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(The db468963776 database is open.)
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The best part of our last reunion was the pleasure of seeing what wonderful persons our classmates have become. I would love to be able to attend this year, but it won't be possible to know until the last moment. In either case, my warmest thanks to the reunion committee for all this wonderful planning.
My life has been joyful in many ways, although it has not followed a straight line: graduated University of Michigan (Information Design, photography major), worked in Chicago doing photojournalism and experimental illustration; married the artist, Richard Frooman and was his model while raising two delightful children into fine adults; moved to Michigan and then Hawaii; worked as a manufacturer's representative and co-founded a wholesale firm selling giftware, custom hotel linens, and costume jewelry throughout the Islands and in the Pacific; divorced; settled in Durham (midway between the children in Atlanta and Charleston, SC); retrained to be a respiratory therapist; worked with an applied medical anthropologist who studied, published, and presented on professional wellness (burnout issues) and advocated for changes in professional cultures; cared for my mother in Chicago for three years, returned with her to Durham, replaced a hip; became interested in the Melungeon genetics-research movement (the curiously unwritten history of Arab, Berber, and Jewish settlement in the pre-colonial Americas, especially the Appalachians, soon after the Iberian Inquisitions); began editing non-fiction; and have been seeking a proper translator for my grandfather's Yiddish poems, with an eye to turning some of the 'Lider' into a song-cycle. Grandchildren, music, and travel to hear music have been my passions since retiring. The grandchildren are in Atlanta, so I'm back in the Grandma Business since my son and daughter-in-law sent two to college and had two more, but there's less I can offer, this time, except funny knitted animals. Most of my best friends are opera singers or jazz musicians, so I try to be where they are performing and/or recording. In some cases, this has meant my going along on their trips to Japan, the Caribbean, Germany, California, Seattle, New York, and New England. I hope to be in Bologna next April when one friend debuts her "Tosca." A planned move to Atlanta has been delayed. It will be hard to leave my beloved loft in an old tobacco warehouse and the great Research Triange area. Look for me in the Durham phone book if you pass through soon and, I hope, in the Atlanta book sometime next year. I'd be happy to see you again. |