Roads not Taken, Lives not Lived

One wonders sometimes what life would have been like had we taken a different road. One can’t help but thinking of Robert Frost and the road not taken.

If only … I could have … Why didn’t I?

Everyone has a story to tell. Everyone is what one is because of a life that perhaps only they know about but which determined the road their life takes.

So, let me tell you my story and let you draw your own conclusions.

USA 1940s   My story begins in the United States in the 1940s. Or perhaps before, but at that point it would be a different story.

When I reach the age where I can make my own decisions, there are two main roads stretching out before me, each of which I begin but then, not that I turn back, but simply that I change direction or decide not to follow. It is hard to say why. Perhaps because I am also looking for something else, looking for something that will fulfil a need in my soul. Perhaps, like all of us, what I am searching for is love and acceptance.

Despite the road others might expect me to take, I haven’t the slightest interest in subjects that would have been transmitted to me by a father who teaches biology. I find foreign literature such as the Ramayana and Shakespeare’s poetry of much more interest.

It is time, as they say, for me to leave the nest. And it is New York with its challenges and possibilities that beckons. New York in the forties, an unknown world waiting to be discovered. As the train, leaving clouds of black smoke in its wake, chugs along, I can see the farm I grew up on overlooking the valley as we pass. I wave goodbye as I consign my childhood to memories, even shedding a tear or two.

I have only a vague idea of what I am going to do and know only that my future is elsewhere. I am looking not just for my place in the world but for some sort of meaning to life.

New York in the forties is still a place a young woman can discover on her own, for drugs have not taken over the hippie scene (is there even a hippie scene?), and a girl can wander around alone at midnight without fear of being mugged or raped. At least at the time, I am naïve enough to never even give this eventuality a thought.

When my train pulls into Grand Central Station, I head to East 21st street, the studio of an artist I met on the train upon my return from an art school in Mexico. He tells me that the YMCA will help me find a place to stay. I eventually settle on a place on East 31^st Street where the fact that the el, its tracks running along above Third Avenue, goes by at all hours of the day and night doesn’t bother me. The   room is very small with kitchen privileges and up four flights of stairs. My landlady is a middle-aged divorcee who works with abandoned children, a nice enough lady but rather distant and, on the whole, we pay little attention to each other.

My artist friend helps me find a job, as well as introducing me to New York and its varied types of ethnic cuisine. Coffee in concentrated form I find is called espresso and sometimes has a lemon peel floating in it. I subsist, when on my own, on pastrami on rye sandwiches from the corner delicatessen as well as bagels with cream cheese and lox. There are museums with the real Rembrandts and Rubens I have studied in textbooks, and foreign films such as the Bicycle Thief.  Even now, over seventy years later I can see scenes from Ugetsu with a boat plying its way through tall rushes in the fog. In return, I help my artist friend do repeats for his textile designs, careful to match the flower at the bottom with the one at the top, and I find employment selling books and memberships at the Museum of Modern Art, which is even within walking distance from my apartment. I get to know a bit of the art environment and end up posing for artists like Moses Soyer or Kuniyoshi (who asks if he can kiss me since it is raining. How polite! But I say no.)   Before long, I also realize how limited, and different, my talents are in an art scene dominated by de Kooning, Motherwell and even Pollock. I have a talent for drawing and even make a stab at painting more abstract pictures, but I soon learn that art is not the road I am meant to take. 

One may think one has left one’s past behind, but it is an illusion. It is always there, and now it makes itself felt in the need to continue sharing experiences and thoughts. I become intrigued with capturing the life around me in words and feel more confident in painting pictures with words as I wander the streets and make notes of what I see and hear and turn them into stories. There is the enormous lethargic black waitress at the corner café and the forlorn woman with too many children despondently sitting on her door stoop and trying to chase away the flies and keep cool. What are their lives like? Eventually I even send some of my stories off to the New Yorker. Surprisingly they answer, saying they like the way I write but that at the moment my stories do not fit in with their requirements.  Although I have found a road to follow, at least for a while, I am still not aware of the vibrant intellectual life going on around me, with writers such as Allen Ginsberg, the Beat Generation, Kerouac, Marianne Moore, and the road I am taking is not leading to any kind of destination.

It doesn’t take me long before I decide to go back to school. I find new friends and the Automat near Greenwich Village is the place for late night coffee and more or less philosophical conversations. If I don’t have time for lunch on my way to Columbia University where I have enrolled I can always nibble on a Mounds bar as I wait for the next subway.

New York is a continent with roads leading here and there, but finding the right one still seems l to be up to chance.  Time passes and, in the end, my two roads merge, as I finish my studies and embark for Europe where my talents for writing and drawing will exist side by side as I find a partial answer to my quest for love and acceptance.