As I look back over the many years of my life, I realize that the years I was most content were the years when I felt loved and accepted by the people whom I loved and cherished the most. In addition, to be perfectly happy, I absolutely felt a need to have animals that I loved, and that loved me in return. Be they cats, dogs, hamsters, gerbils, or birds. Without them, my life would have been lonely. That was as true for me when I was a young child as it is today. 

The Dali Lama said, “The very purpose of life is to be happy.” But when our understanding of happiness includes everything from simple pleasure to rapture—all of which are temporary, as is the nature of feelings in general—how can a person know when he’s truly happy? And is it a state that can be attained and/or sustained?

There were times when I was a child when I did not feel loved. The memory that has stayed with me since I was quite young, perhaps nine or ten years old. I was in my backyard, I can’t remember what I was doing out there except I was sitting under our large Willow tree and listening to the birds that were nesting there. I was by myself. My father came out back and said, “We are going to go visit one of my oldest friends, Dar, and his wife, Jehana.”

I didn’t particularly appreciate going over to this particular friend of my father’s because they had children who had a tendency to play roughly and say mean things to me. If I didn’t go along with whatever they wanted to do. As I stood there looking at my father, I made up my mind that I would refuse to go with them. I said, “ I don’t want to go.” My father responded, “Children who don’t obey their parents are not loved by their parents. And no one will ever love you if your parents don’t love you. At that moment, I felt my heart break. I never told anyone what my father said to me, but I never forgot it. For many years, I didn’t believe my father loved me; even as an adult, I had difficulty believing anyone loved me. Because it never occurred to me that my father said what he said in a moment of anger and frustration. I truly believed he did not love me anymore. And that there was nothing I could do to change how he felt. 

But the truth of the matter was that I loved my mother and father with all of my heart. And I would never stop loving them, even long after they passed away. My father passed away in 1986 from lung cancer. He used to smoke two packs of Pall Malls a day. It was a horrible way to die. It was even more horrible to watch since there was precious little I could do to help him. He died in 1986. My mother seemed lost after my father passed away. They had been married since 1929. My dear mother passed away one year later from congestive heart failure. At that time, there was little the medical profession could do for her aside from giving her pain meds for angina pain.

I, too, was diagnosed with congestive heart failure in my mid-fifties. I am luckier than she since the present treatment for congestive heart failure allows me to continue living for many years. I will be turning seventy-three on my next birthday in May. In general, I feel fine most days. I only have to go to the cardiologist once a year. When I was first diagnosed, I had to go every three weeks for a long time. But, the medication and time healed my heart to some extent. And every day, I’m glad to be here still.

In addition, I have seen my two daughters grow up to be honest and decent people. And not every parent can say that. Now that I am retired, I find I have the time to do all the things I wanted to in the past and didn’t have time or energy to do. I spent a great deal of my time taking care of my family and working full-time until I was sixty-two. Then I decided to file for Social Security since I didn’t know at the time just how long my life would be.

Each day, I make every effort to do the right thing, work hard, and take care of my family and my pets. Bring happiness into each day. I fill my days, weeks, and years doing the things I love and being creative by writing. I have written memoirs and short stories for the past eight years. And at some point in the not-too-distant future, I will attempt to have the book I have written published. It is called GRIND. In addition, I want to begin painting and drawing again. When I was thirty-six, I was excepted at Temple University, Tyler School of Art, and graduated cum laude at forty-one. I taught art for many years. We were living in a large home that had been owned by a doctor, who had his practice in part of the house. I also taught art to children and adults in those three rooms for many years.

In my remaining free time over the last eight years, I have been volunteering at Animal Edventure in Coats, NC, taking care of parrots, macaws, and pheasants. Although it is hard work, I love every minute of it. In addition, there are some 200 other animals that live there that I can see and love.

Life offers us many opportunities; it is up to us to decide how we want to spend the limited time we have on this planet. I believe that I have spent my working years well, and I have tried to help people along the way in every way I could. That included working at NJ State Mental Hospital as a psychiatric aide and many years of working in Social Services with at-risk adolescents who were incarcerated in the locked-down facility called Ranch Hope in Alloway, NJ.

In addition, I worked at the Center for Family Services in Camden, NJ at Center for Family Services with Wilson Good, the first black mayor of a major city in America. I worked with five churches in Camden, NJ, and matched at-risk kids with members of the five churches as mentors, and I worked along with Big Brothers and Big sisters. I would visit the children’s parents, explain the program to them, and then match the adolescents up with mentors. Who were members of the Antioch Church. Often, I had to visit prisons, both state and Federal prisons, where some of the parents were incarcerated, explain the mentor program, and get permission for their children to have mentors. It was a challenging job, but I do feel that what I did benefited these kids. And the people that vollunteered to be mentors.

I can not say how long I have left to live on this planet, but I know that as long as I have breath in my body, I will put forth every effort I can to make my little part of the world a better place. In addition, I will continue to support the people I know and care for in any way it is possible for me to do so. I know that when my time ends, I have done my best. And I can only hope that the world was a somewhat better place when I was a part of it. And I keep in mind that I must first do no harm. I attempt to keep my heart open to those I meet along the highways and byways of my life.

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I have lived a long time, but the best memories of my life took place in the Summer. I can remember counting the days until my summer vacation would begin. I so looked forward to the last day of school. I and all the other students would be counting down the minutes for the dismissal bell. It would ring loudly in the school hallway. And we would all jump out of our seats and start laughing and cheering. And then, we would be warned to sit down and quiet down. Or we would all be staying after school. 

I lived two houses down from the school. So, it only took me a couple of minutes to walk home. I would talk to all my friends once we were released from the school. I say released because school often felt like a prison. I was taught by the St. Joseph’s nuns, and let me tell you, they were strict. If you stepped out of line or talked when you were supposed to be quiet, there would be hell to pay. In that, you would be kept after school and have to clean the blackboards or write some essay saying how sorry you were for disrupting the class over and over again.

I’m not sure what we were supposed to learn from this type of punishment, but nonetheless, the more trouble you got in, the worse the punishment became. Sometimes, if I or some other unfortunate person was caught talking or, god forbid, laughing, you would find yourself standing in the corner, in front of the classroom. And believe it or not, the nuns would put a dunce hat on your head. 

As I look back on this experience, I understand why the sisters were so stubborn. I was part of the baby boomer generation, which consisted of seventy-four million baby boomers born after World War 2.

As you can imagine, the classrooms were crowded, especially in Catholic Schools where birth control was not allowed. However, I believe the public schools where I lived and grew up in Maple Shade were also overcrowded. There were sixty-seven-year-old students in my first-grade classroom. Sometimes, the classroom was so full that there weren’t enough desks, and students had to sit on the windowsills.

As a result, there was often chaos if the teachers, whether they were lay teachers or nuns, didn’t keep the children under control. I used to go home for lunch daily since I lived two houses away from the school. And I used to run home as fast as I could to get away from the classroom and the nuns. My mother would always have chicken noodle soup and Lebanon Bologa sandwiches ready for my sister and I when we arrived home. My mother would always ask,” And how was school this morning?” And I would always say, “I hate it. Do I have to go back?” And my mother and father would laugh and say,” Yes, yes, you do. But only for a couple more hours. My mother would assure me she would have cookies and milk ready when I arrived home at 3:15 PM. And she always did, she asks us how was your day? Do you have homework? How was the teacher today? I never had a kind remark to say about the day at school or anything else. I hated it. However, I liked to play in the schoolyard with my friends until the lunch bell rang. And we had to walk single-file into the school quietly. If you weren’t quiet, you would get rapped on the head with a wooden ruler.

As the school year drew to an end, I became more and more restless. And even worse, there were exams in every subject at the end of the year. And you would told that you could leave back if you failed any of the exams. By some miracle, I always passed all the final exams. However, if I were truthful, I would admit that I barely passed because I hated studying for the exams. If I studied harder, I could have gotten straight A’s, but I always did the minimum. Because I hated school, and I detested the nuns.

As the end of school drew closer, I found it more and more difficult to concentrate. I counted the days until summer vacation, three months without having to sit in a hot, overcrowded classroom or a cold classroom in the winter. And then that long-awaited day arrived, the last day of class before summer vacation. All of the students from first grade through eighth grade were anxious to hear the three o’clock bell ring. And when it did, we all clapped. The sisters tried to calm us all down. But, it was a useless gesture. And after the second bell rang, we all marched into the hallways and to our appointed exits. There was laughter and cheers all the way. And there wasn’t a thing the nuns and teachers could do. As I look back at this experience, I imagine that inside, the teachers and nuns were cheering as well and looking forward to several months of peace and quiet. And then, before you knew it, we were off the school property and on our way home and had a long, hot, and wonderful summer. When we would be allowed to stay out until dark with all our friends in the neighborhood. We looked forward to Memorial Day and the 4^th of July parade. And days and days and weeks and months of playing outside with all our neighborhood friends. We would catch fireflies and then release them. We ran around the neighborhood with flashlights while we played hide and seek.

During the day, my girlfriends and I would go to the clay pits and dig for treasures, ride our bikes to Strawbridge Lake, two towns away, and walk around the waterfall, trying not to fall into the lake. We ate picnic lunches that we had brought with us. We usually ate peanut butter and jelly and cookies that one of our mothers made.

We would stay there as late as possible and come home sunburned and sweaty. After dinner, all the kids in the neighborhood would play hide-and-seek. And we would come home itchy from all the mosquito bites and sunburn from being in the sun all day until dark. Around nine o’clock, our mothers would yell out the front doors of our homes and say,” Time to home, home.” And we would all moan and groan because we were having such a great time.

When I arrived home, my mother would say,” Would you look at her? All red and mosquito-bitten from head to toe. Time to get a bath, Susan, and don’t forget to clean behind your ears. Make sure to rinse all the shampoo out of your hair. Understand?” I would sigh and say,” Yes, Mom, you always tell me the same thing.” And as I turned away, she said, “And don’t forget to brush ALL your teeth. And I would sigh and say,” Yes, Mom. I know.’

Then I would run the water for the tub and lie there and soak, knowing I couldn’t take too long since my sister would soon be knocking at the bathroom door and telling me it was her turn. And I would sigh and say,” Yeah, yeah, in a couple of minutes.” And then I would lie in the water that was getting cold and think, “I can’t wait until tomorrow. Maybe we will go roller skating or ride our bikes to Strawbridge Lake, have a race, or play baseball. Or we could swim in Jackie, my next-door neighbor’s pool. I couldn’t wait to wake up tomorrow morning. And start a new and exciting Summer day.

But, before I knew it, the summer was almost over, and I would have to return to school. I dreaded it. On the other hand, I would get to see my school friends again. A lot of them went down the shore over the summer, and I didn’t see them. And the thought cheered me up. So, I decided not to be sad over the end of summer and look forward to a different classroom, a different teacher, and all my school friends. And besides, I would look forward to next summer and all the holidays that happened before then. I mean, Life was good. I was happy.

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