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By Laura Simon
Loyola University
In Chicago, in my early 40’s, I took a course in psychology at Loyola University just down the street. The instructor was good enough to let me audit for five dollars a semester but don't tell anyone. As usual, I’m the oldest in the classroom. The instructor writes on the board, “Is college worth it?”
Yes. I’m helping my husband to recuperate from his grief, his mother’s death.
“Or,” he is saying to us geniuses, “should we discuss living together?”
I’m first to raise my hand, rightly ignored.
“Or abortion?” Abortion, and I don’t care one way or another, very important to the young ones, rightly so, and as Aunt Bessie would say, “God Almighty.” One young lady got up to say, “It’s my body. Nobody can tell me what to do with it.”
“Oh, yes they can,” I pipe up. As an auditor expected to listen and keep quiet, time the young respected old age. “That baby belongs to the world. It is not yours.”
Afterwards, the instructor took me aside to tell me I would be better off if I took a different subject. “You belong in literature.”
In the corridor, quite by accident, I bumped into Professor Jack Nabholtz, a neighbor. “Whatare you doing here?” he asked.
“I’m looking for a subject.”
First thing I know he invited me into his honors class in literature. In with the honor students?
I could hardly believe it. Yeats, Rousseau, Cervantes, Don Juan in Hell, The Aeneid of Virgil.
One of the students quoted a poet: “Illusion makes life more palatable.” If we old people have illusion, we are paranoid. They put us away."
Bringing home my books that evening to report to Mannie that I am trying to further my education , “One of the students in class said today that, ‘Illusion makes life more palatable.’”
“I think they’re laughing at me,” I said, “I happened to tell them you came here from Poland when you were two years old. They weren’t interested.”
“Books,” I’m telling my fellow classmates studying law, the priesthood, science, “should only cost a quarter, to go along with potato chips. Money does not grow on trees. I come from Russian,Polish, Jewish ancestry and every kopeck means something to me.”
I feel badly. I see that I don’t belong here. I’m just too old to be with these young people.
At Loyola, I was going with a group to the opera. Mannie encouraged me to go. “You still need the education, Laura. That’s fine. If you’re on opera now, so be it.”
The opera instructor had her niece take us home. Evidently that young lady didn’t care for her job. There were five of us and she was pretty nasty to her aunt and to all of us. “Get out, get out, get out of my car.”
We have no control over our destiny. Arguing the point over the phone once with my granddaughter, Anne. She insisted that we certainly do have control over our destiny.
“You have control over the choices that you make,” I said. “But you don’t know by the choice you select what your destiny will be.” I couldn’t convince her. Just like she couldn’t convince me.
At Loyola – Tell Me a Dream
“Tell Me a Dream—It’s Christmas in May," a play which I wrote at Loyola long ago, is still on my shelf. I was always jotting down my observations about some character. I wished I could see well enough to read my notes, for all those personal thoughts.
All life has been a dream and through our imaginations, we create a reality.
In the drama students of pantomime to interpret the dreams of the elderly in a nursing home. Decorations are everywhere in the recreation hall in the Senior Housing Project. Paper cutouts and popcorn strung across the room. A red carnation in a vase on each table with a green sign on the birthday table, “Reserved.” There is a coat rack, a cabinet for dishes and a refrigerator. A Christmas tree near the window faces out to the parking lot and street. A door leads to the lobby and activity rooms.
A whole roomful of elderly wait patiently for the college students to come and entertain them, determined to show off their pantomime skills.
From that, I was about to create the greatest play ever, and spent sleepless nights trying to invent dreams for these elderly in this somber care center. Caretakers, I hear them and see them here and there with armfuls of towels or trays filled with
dirty dishes on their way to moving belts under flushing waters.
Then in my forties, I refused to admit that I lacked the experiences of the aged. In my dreams I thought I knew their dreams
“Here they come!” someone from the audience says, “The interpreters for our dreams. Youdo dream don’t you?”
“Your ticket for this show is your dream,” called out one of the students on stage, already showing off his first lessons, climbing make-believe walls, testing a toe in a bath tub of scalding water, then turning to one of the girls on stage with hugs and kisses.
A student calls out, “OK, who’s first? Remember, this is your ticket to our show. One dream.”
And the second young man adds, “And we’ll do your dream so great you’ll really believe it. On the level. Let’s go!”
An old man anxiously begins telling his dream. “I always had a lot of shoes, dreaming of all the shoes in my closet, dreaming of going to the outside world. My wife’s troubles are over. I only see her now in a dream. In bed. Her coffin? Wake up, wake up, I say. Then I’m running. Why am I running in my pajamas? Then the police find me on a corner in real life and lead me back to my room, where I wait for the doctor, for the dentist, somebody took my teeth -- where did they put my
shoes? I like a lot of shoes. I believe in shoes so I can go outside to the outside world to my life again. My feet are not so comfortable anymore. I need more shoes.”
Then the pantomime players interpret the dream their way by taking off their shoes and turning the stage into a ballpark. Shoes hitting heads. Not so funny for the bewildered dreamers in the audience in my play.
I must say, that is not how I wrote the original dream in the play. Not yet knowing what it was to be old. I was just groping.
Still in horse-play, tired of throwing shoes on the stage, one of the players called out, “Come on, audience, another dream!”
Lazure is in a hurry to tell his dream. “I’m holding on to strong iron. And this nurse is tearing away my fingers. I was almost crying. ‘I won’t go in. I won’t go in.’”
“Oh, yes you will.”
“And like a soldier I am standing – but then I couldn’t manage it. It started to rain. And the nurse gets me away from the lamp post, drags me up the steps and puts me down inside the screen
like a delivery package.”
That’s why your memories are with you forever, just put away and hidden maybe, but they are still there – you never forget.
Sam stood up to tell his dream. “That’s in my dream? That doesn’t look like my dream.”
Coming up closer to the stage. “It was the worst blizzard I ever saw. The wind cut us into pieces just like razor blades. She didn’t have a warm dress or coat. Everybody was holding on to anything. Boots? Boots? We didn’t have boots.”
The four pantomimers sat on the floor cross-legged, huddled together to warm themselves.
Auditing drama at Loyola was no advanced course in learning the realities of age, no college to teach us nursing homes advanced played-out years, the reasonings, the longings. Equipped with my childhood memories of the elderly and my almost hundred years of experience, now I could begin to
write “Tell Me A Dream—It’s Christmas in May.” From newly arrived immigrants to the workers on their way home in late evenings, from factories, from old housewives and shopkeepers. I didn’t realize it then but I did know some of their dreams, from those conversations I heard on the street. I
was a child, all ears. It all sank in.
Richard Bloom, the director of theater at Loyola University, liked the play and prepared a proposal for a grant to produce it on stage in their theater. This play to go around to the Chicago
senior community centers with Laura Simon as director. Unfortunately, the grant-givers decided that the money would go to the elderly alcoholics instead of entertainment.
Note: The dreams included in this essay are excerpted from “Tell Me a Dream” by Laura Simon
Mayfair College
Now I’m writing up on my kitchen counter, trying to find a decent plug for my tape recorder, and scrambling through my memory for a scene I am about to write back in the 50's when I decided on an exciting adventure -- radio and television production at Mayfair City College in Chicago. Was I
going into films? I had my hearing again. I had all kinds of plans in my head. I’d go out with that camera, interview people, write a book. I wanted Mannie to wander around with me and my camera in the streets in search of unusual people in sudden exciting scenes to outdo the younger students.
The best I could do was show some of my paintings on closed circuit television.
“Drive me to Maxwell Street.” I said to Mannie. “That’s where I’ll get the real stuff. Gypsies dancing around in their colorful skirts with bunches of cheap beads dangling around their necks.”
Fully knowing that old women and bearded men would be protecting stacks of clothing on carts andpulling you to them to buy, at the same time hurling insults as you ignore them – “and with a camera yet?”
“You can find stuff for your TV production without me -- and what’s so important anyway?”
I know he saw the disappointment in my eyes by the way he touched me before I left for school.
It would have been better if I had said, “I understand your troubles, Mannie, at the lumber yard.” It wasn't that easy for him to run from the bad to find the good. Now in retrospect I see myself running from the seriousness of that situation.
Me? Teach art evenings in adult school? “But I don’t have a college degree,” I’m saying to the Dean, afraid of the buttons popping off my shirt. They must be desperate for a teacher, I thought standing there dumbfounded, still trying to learn something myself, afraid to open my mouth, scrounging through my head for an excuse. “It’s winter. My car might stall -- or -- in the spring, maybe, but then it’s Passover and we’re busy with Matza and changing our dishes.”
“We saw your paintings on closed circuit television,” the Dean was saying with help from his secretary. “And you don’t need a degree to teach in adult school. We have mechanics teaching
automobile repairs, electricians, so we can have a painter, too.”
Every man should have a trade, as my grandfather used to say.
“If only I could teach the deaf together with the hearing,” I suggested, always wanting to prepare for deafness myself. By painting together, both hearing and deaf would learn how to
understand each other and not holler the neighborhood down like our next-door neighbors, parents hearing, half the kids deaf. “How are you?” was the most the deaf could say and get “Fine,” by lipreading, their hands clasped tightly behind them, no talking by the use of hands then; not permitted in deaf school in those days. They could paint to make themselves understood.
“Good idea,” he said. “Just remember, it takes forty students or the class doesn’t go.”
Try as I might I could only get six, my next-door neighbors who were so very interested for love and color.
“Instead,” he said later, “how would you like to lecture on appreciation of art in a convalescent home?”
If you can't go over you have to go under, I thought.
Enthusiastic once more, for my first lecture I started by going to see a great French exhibit at the Art Institute on Michigan Boulevard, winding up at the downtown library and checking out a stack of prints of those paintings I had seen. Each one complete with description on the back.
Wanting to give my all to the elderly students who gathered around me in wheelchairs, heads drooping to their worn-out shoes.
“Since you can’t go to the Art Institute yourselves,” I said, “I brought the Art Institute to you,” holding up the prints and discussing them one by one. They suddenly sat up and looked at me, listening seriously as I started to combine painting and poetry by quoting Browning's “My Last Duchess Upon the Wall.”
The room was quiet in empathy for this seventeen year old duchess who had been beheaded.
Were they looking back into their own memories?
Just then a woman came screaming and crying bitterly down the corridor, heaving sobs like the surf in the ocean. “I did flush the toilet; she won't let me in the room.” The caretaker, like the Duke in the castle, stood up thrusting an executioner’s hand at her, “You! You get back in there! You get back to your room!”
A man who had been sitting quietly behind the sick people in wheelchairs suddenly got up in great anger. “I came all the way from Mayfair College to hear you -- if this is appreciation of art, I’d rather be in my grave. I wouldn’t be in a place like this -- where who you are is taken away from you,” grabbing his overcoat and muffler and running out into the blizzard.
One woman wheeling in closer, “Women should be smart. If the Duke wants to give her a white horse, she should take it and give him whatever he wants and enough of it -- and when the
doctors come to carry him out, she’ll collect his insurance.”
“What a dog!” a voice is saying. “That husband chopped off the head of his beautiful young wife because the gardener gave her a rose and she smiled at him too soon and she wasn’t ashamed to lift the lace over her wrist while a monk was doing her portrait.”
That was my first glimpse into a nursing home.
I've never forgotten that lesson in appreciation of art, over a half a century ago, the more I realize my father wasn't that bad, but then my mother didn’t live in a castle or have to worry about her lace sleeves. He just didn’t want her to play the piano in his presence, having to see her picture framed above, lace across her bosom when she was seventeen.
Mementoes
Like old mementoes that suddenly appear to touch you deeply, like the flowering house on canvas of most recent years, my acrylic brush slipped from my hand, and I was unable to open one of those windows – what would I be awakening in that old house? Some things are best forgotten.
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 On another canvas there is a clown sticking his head out of the window, a pointed dunce cap on his head. And another canvas. A strange face of a man looking down at a bird.
Painting
What is there now for me since I no longer paint? What do I have? And where do I go? And what do I need? Outside my door in the hot sun, heavy sawing tells me that the old shade tree is going fast instead of just wasting its tired arms away.
My readers come for a few hours to help me to visually see what I write, and then all is quiet again.
The words of my paintings stand out boldly. On a poor seeing day, I take the colors straight from the tube to give life to my canvas without knowing which color is which, golds, emerald
greens, the reds.
I heard the rain against my patio window and occasional thunder when painting Flowering House on my card table in my den. The cobalt-blue black tulip grows up the rooftop stems from the very depth of my being.
Rag Lady
That’s how I felt when I won an award for a painting in a competition through Mesa College and the Clairemont Art Guild. Kitty had coaxed me to enter the competition. In ten minutes she’s at my door, I grab Rosie, the Garden Lady, a painting made of acrylics and oil pencil. Rosie was part
of my life. She was chief of the rag ladies on Potomac Avenue and lived in a shack right near my bedroom window across the alley. She added to her income by selling pieces of coconut for a penny and whiskey under the counter.
Those coconut pieces had lots of company on their shelf. Rosie kept the shopkeepers crazy selling them small glasses of liquor, always afraid someone was spying from around the corner to put her in jail.
She entertained my childhood. Her son would come and there would be a lot of fighting. She was always chasing him with a broom. She didn’t like the way he earned his money and he would yell, “Why don’t you watch what you do, take a bath, get all that garbage out of the wash tub.”
“Get out of here. Get out of here,” chasing him. I would run the other way up Potomac Avenue to Robey Street (now called Damen) to my grandmother. She would unknot a handkerchief
and the pennies would pour into my pocket. Out of breath, still running past the corner where my little brother was killed, past Kalscheim’s Butter and Egg Store where I would stand to take in the creamy smell from those big tubs of butter, getting on to Rosie’s for the coconut.
At night in Chicago’s summer heat, my mother would take us to Humboldt Park to sleep on the crowded grass and there was Rosie in the lamplight picking up bits of trash to turn into a little money.
“Careful,” she would say. “Never pick up a spoon or any food that’s wrapped up.” I tried to be a good rag lady’s helper.
Once, on a hot summer night, she found some old pieces of salami. “You come over here,” she said to a dog. “Taste this? Here, eat it. It’s good for you.” The dog gave it a whiff and turned away and she said, “Laura, you’re not eating this. I’ll bring you something better. Just sit on the bench and wait.” Then going around in the dark among the sleeping people and bringing me chicken. “I’m glad I found this chicken for you,” she said. “You see, there will always be something better for you around the corner, some learning, maybe. Just never go too near the lagoon, remember? The Titanic sank in the ocean,” she said, laughing, “not the lagoon. Always remember,
just take another look around the corner for something better.”One hot night, I ran off by myself. My mother came looking for me and found me asleep in the empty boathouse. “You’re not afraid to be here all alone? The policemen are looking for you.
We’re all looking for you and you’re lost and it’s pouring.” She pulls me down the store steps into thunder. People running in all directions on the grass. The lightning emptying the park in oneswoop. We’re soaking wet by the time we get back into the house.
When painting Rosie, the rag lady, I was reminded of another rag lady in the San Diego news.
She was beaten in the park one night for $5.00 and spent weeks in the hospital. When I read of this, my thoughts turned to Rosie all over again. Together with the colorful rags and artificial flowers from her rag bag, I turned her into a Lucky Lady by taking Baby Doe’s picture hat with the conglomeration of flowers dressing her up so she can go to a yard party. I wanted her to be the Lucky Lady.
Rosie, the garden belle, gave me top award through Mesa College and the Clairemont Art Guild. I didn’t understand how I came to win that award, those students so talented. One young man painted an elephant, realistically like a photograph. Colorful. To perfection. And I thought, why didn’t he win first prize? His elephant had never heard the sound of danger beneath him. Stagnant, he didn’t flap his big ears for sounds behind him or beneath him or look around him. He didn’t bend down on one knee to pray to an elephant god to save him. That paintbrush gave him no sense of feeling.
When I came in to pick up my painting, one of the judges said to me, “Is this Laura Simon, this gray-haired old woman who painted Rosie?”
If I’m still hanging on, so will Rosie with her warnings, “Always look around the corner,
Laura, something better for you.” I have hopes for her, too, that she in my painting never lands in someone’s basement for a home.
The Museum of Man
A great treat! The Seniors are having an outing to see a museum in Balboa Park. I travel with pillow -- the bus seat may not be just right. Prepared for cold, as if San Diego is going Arctic, I take my heavy sweater.
It is free day at the Museum of Man. The sculptures in glass cases, so difficult to get to through the crowds, the acoustics did not absorb the noise. Everyone talking at once seemed to
bounce through my hearing aid. Nobody wanted to join me. I am off by myself to find another museum.
A bunch of young boys are coming toward me. “Where is the Ming Gei? I know it’s around here,” I asked them. “Will you help me?” Selecting one young man who looked like he wouldn’t mind an old woman. Gladly giving me his arm. Kidding around never expecting to have a date so
soon. Only one block to go.
Up at the desk at Ming Gei, I ask for a volunteer. I have a personal escort now to take me on a private tour. We walk arm in arm. She takes me from painting to painting to sculptures, explaining each one to me. I stand before King Ragah on an elephant about two feet high among other sculptures made out of paper mache and dung. Using the material that they had at hand and turning it into a paradise of creativity. Those people had given me this beautiful day.
The volunteer took me across the room to show me a miniature paper mache village of India. I took special notice of the hut with the birds on top.
I don’t want to leave this museum, yet I have to ask about the time, afraid of floundering around on my own. A cloudiness around me. Standing in awe, I am taking one last look at the large painting on the wall done on a cotton sheet, trying to absorb all the colors, every brush stroke as much as my eyesight would permit me, reluctantly having to turn away from that feast of beauty.
The clock won’t stand still one moment. My escort is walking me back to my group at the Museum of Man. “Where were you?” the social director asked, marching up to the bus. We are onour way to the picnic lunch.
They knew exactly where the tables were. Surrounded by trees, they have paper tablecloth and napkins, cups of tuna fish, orange juice, tomato, and lettuce salad.
Japanese Costumes
I think I was in a happier mood when I was painting. There was the time when I went Elderhostel to the University of Hawaii. One day they took us on a tour to a Japanese temple. I
wandered into a back room where women were working on Japanese costumes for dolls. They couldn’t tear me away from that. The first thing I did when I got home was to get art books on Japanese costumes. I was going to make those costumes too and put them in paintings. I was having the time of my life.
Went to the yard-goods store in University Town Center and got pieces of silk and had fun picking out all the colors. Where would I put all those collages anyway? Under my bed?
In my memory, I am in an Elderhostel study group at Aloha College on the island of Hawaii. I have to share a room and bath in a dormitory with another woman.
Instead of looking for the music room, I’m running around for a superintendent. “Tell that woman to stop peeing in the shower. Or give me another roommate,” I say, thinking of a threat.
“I’m going to talk to Elderhostel about this.”
My French teacher again—“call the police.”
“For peeing in the shower?”
The Chanukah Story
Memo to Laura Simon
From Don Harrison
Laura, I hold you in high personal esteem. I want to be able to run a story of yours because I think you add luster to our newspaper. But this last story, like the one before it, unfortunately is just not ready yet for publication.
The problem is that it jumps in stream of consciousness fashion from subject to subject. Yes, it portrays what
your life is like, but it doesn’t deliver to the reader a point about Chanukah. It doesn’t add to their Jewish knowledge
or to their sense of Yiddishkeit.
Your thoughts need to be distilled into a cogent piece. Maybe something like how the Maccabees struggled for religious freedom; how for you and other seniors there other struggles. As the Maccabees overcame, so can you and they
– etcetera.
If you can get me something revised and lightly written (no more that 1000 words) by this weekend, it’s possible we still can get it into the Chanukah issue.
Warm regards,
Don
Literary Letters
Hi Ms. Simon,
Your email seems to have been lost in the shuffle of a software upgrade. Please accept my apologies for the delay. I’d love to see your stories; please send them to me. I’ll be out of the office until the week of January 20th, but I promise a prompt reply upon my return. Happy New Year! I have much respect for your energy and enthusiasm for sharing your tales.
Erica Brody
Features Editor
Forward Newspaper
45 E. 33rd St.
New York, NY 10016
212-889-8200, ext. 434
Fax: 212-447-6406
Dear Ms. Erica Brody:
Thank you for your email letter. Charles Chamberlain called me and I was delighted to hear that you are interested in my two stories – the award winner “The Dress” which stems from my childhood; and “Shopping” which is significant of aging. Both are taken from my book I Am Still Here which is written from history as I have lived it in the last century. I learned early in life the struggles of the newly-arrived immigrants.
Sometimes, on a winter night, they would gather in our kitchen to hear the Yiddish Forward being read to them by someone who had the pennies to buy it. Over hot glasses of tea they sought answers to their personal and family problems: “And do people work?” “What’s happening?” “How
can we make a living in Chicago?”
Ms. Brody, I hope you will like these stories that you will find attached to this email. Looking forward to hearing from you.
In appreciation. Sincerely,
Laura Simon
6032 Gullstrand Street
San Diego, CA 92122
Memo to Heritage contributors, advisory board
From Don Harrison
The following story will appear in the upcoming issue of Heritage (Dec 5 issue). I wanted all of you, who have
been so important to Heritage, to see it before the general public does. Those of you who have stories pending, please get
them in as soon as possible for obvious reasons.
I’m not sure what will happen next, but I want to tell each and every one of you, from the bottom of my heart,
how appreciative I am of all your unselfish efforts in behalf of Heritage. It has made me very proud to be associated
with all of you.
With warm regards, Don
Don’t Say Goodbye
A letter to the San Diego Press Heritage:
The San Diego Jewish Press Heritage came to life about ninety years ago, in 1914, just when the Panama Canal was finally completed, which allowed ships then to enter our port in San Diego from the Canal.
What the Jewish Press Heritage and I have in common is past history, a century of war, millions killed for the sake of peace, the Spanish influenza that was like the Black Plague, the Great Depression, the Holocaust, and other crimes against humanity.
For years, as one awaits a good friend, every Thursday the Heritage would come to me with my mail. I see myself finding my powerful magnifier, already turning the pages to extract a few words from the headlines of articles and commentaries, giving me a quick view of the paper as if flying through time and space. Short in eyesight, others have to read the fine print for me, help me to experience the many voices of Yiddishkeit, Jewish culture, the printed words heard in the mind as voices.
It is painful to say goodbye. I know, having said many goodbyes along my long journey. Remembering what a
Rabbi once said, “The longer you live, the more goodbyes you have to say.” I will miss those friendly talks with Don
Harrison, its publisher, its leader, his insights of Torah rubbing off on me, once saying, “If you plant a tree, Laura,
and keep planting, you will see the Messiach. It’s Torah.” It’s strange. Even though I did not see the Messiach, I had
the feeling of His presence when the Heritage published my story, “The Dress” from my book I Am Still Here, after
which they nominated me for an award. I won second place for ethnic stories from the San Diego Press Club.
So what can I say?
Just that we need you, so do not stray too far from your community. As it is written – “What was, will be again.”
So let us raise our glasses of wine and, with full gratitude to you, Don Harrison, and to you, Norman Greene, and to all who have worked so hard to keep the San Diego Jewish Press Heritage alive for us through all those years, to all –L’Chayim, To Life.
Copyright by Laura Simon
Library of Congress
Washington, D.C.
All rights reserved
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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. 