My Friend Sadie (and unlike something by James Frey, it's all true!)

Well, it's either the blog or trying to figure out facebook and doing a profile, and I think the blog wins out, simply because i have been away from this for 2 weeks or so. Yeah, I know, I know, but life just gets so busy. I can't remember a frigging thing that's been happening in the past two weeks - I know we took two days off last week to spring clean the basement, the garage, planted the next door neighbor's entire back yard for our garden, and then planted our own garden too, had a sick baby with hand, foot, and mouth disease, but she wasn't that sick, been dieting for about 2 weeks and started riding my bike to work in the afternoons, and before bed, blew the diet horribly yesterday and today, went to the lake, came back tonight, pouring rain for hours without any let up.... hmmmm, that's it in a nutshell. So that's what I've been doing. Alas, I don't feel funny or amusing or have anything to say, but when I don't post, I feel stressed. And, I haven't been keeping up with reading my blogs the past couple weeks, so I feel panicked about that. I'm retarded. I did take my laptop to the lake, thinking I would write something that I could save and post later, but didn't happen. So anyway, what I *am* going to tell you about tonight is a story that I think is neat, but you may not. But it's my blog, so goonie-goo-goo bitch.

Anyway, this is all about my friend Sadie. Let me back up a bit. I was one of those precocious kids. A precocious child of the 70s. I make no bones about it. One of those kids you'd like to slap with a dead fish. Remember that mouthy girl from the Neil Simon movie "The GoodBye Girl", starring Marsha Mason, that grumpy fucker from Mr. Holland's Opus, and that precocious little girl? Well, I was just like that annoying kid. In fact, I was probably the only 10 year old who was into Neil Simon movies. And I was, believe you me.... but in any event, what made me so precocious was the fact that I was the youngest child, having sisters who were 12 years, 10 years, and 7 years older than me, and older parents who I was forced to go around and visit their friends with, all of whom were older and had no kids my age. What's a boy to do when stuck with old adults, and older siblings, discussing older things? Well, you get sucked into that vortex, end up knowing more than you should know about many things, and turning kind of odd, where you don't exactly mix well with other kids your age because you are on a slightly different plane than them. This precociousness was also compounded because I was such a voracious reader. My entire family was comprised of readers, and while nobody was reading War and Peace, we all always had books on the go. The librarian in the children's and young adult section of our town library knew me by name (You were the best, Mrs. Watson!), and it was nothing for me to haul my bookish ass to the library after school - I still can't believe my parents let me haul ass all over town like that as a 10 year old.
Anyway, this is sort of a tangent. But I am setting you up by telling you what kind of kid I was. I didn't like reading the usual bullshit. I liked my young adult fiction, even before I was a young adult. You remember how we all read Judy Blume because she was so realistic, and also a tad... well, not racy, but....you know what i mean - It was through her that I first learned what a wet dream was, and that in the olden days, women used some sort of freaky-ass belt to hold pads in place. Stuff we all need to know! So of course Judy was my favorite - I still remember the first time I read Blubber and how I laughed so hard my parents had to come check on me in bed. But I soon garnered another favorite. I remember reading "Tomboy" by Norma Klein, which was supposed to be "Judy Blume-ish", and indeed, it sort of was. I soon started swallowing up all of Norma Klein's stuff - she wrote for the pre-teen set, all the way to the adult market. But she was best known, and most successful, with the young adult market. She was often referred to as the "Thinking child's Judy Blume" and that sort of was true. Her YA characters were smart - frighteningly smart. Most always, they were New Yorkers, with artsy, leftish, academic families, and they most always went to good schools, and were of course horribly bookish and would have sex, mostly without consequence, and lived very adult lives. I ate it up like candy. They really were the thinking child's Judy Blume. She touched on topics such as teen sexuality, adultery, homosexuality, abortion, mental illness.... you name it. And it was all so.... grown up and New York. You see, even as a child, I was obsessed with New York. Blame it on Seasame Street. Blame it on Arnold and Willis. Blame it on the GoodBye Girl and Neil Simon, and later, as a teenager, Woody Allen. But I loved New York and felt like I was a native New Yorker who was temporarily transplanted to British Columbia and later Saskatchewan, and that I would find my way back home soon to my city. Of course, it was an illusion, this Big Apple of my dreams, the sprawling apartment like the Dakota, littered with books and fireplaces and space, the walks through the park in autumn, as the leaves blew and clouds rolled in, the runs to the museums and bookstores and jazz clubs in the village, and the plays and the bagels and the movies from the 1940s that I would go to , and the walking through the park and renting the boats with my Black girlfriend who was identical to Lisa Bonet and who lived in a big old brownstone, and the stopping at the newsstand each evening for magazines and papers, and the flat pizza, and the hailing of cabs, and the concerts at Lincoln Center. Yes, it was a glorified illusion, this city of my dreams. There was no heat or dirt or one room studios or crazies or litter or rats or roaches or ignorant people or whatever. My NYC was a Woody Allen NYC. And a Norma Klein NYC. Because, really, that's what it was modelled after.
So, after this long ramble, let me summarize. My favorite author, since I was a child, was Norma Klein. I owned almost all of her books, and there are a lot of them, and I reread them all the time. Into adulthood, she remained my favorite. So... what.... is what you are saying. Be patient.

Anyway, I ended up going to university, and after switching majors (knowing that I could never pass the science classes to get me into Medicine, which is where I really should have been had I not been a fuck up in high school), where I went in with visions of a career in psychology and counselling and came out with an English Major in my second year, much to my own panic. English was an obsession, and of course at that point of my life, I was being forced to read all the biggies of the literary canon - I had to take classes in all the eras, from Middle English, Shakespeare, 17th century, 18th century, theory, you name it. But, since I was such an odd duck with me precociousness, I developed this huge interest in Feminist literary theory and ended up in a feminist theory class. Thank sweet Jesus for my professor, who was the most amazing woman - we have the same literary interests: modernism, trauma theory, shame theory, feminism, literature and medicine.... just so many of the same interests. And we both love life writing. And so she let us do a couple life writing assignments for our class, one being the topic that brought me to Sadie: "Write the life of your favorite female author". I immediately almost soiled myself, because where else in that stuffy academy could you actually write on Norma Klein? Well, here was my chance, and I took it. SO, I wrote this huge biography on Norma Klein, and why her work is important to Feminist literature.
But I had some nagging questions - I knew my dear Norma died in 1989, but I didn't know why. And I had a few other questions I needed clarification on.
I need to interject here that at this point of my life, for about 6 months, I was living with not my beloved Rachel, but my old friend "Ruby". Rachel was student teaching in this godforsaken town that winter, and Ruby needed a place to live that winter since she was just moving to my city, so voila, instant roomate. Now Ruby had the wanderlust like me about NYC, and one night, after a couple pots of tea and numerous menthol cigarettes, she was like "why don't you just call Norma's husband and ask these questions for your paper?" and the dare was right there in front of me.
So, I called information, found the number easily, and called. I asked if I could send a questionaire, her husband said sure, and that was that. A few weeks later, I received a list of answers from what I asked: Norma died from an overdose of pills - she had been ill with depression much of her life - and other answers. I sent a thank you and that was that.
Fast forward a few weeks. I had come down with the chicken pox (a story in it's own right, remind me to tell you someday, as the doctor tried to imply I had syphilis). It was a horrible time, being 25 with chicken pox, and the worst case my doctor said he had seen, and my only outing was to venture downstairs when the coast was clear, to pick up the mail.
Well, one Monday, in May 1995, I received this package from NYC, from Sadie F. Klein. The package contained a book and a letter. The letter said something like "My son in law told me you were interested in my daughter's work, which pleases me greatly. Here is a book of hers I didn't know existed. I'll write more later." And thus began a great friendship in letters.
Sadie was, I believe, almost 89 years old at the time. In a nutshell, Sadie was married to a Freudian analyst, who saw patients in their huge apartment. She really came into her own after his death, travelling to China in her 70s, earning a degree in literature around this time, playing tennis into her 80s, visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art each week faithfully, living in the same apartment since 1939, being great friends with such a wide array of people, from authors to the newspaper man. And suddenly, we were friends. We wrote monthly, and I became aquainted with her family through her letters - Norma's daughters Jennifer Fleissner and Katie Fleissner, as well as some other friends that she regularly corresponded with. She would send me the latest catalogues from the Met, and well as copies of the Village Voice, etc. She always wanted me to visit, but at that point of my life, it wasn't possible.
Sadie and I corresponded for years, and she would send me copies of Norma's books, and I was always so intrigued at how active she was in her 90s.
Life sort of got in the way of our correspondance - children, work ,etc. I wasn't as faithful as a writer as I should have been. And then I had two letters sent back. And I assumed the worst. And I never wrote again, panicked and not wanting to deal with the loss of my friend.
Flash forward to Friday. I googled something regarding literary criticism on a story I was reading (old habits die hard) and found, right in front of my eyes, a book written by Norma's daughter, who is a professor of English at UCLA. So then I decided to google her to see what else she wrote, and it brought up her father's obituary - he apparently died a month ago. And the obit said he was survived by Sadie. Sadie will be 101 now. SO she is still with us. And i am so excited by this, even though I haven't heard from her in 5 years or so. And I am going to write her tomorrow night.
It was actually through Sadie that I ended up getting email from Judy Blume (let me tell you about that sometime, remind me - Judy loves Sadie). Sadie is the coolest woman in the world. Heart of gold. And it's just the coolest thing that we were friends that long ,and she seemed to understand my hunger for NYC and that yearning. I guess I satisfied a need for her, to discuss her deceased daughter and her work and her life, but it went much more than that - a friendship that transcended all of that. So here's to you, my dear Sadie. I love you dear friend. Long may you run.
And you all have a great week.