December 14, 2009
Monday

This piece was named a Best of Holidailies. Thank you, readers!

There are vibes out there, I sometimes say. Someone I haven’t thought of in ages will make an appearance either in my conscious mind or my unconscious. Maybe it’s a song I hear frequently or a memory I revisit often that elicits, for one moment, an association I do not usually make. I call it the third tier of memory, and once it has been accessed at the spot that person occupies, I suddenly find them all about me, as if they had never left.

I’ve been more concerned about the clutter in my house of late. (I blame an episode of Hoarders that I fell into a few weeks ago while I was eating lunch.) Last week I made a list of useless objects that I cannot bring myself to part with. Yesterday I read a story in the paper about decluttering your house. It was in the section called “Your Health,” and it featured a woman who lives in my township who had worked with a professional organizer to redesign her environment, now that her nest is empty and her needs and her wants have changed.

I know this woman. She is a friend of mine. I have been to her house and, seriously, I never thought of it as cluttered. Now, I guess, it is less so. The organizer told her to ask some questions of every object she handled, for example: Do I love this? When was the last time I used this? Is this object making my life better? Even something that doesn’t take up a lot of space and isn’t in the way can take up psychic energy that is then not available for something else.

As I read the piece, I immediately thought of two scarves I have, neither of which I ever use and both of which reside in the top drawer of my dresser, under some scarves and stoles I actually do wear from time to time.

One is a blue and white silk square that I got in 1975. It had been featured in the October issue of Vogue, as an accessory for a light blue wool A-line dress with three-quarter-length sleeves and a wide boat neck, shown over smart blue pumps with a scalloped quarter and vamp. The outfit, bought at John Wanamaker and paid for by my mother, became part of my trousseau. Such an old-fashioned word, that. But I was getting married the next month and I would have (and my mother would provide for me) all the trappings, including the going-away outfit (even though we only went to the Hotel Hershey ten miles away for the weekend), and the monogrammed stationery with my new initials. (As you might guess, I didn’t use all the stationery in the seven years I used the initials. The box with the engraving plate and the leftovers became a Useless Object that I had no trouble parting with.)

The silk chiffon oblong seen at left was a gift in 1966 from Susie P., a girl I’d gone to high school with and who was part of my close circle of friends there. In the fall of 1965 she and I were classmates again at the local community college.

Harrisburg Area Community College was a start-up school, or an upstart. It opened in the fall of 1964, thus Susie and I and all the others were members of only the second graduating class. HACC was using temporary buildings while the permanent campus was being built.

Two classes that nearly every student had to take — Music Appreciation and Art Appreciation — were taught not in the 19th-century vintage buildings along the river that had once been a private boarding school but at the city high school about six blocks away. The instructors were regular faculty members at the high school, and the classes couldn’t start until 4:00, when the high school day ended. We met twice a week for an hour and a half each session.

Susie lived on the other side of town. Her family did not own a car, and she took the city bus everywhere she wanted to go. The bus stopped just outside her house, and it was an easy, if somewhat tedious, trip west to downtown, where she would transfer to a route that would take her north, uptown, pretty much a straight right angle trip. There was no bus, however, to go the six blocks from the college campus to the high school’s.

I lived across the river, where city bus service was spotty and getting out to HACC would have been an ordeal requiring careful timing, a walk of about a mile from my house and then back, and long waits for the right bus. My parents provided a car which, my father reminded me more than once, was strictly for getting to school and back and was not for gallivanting.

Taking your friend to class at a remote location that you were going to anyway did not constitute gallivanting, and I was happy to assist Susie this way. As the fall deepened into winter it was fully dark when we left class. Susie would have had me drop her near the college campus so she could take the bus out to her house, but I usually drove her all the way home. Sure, it was out of my way, but I liked her company, and on nights that it was windy or raining, I knew she was grateful.

I never asked her for money. My parents paid for the car and the gas, and all I was spending was time. Just after Christmas, in January when our first semester of Music Appreciation ended, Susie gave me the scarf, as a thank-you gift for saving her two long walks twice a week for four months.

I’ve had that scarf for almost forty-four years. I can’t tell you the last time I wore it. It’s too small to wrap or drape in ways that are fashionable now. So is the blue one. Because they had come to mind, I got them out last night. The blue one reflects exactly the woman I was in 1975. I wore a lot of reddish purplish blues, not exactly a good choice for my ruddy Irish skin tone, and decorated my house with it. The effect was a certain chilliness that colored both my environment and my personality.

The tawny hues of Susie’s scarf are not ones I would have been drawn to in 1966, although I know I wore the piece from time to time, and have a similarly-hued silk square with very 1960s yellow daisies against a sienna and cinnamon ground that I acquired not long afterward. They are, however, colors I would choose today. We often choose gifts that look more like ourselves than the person on whom we are bestowing them. Susie must have liked the colors in the scarf. Maybe she even had a quiet premonition about the person I would become.

These are some of the last thoughts I had as I drifted off to sleep last night. This morning I opened the newspaper and found, on the obituary page, the notice of the death of Susie’s father.

As I said, there are vibes out there.

For many years I ran a popular project in my composition classes. It was a letter-writing assignment, and one of the suggestions was to think of a gift you once received that you particularly liked, and to write the giver an additional note of thanks.

It’s time, definitely, to write to Susie. And, if I go to the funeral, as I sometimes do when a classmate’s parent dies, I’ll be wearing the scarf.

 

From the Archives
December 14, 2004 — The Demon Baker: My sister took this picture in 1960 with(we think) a Kodak Brownie camera, a gift from a family friend (again, a guess, based on a short walk through the labyrinths of memory). She was in fifthgrade and I was in eighth. We lived in half a double house on Fifth Street in Harrisburg. John Kennedy had just been elected president, and we saw record snowfall that season. Behind Mother is our 1958 two-tone gray Ford Fairlane, she is wearing a black Persian lamb coat that she loved, and she is smiling.

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