Auld Lang Syne
As this year comes to an end, I wanted to reflect a bit on why I selected “Gray” as the title of my blog.
I chose it, basically, because I thought I was very clever to come up with it. And I like to amuse myself.
I found something particularly poignant and brilliant about the fact that West Point is all about gray (the Long Gray Line, gray uniforms, gray buildings, “black, gold, and gray,” etc.); aging is symbolized by the color gray (and we were all hitting middle age); and there are so many “gray areas” in life. Gray, gray, gray, gray, gray. So many meanings and shades of meaning encompassed in one tiny four letter word which isn’t even a cuss word!
The impetus for starting this blog came from my 20th West Point reunion, which I attended reluctantly but dutifully at the behest of a close group of women classmates who have supported me and encouraged me during some of the darkest days of my life. I had not been back to West Point since 1986, for the graduation of the class that came after mine. Actually, I had flown back from England, where I was attending Oxford as a graduate student, to attend my former West Point roommate’s wedding. Her fiancé was in the Class of 1986, and they were getting married right after his graduation, which was a fairly typical arrangement for West Pointers, who were not allowed to be married while at the Academy.
Only the wedding was called off at the last moment, and I didn’t find out about it until I received a long distance phone call from the fiancé who embarrassedly told me he realized I was coming all that way for nothing. I was stunned, yes, but it was too late really to change my plans. After West Point, I was flying on to join my husband for the summer at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where he was stationed with the 101st Airborne/Air Assault. I had to fly through New York anyway; I would still come up to West Point, attend graduation, and spend some time with my former sponsor and his family.
If it comes as any consolation, my former roommate and her fiancé ended up marrying afterall a few years later. Which seemed somehow very right. I am not in touch with them any more, however. This is one of the problems with military families: everyone moves so frequently, if you miss even one move you can lose touch with people forever, or at least indefinitely. I have no idea where my roommate is. I am not sure that she and her husband are even still married. She did not attend our 20th West Point reunion. She does not list her address with the Alumni Association. I tried searching for her – and her husband – on the Internet, but to no avail. The best I could come up with was the last known address and phone number that I had, and neither of them worked. Mail returned to sender, phone disconnected.
Sigh.
I would love to reconnect and catch up with J. We were so different, yet got along so well. She was like a breath of fresh air at an uptight, male-dominated military institution, a woman with heart and soul and chutzpah. She was African American, from a small town in Florida. Sanford. I used to call it Sanford and Son. I think her Mama was actually her grandmother, and she didn’t grow up with a father. But she had a very loving and devoted extended family of sisters and nieces and cousins. She was wild, dedicated, worldly, irreverent, a hard worker, funny as hell, and loved Prince, Chaka Khan, and Rick James, whose poster hung rebelliously on the back of our barracks room door. And she smoked. I, on the other hand, was an uptight, prudish, naïve white Catholic girl from a conservative, upper middle class suburb in the Northeast and an overprotected, idyllic childhood. We roomed together for three years, whenever we could, often with another roommate added into the mix as well. Finally, in our last semester at West Point we ended up rooming alone, just the two of us. We used to call ourselves the Pointer Sisters. A whole lot of laughter went on inside that room as we impatiently bided our time, ready to burst forth from West Point’s gates and take on the Army and the world at large.
She read at my wedding; she would have been my Maid of Honor, but my only sister filled those shoes. She did shots of Jack Daniels with my new father in-law out in our driveway, forever endearing herself to him as a woman who could hold her liquor in a man-to-man showdown. I visited her in Germany where she was stationed as a new Ordinance LT while I was studying at Oxford. This was after her wedding had been called off; she had met someone else. But that didn’t last long, and she eventually ended up marrying her former beau, whom she had known since Cow year at West Point. After Germany, she joined us at Fort Hood, Texas, where my husband and I were finally stationed together after three years of being separated by the Army and schooling. Her first year there, she livened up an otherwise sedate Thanksgiving dinner that we were hosting for my husband’s soldiers, and then she deployed to Desert Shield/Desert Storm. She was in DISCOM, the division’s support command, in the Materials Management Center (MMC). I used to call her MMC Hammer. She finally married her West Point beau, and the two of them headed off for a tour in Korea. When their active duty commitments were done, they got out of the Army and settled in San Antonio, Texas, where they took over a Western wear supply company from an older couple who wanted to retire. My former roommie sent me, her craft-impaired friend, a glue gun and beads and western silver bits and taught me how to make my own Western wear belts and necklaces. We stayed in touch via phone and letters and Christmas cards, and they came to visit us once when we were stationed at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The boys were born by then, and Auntie J brought them Hi-Ho Cherrio!, which became their favorite board game of all time.
Somehow, somewhere over the years, however, we lost touch. It was probably during the time we were stationed in Germany and moved three times over the course of our four years there. I know that when we moved back to the States, I tried to locate her. They had been in San Antonio for quite some time with the Western wear company, but I couldn’t track them down. The company seemed to have gone out of business, or changed its name and location at the very least, and the addresses and phone numbers I had no longer worked. I think maybe J may not have wanted to contact me again for she could have sent something to my mom’s address, which has remained the same after all of these years.
I have no idea where she is now or what she is doing or what has happened to her or her husband. Their company might have folded, or they may have decided they’d had enough with Western wear and moved on to other endeavors. They were always coming up with creative ideas for new business ventures. They may have divorced. I am not sure if they ever had children. They had been trying to have kids, without success, for several years and had talked about going over to Korea to adopt a mixed race baby. Her husband was an Air Force brat himself, half Korean, half Hispanic. She said if they adopted a baby who had been born to a Korean woman and an African American soldier/airman, the baby would look just like their own.
Little does she know that I divorced after eighteen years of marriage and moved back home. I never thought I would live back here in the town where I grew up. She doesn’t know I went back to school, became a librarian, and am raising my two sons as a single mom.
I would LOVE to reconnect with J. I hope that wherever she is, she is doing well. And is happy.
My sons are almost 13 and 15 now, but they refuse to give away the Hi-Ho Cherrio! game which their Auntie J brought them. It still sits on their game shelf, surrounded by Risk and Clue and Fellowship of the Rings Monopoly. In my mind, which is romantic and prone to fantasy, I imagine her showing up, unexpected and unannounced but always welcome, at our front door one day, and she and the boys would play Hi-Ho Cherrio! For old times’ sake. And it would be a lot of fun!
They would get me to play. There would be a lot of laughter and teasing and remembering. Ribald jokes and bad puns. Southern Comfort and diet Coke. We would laugh so hard, tears would come to our eyes. The Pointer Sisters back together again.
I chose it, basically, because I thought I was very clever to come up with it. And I like to amuse myself.
I found something particularly poignant and brilliant about the fact that West Point is all about gray (the Long Gray Line, gray uniforms, gray buildings, “black, gold, and gray,” etc.); aging is symbolized by the color gray (and we were all hitting middle age); and there are so many “gray areas” in life. Gray, gray, gray, gray, gray. So many meanings and shades of meaning encompassed in one tiny four letter word which isn’t even a cuss word!
The impetus for starting this blog came from my 20th West Point reunion, which I attended reluctantly but dutifully at the behest of a close group of women classmates who have supported me and encouraged me during some of the darkest days of my life. I had not been back to West Point since 1986, for the graduation of the class that came after mine. Actually, I had flown back from England, where I was attending Oxford as a graduate student, to attend my former West Point roommate’s wedding. Her fiancé was in the Class of 1986, and they were getting married right after his graduation, which was a fairly typical arrangement for West Pointers, who were not allowed to be married while at the Academy.
Only the wedding was called off at the last moment, and I didn’t find out about it until I received a long distance phone call from the fiancé who embarrassedly told me he realized I was coming all that way for nothing. I was stunned, yes, but it was too late really to change my plans. After West Point, I was flying on to join my husband for the summer at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where he was stationed with the 101st Airborne/Air Assault. I had to fly through New York anyway; I would still come up to West Point, attend graduation, and spend some time with my former sponsor and his family.
If it comes as any consolation, my former roommate and her fiancé ended up marrying afterall a few years later. Which seemed somehow very right. I am not in touch with them any more, however. This is one of the problems with military families: everyone moves so frequently, if you miss even one move you can lose touch with people forever, or at least indefinitely. I have no idea where my roommate is. I am not sure that she and her husband are even still married. She did not attend our 20th West Point reunion. She does not list her address with the Alumni Association. I tried searching for her – and her husband – on the Internet, but to no avail. The best I could come up with was the last known address and phone number that I had, and neither of them worked. Mail returned to sender, phone disconnected.
Sigh.
I would love to reconnect and catch up with J. We were so different, yet got along so well. She was like a breath of fresh air at an uptight, male-dominated military institution, a woman with heart and soul and chutzpah. She was African American, from a small town in Florida. Sanford. I used to call it Sanford and Son. I think her Mama was actually her grandmother, and she didn’t grow up with a father. But she had a very loving and devoted extended family of sisters and nieces and cousins. She was wild, dedicated, worldly, irreverent, a hard worker, funny as hell, and loved Prince, Chaka Khan, and Rick James, whose poster hung rebelliously on the back of our barracks room door. And she smoked. I, on the other hand, was an uptight, prudish, naïve white Catholic girl from a conservative, upper middle class suburb in the Northeast and an overprotected, idyllic childhood. We roomed together for three years, whenever we could, often with another roommate added into the mix as well. Finally, in our last semester at West Point we ended up rooming alone, just the two of us. We used to call ourselves the Pointer Sisters. A whole lot of laughter went on inside that room as we impatiently bided our time, ready to burst forth from West Point’s gates and take on the Army and the world at large.
She read at my wedding; she would have been my Maid of Honor, but my only sister filled those shoes. She did shots of Jack Daniels with my new father in-law out in our driveway, forever endearing herself to him as a woman who could hold her liquor in a man-to-man showdown. I visited her in Germany where she was stationed as a new Ordinance LT while I was studying at Oxford. This was after her wedding had been called off; she had met someone else. But that didn’t last long, and she eventually ended up marrying her former beau, whom she had known since Cow year at West Point. After Germany, she joined us at Fort Hood, Texas, where my husband and I were finally stationed together after three years of being separated by the Army and schooling. Her first year there, she livened up an otherwise sedate Thanksgiving dinner that we were hosting for my husband’s soldiers, and then she deployed to Desert Shield/Desert Storm. She was in DISCOM, the division’s support command, in the Materials Management Center (MMC). I used to call her MMC Hammer. She finally married her West Point beau, and the two of them headed off for a tour in Korea. When their active duty commitments were done, they got out of the Army and settled in San Antonio, Texas, where they took over a Western wear supply company from an older couple who wanted to retire. My former roommie sent me, her craft-impaired friend, a glue gun and beads and western silver bits and taught me how to make my own Western wear belts and necklaces. We stayed in touch via phone and letters and Christmas cards, and they came to visit us once when we were stationed at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The boys were born by then, and Auntie J brought them Hi-Ho Cherrio!, which became their favorite board game of all time.
Somehow, somewhere over the years, however, we lost touch. It was probably during the time we were stationed in Germany and moved three times over the course of our four years there. I know that when we moved back to the States, I tried to locate her. They had been in San Antonio for quite some time with the Western wear company, but I couldn’t track them down. The company seemed to have gone out of business, or changed its name and location at the very least, and the addresses and phone numbers I had no longer worked. I think maybe J may not have wanted to contact me again for she could have sent something to my mom’s address, which has remained the same after all of these years.
I have no idea where she is now or what she is doing or what has happened to her or her husband. Their company might have folded, or they may have decided they’d had enough with Western wear and moved on to other endeavors. They were always coming up with creative ideas for new business ventures. They may have divorced. I am not sure if they ever had children. They had been trying to have kids, without success, for several years and had talked about going over to Korea to adopt a mixed race baby. Her husband was an Air Force brat himself, half Korean, half Hispanic. She said if they adopted a baby who had been born to a Korean woman and an African American soldier/airman, the baby would look just like their own.
Little does she know that I divorced after eighteen years of marriage and moved back home. I never thought I would live back here in the town where I grew up. She doesn’t know I went back to school, became a librarian, and am raising my two sons as a single mom.
I would LOVE to reconnect with J. I hope that wherever she is, she is doing well. And is happy.
My sons are almost 13 and 15 now, but they refuse to give away the Hi-Ho Cherrio! game which their Auntie J brought them. It still sits on their game shelf, surrounded by Risk and Clue and Fellowship of the Rings Monopoly. In my mind, which is romantic and prone to fantasy, I imagine her showing up, unexpected and unannounced but always welcome, at our front door one day, and she and the boys would play Hi-Ho Cherrio! For old times’ sake. And it would be a lot of fun!
They would get me to play. There would be a lot of laughter and teasing and remembering. Ribald jokes and bad puns. Southern Comfort and diet Coke. We would laugh so hard, tears would come to our eyes. The Pointer Sisters back together again.
posted by delta at 2:59 PM
1 Comments:
Now you've set me thinking about my long lost friend whom I haven't seen since New Year's Day 1989. She would pop in and out of my life but each time she appeared we would pick up as easily as returning from a commercial break.
Like you and J, we were almost opposites and maybe because of that we didn't have to maintain any pretensions with each other. I think one definition of a good friend may be someone who has seen you at your worst but always thinks of you at your best.
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