Love to Write Letters

My friend Anita Long is turning 100 next month. We regularly write letters although recently her letters have been hard to read. She needs glasses and her script is running all over the page. We visited her in Norwich one June Saturday a few years ago when she first moved to Sheltering Arms. I made pizzelles and she loved them. We hung out in her room and looked at the big green-leafed maple tree and we told stories and laughed.

I sat on her bed and spotted an empty glass vintage milk bottle under her dresser and climbed under to get it for her. We laughed. I met Anita years ago when we swam together at the Y. I just loved her as everyone did. We became friends and occasionally we'd have coffee together and she'd tell me stories about her childhood growing up in my neighborhood during the Great Depression. She told me that as a young girl she'd pull rags out of the trash and sew them into dresses. She had a mean mother who kept her home and two sisters, just like Cinderella. Her father was a drunk and so was her husband. "He was drunk on my wedding day," she said. Anita wanted to be a teacher at a normal school* but her mother said "no, you must stay home and take care of me!" She would've been an amazing teacher. She ended up getting a job at a car dealership driving a red Volvo. "I loved that car! Freedom!" She told me she had half of her stomach removed from ulcers. So we ate very slowly when we had lunch together. The more we talked the more we realized we shared a lot in common. She even knew Dora Fleurant the woman who owned my house.
"There was a bar on every corner and lots of gambling back then," she told me.
"The day I saw George I knew I was in big trouble," she said. "He was tall dark and a handsome devil, biiiiig trouble," she said laughing. It sounded like love at first sight at the car dealership.

Anita you are so amazing, I say. "I work at it," she says. And she does. "I have my morning time, and I have my crossword puzzles." Everyone loves her. All of those years of swimming served her well. She took up swimming at age 40 and swam for 45 years. She loved to drive but had to give that up after a few fender benders. She used to drive to the prison every Sunday to see her grand niece Paulette at the ACI. "If you knew how she was raised," she said.


"How did you escape your family in New York" she asked me. "I just got up and left," I said.
"Oh I wish I could've done that," she said.
"Why did you pick the Social District of Woonsocket of all places?" she asked.
"I could afford it and I love Wonsocket's gritty urban personality."

One day Anita came over for lunch. "We used to pull the curtains and drink," she said admiring the pink drapes.
"I think this was a speakeasy in the cellar," I said. "There's a bar and bar stools and two ovens"
"They'd have secret parties down there in the 20's," she said. "Everyone did back then."



*
According to the 1988 edition of the Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins:

Normal Schools derive their name from the French phrase ecole normale. These teacher-training institutions, the first of which was established in France by the Brothers of the Christian Schools in 1685, were intended to set a pattern, establish a “norm” after which all other schools would be modeled. The first normal school in America was established in Vermont in 1823. The name fell out of favor toward the end of the 1920s, when the influence of Columbia University’s Teachers College became paramount in the field of public education. Most such institutions changed their names to “teachers colleges” during the 1930s. Now that the “progressive education” teachings of the Columbia group have been discredited, the Progressive Education Association itself has disbanded and most colleges have dropped “teachers” from their names. Thus we find that the normal school of grandfather’s day became a “state teachers college” during father’s youth, but today’s sprouts are attending “state colleges.”