Remembering Barbara

This is one of the last classes  of women to graduate from Wesleyan University (1912) before we arrived on campus in September, 1970. 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

We were unabashed in claiming their legacy, if not their ruffles and high button collars. Defiant in our flannel shirts and work boots, we knew ourselves to be their blue-stocking daughters - and no one knew it better than Barbara. I don't have a picture of her, but this being her shirt, I'll use this picture of myself to set the stage. 

 

More than anyone else except David, Barbara was my Wesleyan experience. Coming up to our fiftieth reunion, I was asked to write a remembrance, within the constraints of a four hundred word limit. That was not enough - nowhere near enough. 

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What do you do with an undergraduate degree in a brand-new kind of interdisciplinary major, a thing called American Studies? 

Move to a glorified cabin on a dirt road, christen the residence Bored Feet, and set up housekeeping with your beloved and two of his boat-building buddies. Learn to whip up hearty meals on a wood burning stove, savor pre-dawn meetings with the ermine who visits your Maine kitchen, refer to Robert as your paramour, and train as a welder at the Bath Ironworks. 

From Bath to Bay City, Michigan, home of Gougeon Brothers Boats. Barbara and Robert started out in an attic apartment, up a flight of outside stairs. They graduated to a good-sized house with a monster garden and an assortment of cats and dogs.

Barbara took a job as a paralegal, went back to school, got her law degree, and practiced. By then, we were only in intermittent touch, so I have few details to offer on the type of law or professional accolades. They were plentiful, I’m sure, but they’re not the important thing.

Nor is it really important that she died of cancer at the age of 47. Too young, too soon, yes—but far less important than who she was.

After we’d spent an afternoon rummaging through a flea market, she produced a brown paper bag, full of newspaper. “I have no idea what you are going to do with these,” she said, “but you liked them, so I got them.” With little ceremony, she made me the owner of nine perfect art deco martini glasses, gold rims intact. Quintessential Barbara.

She was right, of course. A nomadic Masters student had no use for anything so delicate, so frivolous. And…they brought great joy to a dark and lonely time.

When I think of Barbara, I think of midnight popovers shared with neighbors in the Williams Street Towers. I think of her response to my wedding announcement, “Am I invited? I wouldn’t miss it for the world.” I think of her gimlet eye, her dry sense of humor, and all the things she left unspoken. Then I send a contribution to the Zoe Fund. Established before her death and continued in her memory, its purpose is high-minded: scholarships for women whose educations were interrupted. How many of the beneficiaries know that its namesake, Zoe, was Barbara’s cat, I wonder.