THE SUMMERS OF LONELINESS, DEPRESSION, AND DESPAIR

I spent four summers (1959 - 1962) at The School of Creative Arts in Vineyard Haven, Martha's Vineyard, at a camp run by Kathleen Hinni who was the dance instructor at NYC's Chapin School. 

For two nights, I slept in a cabin in a bed next to Margaret Bourke White who also spent a few summers there. I was taught modern dance by Charles Weidman, and I shared a cabin on most days with Cynthia Wainwright, a NYC debutante, and I was a friend of Toni Kelly, whose father Walt Kelly wrote the comic strip Pogo.

It sounds ideal... but most of the girls were terribly homesick and filled with despair. The rules were strict and rigid and the experience was far from pleasant. I know this to be true because one of the girls attempted suicide on one rainy bleak day by swallowing over 30 Midols. I read in a newspaper years later that she suffocated her baby and was found wandering the streets of her home town. I still have the clipping. 

I also have many photos... photos of a rocky beach and waters filled with ugly seaweed and a few photos that were taken at the Martha's Vineyard airport when my parents came to visit. 

We danced by the cabins and sat at a large table to talk, usually crying about how much we wanted to go home. I can still remember the day I walked alone to the steps that would take me down to the beach... and that loneliness and the strange feeling of being totally alone in the thick still empty quiet hot air still lives inside me. 

I also recall so many of the girls crying at Grand Central Station on the morning of the day we left to take that long train ride to the ferry at Woods Hole, some pleading with their mothers to take them back home. There was no excitement or gleeful anticipation in the air... So why did we all keep going back? The times were different back then.

REMEMBERING AN OLD STREET

On Main Street,

On Martha’s Vineyard, I am

Filled with bittersweet memories.

I remember Main Street...

I was there, so long ago.

I can still smell that ocean air,

So briny and salty and

All those summers come

Flooding back.

The day we ate in the diner

And how the jukebox blared all

The songs we loved.

In spite of all the quaintness

Of that lovely and charming place

I longed with desperation

To be some place else.

I suppose we are what we carry

Inside us and in spite of that

Heady beauty, whenever I was there

I longed to be somewhere else.

I suppose there are places that always

Make us want to go home.

from ROAD TRIPS, poems