Grapes ripening on the vine

Just like it takes many grapes to make a good wine, it took many people to turn me into the person I am today, not that I am comparing myself to a rich Bordeaux or a Châteauneuf du Pape, although if I were a wine, because of my hair colour I would be red. More likely I am a regular gamay or côte de rhone.
While walking through the lush countryside this morning, I stared thinking about all the people who had great influence on me emotionally, intellectually, professionally. (click on the photo to see the grapes)
Here’s my list:

Florence Stockbridge Sargent (grandmother)
From The Women in My Life Published in The Circle Continues
No one, least of all me, knows why I called my grandmother “Dar,” but soon
the world followed, even her friends from childhood.
She never minded being renamed in her fifties.
When she baked a cake, she used all the batter,
but gave me the spoon to lick.
She read me The Bobbsey Twins and made mudpies that looked good enough to eat.
A high school drop out she prodded me through algebra, tested my Latin verbs,
knew more history than the substitute teacher.
She was a New England Yankee:
right was right,
wrong was wrong.
When she had eye surgery, she didn’t tell the doctor
The anesthesia hadn’t worked,
Thinking it should hurt.
And when she lost two children, she bore that hurt too.
My ethics and strength come from her, and when I am scared or not sure what to do I draw her memory to me.

Dr. Helen Zimmermann (teacher)
For three years I sat in her biology, chemistry and anatomy class and although I don’t remember her teaching when I got to college biology I aced the course without studying. Somewhere in between the stories she magically imparted knowledge. She spoke of saving the environment and over population before it was ever thought of. At some level I picked up that it was okay to go your own way and to become the best you can to be.
I toyed with being a nurse, but the pull of working with words was too strong along with the fact that I couldn’t clean up cat vomit without getting sick myself.

Leonard D’Orlando (teacher)
Besides increasing my already existing love of reading, he taught be critical analysis skills. “Nothing is black or white, only shades of grey,” and that I had better know why something was good or bad.

Fred Cole (editor)
He was my first editor when I wrote for the Lawrence Daily Eagle at 16. He was a Spencer Tracey wantabe, with a growl and a gold medal grumph. He also defended me. I had taken a photo of the doctor who was to do the annual Paul Revere ride. The doctor than phoned the paper complaining of being too busy to show up for a kid with a Brownie camera. When the photo appeared front page, the doctor wanted a copy. Fred carefully put it in an envelope, addressed it, put a stamp on it and mailed it—in the waste paper basket. He taught me how to write a news story.

Mardy Willson (friend)
This year we will celebrate 50 years of friendship without an angry word, brought together by a boy who dated both of us. We decided we liked each other better than him. Wherever he may be we are grateful.
We shared so much.
From her I learned to laugh more, but as we bungled our way through life the biggest lesson I learned from her was that as we made our mistakes and often didn’t agree with the actions the other took, that was opinion NEVER judgment of the person making them.
I’ve said that she held the glue pot as I pieced myself together after my divorce.
Her father stood in for my father whenever necessary, her mother’s corn chowder was the WASP answer to Jewish chicken soup, and one of my greatest joys now is her happiness.

Si Gardner (friend)
My marriage would not have survived our tour of duty in Germany had it not been for Si. My ex I were too immature and not able to communicate. I’d imagined an intellectual life, him as musician me as writer, loving and laughing—he pictured a wife who cooked and cleaned and my ineptness stood out from the time I sewed on his new won stripes on his Army uniform upside down. It should have been funny, but it was a crisis followed by many others. Si used to inspect my flat to make sure it was clean enough to satisfy my ex, (okay it was pre feminist days) warn me of bad days at the base. But in our friendship, he taught me more of the world, than growing up in a sheltered New England environment ever could have.

Dr. Patricia Goler (history teacher)
She was a lame, skinny African-American who took over a substitute class and lectured for an hour without a note or a pause. She ran a program every Christmas where students bought presents for a poor family. Even though most of us were struggling financially, she taught it was important to share what we have.
Her intellectual rigour set a standard. If nothing else, she taught me to consider the source, which is probably what makes me such a sceptic and news junkie today. It is her training that led me to search out the news from non-American sources before coming to a conclusion.

Dr. Ralph Golding (psychologist)
Okay, I’ve been shrunk. I had failed at two marriages. Of the second I say I divorced a dead man I was never married to in the first place. I realised I needed to get my life under control.
Ralph’s method was not to go into toilet training but more pragmatic, almost a Neuro-Linguistic Programming. That was yesterday, what did you do about before, what would you do the same or differently… Mostly he taught me it was okay to be myself, for if I pretended to be someone else for acceptance, it was the fake person, not the real one that was accepted.

Walter Masson (professional father)
He was quiet, loved gardening, never understood why I wanted a career rather than to be a wife and mother, but as long as I did he would teach me everything he knew, and he did. But his method of teaching was to let me experiment myself. Once he had been in charge of the Sears Roebuck catalogue. When I went to work for him, I had no idea of office politics, and in between testing lists and headlines, I learned to manoeuvre my way through the quagmire of the organization. And he taught me how to do it without sacrificing my ethics.

Mike Welch (professional, friend)
We started writing when a conference his organization was running that I wanted to attend was in state that hadn’t ratified the ERA. I complained and still went and am glad I did. It began a long association. When his career changed, I wrote for his paper, something I considered an honour to be able to do, and when I was developing www.cunewswire.com his suggestions were invaluable. His slogan “CU Executives Too Busy to Read Read CU Newswire” is on all our printed materials. His comment my headlines could be better is right on, and is still my weak point, but I every now and then I think, “Mike would like this,” although more often, “he would say I could do better.”
We exchange ideas on subjects too numerous to mention, but he has only reinforced my belief you can lead an ethical life and be successful.

Llara (daughter, friend)
Usually we think the parent teaches the child, but the child also teaches the parent. When she was born I was armed with lessons from Haim Ginnott and Kahil Gibran’s

Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

Those words I put up on her nursery wall and have tried, not always successfully to practice them.
I thought I was giving her the stable two-parent home, I didn’t have. WRONG.
Within weeks of her birth my marriage had ended making normal post partum depression seem like a trip to Disneyland.
Somehow Dar’s force fought its way through my pain, and gave me strength. But Llara helped reawaken the joy I once felt and learned I could feel again.
It might be as simple as looking at toads on our tour of the neighbourhood. The toads fascinated her, and it was required stop, even before she could talk. She would sit and stare at them and I would see things I never saw before. Those toads are a symbol for all the things I have seen through her eyes that I never would have seen had she not come into her life.
Because she existed I had to work harder at being a better person.
Now that she is an adult, a separate person, a person who must live her life with her choices, she still teaches me things.

Of course there are many, many others to have been part of my life that have influenced me, an entire vineyard, enough to provide wine for the rest of my life.