Thoughts and Afterthoughts

A Friend in Philadelphia

Within the area of the "City of Brotherly Love" there are several well known townships set up by "Friends"; sometimes better known as "Quakers". Swarthmore is best known for Swarthmore College, an undergraduate establishment whose alumni are highly regarded in graduate schools. It is set in Delaware County and forty years ago there was a research foundation located on the Campus. That was my destination one February day. They had found me lodgings for the night and so I came to 610 Walnut Avenue.

One night became several months. I was always the lodger but soon fitted somewhere in the extended family. I stayed in the extended family even when I moved out and away. The point of contact, somewhat unusual in the area, was the teapot in the kitchen. In the living room, the books were of more importance than the TV. Not too seriously, but always solemnly, we often dropped into "Quakerspeak". It was an accolade to earn "Thou speakest to my condition."
My landlady was an important member of "Meeting", the Friends Meeting House on Campus. Wherever she joined she became involved. Her three daughters all passed through the girl scout movement. If it was good enough for them it was good enough for her to be the parent who was on tap and working. The family were tightly connected to the Swarthmore Players and later she founded and edited a publication about all the local drama groups. These interests might be thought of as personal. The League of Women Voters, a pacifist viewpoint and lingering regrets that Prohibition was no longer the law were more part of her heritage, but certainly skin tight.
Her Quaker lineage was several generations deep, as was her commitment to education. I was warmed but not too surprised when she once remarked that she had been taken as a little girl to meet, long after the event, a slave who had been freed by The Civil War.
She saw the world through American eyes. That did not stop her from identifying with dramatic parts of old world and especially United Kingdom history. A tour when she turned seventy formed a highlight of that year.
Her political and social views were quite strong and I think predictable from her environment. They did not stop her , while I was on a later flying visit, driving me up to look around the cooling towers on Three Mile Island. That did not change her overarching views, but it made her more comfortable with some of the safety aspects. Over the teapot afterward I introduced the subject of the Johnstown Flood. She had maybe forgotten it, or even never heard it described as the largest disaster in Pennsylvanian history. I don't think either of us thought of or mentioned Gettysburgh.
Much of her life was built into 610 Walnut Avenue, and she ached afterwards with the pain of leaving it. The two cats and a dog that were part of the household in the early sixties paid little attention as we discussed their egos and agreed never to let them see that we might laugh at them.
Intimations of mortality included an operation that put a cancer into remission. She was therefore still around at the end of the 11th day of September 2001, and two members of the family were missing. One, a fireman, had been shunted onto a different team early in the day and was too busy to make contact later. The other got out of the tower in which she was working. She was calming down elsewhere, while someone emerged carrying her abandoned handbag and added her to the initial casualty list. Settling down afterward took effort, and time.
Early this year there was a special election that would have brought up 50 years of local voting, but illness kept the lady away. A few weeks later her heart went peacefully to rest.
Many people will go on saying "She still speaketh to my condition."

posted by Donald Beag @ 4:30 PM