23 January 2013

Dear Classmates,

Steve finally got through to me the need to contribute here.  Many, many thanks to him, to Jeanne and all you other leaders, and to the brave souls who put up stories.  Here’s mine.

In college I fell into despair.  I was the roommate from Hell--a morose, self-righteous, neat freak.  In an attempt to get high I took to sitting on top of the refrigerator at night in my dorm suite.  I was too naive to try drugs or alcohol.  My roommates would come in, turn on the lights, and jump two feet into the air.  I clawed my way out of depression by running a volunteer program in state mental hospitals (where the patients made me feel normal), moving into a halfway house with a schizophrenic roommate (with whom I discussed the meaning of life and the value of cigarette smoking), and my own therapy.

After college I worked in a mental hospital in East Africa, fleeing the Vietnam War.  I started a “social therapy” program with bored orderlies leading clubs for patients.  The orderlies brought native drums into the hospital.  Every afternoon the hospital vibrated like a ceremony in a village in the bush.  Discharge rates improved.  Everyone felt better, including me.  I dated Miss Uganda until I discovered she was frigid since having been raped by a president of the republic.  I made a fool of myself with repeated clumsy, drunken overtures to women.  I found African women overpoweringly beautiful and wished I was black.  After 16 months I left, resolving never to live abroad again because leaving was so painful.

I traveled down the length of the Nile, marveling at naked natives, fending off Arab challenges to our country’s support of Israel, and contracting dysentery.  From Alexandria I made a seasick voyage to Athens, then took a train to Istanbul and a plane to Israel.  I lived on a kibbutz for several months and fell in love with a Sabra--a native female soldier.  When she finally sent me away I spent a week in Nice in mourning.  I drank wine all day long in a cafe, playing A Whiter Shade of Pale on the jukebox, watching every female in sight, and fantasizing about ever newer sex acts.

I chose New York City for graduate school because I wanted to be psychoanalyzed.  Pre and post testing of the 8-year analysis indicated I went from severely neurotic to normal.  In the end I concluded that my despair originated in my conception of my family as a perfect machine in which I was an imperfect cog.  I thanked my analyst for being the type of therapist who would let me come to this conclusion on my own.  “Are you kidding?  I’ve been telling you this for years,” he said.

I didn’t put my improved mood to the analysis, but rather to the meeting of my wife on March 20, 1973.  I’ve been in love three times:  with Peggy Brown in high school, with Rahel Shalita in Israel, and with my wife Lynn since 1973.  These relationships have given me the confidence to do the things that make me happy.

Professionally I have had mediocre success.  I’ve been fired several times as a school psychologist for making comments in staff meetings that make everyone uncomfortable, for addressing group dynamics instead of individual deviance, for supporting staff and students against administration, for generally repeating my role in my family of origin as antiauthoritarian.  Furthermore I have never filled all my available hours in my private practice.  This however has been a blessing by freeing me to do all kinds of unpaid activities:  consultant to an ex-offender group, representative of the American Psychological Association to the UN (where, on World AIDS Day in 1994, I provoked the US Surgeon General to make the comments in support of masturbation-as-normal-sexuality that caused President Clinton to fire her the following week), trustee and president of a Unitarian-Universalist church in New York City, Little League coach and commissioner,  publisher of one book and many articles in the professional press.  I’ve been working on a memoir for twenty years.  It has been rejected by 200 agents.

My patients have taught me that we imprison ourselves with oughts, shoulds, have-tos, gottas, and can’ts.  It’s really all about wants.  How to prioritize them.  This is particularly difficult given that the pursuit of happiness often contradicts the pursuit of pleasure.  Relationship problems always seem to boil down to lack of respect.  And respect is hard to achieve because it requires giving up the idea that there are good people and bad people.

We lived 25 years on the Upper West Side in Manhattan.  It seemed like the meetingplace for the globe to us.  The kids attended public school on a track in which the teacher spoke only Spanish every other day.  In 1995 we moved to a small town in Connecticut for the kids’ middle and high school years.  Now our son is an intelligence analyst for the Department of the Air Force in Washington.  Our daughter served in Mali in the Peace Corps and is a nurse in New York.  Neither is married nor has children.  Lynn and I live in a pine grove by a pond in the woods.  I travel to New York once a week for work and also work out of the house.  Lynn has bigger practices than I in both locations.  My free time now is spent as volunteer EMT on our town’s ambulance, harvesting firewood, and playing softball.  A recent family picture is attached.

My hero is Obama.  Back in 2004 when George Bush was reelected my wife and I were overcome with a wish to leave the country.  Within a month we went to Costa Rica, where we had vacationed for years, and bought property in the jungle overlooking the Pacific.  Our house was built a year later.  It is our getaway.

There is no way that I deserve the luck I’ve had.  But this doesn’t take anything away--indeed, luck seems to sparkle around me.  Part of my luck is in being part of this group.  Sometimes I wonder how can people whom I knew only four years long ago be so important.  Recently I remembered two events that illustrate what happened to me during those four years.  Early in our freshman year I took Betty McKee to the fall dance.  Poor Betty.  I spoke not a word!  I could not bring myself to ask her anything because it might put pressure on her to speak.  I could not say anything because I had no idea what interested her.  My memory is she spent most of the evening with upper classmen who knew how to utter words.  Fast-forwarding from that memory, I remember a series of parties at the end of our senior year during one of which I crawled on the floor on all fours, pretending to be a dog, and lifting my leg against the legs of various people.  My skill with women had not improved but my ability for silliness had.  I wonder what will happen at our fiftieth.

Love, Rob