school – Old Lady Writing

When I started law school, we had this incoming yearbook with everyone’s photos, so that you could get to know your classmates—you were going to be with them for three years. We had to list our undergraduate institution and hometown. The first was easy because factual; the second, for me, became unexpectedly convoluted.

At that time, I was not even a decade out of the Old Country, but it was lost to me, irrelevant, and politically incorrect (oh, how the times have not changed!). I had no home with my mother and stepfather, last and least because they moved states a couple of times since my last sojourn with them. I was living year round, working, and attending university in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and so it became my hometown, by default and of the moment.

I lived in the same studio apartment for three years, which was the only place in this lifetime that was all mine, decorated by my teenage self with a combination of my favorite things, including a porcelain mask bought at Middle Earth from when I dreamed of an entire wall of masks (I still have it, the lone holdover; I never bought any others), and a collection of posters of my favorite people and places: best of the Netherlands sent to me by my beloved Dutch host family, the Marx Brothers and the Monkees, Oscar winning movies when there was still a finite number and I knew every one, Mardi Gras by Andrea Mistretta, a field of poppies that reminded me of a train ride from Moscow to Crimea, and an obligatory poster of Moscow (I am most assuredly not from Moscow, but that was the best that was available at Borders). The posters subsequently fell victims to a flood in the basement of my first house, but most of these are still some of my favorite things.

Out there, next to State Theater, is the location of the original Borders bookstore.

And speaking of Borders, I lived a block away from the original bookstore. This was the Borders before it was a chain, before it was international, before it sold music or had a café, and even before the flagship store moved into the space vacated by Jacobson’s (another sad loss; Jacobson’s was a great store). Being able to just walk in and browse, after work, between classes, on the weekends—ah, it was heaven! It was certainly a big part of what made Ann Arbor home. When I was in high school, coming to Ann Arbor with my mother was a double-edged sword: she would visit her friends, I was either bored or resentful, but Borders and the nearby movie theater on Fifth that showed foreign and art films that would never make it to our painfully provincial town of Jackson were always worth the trip[1].

Summers in Ann Arbor were magical yet awful. It was like being in one of those weird stories in which a person wakes up one day and the world is different: there are no adults, or half the population is gone, or the Beatles never existed. All right, maybe this last one is not strictly relevant. But basically, you just walked out on the street one day, and all the students were gone, save for the few of us year-round semi-townies. On the one hand, it was nice to just work and have the predictability of time off. I craved the stability, but I missed the difference of days and the extra activities that filled the school year. And, full time job was not twice as boring as a part time job, it was more boring cubed or quadrupled. It took up so very much time, leaving only the evenings of nothing to do or the weekends of trying to find things to do. There were no tasks to perform in my free time, but instead, the panic of not having those tasks. It was the waiting time. Which is how I sometimes still feel in my adult life.

Eventually, Ann Arbor became too small to contain me and my dreams. It really is a tiny town, with the downtown you can criss-cross in a quantity of minutes, not hours. Were it not for the diagonal part of the main campus (obviously nicknamed The Diag), you could look right through it. I was weary of walking the same half dozen streets. I needed a change of scenery, and so I went to the biggest city I could find.

Back when there was only one tall building on South University.

I spent another summer in Ann Arbor after that, two years later. All but one of my friends were gone, and I was living out a Cat Stevens song lyric, “For you will still be here tomorrow, but your dreams may not” and an agonizing “you can’t go home again” adage. I was a wildly unhappy law student and summer associate in a big firm, terrified by the future not of my own dreaming unfolding in front of me. It was such a weird time, living in an old familiar place, but on different terms, as a quasi-adult in a college town. Living in New York, I yearned for Ann Arbor, yet the minute I arrived, the streets started closing in on me again.

And now, some more decades later, the changes make the town barely recognizable to me. Gone are all the stores I frequented—yes, literally every single one. Not one survives, not Borders, not Middle Earth, not Peaceable Kingdom, not Falling Water, not Schoolkids Records. Some restaurants remain, and there are better ones, including a handful of decent breweries, which would have been irrelevant to the underage me in any case. But the stores were special because of all the solitary browsing one could do, in a crowd yet apart. This is a feeling one can cultivate only in an urban environment, walking in, walking around, walking out, invisible.

Ann Arbor is a reminder, a symbol of the time when everything was possible. Before I started law school, I could have started anything else instead. The road was chosen, but not yet taken. I could have taken a gap year (no, I could not have, I had no resources for that, but it is nice to think that I might have had options). I could have kept working at an office job and used my after work hours to find myself and my path. I could have… well, that is about it. I never really had choices. But there was that one brief shining moment when I thought I did—and that was in Ann Arbor. And so, this town will always be for me a symbol of possibilities, and that is enough for it to have been called “home”.

[1] “Cinema Ann Arbor: How Campus Rebels Forged a Singular Film Culture” by Frank Uhle is a time-machine trip down memory lane to a time that I just barely glimpsed, but during which I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have lived.

[https://oldladywriting.com/2021/01/30/the-road-not-taken/]

This is the poster I should have guarded more carefully!

Last year, I lost my favorite tooth. I mean, I did not misplace it, nor did it fall out. It was surgically removed. This tooth, #6, was my first root canal and my first crown. My own grandfather put the crown on it, made from a melted down earring, and it lasted for decades. Eventually, the crown wore out, and then the tooth itself. There was even another root canal in the mix, so suffice it to say, #6 and I were bonded by hardship. On the day when #6 and I finally parted ways, the nurse offered me nitrous oxide and oxygen, and how could I say no? I welcome any option that results in less or no pain for me.

Jubilee Square. Motorbuilders Palace is on the left. The clinic is on the right.

As I was dutifully breathing in and out, an unbidden memory came to me, of me and my classmates trooping down Lenin Avenue to the Jubilee Square (the one with the Motorbuilders Palace [https://oldladywriting.com/2020/08/18/valor-and-glory-of-the-motorbuilders/]. In my mind’s eye, I saw the golden Russian autumn sung by poets, maple leaves everywhere, the only melancholy season of an ever-sunshiny year. The school year has begun long ago enough to be a bore and a burden, and the time has come for one of the most unpleasant organized events of the Soviet school system—the dental checkup. It is about a mile from the school to the clinic—the longest mile. If ever I felt like a lamb to the slaughter, this was most certainly the time. Usually, I got some kind of exemption, being raised by dentists and being dragged to the children’s dental clinic by my grandmother on my own free time, but that day, I was all out of aces. It is also possible that this was shortly after my grandmother took me to the clinic and I escaped, bolting out of the torture chair and making it halfway through Jubilee Square before I was captured (traffic in those days was unimpressive, but not nonexistent—I was absolutely in danger of being struck by a bus, a fate still preferable to any dental procedure). I have to add, individual cabinets are a Western luxury. In Soviet Russia, an army of Orin Scrivello clones with their whirring drills were leaning over screaming kids in one big room in a fog of ether.

I have a lot to say about growing up in an apartment where our kitchen doubled as the prosthodontist’s office, but that is another story for another time. But one thing I know is true, and that is that our home never smelled of ether. Maybe grandpa had no access to it. Maybe the smells of grandma’s cooking overwhelmed. Regardless, the scents of home were not medicinal. And I know this because had I been immune to these odors, I would not have been so jolted into panic each time I entered a Soviet dental clinic and been positively engulfed by that distinct piercing stench. A mere whiff was enough to activate the fight-or-flight instinct. It was always flight, because fighting presumes staying, and there are no fools. Flee, always flee.

The unintended consequence of my recurrent, determined, and frantic rejections of the most feared dental procedures was that my grandmother gave up (a precursor of things to come—a scythe came upon a stone, as in, she met her match when it comes to wills of iron), leaving me at the mercy of the school system. And so began the long march.

The clinic where my grandmother worked. The was not just dentistry here, but other tortures as well. To be continued…

I always think of that BBC commercial, “They say one’s cows are mad, they say one’s dentistry is diabolical” when I think of the dentists of my childhood. My grandfather did not work with children and was overwhelmingly busy with his relentless stream of patients, and my grandmother—well, I did not trust her. More specifically, I did not trust in her not taking care to not inflict pain. (Well, that was a lot of “nots”—also emblematic of my childhood).

That day, which my classmates and I anticipated with varying degree of fear but with unanimous distaste, was the source of much scheming. While most of them were fairly resigned to this grim fate, I had one accomplice whose fear of the dentist actually exceeded my own. His name was Max, and he was a freethinker. I am told he eventually became an alcoholic, a fate not only unsurprising but entirely predictable given both his environment and spirit (no pun intended). But when I knew him, ages seven to 12, he was a shrewd kid with a profound dislike of conformity and authority. He was non-confrontational but steadfast in his avoidance of anything extra. He was the epitome of “quiet quitting” decades ahead of its time. One of his catchphrases was “And the lesson is going on”, whispered to me whenever a teacher would get distracted and go off on a tangent, meaning that while time is getting wasted, no work gets done, and that is its own reward. Max never got any exemptions from attending mandatory events, and yet he never attended them. He just did not show up. He was reprimanded, chastised, shamed, and accused of being an “individualist”. He gave zero you-know-well-whats. He was, of course, a member of my Link. [https://oldladywriting.com/2023/11/11/scrap-metal-fiasco/]

Max and I conferred and confirmed that we were not going to the dentist, with the class or without. Ever. We did not have the audacity to just not show up to school that day—that seemed just too brazen, and we were not hooligans. We were conscientious objectors. And so, as the column of the condemned dragged itself along that familiar tree-lined alley, led by our fearsome homeroom teacher, the grammatically and socially challenged instructor of algebra and geometry, the two of us simply ducked into the labyrinth of yards off Lenin Avenue. Without any regard for consequences, we ran for our lives. We were not good friends, merely coconspirators. We quickly went our own way, but for one brief shiny moment, we were bound by the shared taste of complete and utter freedom.

Lenin Ave. We escaped between those yellow buildings on the left. Photo taken in January; alas, I have no autumnal images to share.

And all these many years later, in a dental surgery under the calming influence of gas, it all came back to me, the sepia colors and the smell of fall leaves, the voices of my young comrades, the distinct flavor of childhood of unlimited future and potential, and the feeling of my long ago and far away home deep in my bones. It never ceases to amaze me how memories can be summoned by the most unlikely agents and at the most unlikely times. And how joy can be found even in the middle of pain.