She Danced Alone

By Deborah Edick Bumpus

The story of a woman's need to achieve what she considered to be her maximum potential in her life.
"Parenting an always-at-risk son,a trial of seven days duration,the inability to ever love anyone, not even herself."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 8, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499012880

Deborah Edick Bumpus

The author received degrees from Potsdam State, Syracuse University, and Nazareth College. She resides in Canandaigua, NY

Book preview

SHE DANCED ALONE

Deborah Edick Bumpus

Copyright © 2014 by Deborah Edick Bumpus.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014907939

ISBN: Hardcover 978-1-4990-1289-7

Softcover 978-1-4990-1290-3

eBook 978-1-4990-1288-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 05/02/2014

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris LLC

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

618230

She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on . . . far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.

—Virginia Woolf

As you set out for Ithaka . . . hope the voyage is a long one. May there be many a summer morning when, with what pleasure, what joy, you come into harbors seen for the first time . . . But do not hurry the journey at all. Better if it lasts for years, so you are old by the time you reach the island, wealthy with all you have gained on the way . . . Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey. Without her you wouldn’t have set out. She has nothing left to give you now.

—C.P. Cavafy

SHE DANCED ALONE

Whoever undertakes to write a bio binds himself (herself) to lying

To concealment, to flummery . . . Truth is not accessible.

—Freud, The Self as History

Last year at this time, she had been assaulted in her classroom. This year, the teaching was going fairly well, as was her work with her interns, but her sixteen-year-old son is incarcerated. You’ll read more on this should you choose to continue. The holidays (as Christians will have it) are over, and we northerners sink our boots into dormancy and secretly investigate the validity of Seasonal Affective Disorder. No one really wants to admit that winter is painful or that they are hurting, not, that is, until you open the door and show your vulnerability. It goes like this: you tell me your sad story, I’ll tell you mine. The world oftentimes seems to be going to hell in the proverbial hay basket, and we are spinning our wheels trying to sublimate the realities that slap us in the face every day. And where do we end up? Usually alone in our little self-made dailiness, accepting only those truths which we deem somehow palatable, and ignoring those more profound truths, which may somehow ring more clearly (like mortality). But as individuals, we cannot or will not allow these into our consciousness. The pain would be too horrific. Google mortality.

This is a story of a life, and some of the other lives it may or may not have touched. It surely touched mine. One woman’s truth of having lived, lived with all the exuberance deemed possible: redundant, sometimes banal, ephemeral, always gearing for productivity, heartful, sad, fulfilling—all those words heard at funerals—that is a life. Viewed only from my perspective, and I make no apologies or excuses for my words.

The youngest of three far-spaced daughters, told more often than once, that she was supposed to be a boy, Sue spent the first seventeen years of her life in one of the smallest upstate New York villages. Her dad was a mailman whose finest hour arrived when he got the position of rural delivery carrier. Her mom left home at age fourteen to work in the village as a nanny and housekeeper so she could get her high school education. She had hopes of becoming a nurse, but the charm of Burns was too indelible… They married as soon as she graduated from her senior year. Ida worked in factories and was chief caretaker, cook, and enabler of her father. Ida, or Mom, would often remind Sue that she was from the wrong side of the tracks, especially when she would hang out with the sons and daughters of the only business in town… the business that employed both her and Burns early on, and nearly everyone else in town. It was ingrained in Sue that she could never quite match up to others due to her modest roots… This could be one of the reasons for her diligence and drive to achieve, to be noticed. Often class clown, there was a darker side which stayed in her bedroom writing poetry, smoking her mother’s stolen cigarettes, drinking Pepsi, and dreaming of a future without sadness.

Her English teachers felt she had fine literary potential. Her Latin teacher gave her a pair of silk pajamas that she treasured for years. Her guidance counselor told her she would never succeed in college. To her, that posed a challenge. She would defy him, she would show him. She not only got into college, but Columbia no less, and did amazingly well there. That’s when her life really began. Away from the small-town confines and confiners.

I should insert here that Sue was my very best friend. We called each other ‘Cheetah’ from some silly giggles over a Tarzan movie. I spent innumerable hours with her in that house, or camping by the old Sandy Creek where we would experiment with pushing aspirin into the