Roy Rogers Saved My Life

By Ainslie Sheridan and Ainslie Sheridan Brennan

"Roy Rogers Saved My Life" presents the full life of a modern American woman who overcame the bitter legacy of horrific childhood sexual abuse, as well as sexual assaults when she served in the military.  Child of post-WWII Levittown (the archetypal American suburb), teacher in Japan, commander in the U.S. Navy, instructor at West Point, mother (by giving birth and by adopting), horse trainer, professional photographer, and published novelist, Ainslie suffered terrible childhood abuse at the hands of her father, a professor of philosophy, morals, and ethics, at Barnard College.  Years later, the dissociated memories of this traumatic abuse—abuse visited on her brothers, too—came flooding back to threaten her own marriage and even her life.  Through therapy, loving support, animals—particularly horses--and the strength of her own will, she became someone who can say, through self-reflection, "Roy Rogers saved my life," because he did, and this memoir explains exactly how that happened, and how Ainslie came, at last, to understand the course of her entire life.  With humor, dramatic dialogue, and honesty, "Roy Rogers Saved My Life" braids together her seemingly separate experiences into one compelling and interconnected narrative of pain, struggle, hope, perseverance, and salvation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fox Kit Press
• Release date: Aug 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201077075

Book preview

Part One

Levittown and Long Island

Roy Rogers Gallops Straight into My Heart

Whoever does not have a good father should procure a new one.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

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But how could the man who earned the Hollywood title King of the Cowboys rescue a four-year-old girl living in Levittown, New York, in the early 1950s?  He didn’t walk through the front door, but he galloped on a golden palomino across our television screen and straight into my heart.  Actually, this rescue took a long time—over six decades.  Of course, Roy Rogers wasn’t my only lifeline—TV programs and movies, horses real and mythical, dogs, birds, and other animals in need of help, my brothers—they all helped keep me from going under.  It was Roy Rogers, however, who spoke to me directly, who told me he loved me, and taught me the importance of the Golden Rule.

But this gives rise to a second question.  Why did I need to be rescued when it seemed I was living a Norman Rockwell existence?  My father was a philosophy professor at Barnard College.  I had a stay-at-home mom, three older brothers, and two younger ones.  My brother Micah was just fifteen months older, and we played together all the time.  My father was a member of the library board and performed on his beloved cello in a local chamber music group.  Every Sunday he’d bundle us into his car on some special trip, a local arboretum, the beach, a museum in the city.  He was a published author and scholar.  Everyone considered him a humanist, and he adored children.  He understood what made them happy and what made them sad.  He was always attentive to them.  For example, when a little girl on our block in Bethpage (by the time I turned six we had moved to this nearby town) lost her cat to the wheels of a car, my father drove straight to Sentiments Unlimited, a nearby stationery store, bought a sweet and sympathetic card, then wrote her an equally sweet and sympathetic note.  Parents in the neighborhood loved and admired him because he had a doctorate and, though still young, had written a number of books.  Everyone thought he was gentle and kind.

As for my own adult life, it has been fascinating, unconventional, and would, by many, be seen as successful.  On graduating from Hamilton College in 1971, I taught English in Tokyo while studying Japanese at a language institute, then began writing what I hoped would be my first book.  Returning to the United States, I took a commission in the Navy and found myself once again in Japan, but this time on the staff of a two-star admiral.  He was Commander Naval Forces Japan with headquarters located on Yokosuka Naval Base, ninety minutes southwest of Tokyo by train.  My next tour of duty took me to Hawaii, again assigned to the staff of an admiral, but this admiral was Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet and sported four stars.  In 1978 I went to Boston and worked at a Navy Public relations office before being selected to attend the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at nearby Tufts University.  During those four years I met the man I would eventually marry in 1984.  In 1981, I flew to Colombia and adopted a six-year-old girl.  Soon after, I bought a four-month-old filly.  The Navy then sent me to teach at West Point as an exchange officer, followed by a final tour at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.  By then, I was married to Jim and we were expecting a child.  Tired of traveling, in spring 1986 I resigned my commission, and together with my husband, daughter, and newborn son, our two horses, three dogs, and one cat, moved to a small farm in the colonial town of Groton, Massachusetts, an hour northwest of Boston.  I completed a novel, Trophies, published by Signet.  Seven years later, our little family moved to yet another colonial town.  Acton has a first-rate school district, and my husband’s commute was cut considerably.  I soon had more horses, became a licensed instructor, and started to teach riding.  I also began a photography business and combined it with my love of writing.  This resulted in my children’s book, The Kaleidoscope Pony.  I wrote a successful blog, The Windflower Weekly, which related stories of animal happenings on and off the farm.

So, again, what was it about my life, a seemingly great life, that needed saving?  It took over thirty years to access the secrets that my buried memories held.  When revealed, these secrets pushed me to the brink of suicide.  No one elicited or suggested these memories.  I did not see a therapist until they flooded and overwhelmed me.  The professor called Joe by neighbors and friends, and whom my brothers and I called Papa, was a sadistic pederast who, behind closed doors, sexually assaulted and tortured my siblings and me for years.  This took place nearly every evening after dinner, as well as Saturday mornings when my mother drove to the nearby A&P for groceries.  There were other times, too, but they were not as rigidly quotidian.  Sometimes I was alone, sometimes with one of my brothers—usually Micah, then later Noah—and on a few occasions baby Matthew.

When my father came home from the day’s teaching at Barnard College and had finished his dinner, he wrapped the tie he had worn that day around our necks.  He would then drop his pants and force his erect penis into our mouths while strangling us until he ejaculated.  I remember choking, crying, and, when air was temporarily available, screaming and begging him to stop.  He often took one of his dirty handkerchiefs (sixty- plus years later I still can recall the disgusting salty taste of his mucous), ball it up, and shove it into my mouth to shut me up.  Being a sadist, my father exalted in our pleas, screams, and tears.  Sometimes, the torture was not physical but of the worst emotional kind imaginable.  Often it was a combination.

Survivors of sexual abuse committed by fathers relate how confusing it was.  During the actual abuse the father often exhibits kindness, telling his child how important these moments are to him.  For some, this is the only time their fathers appear interested in them.  They may have siblings also being abused but don’t know that.  They are isolated and told repeatedly how special they are.  Added to this confusion, children will often experience sexual arousal over which they have no control, and then will likely feel shame that may last a lifetime.  Parental betrayal infects survivors’ ability to forge healthy and loving sexual relationships.

Any kindness was not the case with me.  The pain was so great, the possibility of death so constant, that it was not possible to conceive of his actions as loving or kind.  Perhaps I was sexually aroused when my father vaginally raped me with objects, but I don’t remember being so.  I also had the terrible advantage of witnessing my brothers suffer.  I loved them, and they loved me.  The importance of this love was immeasurable.

Yet, I loved my father, and during the first five years of my life—as long as I wasn’t in his study—there was much to love.  Aside from Sunday trips, he was nice to be around at home.  He read us stories, taught us how to count to ten with our fingers, and taught me to dance.  As he held my hands I would stand on his shoes and we would circle and spin, waltz and foxtrot, to records playing on the old Victrola.  Dancing was my favorite because my feet were on top of his.  While strangling me and ejaculating into my mouth, he trammeled my feet with his until mine were black and blue.

When I was three years old, Hollywood cowboys, particularly Roy Rogers, and horses—in fact, all animals—became my salvation.  This gentle cowboy helped me understand that even when he wasn’t abusing us, my father was not a good man.  He told me there were better fathers out there.  Introduced to me one Saturday morning at our next-door neighbor’s house, Roy Rogers lived inside the glass of their new, and newly invented, black and white television.  He galloped full tilt on Trigger, his beautiful palomino horse with a white mane and tail, all the while shooting his gun at some bad guy in order to take him to jail.  He also had the handsome German Shepherd Bullet, who would sometimes intervene on Roy’s behalf, whether it was grabbing the arm of an outlaw holding a gun or running to get help.

A few months later we got our own television, so I watched every Saturday morning episode.  The more I saw Roy Rogers, the more I loved him.  I was sure he was speaking to me directly.  He defended the weak and the wronged and always won.  I wanted to please him, and I wanted to do what he did, rescue people and animals from injustice and pain and see that the culprits were sent to jail.  Roy Rogers could do all this, not only because he was a great man, but because he had great friends, human and animal, who helped him.  It made complete and wonderful sense that justice could be meted out from the back of a horse.

Dale Evans, owner of the Eureka Café in fictitious Mineral City, was Roy’s partner against crime.  She was sharp-witted, beautiful, and herself an incredible rider, assisting Roy or coming to Roy’s rescue when he’d been taken prisoner by the bad men.  Dale was not just the standard female prop in Hollywood’s often degrading, sexist, and stereotypical portrayal of women.  Dale packed heat, and in one episode, when Bullet showed up at the café to let her know Roy was in trouble, she whisked off her apron, quickly tying it around Pat Brady, Roy’s comical sidekick and Dale’s assistant cook, and then she flew out the door.  Within seconds, she was galloping after Bullet, riding like the wind on Buttermilk, her buckskin horse, to rescue the man she loved.  Yet, some seem to remember her incorrectly, the poet and singer Joni Mitchell for one.  In her cd set Transmission Impossible Joni describes the sexism of playing Roy Rogers with her childhood friends in Saskatchewan.  She was invariably cast as Dale Evans, never Roy.  She was allowed to participate in the shoot ’em ups, but was immediately shot and instructed to lie dead in the dirt for the duration of the fight.  It seems decades of female stereotypes caused some of us to revise the role Dale Evans truly played.

In real life, Dale Evans and Roy Rogers were husband and wife, lived on the Double R Bar Ranch, and had a houseful of children, some biologically theirs, others adopted.  There seemed little difference between the characters they played and who they really were.  I wished that I could have been adopted by Roy and Dale, but I already had a mother and a father.  Wishing did nothing except make me feel guilty for thinking how much better my life might be if both my parents were dead.

A child, usually a boy, was sometimes featured in an episode, and he often knew the plans and location of his outlaw father.  Roy would speak to the boy gently, telling him that he knew he loved his father, but that what he was doing, or had done, was wrong and needed to stop.  When the renegade parent was finally corralled, Roy remained firm, reminding him that as a father he had a responsibility to teach his children right from wrong.  The usual result was that the father was taken to the Mineral City sheriff with the understanding that once he had served his jail sentence, he would be given the chance to go straight.  Often a family friend or relative would come forward to take care of the child until penance was done and justice served.

Roy never thought that the children who had lawbreaking fathers were lawbreakers themselves.  And he never thought children who had bad fathers were themselves bad.  In fact, he knew they were in great need of good parental help.  These episodes allowed me to hope that Roy Rogers, if he knew my situation, if he knew me, could help me, and he might love me, too, even if just a little.  Like those kids, I didn’t want my father to go to jail, and I didn’t want people to know the truth about him.  That would mean they would know the truth about me.  The thought of people knowing I was so disparaged, violated, and unloved was abhorrent.  There had to be another way.  My father was a professor, known to be very smart, so I thought that if some adult who was just as smart as he— someone like Roy Rogers—could explain to my father that what he was doing to us was wrong, then he would stop and be sad and sorry.  My father might not even have to go to jail.  But that smart adult never came along.

By the time I was four, all I wanted in the entire world was a pony or horse that I could ride and that would transport me to a world of fun, freedom, imagination, and safety.  This horse would help me bring bad guys to justice.  But for a family living on a professor’s salary in the 1950s, with six children, a horse was impossible.  That was always the answer to the request I must have put forward hundreds of times.  So, until I could make my own money, my tricycle Daisy, a gift from my parents on my fifth birthday, became my horse.  She had a black rubber horsehead that my father affixed to the handlebars.  Daisy was the world to me, my best friend, my sister, my mother, my rescuer.  Daisy took me on imaginary adventures.  We caught bad guys until Roy Rogers, also played by me, took them to the sheriff.

I often played Roy Rogers in our backyard and on the sidewalk that ran along Tower Lane.  Sometimes Micah would join in the role of Pat Brady.  He seldom rode a horse, occasionally a mule, but most often he drove a temperamental and obstreperous jeep named Nellybelle.  A discarded tire was Micah’s Nellybelle.  Using many episodes for inspiration and guidance, we fought bad men and saw that they went to jail.  After they paid their debt to society, we would let them out only if they promised to go straight.  We also liberated some innocents from Mineral City jail:  these prisoners had been framed.  Micah and I deemed ourselves essential in keeping Roy’s town a safe, just, and fun place to live.

When I was captured by outlaws, Daisy rescued me; when a mountain lion or a rattlesnake was about to strike me, she always struck first.  Her hooves—wheels—were her weapons.  She never bit anyone, but she could kick the guns out of the hands of outlaws.  And I rescued Daisy as well.  Once Daisy went off with some mustang friends of hers, only to be captured by a gang of bad men.  The horses were going to be killed and turned into dog food, but I stopped the gang with my toy gun.  Roy Rogers—me, again—arrived, opened the gate to their corral, and released the mustangs out onto the open range where they belonged.  Then Daisy and I took the outlaws to Mineral City and turned them over to the sheriff.  I always treated these outlaws and mean men firmly but fairly because I remembered what Roy had said about the Golden Rule:  treat others as I wished to be treated.

On some occasions, Micah played Roy Rogers.  That’s when Daisy and I fused into one and became Trigger.  We were big, powerful, and golden.  I snorted, neighed, and reared by standing on my pedals and lifting the front wheel of my tricycle off the ground.

Our house in Levittown didn’t have a garage, so when I was done riding, I put Daisy in an imaginary stall on the side of my house.  When it was cold, I covered her with an old towel which served as a horse blanket.  But when we moved to Bethpage, her stall was along one of the walls behind my brothers’ bicycles.  Before I left for the night, I gave Daisy pretend cubes of sugar.  I’d used real sugar, but it attracted ants, so my mother made me stop.

My lifelong concern, empathy, and involvement for animals in need began early on, perhaps in Levittown when I was three or four, maybe even younger.  One Saturday, my father was mowing our lawn when Micah found a baby bird that had fallen from its nest.  He picked it up and raced over to my father, who took the bird from my brother’s hands, tossed it on the ground and ran over it with the lawn mower.

That may not have been the first incident of my father’s cruelty to animals, but it is the first that I remember.  Of course, this one, like so many others, never found its way into The Education of a Prejudiced Man, my father’s autobiography.  He took pains to perpetuate the Joseph Brennan he wanted people to think he was.

My Mother Draws a Beautiful Picture

There is a pain––so utter

It swallows substance up––

Then covers the Abyss with Trance

So Memory can step

Around––across

— Emily Dickinson

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My mother could draw well, and in Levittown she sketched a picture of me on a horse.  I believe I was four.  Any neighbor who came to our house said they knew right away it was me.  My mother said that no one was to touch it and placed it on top of a high cabinet.  She brought a stool to stand on so I could see it anytime I wanted.  I loved that picture.  She had taken the time to make a drawing of me on the animal I most loved. 

One day when my mother wasn’t home, my father came into my room and tossed the drawing onto my bed.

Is this you? he asked.  His tone was sharp and strict.

I didn’t reply, hoping maybe, just this one time, something bad wouldn’t happen.

Is this you?! he repeated, his voice now raised and angry.

Yes, I replied.  My heart was beating in my ears.

He handed me a large pair of scissors and commanded, Cut it up!

I hesitated but he thrust the scissors closer, so I took them and tried to cut around the shape of the horse and me.  But the scissors weren’t like the short blunt ones Mama gave me to use.  These were big, sharp, and heavy.  They kept flopping over in my hand.

Cut it!

I tried and failed again.  Furious, my father ripped the picture from my hands, tore it to little pieces, tossed them onto the floor, then stomped out of the room.  I picked up the pieces and threw them in the kitchen trash.  If Mama found them in my room she would think I had destroyed her picture.

Why didn’t I tell my mother that the image she said no one was to touch had been destroyed by my father?  Because, by that age, I already knew my father would punish me terribly.  It’s natural to think that my mother would inquire about the missing picture, but she didn’t.  As with other things belonging to me or my brothers that disappeared, she asked no questions.  Questions often lead to the truth, and I already knew she had no intention of going there.

I did not inherit my mother’s gift for drawing and was in awe of fellow kindergartners who could color within the lines.  And when it came to drawing on a blank sheet of paper, I was a total failure.   However, I was able to sketch an image of a horse head, for which I received much praise, but the problem was that I refused to draw anything else.  If the teacher suggested a particular subject—say, a flower or the American flag—I would still draw a horse.  But to satisfy her I’d attempt to draw a semblance of her requested image on an upper corner of the paper.

During Levittown weekends, my father often played a 45 RPM record, The Big Rock Candy Mountain.  Micah and I sang it all the time.  This is what I remember.

On a sunny day in the month of May,

A bunch of kids came loping.

As they walked along, they sang a song,

Of a land of cake and candy,

Where a kid can play when he wants to play,

And everything’s just dandy.

Oh, the buzzin’ of the bees in the bubble gum trees,

And the soda water fountain,

And the lemonade springs where the popsicle sings

On that big Rock Candy Mountain.

And you’ll go to school in a swimming pool

With your favorite cowboy teacher,

And you’ll have a horse,

Your own, of course,

On that Big Rock Candy Mountain.

I want to go there, I said to Micah.

You can’t, it’s imaginary.

Imaginary?

Some man imagined it and wrote it down so we could imagine it, too.

So, if he wrote it down, then it isn’t imaginary anymore.  That means I can go there.

No, you can’t.  It was only in the man’s head.

At age four I didn’t know the difference between things that were real and things imagined.  The Big Rock Candy Mountain had to be somewhere.  I just needed to find it.

Long Island was not the place to find mountains, especially one made of rock candy, but on Sunday trips my father sometimes took us to the West Hills, a conservation area known for lovely trails.  When I was six, one particular time there I will never forget.  As we stood on High Hill, reputedly Long Island’s highest point, a woman emerged from the woods riding what struck me as the most beautiful horse in the world.  She said his name was Major, and when I told her that I loved horses, she asked my father if she could let me sit on him.  When he said yes, she picked me up as if I weighed no more than a leaf and placed me in the saddle.

There I was, a little girl whose father had ripped to shreds my mother’s drawing of me on a horse, now seated on a real one, a giant one, commanding the highest hill on Long Island. At that moment, I felt like I must be the tallest person on Long Island, even taller than my father.

I don’t remember if I ever knew the woman’s name, but I do remember she was beautiful.  My father took a black and white photo of the woman, Major, and me, but I remember the colors of that day vividly.  Major’s coat was a dark shiny chestnut and the woman’s jacket, breeches, and hair ribbon were all a matching forest green.  Her blouse was white.  How I’ve wished I could tell this woman what she had done that day.  It was more than a simple act of kindness.  She had placed me high on a living throne.  Until then, such a moment had seemed as out of reach as the brass ring my hand failed to grasp when I rode the merry-go-round horses at Nunley’s Happy Land.

Japan

He needed to build his own footbridge over the abyss and rejoin the other part of himself across space and time.

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

After graduating from college, I taught English at the Berlitz School of Languages in Tokyo.  My best friend, Mari Okanda, lived there.  During Christmas vacation I had worked with Mari in New York City at the Japanese import shop Azuma on Fifth Avenue, just up the street from Bonwit Teller, a beautiful building that was razed, along with the Art Deco friezes above the doors that had been promised to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  The ostentatious tower in its place is the citadel of the destroyer and builder Donald Trump. 

Mari had no idea I was coming to Tokyo, though her parents did.  It was a surprise.  The Okandas not only let me stay in their house for many days, Mrs. Okanda helped me find a charming six-tatami mat apartment in the up-scale district of Sendagaya.  Rooms in apartments or homes were usually measured by the number of tatami mats, one mat being just over sixteen square feet.  One hundred square feet isn’t so much.  My apartment had a small kitchen with a wooden floor, as well as a bath, which meant I didn’t have to go to a communal bathhouse.  I was relieved not to do that because the Japanese, curious how foreigners look naked, often stare unabashedly.  As if the difference would be so great!

By the time I was ten, all my memories of abuse were repressed—but alive and festering in the vault of my subconscious.  I saw my father as everyone else viewed him–a kind and gentle intellectual who loved children, particularly his own.  Yet, what I could not recall still influenced decisions I made.  I’d moved halfway around the world and dedicated myself to learning a language I loved (and which he had no hope of learning), and to understanding a complex culture completely different from the one in which he was physically and intellectually rooted.  However, in this strangely wonderful, sometimes bizarre, country, my thoughts invariably returned home.  In my little house of wood, tatami mats, and sliding rice paper doors, I began to write what, hopefully, would be my first book, a series of childhood episodes that the narrator addresses to her older brother.  This was not the first attempt at writing.  In the fifth grade I wrote fifty or so pages about a little girl who rescues a stray dog, and because the dog is then to be sent to the pound and gassed, she runs away with her canine friend.  I modeled the fictional dog on Miggie, a stray I found when I was ten.  More about Miggie later.

I needed the awful comfort of returning to the familiar.  I decided my first chapter would be about the Sunday morning Micah and I left our Levittown house to go to his elementary school, Abbey Lane.  He was five and I was four:

After we passed two gray houses and one white one, we came to your school.  It was very big and made of reddish-orange bricks.  You said that the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth graders were on the second floor and the kindergarten, first, and second were on the first.  I asked if I’d get in trouble if someone caught me at your school because I was too young even for kindergarten.  But you said they wouldn’t care as long as it wasn’t a school day, and that no one was there anyway, since it was Saturday.

What’s that tall white thing?

A flagpole.  The American flag flies from the top of it.

Why isn’t it flying now?

"Because the man who puts it up and takes it down doesn’t

come Saturday or Sunday."

But I wished the man did come on Saturdays and Sundays because when the loose ropes blew in the wind, they hit the pole and made a pinging noise that sounded lonely and made me feel afraid.  — Abbey Lane, My Brother, Your Sister (Tokyo 1972)

What actually happened is not far from that fictional account.  Micah was five and in kindergarten when he told me that there was country called China on the opposite side of the world.  He also said his school had a playground built on sand, and that it was easy to dig there, and so he said he was going to dig a hole to China and live there.  I remember that when we returned home Micah got yelled at a lot more by my mother because he was older, and when we went to bed that night, he told me how furious he was that I had told our mother where we’d been.

You ruined my plans for China, said Micah angrily.

Mama made me feel afraid.

Well, I’m still going to get there, but you’re not coming with me.

When are you going to leave?

Soon.

Micah leaving me for China was a horrible prospect.  He was my voice in the night.  Without him I would have died.

My parents loved Abbey Lane!  My father wrote that my mother was for immediate publication.  Their response made me so happy.  It might seem odd that I would solicit and value the opinion of the very ones whose cruel treatment—my father by commission of brutal crimes, my mother by her complicity— had caused my brother and me to want to run away to China in the first place.  But then, like my parents—I, too, at that time—was heavily invested in believing that Abbey Lane simply told a charming tale about two children who thought they could get to China by digging through playground sand.  In reality, I later saw that my reasons were three-fold.  I wanted to write a publishable book about childhood from a four-year-old’s perspective.  I wanted to depict an adventure I’d experienced.  As for the third, that would remain elusive for decades, even though it was right there in front of me, written between the lines.  I needed to get as far away from Long Island as I could—the other side of the planet, Japan.  And so did Micah, China.  Maybe it was my variation of finishing what Micah and I set out to do in that Levittown schoolyard.  Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that Micah had joined the army and went to Vietnam.  His initial orders were to Germany, but he had them changed.  He said he needed to be with his buddies.  Of course, an army base in Germany would provide him with buddies, too, but not ones whose lives were in mortal danger.

At Berlitz I taught eleven forty-minute classes five days a week.  It was tiring but, depending on the students, it could be enjoyable.  While the majority of Japanese pupils were businessmen, some were doctors, teachers, musicians, and artists—and occasionally children.  One student, a dentist with an expensive practice in an expensive district in Tokyo, gave me some emergency care.   While in the port city of Yokohama—I had needed to use both my hands for whatever I was doing at the moment—I held onto my camera with its strap between my teeth.  A piece of tooth split off.  Though it was the weekend, Dr. Muratani saw me right away.  I hated going to the dentist and especially detested the clank of metal tools and the spray of water in my mouth.  However, there was no choice.  I was in serious pain.

Tooth repaired by this gentle and kind man, I asked how much I owed.  Dr. Marutani was just past the fourth or fifth lesson in Berlitz, but he had obviously anticipated my question and researched his idiomatic reply.

Please, Miss Burehnan, not to mention it.

But Dr. Marutani, I—

He held up his hand for emphasis, repeating, Not to mention it.

This kindness was one of many I experienced during my years in Japan.

Berlitz students sometimes included members of the diplomatic community.  One lively, overweight woman, Mrs. Ramirez, was the wife of the First Secretary at the Cuban Embassy.  She dressed in vibrant colors—a sweater in Pepto Bismol pink seemed a favorite—and she presented a revealing cleavage that would make even Dolly Parton envious.  Before, after, and I’m afraid sometimes during our lessons, she would talk about her husband’s previous posting in Paris.  She regaled me with endless stories about shopping and dining on the Champs Élysées, her stated commitment to her country’s egalitarian principles seldom in evidence.

Mrs. Ramirez was what we referred to as a difficult teach.  Not only did she constantly interrupt the lesson plan with personal stories, she was suspicious of all Americans.  Everyone was better off when she attended class with the English teacher from Great Britain.  One day he wasn’t in, so we got stuck with each other.

So, I am using the Berlitz Method and trying to stick to that day’s lesson plan.  (Each of our rooms was fitted with a listening box, so at any time the management could check to ensure that we were keeping to their pedagogical straight and narrow.)

Good morning, Mrs. Ramirez.

Good morning, Meez Boorennan, she adjusted the gold choker that held together that pink sweater.  There was no way the buttons and buttonholes could join together otherwise.

How are you today, Mrs. Ramirez?

I yam fine.

"Mrs. Ramirez, ask me how I am.

Meez Boo-rennan, how are you?

I am fine, thank you, Mrs. Ramirez.  Next question:  Mrs. Ramirez, what did you have for breakfast this morning?

Why you wanna know? she cocked her head and eyed me suspiciously.

"Why do I want to know?  Please repeat."

Why do I wanna know?

"No, sorry.  Why do you want to know?"

Why do you wanna know?

So, that when you are in the United States or Great Britain, you can say many things.  Once again, Mrs. Ramirez, what did you have for breakfast this morning?

Fixing a beady eye on me she replied with lofty satisfaction, I hadda dee steak an’ dee champagne.

"Wow, fantastic breakfast, Mrs. Ramirez.  Now, please ask me what I had for breakfast this morning."

Meez  Boo-rennan, wha you haf—

"What did you have for breakfast this morning."

Mrs. Ramirez rolled her eyes, exhaling loudly.  Meez Boo-nnan, wha’ did you haf for breakfast deez morning.

This was not the time to work on Mrs. Ramirez’s t’s, v’s, and th’s.

I had coffee and toast for breakfast this morning, I replied.

Mrs. Ramirez’s expression turned exultant, as if she had just unraveled a monstrous crime.  Ah ha!  Maybe dee Prezihdent Neeksohn no wanna you hava dee steak and dee champagne!  (Indeed, President Nixon most likely did not.  He was in the middle of the Watergate hearings.).

The English teachers at Berlitz were mostly Americans, though there were a couple of Australians and one New Zealander.  The Brit who usually taught Mrs. Ramirez annoyed the hell out of all the rest of us.  He was a pedant, constantly criticizing our pronunciation and what he considered our grammatical errors.  One day in the break room, Mike, a tall and laconic Texan from Fort Worth with a wonderful drawl—and therefore one of Mr. Till’s more frequent targets—had had enough:  Mr. Heel, if you’re so concerned about the acc’racy of the English language, maybe you should introduce a ‘beal’ into your parliament demanding that the word ‘Great’ be removed from Great Britain.

Compared to most other countries, you are usually quite safe in Japan.  I freely walked down isolated streets late at night, but it was not always pleasant.  Occasionally I passed vomit, the result of the Japanese businessmen’s excessive drinking.  However, if I needed directions, Japanese would invariably help, including going a block or two out of their way to ensure I was headed in the right direction.  I once left my wallet on the back seat of a taxi.  A half hour later the driver was at my front door, wallet in hand.  Though my forgetfulness likely cost him several fares, he adamantly refused any compensation.

Japanese society is conformist.  Every Japanese knows this proverb and the implicit warning contained in its words:  the protruding nail gets hammered down.  But there is also a less well known Japanese tanka, a five-line poem of equal applicability.  It describes those who might like to stand out from their peers.  The white bird is not forlorn; it sails against the blue sea and the blue sky without fading.  Some Japanese who have either grown up in another country or gone to university find returning to Japan difficult.  Even as late as the 1970s members of the Foreign Service who had lived abroad were sometimes viewed with skepticism and thought to have lost some of their Japanese-ness.  They were seen as somehow tainted.  My friend Mari, daughter of a Foreign Service officer, lived much of her life abroad.  Now back in Japan with her husband, they sometimes wish they weren’t.

Japanese view themselves as singularly different from all other people.  They sometimes ascribe their cultural strengths, as well as some of their weaknesses, to having a shimaguni-konjo or island nation mentality.  It is this sense of being unique, combined with a furious can-do spirit, that enabled Japan to soar to great heights after being reduced to rubble at the end of WWII.  Based on my experience with my New York Japanese friends, I thought I’d have no trouble fitting in.  Wrong!  In the seventies, and I am told even now, foreigners are often viewed as a curiosity.  Traveling on the train, I found myself the object of unabashed staring.  When I walked by a group of children, sometimes one would exclaim, Look, a foreigner!  And I thought I had trouble fitting in in Bethpage.

Because I went to a Japanese language school while teaching at Berlitz, I became fluent in conversational Japanese.  Surprisingly, some Japanese found this disconcerting.  If you can speak in Japanese and express your feelings in Japanese metaphors, you’re considered an anomaly, if not an outright oddity.  Translated, you are not Japanese by birth, but somehow you are speaking Japanese like a native citizen.  This does not compute.

In some cases, Japanese seem to go into immediate denial when you address them in their native tongue.  When I was with Japanese friends, say, in a coffee shop, and asked the waitress a question in perfectly fine Japanese, she would direct her reply not to me but to one of my Japanese friends.  This happened time and time again.  Her brain just could not acknowledge that I spoke her language.  Over forty years later it is still such a common occurrence for Westerners that there is even a hilarious skit about it on YouTube.  https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-sz-001&hsimp=yhs-001&hspart=sz&p=skit+on+foreigners+speaking+Japanese+in+Japan#id=3&vid=f61ab4aca98992d691779caceca4a8a4&action=click

While in Japan, depression became a frequent and unwanted visitor.  During those dark periods, I could manage to roust myself to teach, but in my free time there was no freedom to be found.  Exhausted and sad, I’d stay in my apartment, practice writing Kanji characters and listening to Joni Mitchell on my little phonograph.  Her poetic and lyrical songs about her solitary peregrinations and her hopes for love caused me to feel less alone.  I’d had the good fortune to see two of Joni Mitchell’s performances at the Café au Go Go on Bleeker Street in Greenwich Village when I was home one summer from college.  This was early in her career, which was just beginning to take off because Judy Collins had recently released one of Joni’s songs, Clouds.  Joni had no back-up, just her guitar.  The seating—two-hundred and thirty—was only two-thirds full.  It was magic.

Daisy

Might we not say that a child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own or rather rearranges the things of his