Seeking Reconnection
by Silvia Hines
1. The Physicist
I’d decided to Google him, as everyone did with old boyfriends’ names. His name is unusual, so I found him easily. The first post to come up was a lengthy obituary from a few years earlier, detailing his glowing accomplishments as full professor and department chair at a notable northeastern university. I was shocked to learn he had died of a chronic illness before the age of sixty.
The second post was a summary of academic papers he’d written, which on first glance appeared to be mostly in the fields of astrophysics and astronomy. Assuming those writings would be mostly incomprehensible to me, I bookmarked the article for later perusal while I mused about our short-lived connection.
We’d met in an unlikely way in the spring semester of our senior year in college. We were in an elective literature class in which everyone was expected to read the whole of Joyce’s Ulysses, a feat neither of us was prepared for: he, a physics major and I, a psychology student. He turned out to be far better at it than I; he actually finished the book and received an A.
I bumped into him on my way out of that classroom one afternoon, planning to waylay fellow undergraduates and cajole them into participating in the study I was conducting for my experimental psychology course. I asked him on a whim, and he was all too willing, making typical science-major jokes about being a human guinea pig as we walked to the cafeteria.
We’d bonded quickly. Our first date was an afternoon jaunt by subway to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see the Egyptian collection. It turned out he was an avid student of ancient Egypt and was teaching himself to read hieroglyphics. He explained patiently the difference between hieroglyphs and hieratics, detailed the evolution of writing from pictographs to symbols, and showed me how to read a scroll from left to right or right to left depending on the direction the human or animal figures were facing.
I quickly saw he was no ordinary physics major. I was entranced by this handsome twenty-year-old whose varied interests included quantum mechanics, astrophysics, English literature, Egyptology, and poetry. While I appreciated his wide knowledge base, still I was surprised when he occasionally quoted from the Bible.
“So you’ve read the Bible?” I asked, sitting across from him one night at the cafeteria on 161st Street, near my home. I didn’t know anybody who did that in my secular-humanist milieu. “Are you religious?”
“No, not at all. I’m an atheist,” he said. “What about you?”
“I’m an atheist, too,” I answered quickly. I didn’t usually characterize myself in that way, but it seemed reasonably accurate at the time.
“It’s not something to be decided on a whim,” he said. “I’ve studied this, researched it, and come to a firm conclusion.”
I felt chastised by his rebuke; it seemed he was accusing me of “atheism-lite.” And what did research have to do with it? I don’t remember asking him how one can prove the nonexistence of God. Today, many decades later, I wouldn’t call myself as an atheist, and I wondered if he’d continued to think of himself in that way.
As the end of the semester approached, he told me he’d been the victim of a violent mugging some years before, and had vowed to get as far from New York as he could, as soon as he could. We took one last trip to the Met at the end of May, where we lingered in the gift shop and bought each other a farewell present. He gave me a pair of silver dangling earrings displaying the ankh, which I’d learned was the ancient Egyptian symbol of life.
He left for graduate school on the west coast even before graduation day, skipping the ceremony and all other senior events. I sent him a newspaper clipping featuring the commencement speaker he’d missed, and I diligently tackled Ulysses when I wasn’t preparing for my own departure for graduate school. We corresponded throughout the summer and fall but quickly met other potential partners in our respective schools; we lost touch within our first year apart.
I finished reading the obituary, several linked stories, and the summary of academic papers, hoping to find clues that he’d later opened to the possibility of a spiritual realm, as I had. Wouldn’t someone who was drawn to ancient Egypt, a civilization obsessed with the Other World, have a predilection for seeking spirit? I didn’t expect to find he’d become a practicing Jew or Christian, or a New Ager who collected crystals or read Tarot cards. But I wondered if he might have become attracted to the rational philosophy of Buddhism or the potential power of the life force energy referred to as chi. Or perhaps the spirituality of the indigenous cultures, the inner light of Quakerism, or the personal god of the transcendentalists.
What I did find was an apparent preoccupation, in the papers he wrote and the talks he gave, with explaining miraculous Biblical events in terms of known or suspected astronomical, geological, or meteorological phenomena. These occurrences included the star of Bethlehem, the burning bush, the parting of the Red Sea, and the falling of manna from heaven. I smiled to myself as I considered these papers. Rather than disappointment, I felt a sense of satisfying consistency. He had remained the same person I’d known so long ago, the consummate scientist. And now I understood what he might have meant by research into the existence of God. Finally, I was happy to remember that the ankh is a symbol, not only of life on this earth, but of eternal life.
2. JFK
I thought everyone remembered exactly where they were when they first heard JFK had been shot. I was sitting next to Naomi B. in a statistics class in the Department of Psychology at my college. Naomi was beautiful, with long, thick, chestnut-colored hair. Though she was an undergraduate, she was already married, which seemed cool to me. She hosted a folk music program on the University radio station, in which she played an abundance of selections from current Joan Baez albums. Naomi’s radio voice was strong and clear, a little like Baez’s gorgeous, rich singing voice. One of the less admirable ways Naomi and I had connected was through our proclivity for turning toward each other and laughing over private jokes while the professor lectured.
On that November day, the class was interrupted twice. First, a thin young man walked into the room to tell us Kennedy had been shot. The lanky professor nodded, shared a moment of quiet with us, then went back to teaching. The second time, about half an hour later, the same messenger came into the classroom and told us the president had died. The professor looked at us, seemed a little befuddled — he’d likely never been faced with something like this before — and dismissed the class.
Naomi and I walked out of the classroom together, apparently not yet ready to feel grief or empathy, but expressing chagrin at the idea that LBJ, a southerner from Texas, would not be good for the hope of civil rights legislation. We were wrong.
Last year, I found Naomi on Facebook. I was certain I had the right person and sent her a message. I wondered how much she would remember of that day and thought it would be fun to see how her life had gone. She thanked me for writing, said she didn’t really remember much from that time, and asked me to send her a photo of myself from those days. Oddly, the thing she did recall was the name of the statistics professor she’d had that semester, a name long gone from my memory.
I didn’t mind that Naomi didn’t remember me. But how could it be that I’d been sitting next to the only person in the world who didn’t remember where she was when she heard the shocking news on November 22, 1963?
3. Influence
Of all my childhood friends, I’d say Nina had the greatest impact on my life. Perhaps because she was an artist, she was a divergent thinker and unconventional in lifestyle. She was also a courageous and adventurous person. We spent our teenage years roaming the city: visiting museums, attending concerts, skating in Central Park, listening to folk music in Washington Square Park. We checked out Staten Island way beyond where the ferry left you off. We took part in a supposed demonstration of extrasensory perception, figured out the presentation was a hoax, but decided we still believed in telepathy.
Our most unusual jaunt, however, was probably her scheme for us to take Catholicism classes at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, inspired by the fact that she was seriously dating a Catholic boy. We didn’t mention this outing to our parents, knowing it wasn’t what they had in mind for their Jewish daughters. While I sat mesmerized by the projected cartoon presentations of sacred religious information, she was concocting probing questions for the priest, which she actually had the nerve to ask at the ends of the sessions.
Once, when we were walking from the 125th St. Subway Station to the City College Campus in the evening, a boy appeared from a side street, snatched Nina’s pocketbook, and ran. Before I could say anything, she took off running after the boy. Nobody did that, did they? Watching her go, I had a dual response: I felt an odd admiration that she would even entertain the idea of running after him, as well as a certainty that this was dangerous for her. But more about that later.
After graduation, Nina married her boyfriend and went to live with him in New Haven, where he was studying at Yale for a doctorate in clinical psychology. By the time he finished the degree it was the late 1960s, and he was drafted to be a medic in Vietnam. Rather than figure out a way to avoid the draft, he’d decided to go, and Nina decided to go with him. Again, nobody did that! She lived with him for a year in Saigon, and wrote more than a dozen letters to me documenting her experiences and impressions, including a vivid description of a massive Buddhist protest parade she watched from her apartment window. In another letter she mused, perhaps presciently, that the U.S. should pull out of Vietnam gracefully before it was too late. I kept all the letters folded inside their Air Mail envelopes in a shoebox in a closet.
In 1969 my boyfriend and I drove across country, ending with a much anticipated visit with Nina and her husband in San Francisco, where they’d settled after leaving Vietnam. It turned out they were living with a group of people who were doing a lot of meditating. Meditation was new in this country at the time, and the purpose was generally understood to be relaxation, quieting the mind, and perhaps enlightenment. This group, however, was meditating for the specific purpose of getting high without drugs.
Since it takes a lot of meditation to approach the mellowness that might resemble a drug high, this must have been a time-consuming task. From the time we arrived, until we left to go home, Nina was almost unrecognizable to me; she appeared to be in a trance, speaking quietly and with little emotion. She was indeed involved in something different again, and it looked like our strong connection was gone. We lost touch after that, launching separately into our adult lives on our separate coasts.
About 45 years later, when we reconnected on Facebook, Nina was clearly back to the ebullient person I remembered, happily exchanging emails with me in which we detailed what our present lives were about. I told her I had kept her letters from Saigon and was willing to scan them all and email them to her. Doing this and talking with her about the letters was like a rebonding for us; I felt I was a conduit allowing her to encounter her much younger self and a bit of my own self as well.
A couple of years after our Internet communications had dwindled, she sent me a Facebook message asking if I remembered the time her purse was grabbed on the walk from the subway to an evening meeting at our college. “I ran after him toward a nearby park,” she wrote, “until I heard you yell something at me. Did I ever tell you how much I appreciated your wisdom that night?”
I wrote back at once, intrigued by the idea that I’d had more than a passive role in this disturbing incident. I told her I indeed remembered the event, that I’d thought she was uncommonly brave though also reckless, but that I had no memory of what I’d said. I told her I thought she’d quit her chase and come back to where I was waiting because the mugger ran faster than she.
“No,” she responded. “I had followed my first reaction of anger, until I heard you yell something out to me. You said, ‘If you catch him, what are you going to do?’ You made me realize that what I was doing was foolish and dangerous.”
Although I don’t remember saying those words, I thought it was quite likely I had. It sounded like me: practical. I was happy to see that in addition to the strong influence I’d felt she had on my life, perhaps I’d influenced hers as well.
Copyright © 2021 by Silvia Hines
