Purple Golf Cart: The Misadventures of a Lesbian Grandma (2 page)

While the history in this book is accurate—at least accurate in my own mind—I changed the names of some of the people because this is my memoir, not theirs. Their recollections may be—and probably are—much different from mine. I see no need to deliberately piss off people from my past any more than they may have been pissed off originally. You’ll know which is which. Pseudonyms are first names only. Real names are first and last. Anyway, others must find voices to tell their own stories. I can tell only mine, and only from my own perspective. In addition, I include chronology at the beginning of many of the chapters for perspective. I want you, the reader, to understand what was happening socially and politically during those years and how my life—and perhaps yours—was imbedded in and affected by the culture of the day.

I extend my heartfelt thanks to all those folks through the years who encouraged me to write my story. It took a while, but their words stayed with me. I’m grateful to my dear friends Helen Schwartz, Melinda Moore, Jill Harris, Annie Goldman, and my sisters Sherry Horwitz and Barbra Miner, who read much of this work in its early stages, provided feedback, and encouraged me to continue, and to Kristen Snyder who read the almost-final draft. I offer thanks to Peggy Schumacher for her feedback while on our Eco-Arts writing retreat in Costa Rica, and to the women on that trip who listened and offered ideas despite sitting in the humid Costa Rican jungle. I’m also grateful to Dr. Karen Derr who helped me process the painful events and feelings as they captured my attention in my consciousness. Don’t do a memoir without your therapist nearby!

Regina Lark, my best pal, read many iterations of this work as she was building her own businesses. She generously provided tremendous encouragement, marketing tips, and really strong coffee the entire way. Barb Gottlieb, the best web diva ever, guided the technical part when I didn’t know there was a technical part!

My life could never have been what it was and is without my two precious children, Berit and Erik. They suffered as much as I, yet it didn’t stop them from coming “home” to me. Finally, I’m thankful for every person from my past, even the scary ones. Regardless of circumstances, I’m glad our paths crossed and our lives touched. I would have had a very different life experience had it not been for each one of them.

I’m 64 now. As I reflect back in these chapters, I realize that life has been good despite—or perhaps because of—the distant and recent crises: the loss of custody of my children; my poverty, transiency and homelessness; friends dying from AIDS; multiple failed relationships; depression; cancer; being fired from more jobs than I care to remember. Words in a Jimmy Buffet song describe how I feel today about my life’s journey: “Some of it’s magic, some of it’s tragic, but it’s been a good life all the way.” Indeed...

I attended a workshop recently in which there was an ice-breaker that required participants to describe their very best day. “Are you kidding???” I proclaimed. “THIS is my best day. I woke up. I’m still here. It’s good!” Today, this day, is my very best day. I have a large loving family including my parents who are in their 80s and still going strong; my children and grandchildren who fill my heart with deep pride and joy; my sisters and brothers, by birth or marriage to one another, who are my best friends; talented and passionate colleagues; and sweet loving friends. I have meaningful work as a professor in educational leadership at the California Stare University Fullerton, and I’m blessed to be surrounded by smart, excited, engaged students. I have good health and a happy heart, sweet dear friends, and I have my purple golf cart.              

I invite you to come along on this journey with me. It is a journey of reflection and resilience, of shared stories about my life, of remembering from where I came. Perhaps something will resonate with your life experiences and you, too, will be motivated to write your story. My email is [email protected]. I hope you’ll let me know what you think. In the meantime, hop aboard my purple golf cart and let’s ride!

2. From My Jewish Roots, I Rise

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1947

U.S. President
: Harry S. Truman

Best film
: Gentlemen’s Agreement; Miracle on 34
^th
St.

Best actors
: Ronald Coleman; Loretta Young

Best TV shows
: Kraft Television Theater; Meet the Press; Kukla, Fran & Ollie; Howdy Doody

Popular songs
: The Anniversary Song, Heartaches, Peg O’ My Heart, White Christmas

Civics
: Hollywood “Black List” created

Popular Culture
: Microwave oven invented; Jackie Robinson joins Brooklyn Dodgers; Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank published; Vice Versa, the first North American LGBT publication, written and self-published by Lisa Ben in Los Angeles.

Deaths
: Henry Ford, Al Capone, race horse Man O' War

_________________________________________________________________

“You’re almost 25 and you’re not married. What are you, funny or something???”

The words swirled furiously around in my head and landed in my gut like a boxer’s powerful punch. My grandfather demanded to know why I wasn’t married. I panicked! He must know my secret, but how could he? I never told anyone, never acted on it. But he had to know or he wouldn’t have said it like that!

I did the only thing I could think of to deflect his suspicions: I called my old college default date Jake who was now a school band director in Florida. He’d proposed once, just before we graduated from the University of Florida in 1969. He drew a high draft number and didn’t want to go to Viet Nam. No need, though. His father bought him a ride in the National Guard.

“Do you still want to get married,” I asked even though I hadn’t seen or spoken to him in two years, and despite the not-so-insignificant fact that I now lived in Los Angeles.

“Sure, why not?” he responded.

We were married three months after my grandfather’s words. Eight years later I lost custody of my children.

~~~~~

Though I claim Florida as my home state, I was born in 1947 in the small town of East Liverpool, Ohio. My father’s parents, Polly and Saul Ruchelsman, immigrated from Poland in about 1913. From New York they traveled as far west as their money would take them, via Cleveland to East Liverpool, Ohio. East Liverpool is a small town surrounded by pottery and steel mills on the banks of the Ohio River, across from both West Virginia and Pennsylvania, kind of a bend in the river that’s easy to miss. Saul had just enough money left of their travel funds to buy a small mom-and-pop grocery but not enough money to change the name on the sign over the door of the store. My grandparents went from being Polly and Saul Ruchelsman to Polly and Saul Lebman because that was the name on the store, Lebman’s Grocery.

My father, Sanford Lebman, served in the Army during World War II, in the 42nd Rainbow Division, and came home from Europe with a Purple Heart that signified he’d been injured. He also came home with painful memories of the liberation of Dachau. My father was probably the first American soldier to enter that concentration camp, guns blazing, as his tank tore down Dachau’s gates, but it would be another 50 years before he would speak about the atrocities he saw there. He was twenty-one years old when he came home, physically and emotionally wounded. He wanted to be a pharmacist but he went to work for his father in the family grocery store instead.

My mother, Lois Schonfield Lebman, was twenty when my father came back from the war. They’d already been married for two years during most of which my father was overseas. My mother was, and still is, a brilliant, beautiful woman. She’d planned to go to college to study journalism but between the war effort and her own mother’s serious illness, there was no money for school. She worked as a bank teller instead. She also worked at her parents’ shoe store and in Lebman’s grocery as the bookkeeper.

While Saul and Polly were classically old-world, my mother’s parents, Frances and Schoney Schonfield, were quite modern. Both were born in the U.S. to Russian immigrants and together they operated a shoe store in East Liverpool. Both sets of grandparents had their financial issues, juggling between working-poor and sheer impoverishment. As an unusual result, they all lived together in the same three-story house. My father’s parents were on the first floor, my mother’s parents on the second, and my parents lived on the third floor while my father built a house for us out in the country, as if East Liverpool were not rural enough.

The concept of family extended over the generations and across many coattails. We were a family who lived and traveled in a pack. Like a flock of birds, in 1954 we all up and shifted from East Liverpool, Ohio, to Miami Beach, Florida. The reason: allergies and hay fever in several of the family members including me. The Jewish migration south had begun. In 1967, the flock migrated again, this time west to Los Angeles.

My mother’s parents had actually moved to Miami Beach before the rest of us. I remember flying from Ohio to Miami in one of those old DC-3 tail-dragger airplanes that Pan American World Airways operated. Those planes always smelled like oranges, a Pan Am trademark of squirting citrus fragrance to heighten the anticipation of arrival to Miami, or the attempt to extend a visit if leaving Miami. I also remember the matching leopard-skin-designed bathing suits that my sisters and brother and I had to wear when we went to Miami Beach because some distant Miami-residing cousin-eight-times-removed was the manufacturer.

When my family first moved to South Florida, we stayed with my mother’s parents in their brand new home in Miramar, a subdivision near Hollywood, Florida. Within a few months, though, my parents had purchased a newly constructed three-bedroom two-bath house on 181st Street in North Miami Beach for $14,000. I enjoyed living with my Grandma Frances and hated leaving her, but it was time to go, my parents said. North Miami Beach was where hundreds of young Jewish families began to settle, a large modern-day shtetl.             

My grandmother Frances was modern, powerful, and popular, and president of everything in her community. She was tall and carried herself with an air of authority. She was the most wonderful woman I ever knew, and she loved me fiercely! She was the one person in the entire family who, I remember, just wrapped her arms around me and hugged me tight. I was the first grandchild on both sides of the family. As a precocious, vocal, opinionated little kid, I was the family entertainer. Everyone thought I was pretty terrific, but there was a specialness about the way my grandmother cherished me. I knew without a doubt that no one loved me like she did. Her husband, my grandfather, Schoney, was attractive and debonair. He worked at Abercrombie & Fitch back when it was a “gentlemen’s” store and always wore the most current Miami-style pastel slacks and matching shoes and belts.

I missed seeing my grandmother every day after we moved to our own home, but I was glad to be away from my grandfather. Sometimes he just creeped me out. We children were required to kiss the grownups goodnight at bedtime, or kiss them goodbye whenever we left their homes. I didn’t like the way my grandfather kissed me, too long and slobbery. I made a million excuses to avoid him. Was I sensing a problem or just imagining something that wasn’t real? Everybody seemed to love my grandfather. He died at the age of 87 in 1991, and to this day people remember him fondly. I’m just not one of them. Are there unspoken secrets in the family, those Big Secrets that quietly and insanely form and inform our lives? I don’t know. I’ve never asked. Maybe it was just me…

The other thing that disturbed me about my grandfather was the way he mercilessly harassed my brother about his thumb sucking. While I’m sure many people witnessed my grandfather’s unkind words to my brother, no one stopped the old man from saying those things to that little boy, at least not that I remember ever hearing. The harsh teasing started around the time I was discovering my sexual orientation, when I was 11, and continued into my teens. The clear message for me was since no one protected my brother, no one would protect me from such overt and painful judgment. Strangely, when I recently asked my brother about the harassment, he had no recollection of it. Like everyone else, he sang my grandfather’s praises. Did I imagine yet another situation with my grandfather way back then? I just don’t know...

I knew my Grandmother Frances was very ill. She suffered from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and because of ulcerative colitis, she had had an ileostomy. But she never dismissed me because of her health. She’d let me climb into bed with her and hold me close, telling me that I should be a lawyer because I had been “vaccinated with a Victrola needle.” Apparently, from the time I was a toddler, I talked incessantly, a trait she thoroughly enjoyed and encouraged. Grandma Frances died in 1958 at the age of 54, three years before my grandfather Saul—my Pop—my father’s father passed. Strangely, I have no recollection of my grandparents’ deaths or funerals. Children in my family were not supposed to participate in unhappy events. I was in tremendous pain from the loss of my grandmother and had no way to express it so I stuffed it deep down inside of myself.

Several years after my grandmother Frances died, Schoney married Mae Wallace, a woman to whom he remained married until his death in 1991. Mae, who was as loved in our family as if she were a biological member, died 17 years after Schoney, just three months short of her 103rd birthday. A few months before she passed, I visited her in the nursing home near Ft. Lauderdale. I loved Mae and marveled at how articulate she remained despite her physically weakened state. As we shared an ice cream in the dining hall of her nursing home, she said to me, “I’m telling you, Ronni, there’s a lot to be said for Alzheimer’s. With Alzheimer’s, when you live to be this old, you don’t know how bad off you are. Wish I had it.” Her mind was sharp but her body quit functioning in any meaningful way. She told me she was ready to go. When I kissed her goodbye, I knew it was for the last time. I cried for her, and prayed, as I walked out to my car, into the bright Florida sunshine, grateful that she had been such a sweet part of my life. She and all of my grandparents are buried in the Mt. Sinai cemetery in Miami.