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By Laura Simon
Chamberlain ClassI got up early this morning to get ready for my transcriber. We’re moving along in transcribing the book to keep up with my former instructor, Professor Charles Chamberlain. The first day I met him is still so vivid in my mind, about 20 years ago when I audited his writing class. I had called him
on the phone saying, “I’m not a member of the ICL (Institute for Continued Learning) any more, with the privilege of auditing any class on campus free with permission of the professor. But I saw your name in the schedule and would like very much to audit your class.”
“Well,” he said, “come. It’ll be the first day of school and we’ll see.”
Potomac Avenue was with me when I walked into that crowded room and seeing all those young students sitting around on the floor, the room so crowded. All that was missing, I thought,
was a campfire in the middle. Remembering my childhood when some volunteers of the AssociationHouse gathered up some seven-year olds and drove us way out to Lake Forest for the day. I had never been away from Potomac Avenue. I was scared. I was stranded. When are they taking us home? That same kind of feeling came over me: “Do I belong in this classroom or am I in a fairy tale?” All these young students, one getting up to give me his chair.
When Professor Chamberlain came in, he started out with a talk. “You see how crowded this room is? If you call my secretary Monday morning, she will tell you who is in and who is out.” That talk I thought was especially for me and he was being very polite to this old lady who had wandered
in from God knows where.
I had entered the inside of a new frontier and had to grapple with the wilds of a writing class.
Professor Chamberlain asks us to write an essay. Anything we like. It could be of our childhood. “Oh, my God,” I thought. “Right up my alley.” I will write about the Gardens of
Babylon. Starting with the First World War and up to and when I put morning glories and a bunch of colorful asters on a big picture hat of Lucky Lady in the collage. Instead I wrote about how I walked up those stairs to Northwestern Business College to become a secretary. I quickly scribbled down about my secretarial education, leaving out the sordid details of the Prohibition days and how I got the job at Famous Players Lasky Corporation, Paramount Pictures, by telling them I went to Northwestern instead of Northwestern Business College.
At the coffee break, I met him in the hallway. “Professor Chamberlain,” I say in my sweetest voice. “Whether I’m accepted or not, I want you to know how much I appreciate this opportunity.”
He said, “Laura Simon, if you are accepted, I want you to promise me that you will never drop out.”
This old lady accepted? I could hardly believe it.
Teachers
Either I get into focus again with this book or take to the rocking chair. Enough silence and meditation and from out of my childhood I hear the voice of a teacher. When I was seven years old, “Look,” she said. “Your dress is on inside out.”
Quickly taking me to the dressing room, she had me take it off and put it on right. Showed me how to adjust my garters and pull up my stockings. “Now nobody will see your wrong side.” Miss Howe took me by the hand, led me to my seat. The years
did not erase her memory.
A little boy in my daughter Syd’s class would also remember that day when he stood at a window sobbing. It was Halloween. His father promised to come with a costume and never showed
up. Syd fixed his shattered hope by taking colorful crepe paper out of the cupboard to make him a costume. “Now, look at yourself. You could be Jack and the Beanstalk, a tiger, a hobo, and you can even be a cat. I’m going to put some whiskers on this mask.”
She may not have realized then but just as teachers had changed my life, she may have changed his. Something always to remember. He was getting his first lesson on how to pick himself up and brush himself off by changing himself when he was unable to change others.
“Professor Chamberlain,” I said. “I have been calling you all morning. Your line has been busy.”
“The phone was tied up,” he said, with his computer. He’s working. There’s going to be finals. He has to mark papers. It will be the last day of school and then he’s taking off. I don’t ask where or what are your plans?
“I called,” I said, “because I have an idea.”
Diverting my thoughts, “Do you need anything from the supermarket?” he quickly asked.
I felt like saying writers who starve a little and live in attics do better work. “Oh no,” I said.
“Thank you.”
“How is the book coming along?” he asked.
“Oh, great.” But I didn’t mean to say it like that of myself.
“I know,” he said. “Just so you’re progressing.”
So far and so high, I thought. And so much of it I could chop it in half and have two books, easy. And since I am almost touching a hundred, my biggest worry is: what am I going to do with the rest of my life? Who will want to bother with an old, old woman?
“This part of the book,” I am saying to him, “is about friends.”
“Then count me in as your friend, Laura,” he said.
“I already have,” I said, deeply touched.
“I was just wondering if you could suggest a book for me to read, one that I can get from Braille.”
“Get the Tanakh,” he said. T-a-n-a-k-h, spelling it out. The Bible.
Skokie Exhibit
Visiting my daughter in Highland Park, together we go to Nordstrom’s in Skokie. Soon I am saying to a sales girl, “I don’t care how expensive this hat is. It’s my 90th birthday,” admiring myself in the mirror.
When I get back home in San Diego, there’s a centerpiece of baby orchids and roses from Nordstrom’s in Skokie. I immediately called the manager of the store, “Miss Love,” I
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 said. An easy name to remember. “How can I thank you and Nordstrom’s for this beautiful birthday gift?” I told her about my paintings, which resulted in an exhibit. “Meet Laura Simon. Artist and literary personality. Join us as she presents her work -- Nine Decades of Life -- in a personal exhibit.”
That is me printed in the poster at the doorway of the gift shop at Nordstrom’s. I wore a floor length, emerald green panne velvet skirt and a gold mesh sweater set. It was a joyous occasion meeting old friends, refreshments, lots of discussions of old-times, new times. One woman saying to me, “I told my friends you must go to Nordstrom’s to see those rice paper collages by Laura Simon.” Now I was Lucky Lady for a day.
Curator
Now, what was I going to do with my paintings? I must find them a home. I called the San Diego Museum of Art in Balboa Park and asked for the curator.
“I’m Laura Simon. I’m almost a hundred years old and legally blind. Anyway, I’ve done somewonderful paintings. Even won an award for Rosie the Rag Lady. Do you think you would like to come and see them? I’d like you to know I worked very hard.”
“Well,” he interrupted, “if I come to see your paintings, what do you expect? What do you have in mind?”
“I want them to hang in your museum,” I said.
“Well,” he said, “we don’t especially do that. We don’t take contemporary paintings. But since you called, I’d like to come and see them anyway.”
In my mind’s eye, I already had them hanging in the San Diego Museum of Art. They’re not going to find my paintings in the basement like Tiffany’s stained glass Fountains and Gardens that Ihad seen in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, that were found in a basement storeroom.
“OK,” I said. “Let’s make an appointment.”
When he walked in, he said “Wow” to all my paintings on the floor in the living room, every one of them. Going right to “Cultivating My Own Garden,” carefully studying the fireman’s artificial rose, Sydelle’s ceramic rose buds and my own acrylic flowers. Out of them all, he held “The Genie”
up close and as if he could see through my thoughts, the 1001 nights that I had in mind, guided by Aladdin’s lamp, covered with the natural branches from my own hibiscus tree on the patio. He studied the paintings carefully, holding each one up close to an eye as though he couldn’t see that well either.
My painting “The Genie” hangs in the hallway right at my front door. Touch it. It’s an Aladdin's lamp. Make a wish. “Star light. Star bright. First star I see tonight. I wish I may, I wish I
might, I wish my wish comes true tonight.”
Finally, putting them down, never looking at Rosie on the wall, preferring the collage, “The Refugee Returns,” with my home-made aged copper, where I tried to make my point about war and devastation. Aging the copper by spilling salt and lime juice over a sheet of it and putting it out onmy patio in the hot sun for a few days. A man with a pack on his back is returning to this heap of copper on rice paper that was once his home. I did that painting about ten years ago. Seemingly, it’s more appropriate today. We have witnessed this day in history the devastation of the Trade Towers in New York. More than once today I heard that thousands of people in Afghanistan are leaving their homes and going toward the borders for safety. I should rename this painting “Looking for
New Frontiers.” It’s a different world. No protection anywhere.
“Mrs. Simon,” he said casually, “your best bet is to join the Artists Guild of the San Diego Museum of Art. When the judges get around to your paintings, if they should select one, that’s when you’ll have a chance to have your paintings hanging in our museum.”
I went wild. My paintings were going to have a home. I called in a photographer, had all my paintings put on slides to send to the Artists Guild as requested with a check for $25, writing:
“You’ll find almost a century of living in these paintings. And I would like to be a member of the San Diego Museum of Art Guild.”
They didn’t care if I was 200 years old. I was turned down.
Literary Agent
I was busy researching libraries to find a literary agent for this book. I couldn’t get over it. The agent I called really answers his voice mail. He wants to see manuscripts. I told him I called
publishers and other agents. I never get a return call.
“So what can I do for you?” said this friendly agent. I was afraid to say that I just came home from an Indian gambling casino that swallowed up my dollars so fast I didn’t know what hit me.
“Well, I’ve written this book,” I said. “by tape recorder because I don’t see so hot.”
“My brother,” he said, “was blind at nine years old and now he’s a multi-millionaire.”
“The publisher,” I said, “prefers a literary agent to present the material.”
“Of course,” he said. “All I will do is ask you one question. Why should anyone want to read your book? Because it’s brilliant?” I nearly fell out of my chair. I felt like telling him and be done with it. It’s super. It’s great. World shattering.
“Now,” he is saying, “if you were somebody special, a great actress, a great scientist, a discoverer of something to cure cancer, AIDS, or an astronaut.” This man has discovered that I am a nobody. I don’t know who I am. I can’t say anything. “Or,” he said. “If you were a prostitute -- but then again prostitutes are out.”
“Oh,” I said. “There were some men in my life after my husband died. I wasn’t a saint, you know.” Thinking there go my confessions of a Geisha. What am I saying? How does it sound? He’s much too silent.
“So why should a publisher buy your book if nobody wants to read it?”
Keep going, Laura, I say to myself. It wasn’t a rock. He just hit you with a pebble.
“The first part of my book,” I said, “is called My History in Medicine.” He perked up.
“Oh. Were you a doctor?
“No,” I said. Turning back pages to that dilapidated Potomac Avenue for help. I say sternly,
“I have survived the battles of everyday living, everyday of it by myself. I have survived the demands required of me in almost a century of living. I am a survivor. That’s who I am. All through the years we elderly in our lifetime are spreading the seeds of survival so that humanity can progress. I just
hope that this book will make a difference to others. I’m just sorry that you don’t want to see mymanuscript.”
“I didn’t say that. Just get a printout and send me 75 pages. On the first page say ‘I am 95 years old’ and I will know who you are.”
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Editor's Note: Today San Diego Jewish World continues the-weekly serialization of I'm Still Here by Laura Simon, a San Diego resident who is still going strong at 103. She wrote this book to mark her 100th birthday. 