and try to make her stop screaming so I can tell her I love her and goodbye. And finally running to the gaping hole in the wall where the windows used to be and deciding in an instant to save myself from the flames.


I imagine the point at which I am filled with an inexplicable sense of peace. I even smile. And I jump.

Rest in peace. We will never forget.

The Sorority

Friendship versus principle. Right versus wrong. Easy versus difficult. History stayed versus history made.

It seems to me that I have been making choices like these all of my life. The circumstances of my birth, more than anything else, caused most of them. And, of course, the timing.

Members of the Greatest Generation were my parents. World War II would end within a year of my birth. Race relations in the United States were nowhere near good. And I was a *colored* child whose interracial family was impossible to understand for people with racial prejudices.

The word "first" became a common adjective used to describe me. I was the first non-white child to be admitted to St. James Catholic Elementary School in my hometown of Maywood, Illinois. I was the first black student elected to a class office at the local high school. I was the first black majorette in the history of the school, and allegedly the first black girl in the history of the school to be named to the National Honor Society.

So in 1962 when I applied to and was accepted with a scholarship by Ripon College in central Wisconsin, I was well-prepared to step into an environment where I would be the only African American woman on campus for the first two years of my time there.

No one in my family had ever attended college, so I knew very little about the ways of campus life. Yes, I had read articles in Seventeen Magazine and Glamour Magazine, so I knew what fraternities and sororities were. What the articles failed to mention, however, was the existence of exclusionary clauses in the charters of most national Greek organizations.

It didn't take long for me to become well-schooled on all of that. Shortly after my freshman year began came the rush season. On bid day -- the day that freshmen were given invitations to pledge or join fraternities and sororities -- I received none. By then I already knew I wouldn't be pledging anything. Despite the fact that every one of my closest friends in my dorm had received multiple bids, we all knew that I was doomed to be a GDI -- god damned independent.

That was hurtful, yes, but not at all unusual in my experience. Another one of my "firsts" in high school was to attend a school dance with a white boy. We knew what we were doing. We knew that the dance chaperones, usually teachers, would take one look at us on the dance floor and proceed to have some version of apoplexy. And, no, we weren't at all surprised when we were asked to leave shortly after we arrived.

We were shocked, however, when on the following Monday morning we were summoned to the superintendent's office. Assembled there were several other students, black and white, with whom I had been working somewhat informally to try to loosen the unwritten rules about fraternization between the races.

Jesse Owens at the Berlin Games

None other than 1936 Olympic Champion Jessie Owens was seated next to Mr. Kochendoerfer, the superintendent. I knew who Owens was only because my boyfriend, who was also among the summoned, was a track and field star there in high school. Owens had been invited by the school administration to "talk some sense into" this group of young people who were actively seeking to change things both in the school and in the town. My boyfriend had lead an effort to convince the local roller rink to *allow* African Americans to skate there. At the point the meeting with Owens was taking place the owner of the rink had reluctantly agreed to allow us to skate as a "private party" on Monday nights, the night the rink was officially closed.

The awe-stricken look of hero worship on my boyfriend's face was soon gone. In its place emerged a gaping-mouthed, eyebrow-raised look of disbelief. "It is not your place to be doing these things," Owens announced. "You all need to stay in your places as students."

Owens had made a serious strategic error. Uttering the phrase "stay in your place" was almost synonymous with speaking the N-word in those days. It evoked a mental image of characters such as Stepin Fetchit and Lightening from old Amos n' Andy radio and television programs -- subservient, cowed, and ignorant. As Owens droned on, any observer would have seen each student in the room mentally and emotionally shut down. He had been dismissed as an Uncle Tom.

So, no, it came as no particular shock four years later when it was explained to me why I hadn't received any bids to join a sorority. What it did was make my friends very, very angry. They all actually pledged with the Alpha Phi Sorority, quietly vowing to change things from within the system.

Of course I survived. I took a job as a freshman dorm counselor in my sophomore year, while all my friends moved into the sorority house. My spirit had been wounded, but not slain, so I went on with my studies and my involvement in a variety of extra-curricular activities. When Rush Week rolled around in the fall of 1963, I was invited to several Preference Parties -- an opportunity for a prospective member to alert the sorority of her interest. I went to all of them. In the meantime, my Alpha Phi friends, now active members with voting rights, had initiated a petition to Alpha Phi's national leadership to throw out the racial clause (which, by the way, also excluded Jews) so they could invite me to pledge.

At the same time, another sorority, Alpha Chi Omega, had become well-known to me through a number of girls I'd met in my various classrooms. They were all fine young women, just like my other friends. Unbeknownst to me, they too had initiated action with their national organization challenging the racial clause, with the specific statement that it was their intention to pledge me.

One evening I was studying at my desk in the freshman dorm when I was startled by loud banging on my door. Four Alpha Phis, all my close pals, pushed into the room screaming and jumping. "Lez, we just heard from national! They said you can join Alpha Phi!"

Elated, I jumped up and hugged them all. One of them, though, had a strange look on her face. It was far from joyous.

"You're going to be a Social Member, " she said, not looking at me.

They explained what that meant. I would be welcome to join them in the sorority house, live among them, and pay my dues until I either left the school or graduated, whereupon I would be required to surrender my pin.

On that very spot, at that very moment, I changed from a young girl to a woman. I realized then that for my friends, it was a question of how to get me into the group, but for me, it was something much bigger. It was a matter of principle and personal honor.
A week later, the Alpha Chi Omegas were rumored to have threatened their national to pull out of the organization if they were not granted permission to pledge me and anybody else they saw fit. It was time for the bids to be distributed and I was convinced that I would be choosing between two unacceptable solutions to a problem -- me.

That's not what happened at all. I received a bid from Alpha Chi Omega. It was delivered to me personally by the sorority's campus president. "We know that Alpha Phi was not able to get clearance to pledge you. We feel very sorry for you and for all the girls we know are your friends. But, Lezlie, we have prevailed. If you accept our bid, you will become an Alpha Chi Omega for life."

Unable to eat or sleep for the next few days, I struggled with my options. I was tired of skating in the rink when the rink was closed. I was tired of being told "you are great, Lezlie, but you are different." I was tired of being a token.

I am an Alpha Chi Omega. To this day, several of my Alpha Phi friends have never forgiven me. We were all much too young and much too naive to grapple with the significance of these events. I was forced to choose between friendship and principle. I've never regretted what I chose -- my sorority sisters have been lifelong friends -- but I will regret forever the loss of those friendships.

All Thumbs

If you tell your mother about our special times, it will hurt her feelings because she will be jealous. Your sister, too. You don't want that, right?

Even as I sit tapping these words onto my screen, I hear him delivering that warning in my mind's ear. These are the words that make me feel so much shame. Not because of what they were uttered to cover up-- I wasn't yet aware of what that was -- but for my inability to grasp their true meaning. I should have been smarter. I was the smart one, after all.

At eleven years old, I never wanted to do anything to upset my mother. I cared very much whether or not she was happy or sad, mostly because it made all the difference in the way she treated my sister and me. When we were good and her world was good, it seemed that our lives were perfect.

There was really very little perfect about our lives then. My mother had just married her third husband, a long-term friend of the family whom I adored; my grandfather's alcoholism was starting to become a factor in my little social life; we were living in a tiny, mouse-infested coach house behind the larger, one-time mansion of a wealthy somebody of the distant past; and, my mother's job depended upon keeping it a secret that her two young daughters were several parts "colored."

On one day a week, my nine-year-0ld sister would be late coming home from school because of her Brownie meeting in the school basement. That would be the one and only day she was allowed to walk home with her pals and without me. Her safety and well-being were responsibilities I took very seriously. I took everything very seriously. I had what the "old folks" called an old soul.

My mother worked in the Chicago Loop. She rode the Bluebird bus line to her office in a LaSalle Street law firm and back home. He actually was a driver on that bus line, but most of the time he would get home a couple of hours before she did.

On one of these Brownie-meeting afternoons, I was sitting cross-legged on my twin bed, which was exactly 15 inches to the right of my sister's bed next to the window. I was doing my homework so that I could get outside to play before darkness descended.

He came home, looked in and smiled hello, then went to their bedroom to change. I almost didn't see him come back into our room; I had my head down reading a textbook. He walked behind me and began to massage my shoulders, which felt great. His strong hands had done hand-to-hand combat in the Japanese Theater of World War II. Just the night before, I think it was, he had shown us the blood-stained dagger he had used to slay a Japanese soldier.

"Does that feel good?" he asked.

"Oh, yeah," I answered. All that seriousness always seemed to manifest itself in muscular aches and pains, especially in my shoulders and back.

"Lie down, and I'll give you a back rub."

I only hesitated for a nanosecond and that was because I was almost finished with my homework and wanted to be finished. But the idea of this special attention from my new "Daddy" -- something that I had craved for the seven years since my mother divorced my real father -- was just too appealing to pass up.

This scenario played out again and again for several weeks. I felt as special as any Daddy's girl could feel. The back rubs graduated to full-body massages, requiring that I leave on fewer and fewer items of clothing to "insure effectiveness," he had said.

Then one afternoon he introduced a new element to the proceedings. I cannot recall under what pretext he did so, but he covered my face with a towel before he went on with the massage after I flipped over onto my back. I asked why. He said it would help me relax to block out the light in my eyes. I felt panicky, unable to breathe. I attempted to raise the corner of the towel. He stopped me.

He felt me tense. "Just relax," he chuckled. "You're fine."

I wasn't fine. Alarms bells were clanging in my confused head. Nothing seemed right about any of this anymore. What's happening?

I felt those strong hands lightly touching my lower girl parts. He had already "massaged" my newly budding chest. I felt his four fingers of each hand on my hips. Then I felt his two thumbs barely grazing what I learned later was my pudenda.

Wait a minute! clang, clang, clang, clang, clang... Why am I feeling a third thumb? No, that's not a ... clang, clang, clang, clang, clang...

In one swift movement I snatched the towel away from my face, used my foot to push his body away from mine and SAW what was happening.

I was so ashamed. How stupid of me. Now I had gone along with and therefore was responsible for behavior that nobody would believe or understand. My fault. I'm a bad girl.

Nothing about it was ever mentioned again. And IT never happened again.