SLO LIFE Dec/Jan 2020

et’s start from the beginning, Wendy.
Where are you from? I grew up in the
Midwest. I was born in St. Louis, Missouri,
which is where my dad’s family is from, but,
when I was two, we moved to Ohio. My dad
got a job at the college there, actually it’s a
college and a musical conservatory. And, so
that’s where I grew up, in this little town Lof Oberlin—just two miles in diameter—there were about 8,000 people,
and it grew to 11,000 when the students were in town. It was truly an
idyllic upbringing: kids and bikes everywhere, come home by dark, and no
fences between homes, and just a lot of wonderful childhood memories of
growing up in that little place.
What were you like as a kid? I was really into music, and I was verbal, very
verbal. I liked to talk. I liked language. I did well in school. My friends
used to say we were the nerds in the popular crowd. We hung out with
the popular kids, but we were definitely the nerdy ones, the nerdy friends.
Everywhere we went, our bikes were the mode of transportation. I rode
my bike everywhere. Most everyone in Oberlin seemed to love music, a
lot of my friends’ parents taught there also. I played in the youth orchestra,
did musical theatre. I wasn’t the greatest athlete; drama was my thing.
How did your family end up in the Midwest? I’m Jewish, my mother’s
side of the family is Jewish. Her parents escaped the Holocaust when they
left in 1938. My mom is of Austrian descent. She was born in Rochester,
New York two years after they arrived, before they settled in Indiana. My
dad’s side of the family comes from a long line of St. Louis Presbyterians.
By the time I was getting ready to have my own family, I was feeling more
of an affiliation with the Jewish side, just psychically and intellectually, it
was more in line somehow; it just sat better with me. So, when my son had
a bar mitzvah and my daughter had a bat mitzvah a few years ago, both
my parents came out from Boston where they live now. Dad brought Bill,
and my mom brought Peggy.
Wait a second, hold up. Who are Bill and Peggy? [laughter] Okay, this
is where things get a bit complicated. I was in my mid-twenties when my
parents split. They had been married at that point for thirty-three years.
Where the story takes a turn is when they both ended up partnering with
same gender people. My dad, his name is Carl, partnered with Bill. And,
my mom, Mary, ended up with Peggy. For the most part, they get along
really well now, they even go on double dates. I’ll call my dad sometimes
and he’ll say, “I can’t talk right now because Bill and I are heading out to
meet Mary and Peggy for a beer.” Looking back on it now, I think my
mom just had enough of this kind of cloaked secret life with my dad’s
sexual orientation, which was the immediate impetus for her to leave, but
there were other issues, as well.
Did you know all this was happening when you were growing up? For
my sister and me, no. We had no clue. But, I will be in a conversation
with an old friend from high school or something, and I’ll say, “Can you
believe my dad’s gay?” And they’ll say, “Yeah, we all knew it. We all knew
it, Wendy. Why didn’t you know it?” But, the fact that now at eighty years
old, with his health failing him, he’s in many ways, physically very, very
uncomfortable. And, yet, I would venture to say, he’s never been happier.
On some fundamental sort of psychic level, he’s in a loving relationship,
he’s got a great house, he’s got wonderful friends, he feels good about
himself in terms of the life he’s living. So, in moments when I doubt my
own situation or what’s happening in my life, I look at my parents.
How long has your dad been remarried? Dad and Bill only got married six
years ago, but they’d been together maybe four years before that. So, they’ve
been together about ten years now. And, then mom and Peggy, a couple of
years before that, three or four years before that. And, Peggy has a daughter
in San Francisco who is my stepsister. I’ll tell you, the thing that I took
from their experience is that you just never know when you’re going to be
the most happy in your life. Does that make sense? Here’s where we are.
We’re here, right now. I’m not saying it quite right, but the whole thing has
taught me that at any point in your life, something really great can happen
that enriches it in ways that either it was meant to be enriched or you didn’t
expect it would be. So, during all of those younger years, and I do think
that my parents had some pretty wonderful chapters, at least segments of
chapters, but there was always something missing. And, they both found it.
Alright, let’s get back to you, Wendy. What happened after Oberlin?
Okay, yes, I graduated from high school and then went off to college. I
got lucky enough to be accepted at Brown University in Providence. So, I
moved to the East Coast for my college experience. My college years were
spent studying History and Russian. I became a Russian major, which was
somewhat an accident of fate. I picked up a Russian novel in high school,
Crime and Punishment, and it caught my interest. I was quite intrigued by
how brooding and dark and complicated it all was. And, so I thought, “Who
writes a book like this?” I think that, especially during those formative
teenage years, there’s something that happens to us, whether it’s a book or
a film or a trip or something that just captures our imagination. That’s what
happened to me with Dostoyevsky’s book.
What came next for you? So, I headed off to college and started dabbling
in Russian literature classes. Then, I befriended some people in the Russian
department. Finally, I said to myself, “Well, heck, if I want to understand a
little bit more about the sort of psyche of these people in this place, I should
learn the language.” And, this was during the end of the Cold War, so it
also had a little bit of mystique to it. It was dark and dangerous, not at all
like London or France or something. This was the ‘80s, so it was the Iron
Curtain and scary. I did a term abroad in Leningrad, and when I returned
I taught Russian for a year; it was more of an internship, really. Around
that time, there was a huge surge of Russian Jewish immigrants who were
applying for refugee status coming out of the Soviet Union. So, I ended up
moving to Rome to work with a refugee resettlement agency called HIAS.
I became a caseworker there and helped people file their paperwork with
the US Embassy Immigration & Naturalization Service. After a year doing
that work, I went to an exchange program at a physics and math school in
Siberia. I taught English and took care of a group of high school exchange
students. I stayed there, in Novosibirsk, for a year.
Wow, a year in Siberia. Then, I came back, taught for a few more years at
Andover and realized that I wanted to go back to graduate school, but I
didn’t think I wanted to go into Russian. There just weren’t many jobs in
that field. Is this too much detail? I feel like I’m talking too much. So, I
ended up going back to school again. I got really lucky and had a chance to
get a master’s in public administration at Harvard. I was really interested
in the intersection between education and the schools and the community.
After grad school, I worked at an agency in Cambridge, Massachusetts
called Cambridge Community Services. I was the associate director there,
and one of my favorite programs that we ran was called City Links. It was
a program that was in partnership with a high school. The high school
in Cambridge taught a civics government class for kids, who were either
themselves immigrants or children of immigrants. And, in conjunction
with the civics government class, they also got paid internships in city
departments in Cambridge. >>
DEC/JAN 2020 | SLO LIFE MAGAZINE | 43