Loneliness and Love Charms:  Sophocles’ “The Women of Trachis”

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Sophocles’ The Women of Trachis is seldom read, a little-known tragedy that focuses on a woman’s loneliness and love charms. There is nothing quite like this in Greek literature. The complicated heroine, Deianira, the lonely wife of Heracles, an absent husband, dominates the play, with 946 of the 1278 lines.

Many heroines in Greek tragedy have absent husbands. Clytemnestra in Agamemnon does not grieve for her absent husband: she takes a lover. They murder Agamemnon when he returns from Troy, accompanied by Cassandra, his enslaved concubine.

Deianira is charming and sad, floating and mooning around in front of the house, anxious about Heracles’ future and her own. She has no one to talk to, except the nurse, the messenger, and the chorus, and if they don’t advise her, she wavers, or when she makes decisions, they are bad.

But Deianira has one secret that she may use to get Heracles back. She has a love charm given her by a supernatural being, a centaur.

Perhaps we should all be given love charms, hidden like Deianira’s in a copper urn. Heracles absent-mindedly visits Deianira occasionally, but doesn’t stay long. She is in agony when she learns he is in love with a younger woman. He sacked a city so he could possess this woman. The sacking a city concept would drive all of us mad.

Deianira worships Heracles in theory. As a beautiful young woman, she was accosted by monsters. Heracles defeated lchous, a terrifying river that took three forms, that of a bull, a serpent, and a man with a bull’s face, who was determined to marry her. Later, Heracles kills a centaur who attempted to rape her.

Perhaps Deanira loves monsters, after all.  When the centaur was dying, wounded by one of Heracles’ poisoned arrows, he told her to take blood from his wound, where it was black with serpent’s bile, as a love charm to assure that Heracles “would never look at another woman and and love her more than you.” 

Certainly it is a tempting offer, and it is easy to see why she decides to use the charm. It was there, after all, in the copper urn –

And so it’s time to get out the love charm. She dips a new robe for Heracles in the love charm, and sends it to him as a gift, believing it will bring him back to her.

Let him come from there
all desire when the beast’s
inducements, all dipped in persuasion, have melted him.

The robe is dipped in poison. not persuasion, and it melts him. He dies an agonizing death. And before he dies, she commits suicide.

Critics have different views of Deanira. Some believe she is innocent, others that she is a cold-blooded killer, who knew what she was doing when she dipped the robe. It is true that Deanira didn’t worry about the quality of the love charm until after she sent it. She wonders if she was impulsive, if it would hurt him instead. But I also think she was not quite in her right mind.

The love charm is hidden, so no one will find it, and it is not a love charm at all.

An Interview with Robert Hellenga, Author of “The Confessions of Frances Godwin”

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Robert Hellenga (1941-2020)

In 2014, Robert Hellenga, a novelist and professor at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, agreed to an inverview about his novel, The Confessions of Frances Godwin, a woman’s version of Saint Augustine’s Confessions. He was fascinating and one of the most generous writers I have interviewed.

An Interview with Robert Hellenga

Kat: The love of classical literature has shaped the identity of the narrator, Frances, a brilliant Latinist whose translation of Catullus has been accepted for publication. Why did you choose to make Frances a classicist, and is this an integral part of her character?

Robert Hellenga:  I like to use the classical world as a frame of reference. It give us (me, Frances, the reader) a place to stand outside the modern world. Other things being equal I would have gravitated toward a college Greek professor rather than a high school Latin teacher, but I’ve already written a novel about a college Greek professor (The Fall of a Sparrow), so I didn’t want to do that again. I’ve studied Greek and Greek literature, but not much Latin or Latin literature, so I had to work up a “frame of reference” that resonated with me. So I reread Virgil and Catullus. The Aeneid gives us a sense that with the founding of Rome the world has turned a corner, that history has a sense of direction (as opposed to the Greek view that history just goes round in a circle). This is a view that Frances has to abandon at the end, when Father Viglietti tells her that what she needs is no absolution but a grappa and a nap. Catullus is already closer to this view. My wife and I have lived in Catullus’s home town (Verona) and last year we spent six weeks in Rome, so I had a sense of place to draw on in both cases.

Kat: I’m always interested in novels with Midwestern settings, because I’ve lived most of my life in the Midwest; yet there seem to be few Midwestern novels. Were you making making a radical decision by setting a novel in Galesburg, Illinois?

Robert Hellenga:  The Midwest has been a theme in all my novels, generally in contrast to Italy. Our family spent a year in Florence in 1982-83 and it was a turning point in our lives. It’s hard for me to write a novel in which no one goes to Italy, although in Snakewoman of Little Egypt, the protagonist, Sunny, goes to France rather than Italy. Like the classical world, Italy offers a place to stand outside the Midwest, but in every case my Midwestern characters hold their own against their Italian counterparts. They love Italy, but the Midwest is home. In The Fall of a Sparrow, Woody is in love with a wonderful woman from Bologna. He wants her to move to Illinois; she wants him to stay in Italy. In a later novel, The Italian Lover, the same thing happens again, with a different wonderful woman.

The decision to set Confessions in Galesburg was a conscious decision but not a hard one. I didn’t need a big city (Chicago) for this novel; I didn’t need a big university, as I did in Snakewoman, which is set in a fictional town very near Galesburg. Galesburg has the last remaining site of a Lincoln-Douglas debate; it’s got Carl Sandburg’s old house. It’s got a great college, which I taught for many years. I didn’t need anything else.

Kat: Frances’s intense pain over the tragic decision of her daughter Stella, a poet in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, to live with the dangerous ex-con, Jimmy, is intensely, disturbingly realistic. How were you able to portray the psychology of this fraught mother-daughter relationship?

Robert Hellenga:  As I’ve often said, “A man with three daughters will never run out of stories.” My wife and I have never been seriously at odds with our daughters, but I think that all a father has to do it tap into his fear-fulfillment fantasies to come up with someone like Jimmy.
At an early stage of Confessions my agent said that he couldn’t understand what had happened to Stella to make her such a piece of work. “Abuse” would have provided a convenient explanation–the dark secret that eventually emerges–but that was out of the question for me. So I gave Stella a long history of making bad choices about men, a history going back to high-school bad boy Howard Banks, and later on the fact that she enters into a stable lesbian relationship with Ruthy suggests that maybe her sexual orientation was the problem all along, but I didn’t want to make too much of this. I just wanted it to be part of the frame, and Frances feels the same way.

Kat: Did any writers influence you in the writing of The Confessions of Frances Godwin?

Robert Hellenga:  I keep going back to the same sources for inspiration: Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Jane Smiley’s Horse Heaven, and Gail Godwin’s Finishing School, Father Melancholy’s Daughter, and now, Flora. I didn’t exactly name Frances after Gail Godwin, but I sort of did. I started out with a name I liked, Frances Cochrane, but (a) I’d already used that name and (b) I didn’t want to suggest an Irish theme. I liked the way “Godwin” hints at a relationship with God (= “God-friend” in Old English).

Kat: What are you reading now and who are your favorite authors?

Robert Hellenga:  Confessions was one of two novels assigned for a religious-studies course at Beloit College. The other was Joshua Ferris’s To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. I read a library copy and liked it so much I bought my own copy. Right now I’m rereading Kent Haruf’s Benediction and Richard Ford’s The Lay of the Land.

I’ll probably reread Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteredge and Jane Smiley’s Horse Heaven, while I’m working on a new novel, and Anna Karenina too, though I’ve read it so often that I tend just to dip into in when I need a shot of writing adrenaline.

Alice Adams: Listening to Billie

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Many years ago, I reviewed Alice Adams’ novel,  Second Chances, for The San Francisco Review of Books (a defunct little magazine).   I was already a a fan of Adams, a San Francisco writer, so I was thrilled when they sent me the book.

And then I went back and read her early novels. One of my favorites is Listening to Billie (1975). The heroine, Eliza, is a Billie Holiday fan.  The novel begins at a club where Eliza and her boyfriend have gone to hear Billie sing. Throughout the novel, Eliza listens to Billie Holiday records.

“Billie is late – of course, she is always late – but the crowd in this small packed rooom is not resigned:  people are restless, and tense.  There is a lot of lighting of cigarettes, looking at watches, loud orders for more drinks.” 

Adams (1926-1999) is a graceful writer, underrated, seldom read anymore.  Her work is consistently absorbing, usually set in San Francisco, and her female characters are complex,  literary, and sexy.  What I like about Eliza is that she is so relaxed about sex.  She loves men, but is not looking for a husband. 

Adams’ description of the workplace is also spot-on.  Eliza, a poet, works part-time as a secretary at a doctor’s office. The office politics are strained: Kathleen, the supervisor, rages against men. Her boyfriend has moved to L.A., and she knows he is cheating on her. She is also verbally abusive to Miriam, a young Black junior secretary, who lives in the ghetto, gets  high a lot, and briefly considers becoming a prostitute.

Adams’ characters are so well-depicted that we can see them vividly, hear Billie Holiday’s music, and feel the anxiety that comes of being a woman on her own. It is also an unusual novel, in that the heroine is so independent, though she worries that her many casual relationships with men mean she is promiscuous.

I loved this well-written novel, and I discovered that it was not just a women’s novel, when Tony, the author of the blog Tony’s Book World (we miss him), reviewed this and some of Adams’ other books.

Medea and the Labradoodle

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“Hate me.  But I tire of your barking bitterness.” – Euripides’ Medea

If you frequent the coffeehouse at the corner of X and Y,  you probably know the owner’s adorable Labradoodle.  That Labradoodle is one of my closest friends. It sits by my feet and stares at me with love.  That is how it demands a tip – half a scone will do – and then it yaps in sympathy, whatever I say.  

It’s one of those days when I quote The Medea from memory:  “I would rather stand in front of the shield three times than give birth once.” 

 I was a naive reader when I first perused Euripides’ Medea.  I thought she was a feminist! Even when I read it in Greek, I may have regarded Medea as a feminist. Many feminists are monsters, of course: there is a tendency to be simplistic and to think in meaningless cliches. Medea, however, is a murderer.  She cut up bits of her brother and threw them into the sea to slow down her pursuers; and when Jason left her for a princess, Medea killed that unlucky woman with the gift of a  poisoned dress; the king was killed accidentally when he tried to tear the poisoned dress off his daughter; and Medea killed her two sons for the ultimate revenge on Jason.

She is an eloquent politician.  In Euripides’s tragedy, she persuades the chorus to empathize with her.  Of the three tragedians, Euripides is the one who most sympathetically portrays women, and that is why this play can be read and read again, with different shattering interpretations each time.

Let’s Hang out with Hipsters!

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I used to go every day to a small dark coffeehouse to read Latin poetry.  The bike ride was perilous because the panniers were stuffed with hardcovers: Lewis and Short (a Latin dictionary), Allen and Greenough (a Latin grammar), .and Horace’s Ars Poetica (a poem about literary criticism). 

I often read in public in those days.  I was forlorn, new in town, and though I did not want to have a sad aura, I probably did.  One hot summer day, a man asked, “Has school started?”  I looked at him dazed but then realized he was funny and cracked a bewildered smile.

Actually, he was the kind of hipster we all like to hang out with.  He had a radio show about bicycling.  And, like me, he didn’t wear a helmet, which is not nerdy, but super-hip, and we discussed it endlessly. He even gave me a compliment: “My high school Latin teacher was hot, too.”

 I got a chuckle out of that:  a Cuban colleague who taught Spanish and had been married five times, twice to the same woman, used to tell me that when I was in my thirties. Give a girl a pair of glasses, a Latin book, and faded jeans, and you’re set for a decade or so with hipster boyfriends. 

And then one day I met another lost soul at Starbucks, who said, “I can live anywhere that has a Starbucks and Target,” and then burst into tears.

“Maybe try another coffeehouse?”

I saw her there once.  She didn’t find the hipsters charming. “Doesn’t he smell?”  she asked about a handsome hipster artist.

“A bit?”

Alas, the hipster bicyclist moved away, the handsome hipster artist died, the hipster woman who looked like Morticia Adams started a rival coffeehouse, and the hipster owner of the dark coffeehouse sold (out).

After all, Emerson wrote about self-reliance.  I make coffee at home now.

Rediscovering Thomas Hardy: A Book without Notes

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This was the draft I meant to publish on Thoma Hardy. Enjoy!

Are you a reader of introductions, footnotes, glossaries, and chronologies?  Do you take notes on index cards, or indeed remember what an index card is? Or do you read the book separately from the scholarly apparatus? 

Mind you, for the last 25 years I’ve enjoyed reading the introductions of Penguin classics and Oxford World Classics.  Penny Boumelha’s introduction to the Penguin edition of Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native is in itself a work of art.

Boumelha begins: “The Return of the Native is characteristic of many of Hardy’s novels in that at its core lies a story of love, courtship, and marriage.  In this recurring central structure, one or more characters is faced with the erotic or marital choice between potential lovers which serves to foucs those issues of class mobility and social allegiance that always interact closely with sexuality and the emotions.”

On my last reading, I perused Boumelha’s introduction, but this time I chose to read an old hardcover edition with no book jacket or notes. And as I read The Return of the Native, with no scholarly apparatus, I experienced this book not only as my favorite Hardy, but as Hardy’s masterpiece.  Well, one of them.

The critics often consider Jude the Obscure his masterpiece.  If you’re in in the mood to read the gloomiest bildungsroman in literary history, this is for you.  Jude, a working-class amateur classicist, struggles to teach himself Greek and Latin. He wants to go to an Oxford-like university , but the professors send ntes declining to meet with him. It’s clearly a class issue. And much later, in one of the most brutal scenes in literature, his gloomy young son hangs himself and his siblings.  I recommend pausing at this point to pop a Tylenol or eat a bag of Pepperidge Farm cookies. 

The Return of the Native, a gorgeously written, fascinating novel, with a brilliantly symmetrical structure, is set on gloomy Egdon Heath. Bonfires abound.  Beautiful, brooding Eustacia Vye pays her young admirer, Charley, to light a bonfire on Nov. 5 to signal a meeting with Wildeve, her illicit boyfriend.  These two physically beautiful people seem well-suited but keep betraying each other with other people. 

And at the center of two mismatched couples is Diggory Venn, the reddleman, who always knows what’s going on in the neighborhood. (Penguin footnote: “A reddleman is one who sells or deals in reddle, a form of red ochre dye once widely used by shepherds and farmers to mark and identify sheep.”) He’s my favoriite character because he uses his knowledge to protect pretty, sweet-natured Thomasin, with whom he is in love. She loves another.

I am fascinated by Eustacia, though she is not what I’d call a nice person.  Venn the reddleman, asks her to keep away from Wildeve so he will marry Thomasin, whom Wildeve more or less jilted at the altar, claiming there was some mistake in the marriage license.

Eutstacia rages. “I have not injured her: he was mine before he was hers! He came back – because – he liked me best!”she said wildly.

Love is a dangerous, terrible force in The Return of the Native. You can literally die of love.  Hardy certainly is gloomy.

But somehow the book is not gloomy. It is a romantic page-turner.  Eustacia and Wildeve, who marry other people, represent chance and wrong choices, the wild Egdon Heath and implacable landscape.  The blander pair, Thomasin and her cousin Clym, married respectively to Wildeve and Eustacia, have an intelligence that helps them endure the harsh heath.

Now I’m reading another book by Hardy, this time in a paperback with an introduction and notes.  I may have a “naked book” of this one somewhere. If I tire of the footnotes, I’ll look for it.

Poets at Large: Mary McCarthy’s “The Groves of Academe”

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Near the end of Mary McCarthy’s satire, The Groves of Academe, the squabbling English department at Jocelyn College sponsors a poetry conference.  My reaction to poetry conferences is awe.

But Mary McCarthy is not awed; she explains the mechanics of the conference.  The poets have attended so many (for a small fee) that they can predict the trajectory. They know that  the president of the college will stand up at the last event and ask an intelligent but very long question.  

One of the most charming moments is when Miss Mansell, wearing “a high- necked black heavy crepe blouse encrusted with with sequins and a long black crepe skirt” (an outfit that would suit any poet), announces she intends to speak about and recite Virgil.  The faculty and students are both shocked.

McCarthy explains, “From the point of view of the students, the choice was not a happy one.  The majority of the students present had never heard of the Mantuan; they supposed he was a modern poet whom their faculty had not yet caught up with…”

Those who know Virgil are equally upset.  “A few scowling students who had not had the good fortune to be educated progressively moved restlessly in their seats, as though fighting being awakened from a dream tto their Latin teacher and the abhorrent learning by rote.  There were stifled cries of ‘Let me out of here.”

This made me laugh because – full disclosure – I used to teach Latin.  So did my husband. We loved being T.A.’s at the university, and in my case I was also a Visiting lecturer while my husband finished his thesis.  I taught Virgil and two first-year Latin classes, and required my students to memorize the opening lines of the Aeneid. I knew from experience during a protracted illness that reciting Virgil (silently) is calming.

This is one of McCarthy’s best satires, and poets would doubtless enjoy it. And if you can’t wander off to a poetry conference, read this book instead.

Tears in the Woods

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 The Woodlanders is one of Thomas Hardy’s most brilliant novels. I did not, however. find this book till midlife when I was browsing at Goodreads. Yet I was introduced to Hardy years ago by Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye, who was enticed by Eustacia Vye.

The Woodlanders has a different, less artificial, less Gothic atmosphere.  Set in a tiny, wooded hamlet, inhabited by characters who make their living by aspects of forestry, it tells the story of the clash between classes, between lovers of different classes, and their relationships to the woods.

Marty South, a minor character, would make a more interesting heroine than the designated heroine, Grace. Marty supports her sick father by making “spars, such as are used by thatchers.” To eke out their living, she sells her hair to the barber. His customer, Mrs. Melbury, a rich widow, has nagged him to buy Marty’s hair for a wig.

And now Giles Winterborne will never love Marty, though there was never much hope. 

Winterborne says, “Why, Marty – whatever has happened to your head?  Lord, it has shrunk to nothing  – it looks like an apple upon a gate-post.”

He is a good man but does not understand women. Ironically, later in the book, Mrs. Melbury is also responsible for Winterborne’s business woes.  Winterborne alienates the newly-bewigged Mrs. Melbury by refusing to back up his cart, which is piled high with a load of wood. Haughty Mrs. Melbury never forgives.  Again, it is class vs. class.

Unlike Marty, I have an abundance of hair, but I, too, recently burst into tears in the woods.  Suddenly I became very sick. We had to thrash our way to a meadow where I could squat.

I had to wipe myself with Kleenex and dead leaves.  My husband, who has camped off-trail, knows  the outdoors and gathered most of this material.

I’m not a crier.  Here’s why: I cried my eyes out as a young woman. But now in the woods, I cried. 

My resolve: no more tears!  No more crying!  I’ve shed so many tears that there are few left. Far better to reread The Woodlanders when I’m feeling sad.   

There are always reasons to cry in Thomas Hardy’s novels.

My Favorite Academic Satire: Mary McCarthy’s “The Groves of Academe”

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Mary McCarthy, the 20th-century novelist, critic, and essayist, taught English for two semesters in 1945 and 1946 at Bard College, a progressive college. McCarthy taught a class in The Modern Novel that only went as far as Henry James.  This may have been a low point for McCarthy, because she wrote an academic satire of Bard.

The Groves of Academe, set during the Communist witch hunts and McCarthy hearings of the 1950s, mocks the instructors and professors, the “progressive” curriculum, and the college bureaucrats.  The hero, Henry Mulcahy, a brilliant, lazy professor who doesn’t turn in his evaluations on time and sometimes forgets to meet with “tutees,” receives a letter from the college president informing him that his contract won’t be renewed at Jocelyn College.

Hen is not as broken-hearted as you would think.  Instead, he goes into battle mode, plotting and scheming to save his job.  This is the end of the line for him: he has been fired from so many colleges and universities that there’s no going back, and he must support his wife and five children. He considers this job beneath him (he is the only Ph.D. at Jocelyn College), but he got the job only because two of his friends asked the college president for a favor.  

And yet it is simply unimaginable that Hen would get fired!  Jocelyn College might be a step above “Drake and Montana,” he muses, but isn’t he the best professor here (perhaps on his good days!)? Well, this is comic hubris, but it is true that some of his colleagues are similarly lax, and don’t get fired.

Hen is a comic character, but he is not a sympathetic character. The effect of his campaign on his supporters , especially Domna, a new instructor, almost witchily alters her character. She fibbed, almost lied, during a meeting about Henry with Maynard, the college president. And she wonders coldly why she didn’t tell Maynard that Henry’s confession of party membership implicated Maynard as well in these times.

McCarthy writes, “As soon as this devilish idea reached her full consciousness, she expelled it as wicked and useless – it could only end in ineffectuality or in both men’s losing their jobs. Yet the fact that it could have proposed itself to her so readily, easily, and naturally gave her a disturbing shock.”

Hen, of course, has no such doubts. Unlike stumbling, sweet-natured Jim in Kingsley Amis’ academic satire, Lucky Jim, McCarthy’s Hen, a famous Joyce scholar who also writes for The Nation, has few moments of sweetness.   Hen is a trickster, like so many comic heroes.

And yet I am surprised to say that, on a third reading of The Groves of Academe, I dislike Hen less.  His actions at the college are still despicable, but he is a good husband and father, and has good friends at Jocelyn College.

On this reading, I also find that Hen’s politics and philosophy are not entirely wrong, and it’s touching the way his colleagues support him.  One woman even resigns her job.  Pity the woman who resigns her job for a trickster.

During the McCarthy hearings, leftist writers, actors, and professors, and of course others lived in fear.   Hen hints to his colleagues that he is being fired for his Communist affiliations:  he has in fact never been a member of the party, though has attended some Communist lectures.  His colleagues are so indignant about the state of intolerance in the U.S. that they rally round him and work to topple the college president’s vendetta. Hen also claims that his wife is so ill she might die from the shock. It never occurs to them that Hen might be lying, or at least exaggerating.

My guess is that some people at Bard College might have been offended by this satire, but probably most of them laughed. However, McCarthy made a lot of enemies through her writing, and she burned a lot of bridges. Perhaps this wasn’t a bridge she minded burning.

In the City, Part 1:  Initiation

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It’s not as hard as you might think, living in a city. You were blissful in the university town where you loved your studies and made many friends, but you were all kicked out en masse after you finished your degrees.

 You donned a smart dress, or a suit (it was the age of suits), flats instead of walking shoes, flew to a strange city, took a taxi, and finally ended up in a headmaster’s office for the interview.  We chatted about whatever popped into this charming man’s mind. (Hint: it wasn’t movies! He had never heard of Half Moon Street, Slapshot, or the screwball comedy classic, The More the Merrier.)  The assistant head plied me with tea in a china cup and saucer, and gave me two Pepperidge Farm cookies.  And then they hired me for the job. 

In this beautiful city, I went to art museums, saw Aristophanes’ The Birds at a theater, frequented a bookstore and record shop near my apartment and nerdily attended a lecture on Hesiod.

Anyway, my husband (then boyfriend) found a job in another city, where we could live more cheaply. After we got married by a Justice of the Peace – it was moving, because it was just us and the words – we drove the Ryder truck to our new home.

Having lived in cities for many years, my husband was pragmatic about the ups and downs.  At that time, the supermarkets were closed on Sunday. This was, indeed, a strange custom for a city.

 I took the optimistic view of life in this city.  “Well, it’s gray.  I like gray.  Do you suppose it’s like Seattle?”  My husband roared with laughter.  “Good one!” He may have thought I was joking…

And then I decided to get tough about it. “At least all the s___ is on the surface,”  I said daringly.

He put a wrestler’s hold on me before turning it into a hug.”Well, I would say there are sewers, too.”

Everything was perfect at first.  We loved our duplex,  were able to walk to the grocery store, and the lake was only a mile away.

And then the alley took on a new life.

Every night, night after night, people partied in the alley and took drugs.   I have trouble sleeping anyway, and the parties kept me awake. I got up one night while my husband slept to ask if they could take the party elsewhere.

I’ve always been a peaceful person. but there are limits. I started to cry as I made my request.

A thin, careworn man with dilated eyes muttered, “Sorry, dear.  You look like you could use some sleep.” They duly left their “camp” and went somewhere else. Whenever I saw him afterwards, we nodded Hello. One day, we sat together on the bus, and told each other our stories. He was an emergency room doctor. “It pays well and no one wants to work there.” And then he looked at my tired eyes. “I advise you to get more sleep.’

He was right. Sleep matters! My job was exhausting. I loved the work, but felt I did nothing but commute back and forth (two trains, a bus, and a brisk walk),. 

And things changed: I found other work that I loved. That is the key to happiness at certain stages of life, and I look back at that time fondly.