THE HOLIDAY PAJAMAS AND FRANKIE AVALON

This work is copyrighted. Other than brief excerpts on search engines or links, it may not be copied or excerpted in any form on any type of media. Except for purposes of locating in search engines, this post and this blog may not be used in any way by AI (artificial intelligence), including excerpting, scanning, summarizing, or training, without the author's permission.

 

by MARY ELIZABETH (LEACH) RAINES, © 2024

“Ann?” calls a woman’s voice from outside. “Ann, are you there?”

“Hold on. I’m slow,” I reply as I shuffle to the door of my trailer.

I don’t go by Ann. I have never gone by Ann. I don’t even like the name Ann. Okay, yes, it’s my legal first name, but from the time I was born, I’ve only been called by my middle name, Marie.

This does not matter to Amazon, Verizon, Medicare, Social Security, hospitals, offices, and the people on the other end of the line in overseas call centers who only answer the phone many long minutes after I have been placed on a hold by a recording telling me that they are experiencing larger call volumes than usual and how much they value me as a customer. To all of them, I am Ann.

I continue to the front door, holding onto my walker for balance. When I open it, a chunky blonde woman stands there. She forces out a patronizing smile.

“Ann?”

Should I even bother telling her what my real name is? No, no need. I will never see her again. I nod my head yes.

“Happy Holidays, Ann,” she says, pleased with herself, and hands me a package. It is wrapped in cheap red paper that has reindeer faces on it and the words, “Jolly Holidays.” Both she and the wrapping paper are careful to avoid using the word Christmas.

“My goodness. What is this?” I pretend to be surprised.

“It’s your holiday gift from the Senior Ride Center!”

She continues to squeeze out a smile. It reminds me of a beauty contestant who has just lost the contest.

“Well my goodness, how very nice,” I say, my voice quavering.

From the way she dresses and the newly-waxed Lexus I see over her shoulder in my carport, she is someone who has money, lots of money. I ask anyway. Maybe it’s a little bit mean of me.

“Do you work at the Senior Ride Center, dear?” I ask.

“Oh, no.” She seems both amazed and horrified at the question, and is eager to set me straight. “No, no, no. I’m a volunteer from the Women’s Club.”

She explains further about the Women’s Club, speaking to me in a slow, condescending manner as if she were addressing a toddler or someone who isn’t very smart, but I have to hand it to her: she keeps on smiling. I smile back at her, behaving as though I enjoy being patronized and wouldn’t have it any other way. We are both being incredible fakes.

The Senior Ride Center arranges rides to medical appointments for people like me, old folks without money who are unable to get around on their own any longer. Each year as December approaches, they mail form letters to all of us seniors. These letters are printed in blue ink using a cheerful cursive font so that it almost-but-not-quite looks as if they have been personally hand-written.

“Dear Ann,” mine begins. The letter amiably asks me to choose which gift I’d like from the below list by checking off the appropriate box and mailing the form back to Center. It tells me that if I prefer, I can call the office with my selection. The list gives me the choice of receiving an afghan, soap and shampoo, a Christmas—er, sorry—holiday wreath, pajamas, or slippers.  It also has a line asking if there is anything else that I need.

To save the money of using a stamp, I call the office and say that I would enjoy receiving a pair of pajamas please. Another pajama set is always welcome. I add that I also need a new sports bra

Here’s what I’d really like: an all-expense-paid trip to a warm beach. I like the beach. It brings back memories. Or a subscription to satellite TV, because that’s gotten super expensive. Or, if that’s too much to ask, a bottle of wine, because who can afford wine any more. But I settle for the pajamas. And a sports bra.

“What size pajamas, Ann?” asks the unfriendly female who answers my call.

“Oh, gee, my size? I don’t know. It wavers between an extra large and an XX,” I say, rambling. “Or maybe just a regular large. An L. Depending on whether the pajamas run big or not. Because, you know, if they’re made in one of those countries where the women are tiny, what they think of as large turns out to be…. ”

She interrupts me and snaps, “Just choose a size. I can’t write all that down on the form.”

Oh, dear. I’ve talked too much. You do that sometimes when you’re lonely. I should have known better. Especially with this woman. There are several different people who answer the phones at the Senior Ride Center. Whenever I call and get her, I have to remind myself to keep it short, even abrupt. She always acts as though my requests are huge impositions, as if I am being a pest, and I inevitably feel let down after I’m done booking a ride with her.

“Just choose one or the other,” she now says impatiently. “Quickly. I don’t have all day. What size?”

Without time to think, I say XX, and immediately regret it, but she has already hung up. I feel depressed. Happy holidays to me.

Back to the door: despite the red paper wrapping with the reindeer faces, I of course know exactly what is in the package that is being thrust at me. My XX pajamas. And my sports bra. Except when I open it later on, there is no bra. And the pajamas are way too big.

I continue the feeble old lady act with the stocky blonde at the door. It’s expected of me.

“Why, thank you, dear,” I say in a (genuinely) wobbly voice, leaning over my walker and taking the package from her with a trembling hand that is, always to my surprise when I look at it, full of veins and criss-cross creases and brown age spots. What else can I say to her? “Hey, man, that’s so groovy!” In fact, while the pajamas will be useful, this gift is not groovy.

It’s funny, putting on such an old lady show. I’m quite good at it, but I SO don’t feel like an old lady. No, other than the fact that I am full of wrinkles, and my hair has become white and cottony, and my body hurts, and I’m lonely because everyone I know has died, and I can’t walk on my own any longer (the sports bra being only for support)—apart from those things, I don’t feel much differently than I did when I was young and pretty and everyone called me Marie, because nobody had computers then that decided what your name should be.

I didn’t have any money in those days either, so I couldn’t afford college, but what I wound up doing was even better. I moved to L.A. where for a while I worked as a go-go dancer in a nightclub, wearing a miniskirt and thick black eyeliner and little white boots. Yes, that was me doing the twist in that go-go cage. Boy, could I ever move! I loved the dancing. My legs, now such swollen stiff stubs, were absolutely terrific and my smile was genuine.

After a few months, I advanced to being an extra in the teen-surfer-beach movies that were popular back then. The pay wasn’t much, but it was a really cool job. I had so much fun! Think about it: going to work consisted of putting on a bikini, teasing my hair up in a beehive—hair that did not then look like white cotton candy—and wiggling my hips as wildly as I could to rock ’n roll hits. I wasn’t a star, of course. We girls were just backdrops for Annette Funicello, and I was only one of a throng of a couple of dozen other cute kids, all pretending that we were having a great time. For the most part, we were. On our down time, when they were putting up the lighting and stuff, we goofed off a lot. And when the cameras rolled, that was exciting. I thought of myself as an actress.

I never spoke with Annette, but once I was in a short scene with Frankie Avalon, who spent some time chatting with me between takes. He was awfully nice, but of course he was just being friendly as he was already married. There were lots of others, though, who weren’t. I flirted shamelessly with the boys on the set, and sometimes wound up bringing this or that guy back to my bed when the film shoot was over. Once I brought two of them home with me. I was good in bed. Who, looking at me now, would ever imagine that?

And guess what? I never ever wore pajamas. I didn’t even own pajamas. No, if I slept in anything, it would be in my little bikini bottoms. My favorite pair had a small fabric honeybee placed in a prominent spot. When the censorship people would not allow them to be worn in the film, the costumer gave them to me, saying that they were no longer of any use to her. I still have them.

It wasn’t only in bed that I was good. Obviously, I used to be very good at dancing, and, at least in my imagination, acting.

I can no longer dance, and quite sadly, I haven’t entertained a man in my bed for years, but what I am still good at is acting. So now, in front of this woman at my door, I act as though I am feeble and grateful, and that is, okay, not entirely an act, because I am actually feeble. And I do try my best to be grateful. Beats being a sourpuss. Still, it’s not me, not the real me.

Anyhow, I continue my fake smile, throwing in a dash of humility as a bonus, and act as if receiving this package is the highlight of my year. Pajamas. What fun!

On an impulse, I say to the blonde Bearer of Gifts, “Hey, do you remember Frankie Avalon?”

I say this because I have suddenly gotten the urge to share that part of my biography with her. It’s my claim to fame, after all. Maybe she’ll tell the people at the Senior Ride Center, and they will be impressed, and they will stop treating me like a name on a list, and start calling me Marie instead of Ann.

She looks blank and shakes her head no. Her smile is starting to grow limp now, as her task has been accomplished. She says a brisk “Goodbye, Ann,” and hastily turns to leave. Christmas—er, I mean the holiday isn’t for another week, but she is very busy. She’s done her good deed and she can cross me off her list. With my little burst of enthusiasm smothered, hoping to save face, I revert back to being the fretful old lady.

“Take care pulling out of the driveway, dear,” I call after her. She nods as she hurries away.

I go to my dresser. Hidden away in the corner of a drawer are those bikini bottoms with the honeybee from my dancing days. I pull them out to look at them. When it is my time to go—and that will be soon—I would love to have enough nerve to ask to be buried in them. But because I currently wear an L or sometimes even an XX, I guess that they would be far too small. I sure hope they don’t bury me in my pajamas.

***

HARLAN ELLISON AND OUR BIG DATE

This work is copyrighted. Other than brief excerpts on search engines or links, it may not be copied or excerpted in any form on any type of media. Except for purposes of locating in search engines, this post and this blog may not be used in any way by AI (artificial intelligence), including excerpting, scanning, summarizing, or training, without the author's permission.

by MARY ELIZABETH (LEACH) RAINES, ©2024

~“People like you are the reason they find the dismembered bodies of young women buried in back yards.”~

BUT LET ME go back. It was the early 1970s. His award-winning writing was groundbreaking: unrestrained, brazen, and quirky. He told stories that the rest of us scarcely dared think about, much less put into print. His visions alternately filled me with dread and tantalized me. I became a fan.

I was particularly impressed by one morbid tale he wrote called “Repent, Harlequin!” said the Ticktockman. It was about a rebel in a future society where punctuality was demanded of its citizens. Anyone who broke the law by being late for something would have his life shortened by exactly that amount of time. The worst offenders—people who were habitually late and ran out of minutes—were executed.

It was obvious that Harlequin was a play on words of his own name, Harlan. As in Harlan Ellison. I related to the statement his story made, for I was myself a chronically late person, one who had been judged unfairly for it all of my life. The rigidly punctual segment of our population has always self-righteously maintained that tardiness stems from a selfish lack of consideration. As one of the condemned, I’ve never been given the chance to protest that this is not true. I simply lacked and still lack any sense of time. In my older age, I have learned to curb my natural inclinations so that I’m now able to skid breathlessly and just barely on time into appointments and concerts and lunches, but doing so remains an oppressive burden.

Here is an aside that is part of this story:
Around the same time that I discovered Ellison’s books, because my own writing only pulled in pennies instead of the dreamed-of buckets of dollars, I got a job with a major technological company in a large, windowless, fluorescent-lit office building where I sat in a cubicle and fought off yawns as I scanned microfilm. Rather than walls, partitions divided our dreary work spaces. I was perpetually late to work (although in fairness to the company, this flaw also worked in the reverse: I was late going home as well).

After a bit, I devised a sneaky tactic to avoid being reprimanded. As soon as I entered the building, I would take off my coat, and when I reached the partition that separated the hallway from my particular cubicle, I would proceed to fling both it and my purse over the top. Then I would saunter casually into the department where I worked as though I’d been there for hours and had just taken a bathroom break.

I thought that I’d fooled everyone until one day when I accidentally arrived exactly on time. As I entered the office space, all of my co-workers stood up from their desks and applauded me.

You can see why the story about the Harlequin made me feel all warm and fuzzy. Ellison got me.

I proceeded to devour every book he wrote or edited. In some of them, interspersed between the tales, he rambled on about his personal life, loquaciously sharing his opinions about people, politics, and the world in general. Moderation was nonexistent. He was scathingly critical, even pugilistic, in his assessments of those who he believed had wrong ideas or had wronged him. I was impressed. In my 20s and with the imprudent arrogance of youth, I saw his contentious verbiage as courageous truth-telling.

Beyond all of that, he sometimes wrote in a horny way about sex and the women to whom he was attracted. I found that aspect of him especially titillating. Scrutinizing the photos of him on the back covers of his books, I came to the conclusion that he looked pretty good. I began to imagine myself as being one of those women he liked.

And this was how I developed a reader’s crush on Harlan Ellison.

At the time I didn’t even know how many awards he’d won, how incredibly prolific he was, or that he’d authored amazing scripts for TV shows like the original Star Trek and The Twilight Zone. And The Flying Nun. That last one still makes me scratch my head in wonder, although apparently Ellison claimed only to have written an episode for that inane show in hopes of getting a date with its then-youthful star, Sally Field. She and I are close in age, and in my younger years some people believed that I had a slight resemblance to the actress. Had I known about his attraction to her, it would have heightened my growing but ill-fated enthusiasm for the author.

Back to the windowless company with the partitions: I had suggested numerous times to my fellow employees—the ones who’d applauded me—that the company ought to give us regular coffee breaks, because back in the 70s in that east-coast state breaks were not yet legally required. I even taped onto a common wall a little cartoon I’d drawn of a grumpy girl with her fist raised and the caption, “We want coffee breaks!” It wasn’t a big deal to me. I’d only drawn it because I was bored.

The sign was angrily torn down the next day, a scowling underling shook her finger at me while using the word “inappropriate,” and I was then hauled into the office of the top boss, where he explained to me that they couldn’t give us coffee breaks because some people don’t like coffee. Shortly afterward I was laid off. I realize now that they must have been terrified of me, mistakenly believing that I was some kind of a union organizer. Which, if you watch old movies, is another sort-of connection with Sally Field. Yet a third is that years later I was a background actor on a short-lived TV show in which she starred, although we never spoke. I did have a nice chat with her look-alike stand-in, however. We background folk used to say that Sally Field’s stand-in looked more like the real Sally Field than Sally Field did. But I digress.

I didn’t mind losing that job one bit. The severance and unemployment checks I received permitted me to do something daring. I decided to attend my very first writer’s conference. It was going to be held in Santa Barbara, California. I had never been to California, so I had the added adventure of driving across the country in my Plymouth Barracuda. Immediately after the conference ended, I’d been invited to housesit for three weeks for a family in North Hollywood to take care of their dog while they were on vacation.

And here is where Ellison begins to re-enter the story. A lot of famous people spoke at that writer’s conference, perhaps the most impressive collection of authors ever gathered, from Ray Bradbury to Maya Angelou. I had the improbable fantasy that even though he was not a scheduled speaker, perhaps Harlan Ellison would drop by. He did not, but I wasn’t that far off. Several notables did, in fact, drop by, and I schmoozed with a few of them…but alas, no Ellison. During and immediately after the writer’s conference, I entered into a dating frenzy. H.E. could eat his heart out. I didn’t forget about my crush on him, though.

He’d written in one of his numerous rants that as far as women were concerned, he was “easy.” And guess what? When I was housesitting after the conference, I discovered that his phone number was actually listed in the local phone book! I decided that I would ask him out on a date.

In that year, 1975, it was still the norm for guys to do the asking, so this was going to be incredibly bold of me. I reasoned, however, that it was the only avenue left open for meeting him. I couldn’t wait to chat with him and probe that incredible mind of his. He was between marriages then, and once we connected, he would see that we had a great deal in common—heck, we were both writers—and he would certainly be just as fascinated by me as I was with him. Who knows? Our date might even wind up being romantic!

There was another strong leg to my fantasy. It seemed to me as though the best writers had their own network, a kind of secret club. The conference I’d attended did not disavow me of that impression. I felt that I belonged in that network; it was time for the world to take notice of my writing. Ellison could give me my badly needed foothold. It was a secondary but still powerful impetus to meet this man. Who was, incidentally, thirteen years older than me.

I took note of Ellison’s address, which was in the phone book along with his phone number. He did not live far from where I was staying. I didn’t want to be weird (the word “stalker” was not yet in use), so I scrupulously avoided driving past his house ahead of time, but I did scope out the neighborhood to find a suitable place for Our Big Date. I finally settled upon the perfect spot, a quaint German restaurant on a secluded wooded hill with a water wheel. I went inside to check out the menu and the ambiance. There were candlelit tables, dark panels, and a big fireplace. It was the perfect setting for my new friendship—and probable romance!—with Harlan Ellison. The menu was pricey, but hey, I still had some cash from my unemployment checks. The investment would be worth it, as I expected that this was going to be one life-changing night.

With the groundwork now established, the time came for me to make my call. I had nervously rehearsed what I would say. I was cute enough in those days and men seemed to like me. Still, any confidence I displayed was faked. I was not the least bit sophisticated or self-assured—quite the opposite—so it took me a longer time than most women would need to work up the courage to make the phone call. Even though I anticipated rejection, I finally dialed Ellison’s number. To my absolute amazement, he answered immediately.

“I’m a fan of yours,” I mumbled, “and I wonder if you would let me take you out to dinner.” He was friendly and, just as he’d said, easy. Our conversation went smoothly and we agreed to meet at his house a few days hence.

When the night of Our Big Date arrived, having made myself look as good as possible, I started to freak out. I’d assured Ellison that I wasn’t a wacko, but boy, I suddenly felt that way! My hands became super shaky, and worse, since I was already a blusher, I knew that in this acutely self-conscious state my face would turn an embarrassing scarlet the moment that I saw him. I’ve never been much of a drinker, but I realized in my panic that I needed to do something to calm down. My solution was to drink a glass of wine. To my relief, it did exactly what it was supposed to do, and took away the jitters.

As I drove to his house in my Barracuda, I saw that I was going to be a little bit late. I blamed it on pausing for that glass of wine, but in truth, I probably would’ve been late regardless. I didn’t let it bother me. It wasn’t by much, and, I mean, he wrote that story about the Ticktockman, right?

With mounting joy, I turned onto his street, my dream ready to come true. Lo and behold, Harlan Ellison was actually standing on the curb in front of his house, waiting for me! Before my heart could start thumping, however, I saw that something was amiss. He was tapping his foot impatiently with his arms folded across his chest, and he was not smiling. I quickly parked and came out of my car to greet him.

“Hello,” I said jovially, introducing myself.

“You’re late,” he snapped. “I made restaurant reservations for us, but now we’re not going to make it in time.” Heaving an annoyed sigh, he turned away from me. “Come inside.” I followed meekly.

It got worse. Entering his house, I saw a nondescript younger couple. The man was introduced as another writer, someone I’d never heard of. He seemed to be an Ellison sycophant. The woman, who scarcely spoke, was the guy’s girlfriend. Or maybe his wife. Nobody explained to me why they were there, and they did not appear to be leaving.

I really hadn’t been that late, but Ellison continued to whine about missing the restaurant—an establishment of his choosing, even though I’d said in my phone call that I had a place I wanted to take him. My dreams of sitting in romantic candlelight across the table from this glamorous writer in the quaint restaurant that I’d so carefully scoped out burst into a sodden puddle.

Without consulting me, Ellison took command and decided that we would ride in his car to go to another restaurant. All four of us. The two men took the front seat, and I was left with no choice but to climb into the back with the quiet girlfriend. I looked dejectedly at my parked Barracuda as we drove past it. I had put a lot of effort into cleaning up my usually messy vehicle for Our Big Date.

On the ride, Ellison finally relaxed a little bit and, glancing at me over his shoulder, said, “Tell me about yourself.” Other than scolding me for being late, this was the first time that my dream date had actually addressed me. I said awkwardly, “Oh, gosh, where to begin,” and then froze. The audience of three waited coldly to assess me. Here was my big chance, an opening, the beginning I so desperately wanted, but I felt too flustered to think straight. I needed to say something, and quickly, so what was the first thing I told this unwelcoming, keenly observant, opinionated Jewish man? I started out biographically, stating with forced cheerfulness that I was the daughter of a Protestant minister. Why did I say that?! His response was a discouraging silence. From the back seat I continued to chatter in a fruitless attempt to rescue myself. The more I spoke, the worse it became.

Somewhere along the way, I did manage to mention rather proudly that I was also a writer. He remained mute, expressing no curiosity at all. Next I said how, at the recent writer’s conference I’d attended, I had met one of the top editors at Doubleday—the same group that published his stories!—and related buoyantly that said editor had invited me to send him my work. This was an anecdote that I had planned well in advance to reveal, imagining that it would boost my value to Ellison, who himself would inevitably ask to read some of the material I’d written, thus cementing my entry into the longed-for writer’s network. After a pause, Ellison finally responded. He stated in an unkind way that Doubleday was never going to publish me, and implied that the editor had only wanted to get laid. Okay, yes, said editor had imbibed a few drinks when he put forth his offer, and Ellison was doubtlessly correct, but pointing it out made me feel small and worthless. Conversation between us pretty much faded after that. It turned out to be the most I would get a chance to say for the remainder of the night.

When we finally arrived at the restaurant, I was dismayed to see that it was just a narrow, dismally-lit hole in the wall with smudged windows looking out at the traffic on the street, and a few decaying wooden booths. The four of us crowded into one of them. Even though it was dinnertime, we were the only customers.

Once we had settled into the booth, my date eased up a bit. This was to continue throughout the night: he’d be hard, then soft, then harder, then softer. He and I were sitting next to one another, and as we ate our nondescript dinner, Ellison did what men do when they are probing the possibilities of an encounter, and pressed his arm and hand suggestively against mine to test the waters.

I did not respond. Here’s why. My dreamboat had turned out to be much shorter and smaller in stature than I had imagined, and while that was not in itself cause for cancellation, nothing about him physically appealed to me. He was not anywhere as nice-looking as he’d appeared to be on his book covers, and, as I’ve mentioned, he was older than me. It showed. He had dark circles under his eyes, his complexion was paste-colored, I didn’t care for his build or his hair or his speaking voice, and beyond those superficial things, we had no vibe. None whatsoever. Zero. Naturally, our initial meeting and our subsequent lack of even slightly friendly conversation didn’t help. Any romantic interlude was out of the question. It astounded me that he was even bothering to make a pass at me. I remained polite, but I pulled away from his arm, ignoring his nudges.

After the meal, for which he at least had the decency to pay, he shepherded our quartet back to his house where—he had already decided—we would watch a movie on his TV. While the possibility of a romantic dalliance with Ellison had fizzled into the same puddle of futility into which my German-restaurant dreams had sunk, I still held faint hopes of creating a writer’s friendship with him and its imagined stimulating exchanges, even though by now that didn’t hold much promise either. So far Our Big Date had mainly consisted of a dull conversation between Ellison and the other guy about people and events that were unknown to me. I should have accepted defeat and left, but for some reason, I stubbornly persisted in believing that there might yet be a breakthrough. After all, I had glamorized this unfortunate man for quite a while, and the camaraderie portion of my fantasy, while badly injured, was not yet ready to die and join the romantic fantasies and the German restaurant in their sodden puddle.

Before starting the movie, our host asked me gallantly if I would like a glass of white wine. I said yes, he  fetched it, and then he pulled up a chair opposite the couch where I sat with the couple. Nobody else said yes to a drink. It was just me, and I felt awkward.

As the guys continued to converse about people and situations that excluded me, I waited for a break so that we could talk about Ellison’s writing, but it never came. During this exchange, he made enthusiastic references to a young woman to whom he was apparently attracted, seemingly swept away by the fact that she kept a knife hidden in her boot. From his description, she was no Sally Field. That he would talk this way about another female in front of me, his date, much less rave about her gangster tendencies, took me aback, but then I had rebuffed his advances, so I decided to let it be okay. Maybe he wanted me to see him as desirable.

As he continued, Ellison began to tease me. He did this by making a few snide jokes, such as roughly declaring that as an obvious goy, I must eat sandwiches made with Wonder Bread and a lot of mayonnaise. Worse, unknown to me, when I first arrived I’d apparently had wine on my breath from that initial bolstering drink, and because I had then accepted the glass of wine from him, he decided jovially that I was an alcoholic, and that my mother (my mother?) was probably one as well. I can laugh at a fair amount of teasing, but he crossed a line. None of his jests were quite offensive enough for me to storm out indignantly, but they came awfully close. I stayed. I didn’t want to seem rude, whereas he seemed to have no problem with that. At least he was finally acknowledging my presence, and he appeared to be a little more relaxed.

The bare coffee table in front of me was the kind that had been made out of one large piece of wood. After a while, tired of holding up the wine glass, I set it down on the table. Ellison was horrified! He leapt to his feet as if someone had poked him with a cattle prod. Realizing that I’d obviously made a mistake, I quickly picked the glass back up. Meanwhile, he rushed into another room and came running back with a bottle of polish and a cloth. There was absolutely no moisture and definitely no ring on the table, yet he rubbed more frantically than a housemaid on speed at the place where my glass had ever so briefly touched down. His unspoken reprimand was obvious.

As he ground away at his cleaning task, I turned to the others and said in a stage whisper, “And the truth is, there was nothing there at all.” This was the truth, and I was being merry. He’d made rough jokes about me; I was simply returning the banter. I did not realize that you didn’t do that with Harlan Ellison. He finished his job in hostile silence, stood, and then said with a snarl as he walked away, “People like you are the reason they find the dismembered bodies of young women buried in back yards.”

His nastiness was palpable. I sat paralyzed in shock. Yet, when he returned  to the room, he began to behave decently again. His Jekyll-Hyde character switches left me in a confused daze. Before I could make excuses to leave, Ellison proceeded to start the movie. At least I had the protection of the other couple, although they were tediously dull and neither of them had even once directed a comment my way. The movie we watched was a Woody Allen comedy. It was funny, but I was by now far too tense to laugh.

As soon as it was over, I was ready to leave, but the couple beat me to it. This left just Ellison and me standing next to the front door. Before I could say my goodbyes, he strode into his office, which was right off the entryway, and sat down in front of a prominent typewriter. “I’m going to write now,” he called out nonchalantly. “You can stay and watch me write if you want, or you can go home.”

I took the opportunity to escape, but it was strange. He did not even rise to see me to the door. Shaken and dismayed, I got into my Barracuda and drove only a few feet…and my engine died, just like that. I couldn’t re-start my car, and sat behind the steering wheel in a sick distress. Here I was, stuck right next to Ellison’s house, which was on a dark street in the hills with no businesses or phone booths within any kind of walking distance. In 1975 we didn’t have cell phones. The only thing to do in such an emergency would be to go to someone’s house and beg them to call a towing company. But should I return to knock on Harlan Ellison’s door? The thought was horrifying. And if I went to one of his neighbors instead, what if he were to look out the window and see that my car was still in front of his house?

To my enormous relief, after a few minutes I was able to get the Barracuda started again. As I drove home, increasingly feeling as though I had been assaulted, all of the stinging things that Ellison had said to me during our bewildering date melded into an obnoxious heap that spun relentlessly in my mind. This persisted throughout the night and into the following day. Other than offering me a glass of wine, I realized that he had not said one kind thing to me. It really bugged me that I had failed to stick up for myself. I concluded that the only way I could vindicate myself would be to write him a letter.

In this small way, I guess he and I were alike. We both possessed a stubborn need to defend ourselves when we felt wronged, although his truculence was accomplished, and I was only a meek amateur. Ellison was more than happy to punch people who bothered him. I preferred diplomacy. It took me a while to compose the letter. I thanked him graciously for his hospitality and the meal—but interspersed between the niceties, I defended myself against his slurs, stating emphatically that my mother and I were not alcoholics, nor did I lust after Wonder Bread and gulp down mayonnaise. As I mailed the letter, I felt pleased with myself. I’d made my points well, and had done so with reasonable tact. I had failed to realize, however, how dangerous it was to enter into the ring with Ellison, who had a need to win even the smallest battle, and in doing so would entirely disregard any rules of sportsmanship, like the prohibition of hitting below the belt.

A few days later I received a reply from him. Smiling with surprise, I opened the letter quickly, curious to see what he had to say. As I read, I began to shrivel in pain. It felt as though in his own way—through language—Ellison was chopping me up to bury in his back yard. I have never before or since encountered such venomous writing. He concluded by saying something like, “I don’t know what your fantasy is, but I never want to see or hear from you again! Stay away! I mean it!” The bloodied pieces that were left of me after reading the letter obeyed his request.

I’m not interested in delving into the reasons that Ellison was so pugnacious. Or why I was so inept. From all accounts that I read later, he’d been like that his entire life, even in childhood. I certainly wasn’t alone in being attacked by him; throughout his lifetime many others experienced the brunt of his nastiness, sometimes physically. Bewildered and butchered as I was for whatever my crimes had been, I cannot imagine how much more brutal the ending would have been if on that famous date we’d actually begun the friendship that I’d hoped for, or worse, become intimate.

The bottom line is that even though the late Harlan Ellison was a distressingly troubled man, and even though I was never able to connect with him, he was an absolutely brilliant and unique writer. Frankly, I haven’t had the desire to read any of his stories since receiving that jolting letter so many long years ago, but I imagine that if I did, I would still like them a lot.


EUNICE AND GRANDMA

by Mary Elizabeth (Leach) Raines, (c) 2024

Eunice helped my grandma die. Let me go back.

When I was a kid the early 1950s, I used to visit my grandparents in rural Wisconsin. One of my favorite treats was accompanying them when they took us into town to an establishment called the Dairy Bar, the place where they bought their milk and butter. It looked plain enough, but I found it bedazzling. Inside the doors next to the cash register stood a gleaming rack full of penny candy, and beyond that was a small counter with red-topped stools where there was ice cream—lots of it. The pretty teenager who worked there put four scoops of ice cream into the milkshakes, which would set you back 20 cents, and five into the malted milks, which cost a quarter.

To my lusty young eyes, however, the ice cream cones reigned over all else. She’d give you a generous single dip for a nickel, a double scoop for seven cents, and a triple dipper for a whopping dime! This has to do with the story that follows. Read on.

I met Eunice as an adult when my widowed grandmother, Hazel Nelson, already in her 90s, became too frail to live on her own and had to move into the healthcare center in the same small town as the Dairy Bar. I moved into Grandma's former home to be nearer to her. Eunice was the recreation director at the center.

She had been born only eight years before me, but the rift between our generations was enormous and she seemed far older. While my peers were the earliest to get excited over the emergence of a band called the Beatles, hers were the earliest to swoon over a singer named Elvis Presley. Young women in my age group burned their bras and fought loudly for women’s liberation. Young women of Eunice’s age mostly wanted to become good church-going mothers and housewives. My generation became vehement hippie protestors. Hers adhered fiercely to the social mores of their time while attracting as little attention as possible. This made Eunice a good fit for the even more conventional residents of the nursing home, like my grandma.

Plump in a friendly kind of way, Eunice wore blue-rimmed glasses, and her short blonde hair was permed into layers of curls like stacked yellow sausages. Rural Wisconsin women preferred to avoid any show of emotional expression, and so did she; her facial features, while round and sweet, were always prim, and smiles were rare. This meant that you couldn’t read what was going on with Eunice by looking at her, but over time I learned that she felt things deeply, and her affectionate heart was enormous. A tiny peek into those emotions could be gleaned by looking at the color of her cheeks because, tight lips notwithstanding, she blushed readily.

Eunice loved her job and she really understood the residents at the healthcare center who, like Grandma, all had their roots in the same area and shared similar values. These oldsters were Her People. In her role as recreation director, Eunice arranged for their entertainment, providing the kind of gentle fun the elderly residents enjoyed the most: little nostalgic van excursions to the nearby countryside, funky hometown bands that played the hymns and homespun music that they had grown up with, simple crafts, “jobs” folding tablecloths and napkins, and regular bingo games where the prizes were apples.

That Grandma enthusiastically participated in the bingo games shocked me. Grandma, you see, was a devout Babtist, as she pronounced it. She had converted from the much more pagan Lutheranism in her teens. As such, my grandma did not believe in dancing, drinking, or anything resembling gambling. This included playing cards. I still remember the only time she ever scolded me. It was when I visited her once as a teenager and pulled out a deck of cards I had brought with me to play solitaire. For some puzzling reason, however, bingo met with her approval; she often kept her apple winnings tucked away next to her in her wheelchair, carefully wrapped in a napkin.

Grandma had grown up humbly in the late 1800s and early 1900s on a poor but self-sufficient Wisconsin farm. Her family regularly ate mush and salt pork, and not much else. She once told me that they had grown a lot of oats. When I asked her if they made oatmeal from it, she chuckled at my ignorance. “Them oats was for the horses, not people,” she exclaimed. This was as close to being haughty as I ever saw her get.

Even as a child, Grandma had to work hard. During the long dark days of Wisconsin winters, she stayed indoors on the farm doing household chores and cooking. As a result she got Ricketts, a disease that stems from children not being exposed to enough sunlight. It gave her severely bowed legs, worse than a cowboy’s, that never straightened out, although that wasn’t too obvious since she always wore longer dresses.

Grandma met my grandpa in the early 1900s. She was 16, and he was a few years older, a thresher who ran a huge steam-fired machine and traveled across the midwest helping farmers harvest their crops. They met and courted when his crew came to her family’s farm, and eventually they married. Later, as cars began to replace horses and steam engines, Grandpa became a Ford mechanic and opened a garage. The couple raised their family through the Great Depression without having much money, but this was not unusual; surviving on the edge of poverty was the same for all of their neighbors and friends. Grandma had to be frugal of necessity in those days, and she continued to live modestly throughout her life, even after she became a widow.

As she aged, she shrank. In her last few independent years, she was so short that when she would drive to the Dairy Bar for milk or to services at the Baptist church, her head couldn’t be seen above the steering wheel. People would turn to stare in wonder at the car that appeared to be driving itself.

Being that small, her appetite was tiny, and, as noted, she was frugal, so at the healthcare center, in addition to the apples she’d won in bingo, she was in the habit of wrapping up any leftover food from her meals in napkins and storing it next to her in the wheelchair for later on, even though later on never came. You didn’t waste food, you see. One day when she was 101 years old and I was visiting her, I smelled something really bad and discovered a large stinky piece of leftover fish that she’d hoarded from some unknown meal, all wrapped up in a napkin and stashed next to her in the wheelchair.

Eunice, who acted as a kind of mother hen, understood these sorts of things. She went out of her way to satisfy the simple needs of her residents, and she always treated them with gentle respect, even after their minds stopped functioning well, as Grandma’s sadly did. One day when Eunice came to work, she discovered that the not-always-conscientious aides at the healthcare center had wheeled my by-now very elderly grandma out into the main lobby where the residents congregated without dressing her. Grandma was still wearing her nightgown, robe, and slippers. Eunice’s face grew bright red, and this normally quiet woman went ballistic, reaming out those who were responsible and shocking the entire staff. She did this because she knew that my modest grandmother would have thought it positively indecent to let anyone see her in her nightclothes. Wisconsin farm women simply did not do that, and Eunice was their protector.

Although Grandma always seemed overly stodgy to me, I learned that as a young woman she went through a period of rebellion the way that most of us do at that age. She never burned her bra, but she did something almost as outrageous. Back in the day, women’s drawers (e.g., underpants) were a form of shorts that were slit open all along the crotch. This must have made visits to the outhouse easier under those long skirts and petticoats. Grandma shared with me that shortly before she got married, she did something extremely progressive. Sitting in her parents’ living room and using little stitches, she hand-sewed shut all of the slits in the underwear of her new trousseau! She told me that one of her uncles watched as she was doing this and grumbled at her the entire time for having such outlandish newfangled ideas.

I learned something else. Throughout her life, even into old age, my grandma always wore stockings that were not held up by anything, but instead had the tops rolled down to just above the hemline of her long dresses. I always thought that was incredibly frumpy of her, until I discovered that rolling your stockings down was a rebellious and frowned-upon fad with young women in the early 1900s, one that naturally drew severe disapproval from older folk in the same way that sewing up the crotch of your drawers was, or the way that piercing certain body parts is today. By rolling her stockings, Grandma was actually making a strong and trendy fashion statement. Who knew!

Despite possessing such modern inclinations, she could never bring herself to accept the idea of women wearing pants, which her daughter—my mother—and, of course, I were both inclined to do. It particularly distressed her when we would go out in public wearing pants.

“Women oughtn’t to wear pants,” she would fuss. “It’s not in the Bible.”

“Well, why not, for goodness sakes?” my mother would retort. “After all, Jesus wore a dress.”

Thus, when the aides at the healthcare center for the second time made a mistake by dressing Grandma in someone’s sweat pants before wheeling her out to the main hall, Eunice once again blasted them. I later discovered that on her days off, with her own money, Eunice would shop for clothing and other trinkets for the elderly residents, many of whom, like my grandmother, had no income beyond the meagre Social Security that the healthcare center took from them. Eunice knew what each one of them liked, and what kinds of things gave them comfort.

Once when I was visiting my grandma, a larger-than-normal crowd, including outsiders like me, had gathered to hear a concert that Eunice had arranged. It was being given by a group of musicians who were more widely known and professional than the usual local fare, so the spacious recreation room in the healthcare center was packed. During the middle of the concert, a tall gangly resident with Alzheimer’s jumped up from her chair, moved to an empty space, and began spinning around in circles, dancing wildly to the music. It was embarrassing. Eunice rose and without expression quickly approached the woman. I waited for her to help the resident back to her seat, using her usual kindness and diplomacy. Instead, Eunice hooked arms with the woman and danced right along with her. They continued until the song ended. That someone as reserved and proper as Eunice would do this still brings tears to my eyes. It’s a perfect example of how exceptional she was.

When Grandma reached 104 years of age, she began to die. As an adult, she had always grown her own vegetables, and she began buying health food at what she called “the nutritious store” decades before it became popular. The result was that her body outlived her mind, which had started to deteriorate when she was in her late 90s. Now, finally, her body was ready to stop as well. There was no particular disease that struck her down. One morning she simply didn’t awaken, and she never would again. Instead, she lay there in her bed for a number of days, comatose, breathing more and more slowly with an open mouth. When she had been younger and lucid, she had told me with both pride and love shining in her eyes that she was the one who had given me my first bath when I was a newborn baby. I thought it only fitting, in a full-circle way, that since she was with me at the beginning of my life, I should be with her at the end of hers. During those final fading days I would come to the healthcare center and sit in a rocking chair at her bedside, where I would chat gently about the weather and the neighbors, play hymns now and then on the tape recorder, swab her drying lips with moisturizer, and otherwise keep her company. She had read the Bible nearly every day of her life and it was precious to her, so although it wasn’t my thing, sometimes I would read passages of scripture aloud, even though it is doubtful that she knew.

And this is where Eunice helped my grandma die. She would frequently come into the room to spend a few minutes with us before she was called to be elsewhere. At those times she would speak to my unconscious grandmother, encouraging her. “It’s okay, Hazel,” she would say softly. “You know what to do. It’s all right to leave. You know how to do this.” Eunice fully understood about death, and she also understood Grandma. After a week or so, my grandmother died peacefully.

Several years later I was working as a hypnotherapist, and Eunice decided to see me. She had always been just a bit roly-poly, and now she asked me to give her hypnosis to stop her addiction to sweets, since losing weight was necessary for her health.

There was a sad story behind this. Eunice had needed to take time off work for a serious heart surgery that wound up having complications. The healthcare center where she’d worked all her life had recently been sold to a corporate group, and it was no longer the locally-run place in the town where everyone knew everyone else. When Eunice finally recovered and was ready to return to her old job, the new management told her in a hostile way that while she could have the position back, she would have to start all over again at minimum wage and she would lose her many years of accrued benefits. She refused. Eunice was already in her 60s, her husband was unable to work, and they had been financially wiped out by medical bills. This normally placid woman cried as she told me the story. What that place did to her was beyond cruel. I was glad that Grandma was no longer there.

My heart went out to Eunice and I invited her to have her hypnosis sessions for free, or, if she wanted to pay, no more than $10. Because she was proud, she insisted on paying. When she came for an appointment, she would place her $10 bill on the table with a trembling hand. For her, that ten dollars was what several hundred dollars would be for anyone else.

Eunice turned out to be an excellent candidate for hypnosis and it worked well for her, helping her to avoid excess sweets. She loved her sessions and periodically she would return with a ten-dollar bill to have another one. Sometimes, as part of the hypnosis, I invited her to create what I called a special place—a wonderful place of her choosing where she felt especially happy and peaceful. She particularly loved that part of the session. Whenever I asked where her special place was, she always answered that it was flying in an airplane up high in the clouds, which I found rather curious.

As she continued having appointments and we got to know one another a little bit better, I discovered to my surprise that I had actually first met Eunice in the early 1950s when I was just a little girl. It turned out that during her teenaged years she had worked at the Dairy Bar where, if you recall, Grandma used to take me for a treat. Eunice had been the girl back then who had sold Grandma her milk and scooped out my ice cream cones. How I loved having that association with this kind woman!

Eventually Eunice gained enough trust in me to share a special secret. It turned out that the special place she went to during hypnosis wasn’t flying in an airplane at all. She confessed that she had only told me this because she wasn’t sure that I would understand. She revealed that her special place was actually up in heaven, lovingly surrounded by all the former healthcare center residents she cared about so much who had died. They would throng around her, and she would be filled with indescribable peace and joy. My grandma, she told me, was always one of them.

After a few years, I moved out of the family home in Wisconsin, and we lost touch. Just a short time ago I came across Eunice’s obituary online. I believe that she must be having a wonderful time in heaven. I hope she says hi to Grandma for me.

***

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Goodbye, Henry

This work is copyrighted. Other than brief excerpts on search engines or links, it may not be copied or excerpted in any form on any type of media. Except for purposes of locating in search engines, this post and this blog may not be used in any way by AI (artificial intelligence), including scanning, excerpting, training, or copying in any form.

by Mary Elizabeth (Leach) Raines

As an admitted foodie, I tend to remember past events by what I ate, even dates with men that I went on more than half a century ago. While I have clear recollections of the food that was consumed, I often don’t remember the guy I was with, something that those who know me tease me about. But I do remember both things well from a date I had with a young man named Henry Mollicone. In my mind, he will always be connected to jamoca almond fudge ice cream.



Henry and I were students together at Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music during the 1960s. I was a piano major, but I hung out with the composers, a small handful of mind-blowingly brilliant and utterly nerdy young men: my people. Henry, who was a year older than I and a superb pianist, was the school’s most lauded student composer. His gifts far overshadowed those of the rest of us, even though all the students had to be tremendously talented just to gain admission to the conservatory, which was at the time one of the top three music schools in the country.

How unfair it is to summarize someone’s lifetime of work in two sentences, yet I’m going to do that. Throughout his life, Henry composed lots of beautiful music, taught at universities, led a music festival, wrote and orchestrated scores for movies, had a stint assisting Leonard Bernstein on Broadway, and conducted orchestras, including the New York City Opera. The Washington Post called him “…one of the most distinctive American opera composers.” The fact that he wound up with his own Wikipedia page is a testament to his skills.


Henry was a short little guy with curly dark hair, the proud member of a large Italian family from Providence, Rhode Island. Height aside, he was at times capable of having a commanding and confident presence. I say “at times” because his appearance fluctuated. Often he came across as geeky and aloof, which befitted his title of composer, and yet occasionally, in the right light and the right mood, Henry would shift and become a handsome and charismatic man in a heart-melting kind of way. In either posture, along with possessing an overabundance of talent and musical intelligence, he was quirky.



I was pretty sure that one of Henry's quirks was a preference for blondes and busty sopranos, so I was both stunned and pleased when he spontaneously invited me to get some ice cream with him one evening. Even though we both socialized with the same small crowd, I’d always placed him on a pedestal. He was a guy I had considered to be out of reach. And now I had a (kind of) date with him!

He and I walked several blocks from the Conservatory to Brigham’s Ice Cream Parlor, which is where the jamoca almond fudge ice cream comes in, as that was what I ordered. Ah, I pine for those youthful days when one could chow down such goodies with no misgivings and still retain a great figure! Unlike most of my other rendezvous where the food was more outstanding than the guy, I recall Henry vividly and the delightful chat that we had. Our conversation was one of sweet discovery, and I was happy to discover that this impressive fellow was, after all, a swell and rather vulnerable human being: a regular person, and a likable one.



After our treats, we went to his apartment that was right off Boston’s Copley Square to talk some more. It was growing late, so rather than walk me all the way to the conservatory dormitory and then back, Henry decided that I should spend the night, and he invited me to climb into his bed. He crawled in next to me, of course. Even though we both felt that we were terribly grown up, we were truly only just barely past being teenagers, so the fact that he had a roommate who seemed to be sound asleep in a twin bed across the room was somehow not seen as a deterrent.



I’d of course admired Henry, but up until then I had not considered being romantically interested in him. With his warm body next to mine, however, I found to my surprise that I was attracted to him. He and I wound up kissing, as college-aged kids are prone to do, especially when they are tired and their guard is down. His kisses were quite delicious, even better than the jamoca almond fudge had been.



Despite the fact that we were awfully drowsy, after more kissing, I wanted to push our make-out session to the next level. When I offered, he whispered quite tenderly, “No, no, you’re not that kind of girl.” While kissing my neck. (Or maybe I was kissing his neck. I forget.) Gosh, I tried ever so hard to convince him that yes, I was that kind of girl, but he stubbornly resisted and there was nothing I could do to change his mind, so to my disappointment, our encounter never evolved beyond a little bit of pleasant necking.



Henry certainly liked me well enough to kiss me. Who knows? Maybe he had only gotten cuddly because of the sugar high from the ice cream. In looking back now, I wonder if saying that I wasn’t that kind of girl was a polite way of telling me that he was not that into me, because there had certainly been other girls who’d entered his life who, it seems, were that kind of girl. Then again, I was neither blonde nor a soprano. Sigh.



I moved on and never held it against him, nor did I pine for him. Well, not much. (Read on). Today I realize that should a romance have ensued, I would have been a dim satellite to Henry’s bright and growing star, which is not a role that would have suited me. Adding to that, he was more than a little bit crazy, although I confess that this quality in a man has never particularly deterred me.



A few months passed and I turned my attention to other boys. Then Henry gave a concert at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, where only topnotch musicians were invited to perform—this before he had even graduated. But, as I already told you, he was an exceptional pianist. He played the difficult Liszt Piano Sonata in B minor. I have in my long life heard many concerts by the top pianists in the world, and yet the best musical performance I ever heard in my life, hands down, was this one given by Henry.



I arrived late, just as the concert was beginning, and rather than trek up to the plush hall where the audience had assembled, I decided to remain several stories below in the magnificent interior courtyard of that museum, an eclectic and priceless mixture of Roman, Renaissance, and Medieval artwork and designs. (The museum would some years later become the site of one of the world’s most famous art heists when 13 invaluable paintings were stolen, never to be recovered.) I sat there alone amidst ancient statues, ornate columns, fountains, and, on that particular spring day, hundreds of fragrant Easter Lillies. As Henry began to play, the notes of this passionate piece of music echoed down through the high arches surrounding me and poured over me in a cascade of ecstasy. Yes, okay, I am gushing, but words are insufficient to describe the shivering impact of the music. His playing touched my soul in a way that in well over half a century since has never been replicated…which kind of makes me wonder how that other performance might have felt, had he not decided that I was “not that kind of girl.”


After the concert was over, with my attraction to Henry newly reignited, I was eager to congratulate this man with whom, albeit briefly, I’d shared a bed. I went to the reception room where he was surrounded by an admiring throng. As I started to make my way toward him, a brassy blonde wearing an inappropriately gaudy and super-tight dress—a trampy-looking female who was obviously not a fellow music student—moved close to him and to my dismay snuggled right up against him. Worse, he seemed to like it. She didn’t appear to be the type who would be into Liszt. Now, I will grant that my memory may be distorted. While this girl might in reality have been a Very Nice Cultured Person, from my depressed perspective she was quite obviously that kind of girl. The kind I wasn’t. I was overcome with jealousy, and went home without congratulating him.



The very last time I saw Henry in person occurred a few years after we were out of the conservatory. I had bravely gone to audition as an actress for a big-deal children’s theater in Boston. I say bravely, because I was nervous; they wanted me both to perform a monologue and sing a song. The monologue wasn’t what made me nervous. I’d already been in a number of plays, and I loved to act, so I had no qualms about that part of the try-out. It was the singing that got me jittery. I’ve always been shy about singing by myself in front of other people, especially people who are listening to me with a critical ear. I badly wanted to join the theater troupe, however, so I rehearsed my song a lot and hoped for the best.

When it was my turn, I anxiously climbed onstage. The director and his accomplices were seated in a little clump below in the darkened theater, and on the stage there was a grand piano with an audition accompanist waiting for me. As I walked toward it to hand my music over to the pianist, I saw with a shock that the person seated at the keyboard was none other than my very own jamoca-almond-fudge Henry! I handed him my music, and maybe said a quick hello, but my thoughts quickly turned back to the audition.



First I performed a monologue, something out of Tennessee Williams. Kiddos, I will confess here that I was really, really good. The director and his cohorts actually applauded me! I hoped that Henry was impressed. I glanced at him, but he had a professional-looking deadpan expression on his face.


Then it was time for me to sing. I nodded at Henry and he began playing the introduction to the tune I had chosen, which was from Anthony Newley’s musical The Roar of the Greasepaint, the Smell of the Crowd. At this point my great audition took a swift and unfortunate downturn. It was the very first time I’d ever sung for a theater audition, and to my horror, my voice did not come out at all in the mellow, rich way it had sounded in my apartment when I was practicing the song. The noise that emerged from my choked throat was creaky and croaky and weird. In short, it was abysmal. When I finished, the director, who had only minutes before applauded me, would not even make eye contact. Instead, he dismissed me with a terse thankyou-we’llletyouknow. Humiliated, I grabbed my music without daring to look at Henry and ducked out of the theater as fast as I could.

[Aside: Despite that failure, I persisted in auditioning for musicals, and in later years I actually did get a few singing parts, but that was only because I was cast as either a comedic or a deranged character, so my voice didn’t have to sound pretty. I like to assure myself that if I’d had a beautiful singing voice, it would have been a deterrent to those roles.]



Henry and I did not connect again until about ten years before his death. One of his offerings was that (for a fee, of course) he would compose a piece of music for someone based on the notes that correlated with their birthday, so my son and I pooled our resources and commissioned him to create a piano piece for my sister when she turned 70. She loved that gift! By this time, Henry was, as mentioned, an esteemed composer. And married to his second wife. He had achieved a fair amount of renown–I mean, jeez, his own Wikipedia page–although I always wished that he would have received even more fame and recognition than he did. For example, I don’t think that Aaron Copeland ever had to advertise that he would compose birthday tunes.



In our renewed friendship, which first took place over the phone and then via occasional emails, Henry was enthusiastic and warm; our conversations sometimes even bordered on the flirtatious...until one day when I asked how he was doing. He responded with an uncharacteristically cool email, stating that he had been dealing with some medical issues. His communications to me ceased after that. I later discovered that the medical issue was cancer that had begun to metastasize. A mutual friend of ours—curiously, the same man who had been the sound-asleep roommate in the other bed during Henry’s and my brief romantic encounter—shared that my former ice-cream date had fought valiantly for his life, but the cancer finally got him. Darn it.



Now you get to compose for the angels, Henry. Jamoca almond fudge ice cream will always belong to you. How lucky I was to have known you! I regret that I didn’t get to know you even better, but in retrospect, you were probably correct: as much as  I yearned to be, I just wasn’t that kind of girl.

***

If you are a musician, a singer, or an opera or a choral conductor, you must absolutely check out his music. Even if you don’t fit in those categories, look him up on YouTube, and get a dose of beauty and wonder!

Below is a YouTube of him improvising a song based on the notes that correlate with a person’s phone number. Take a look and a listen–it’s shorter than two minutes–and you will be glad you did.