Goodbye Scales
As I mentioned last week, my eldest sister's best friend from college was seriously injured. She died yesterday morning, ten days after they had ceased IV liquids. She was a stubborn, beautiful, magical person right to the end.
Here is an obituary from the Albuquerque Journal.
Anne writes:
Scales (as I knew her) and I transfered into Wellesley College at the
same time, the Fall of 1971, when she was nineteen and I was twenty.
We met at the picnic for new students in the quad on a late summer
day, as I brought some beer (the drinking age was 18, so we were
legal, and in fact they sold beer at Schneider) to share, which
shocked those around us. We were both experiencing a bit of shock
ourselves from the polish and propriety of Wellesley, and we bonded
over that. We didn't live on the same floor, so we became acquainted
gradually over the next few months. In the spring term she moved a
couple of doors away from me, and that was all it took.
I was a wild child with my MIT boyfriend staying with me most of the
time in the dorm, which just wasn't done openly at WC. Scales was
fragile emotionally, with nightmares and anxiety, as she was deep in
grief for her sister. Students were drawn to her, as even in her
distress she burned brightly. They wanted to take care of her and
ease her pain. She was pre-med when I met her, following in her
sister's footsteps, while I was majoring in philosophy and history.
We reveled and frolicked in the life of the mind. It was the extreme,
rococco end of the 60s, when the Age of Aquarius was both darkening
and subsiding. We played games with the expectations of the
traditionalist students, enjoying shocking them with our decadence and
nihilism. The first of a long pattern of intense but ultimately
failed relationships began for her, eventually leaving initially
bitter lovers behind, along with a tortured and torn Scales. I tried
to pick up pieces on both sides, repeatedly, and reintegrate them,
with varying success.
I wasn't quite sure, at the end of that spring term, whether we were
true, long-term friends or if it had been a temporary friendship of
convenience. I was quite surprised when she announced at the end of
the summer that she was coming to pick me up at my home in a rental
truck, and taking me to college. Somehow our connection was
completely different; she was joyful, at that moment, and we
completely clicked, beyond just sharing our alienation from the posh,
grade-oriented students. The intellectual exchange between us
intensified -- inspired by our classes and the books we were reading
for them, we explored, among many other things, the great system
builders of philosophy and the key moments and theories of history; we
worked on understanding the implicatons of feminism and utopias, and
theory of gender and sexuality years before women's studies existed at
Wellesley. We ravaged everybody from the Presocratics to Heisenberg,
seeking questions and modes of thought. Perhaps our beliefs were
grounded in the idea that through analysis of concepts and rich
associations, expressed incisively, we could actively educate
ourselves as well as entertain and distract ourselves from our psychic
pain, or even perform a miracle cure of transcendance, becoming more
than our apparent potential or limitations. "Baked potatoes for the
mind" could expand and nourish us. Exegesis saved and dialectics
powered us.
When we reached Wellesley we fell out of the truck into the summer heat, and
amazing students we had barely known the year before grabbed us and
hugged us and bonded with us.
Scales had moved to a different dorm, but she changed her mind, and
stayed on my extra mattress until she could get a room in our dorm,
Cazenove. Our group of friends grew, as talented, creative, and
interesting people hung out with us. A culture, with its own language
and style, started rolling, a porous and expanding ambit of
friendship.. We had an internal name, Poland, reflecting the 17th and
18th century history of that nation, and an external one, the
Twinkies, named for our sports team. Scales made us all red baseball
caps with our new Polish names in yellow. It was such explicit
community-building that it felt like practical anthropology. Now we
had something wonderful to put against the hypocrisy and lack of
self-awareness or courage we arrogantly felt all around us. Our minds
sparked against each other and lit up like roman candles, and that
seemed to take the pain away as nothing else could. What would later
be called memes, and tropes, sprang by the thousand from our minds:
"tones and textures" "reality organizer", and "it's not *that* hard".
Scales switched into history and philosophy. We flagrantly
disregarded, no, enjoyed outraging, the sensibilities of more
conventional students.
There was also splendor a a different sort: road trips to North
Carolina where we played at the president's house and I observed her
parents with awe, to Chicago, and to the wilds of the North End
(remember singing at Betty's Rolls Royce?). We went to bars and
danced the bump. We made ourselves press passes, went to an Aretha
concert, interviewed her afterward, and wrote it up in an article for
the Wellesley News. There were wild parties and very loud and eerie
music. We took over the dorm's Christmas party and turned it into an
extravaganza awards show. Halloween costumes reached new levels.
Everything was magic. Paradox College was subject descriptions of
mashup classes we wanted to take or teach. There were professors we
came to love and who seemed to appreciate us. I graduated almost
against my will and got an administrative job at MIT. Students from new
Wellesly classes flocked to us. We put out a comic newsletter one
summer.
Our thesis contained its own contradictions and antithesis: painful
ends of relationships were mounting up, along with endless dramas of
insufficiently requited passions, and finally one cracked Poland
apart, on March 26th, 1975. Nothing would ever be quite as magical
again. I couldn't re-synthesize our once-merry band back together
again with intellectual slight of hand. Not ever again. Suddenly I
was too afraid of the darkness -- I'd seen the damage and lost
confidence, as others had lost confidence in me. I became ambivalent
toward intensity, for the first time sensing my need for a bedrock of
calm. Adrift from our group, our friendship continued.
Scales had graduated before that, and gone off to UNC Chapel Hill
philosophy grad school, to which her father had arranged for her to be
admitted without mentioning it to her, and she lasted three weeks away
from Boston before freaking out. I helped her get a job at MIT, and
took the LSATs with her to keep her company (no academic dishonesty
involved). We lived together her second year at Harvard, but
we were each developing our own separate and incompatible lives -- our
friends weren't mutual any more, and her law classes and my
educational administration issues at MIT didn't inspire more than
flashes of the same intellectual communion. We cried when she left
for California; it feels like yesterday to me: another hot summer day,
just like the beginning.
There were occasional and increasingly infrequent visits, but we both
knew our moment had passed, it was the end of our era, that the
extremes of our friendship were behind us, as much as we valued what
it had been, and given us. I've read her papers and her book with
love, and feel sad sometimes that I couldn't go with her on that path,
another bulwark or flying buttress for her. I dream about her all the
time.
So I spend my life counseling MIT undergraduates academically,
balanced on the "two cultures", listening to my students and seeing
into them, then reflecting my understanding back to increase their
self-awareness, giving them the option to change if they wish.
Every day I know I make a difference, just as she did.
This entry was originally posted at http://lillibet.dreamwidth.org/609718.html. You can comment either place! There are
comments over there now.
Here is an obituary from the Albuquerque Journal.
Anne writes:
Scales (as I knew her) and I transfered into Wellesley College at the
same time, the Fall of 1971, when she was nineteen and I was twenty.
We met at the picnic for new students in the quad on a late summer
day, as I brought some beer (the drinking age was 18, so we were
legal, and in fact they sold beer at Schneider) to share, which
shocked those around us. We were both experiencing a bit of shock
ourselves from the polish and propriety of Wellesley, and we bonded
over that. We didn't live on the same floor, so we became acquainted
gradually over the next few months. In the spring term she moved a
couple of doors away from me, and that was all it took.
I was a wild child with my MIT boyfriend staying with me most of the
time in the dorm, which just wasn't done openly at WC. Scales was
fragile emotionally, with nightmares and anxiety, as she was deep in
grief for her sister. Students were drawn to her, as even in her
distress she burned brightly. They wanted to take care of her and
ease her pain. She was pre-med when I met her, following in her
sister's footsteps, while I was majoring in philosophy and history.
We reveled and frolicked in the life of the mind. It was the extreme,
rococco end of the 60s, when the Age of Aquarius was both darkening
and subsiding. We played games with the expectations of the
traditionalist students, enjoying shocking them with our decadence and
nihilism. The first of a long pattern of intense but ultimately
failed relationships began for her, eventually leaving initially
bitter lovers behind, along with a tortured and torn Scales. I tried
to pick up pieces on both sides, repeatedly, and reintegrate them,
with varying success.
I wasn't quite sure, at the end of that spring term, whether we were
true, long-term friends or if it had been a temporary friendship of
convenience. I was quite surprised when she announced at the end of
the summer that she was coming to pick me up at my home in a rental
truck, and taking me to college. Somehow our connection was
completely different; she was joyful, at that moment, and we
completely clicked, beyond just sharing our alienation from the posh,
grade-oriented students. The intellectual exchange between us
intensified -- inspired by our classes and the books we were reading
for them, we explored, among many other things, the great system
builders of philosophy and the key moments and theories of history; we
worked on understanding the implicatons of feminism and utopias, and
theory of gender and sexuality years before women's studies existed at
Wellesley. We ravaged everybody from the Presocratics to Heisenberg,
seeking questions and modes of thought. Perhaps our beliefs were
grounded in the idea that through analysis of concepts and rich
associations, expressed incisively, we could actively educate
ourselves as well as entertain and distract ourselves from our psychic
pain, or even perform a miracle cure of transcendance, becoming more
than our apparent potential or limitations. "Baked potatoes for the
mind" could expand and nourish us. Exegesis saved and dialectics
powered us.
When we reached Wellesley we fell out of the truck into the summer heat, and
amazing students we had barely known the year before grabbed us and
hugged us and bonded with us.
Scales had moved to a different dorm, but she changed her mind, and
stayed on my extra mattress until she could get a room in our dorm,
Cazenove. Our group of friends grew, as talented, creative, and
interesting people hung out with us. A culture, with its own language
and style, started rolling, a porous and expanding ambit of
friendship.. We had an internal name, Poland, reflecting the 17th and
18th century history of that nation, and an external one, the
Twinkies, named for our sports team. Scales made us all red baseball
caps with our new Polish names in yellow. It was such explicit
community-building that it felt like practical anthropology. Now we
had something wonderful to put against the hypocrisy and lack of
self-awareness or courage we arrogantly felt all around us. Our minds
sparked against each other and lit up like roman candles, and that
seemed to take the pain away as nothing else could. What would later
be called memes, and tropes, sprang by the thousand from our minds:
"tones and textures" "reality organizer", and "it's not *that* hard".
Scales switched into history and philosophy. We flagrantly
disregarded, no, enjoyed outraging, the sensibilities of more
conventional students.
There was also splendor a a different sort: road trips to North
Carolina where we played at the president's house and I observed her
parents with awe, to Chicago, and to the wilds of the North End
(remember singing at Betty's Rolls Royce?). We went to bars and
danced the bump. We made ourselves press passes, went to an Aretha
concert, interviewed her afterward, and wrote it up in an article for
the Wellesley News. There were wild parties and very loud and eerie
music. We took over the dorm's Christmas party and turned it into an
extravaganza awards show. Halloween costumes reached new levels.
Everything was magic. Paradox College was subject descriptions of
mashup classes we wanted to take or teach. There were professors we
came to love and who seemed to appreciate us. I graduated almost
against my will and got an administrative job at MIT. Students from new
Wellesly classes flocked to us. We put out a comic newsletter one
summer.
Our thesis contained its own contradictions and antithesis: painful
ends of relationships were mounting up, along with endless dramas of
insufficiently requited passions, and finally one cracked Poland
apart, on March 26th, 1975. Nothing would ever be quite as magical
again. I couldn't re-synthesize our once-merry band back together
again with intellectual slight of hand. Not ever again. Suddenly I
was too afraid of the darkness -- I'd seen the damage and lost
confidence, as others had lost confidence in me. I became ambivalent
toward intensity, for the first time sensing my need for a bedrock of
calm. Adrift from our group, our friendship continued.
Scales had graduated before that, and gone off to UNC Chapel Hill
philosophy grad school, to which her father had arranged for her to be
admitted without mentioning it to her, and she lasted three weeks away
from Boston before freaking out. I helped her get a job at MIT, and
took the LSATs with her to keep her company (no academic dishonesty
involved). We lived together her second year at Harvard, but
we were each developing our own separate and incompatible lives -- our
friends weren't mutual any more, and her law classes and my
educational administration issues at MIT didn't inspire more than
flashes of the same intellectual communion. We cried when she left
for California; it feels like yesterday to me: another hot summer day,
just like the beginning.
There were occasional and increasingly infrequent visits, but we both
knew our moment had passed, it was the end of our era, that the
extremes of our friendship were behind us, as much as we valued what
it had been, and given us. I've read her papers and her book with
love, and feel sad sometimes that I couldn't go with her on that path,
another bulwark or flying buttress for her. I dream about her all the
time.
So I spend my life counseling MIT undergraduates academically,
balanced on the "two cultures", listening to my students and seeing
into them, then reflecting my understanding back to increase their
self-awareness, giving them the option to change if they wish.
Every day I know I make a difference, just as she did.
This entry was originally posted at http://lillibet.dreamwidth.org/609718.html. You can comment either place! There are
comments over there now.