I was a smart ass kid, and gratitude wasn't the conscious practice it is now. My juiciest memory at Hunter was of nearly being expelled in our senior year, along with my soul buddies Carole Lax and Risa Bisgeier, for leaving the building during lunch. We slipped out through the college, and one fateful day, every entrance was manned and Mildred Busch grabbed us by our necks when we returned, yelling "GOTCHA!" The next day, our unhappy parents in tow, our characters were massacred by Principal Bernie Miller, who suggested that we had the devil in us.(!) We were lectured about the great privilege of attending Hunter, and I stood up with my hands on my hips and proclaimed "I never heard of a privilege that had to be ENFORCED!" At that, my father (who later said he'd been reluctantly proud of me) slapped his hand to his head, and Dr. Miller said fine, we were expelled! We used our Hunter-educated verbal skills to turn that one around, but I was so furious that for years I scrawled my accomplishments on my alumni dues form with the message "Tell Dr. Miller THAT!"

I WAS truly privileged to study French with Mrs. Luisa Ghnassia, and despite my utter lack of talent for foreign languages, stayed on through AP French so I could continue to be her student. A cameo memory: Mrs. Ghnassia describing the miserable life of poet Francois Villon, writing from prison, and asking us to see the story under the story. She spread her arms like she was flying, and in her musical lilt, proclaimed "Il aime la vie!" Despite and because of it all," Il AIME la vie!" I had goosebumps.

Dr. Witmer called Carole, Risa and I "the Three Graces." Not without irony. Our 9th grade bio teacher, Anne Heckel, inspired our imaginations with a description of the African Hottentot tribe, known for large fat deposits on their derrieres. We were thrilled, and wove up a Hottentot ancestry for ourselves, with a whole mythology, a scowling Hottentot face, gutteral, grunting Hottentot speech, and a counterculture disregard for fashion, behavior, figure and moral constraints of the times, which lasted through graduation and spawned art, literature, song, alternate names, and Hottentot holidays.

I studied English lit at Boston University for two years, and got my BA in Psychology from New York University, phi beta kappa. I worked as a recreation leader for a year at a hideous nursing home that was later shut down by the state, when I didn't get into the graduate programs I thought I should, and met my husband, Les Schwartz, at a party that year, while he was working resentfully at the post office because he hadn't gotten into the graduate schools he thought he should. When we met, I was already slated to start at Columbia for my MSW degree, and he was off to law school that fall in Denver. We had two years of letters and longing before I got my master's degree in social work and joined him in Denver. He said the sky is blue, the trees are gold, the air is dry, his hair didn't frizz, he was never again living in NY. We married in 1977, and had two beautiful sons, Timothy (now 38) and Michael (34.) Tim is a mechanical engineer in the aerospace industry, living with his wife, 4 children, 2 cats and soon a micro mini pig in Seattle. Michael is married with one son, lives in Greeley, Colorado, and owns a family pizza restaurant. We are five times grandchild blessed, and spend all the time we can with them.

Les had a solo law practice, from which he retired this year. My career was in counseling and mostly medical social work. I worked with people from all over the country with life threatening asthma, did cognitive behavioral therapy with agoraphobics, taught corporate stress management, worked with physical rehab patients, worked on a high risk ante partum unit of a women's hospital and ran an infant loss support group, counseled at a teen pregnancy clinic, and for the last nine years of my career, my passion was hospice.
I retired earlier than planned because of the revolting changes in health care. Which one day we'll remember as "the good old days," given the current climate.... We may be the first 21st century generation to be put out on ice floes when we can't provide our own food, if there is still ice. When I started at hospice, I was thanked profusely and publicly for being up all night attending a death, with family members too fragile to be left alone. When I decided to retire, I was berated for a similar act, asked "HOW do you justify the time? You don't expect to get PAID for that?" So, final curtain.

I love nature, wildlife, the ocean, travel, reading fiction. Hawaii is my favorite place anywhere, and if I am snorkeling I am very very happy. I gave at the office, 30+ years of human beings at every edge, now I play with my grandkids and spoil four pet birds, two talking, screeching, funny, badly behaved parrots and two rescue grackles with deformed feet. My favorite volunteer work has been years of wild bird rehab, especially in the summer when we have shelves, boxes, incubators, baskets and cages full of begging, screaming, quacking, cawing babies who have to be fed every half hour. I have held a great blue heron on my lap, been bitten on the cheek by an angry pelican, cuddled a baby blue jay. I can die happy.

The biggest influence on my adult life was the amazing Dr. Jean Houston. I studied with her for over twenty years, traveling to New York to attend her mystery school, with my sister (Amy Ober Flanders, Hunter '74) her husband, and some years, Risa Bisgeier Marlen. Jean is a human capacities, new age Renaissance woman, who laughingly called Mystery School the longest running adult kindergarten, but we rethought spirituality, history, culture, the universe and the MIND, thrillingly; raised kundalini, partnered with gods, goddesses, archetypes to achieve our goals and grow, in a "universe more complex than your wildest dreams." It was a logical extension of Hunter, where we were told we could be and do anything in the world. Jean was saying we can be and do anything in consciousness, we could influence space, time and reality itself.. I told people it was like being alive at the time of Socrates, and lucking into the inner circle. Without Jean, I would have been ill prepared to work with the dying, and meet challenges such as the occasional devastated patient furious at god, filled with despair and requesting a whole new cosmology to fix it. I traveled with Jean and a group of her students to Bali and Java, where we meditated in a crystal cave associated with Mohammed, attended Hindu rituals, wrapped up tight in those beautiful (but not intended for big hipped women) sarongs and belts and lacy blouses, snorkeled on a protected reef with blue starfish, studied painting with a Balinese master, met with a Javanese white magician on a beach at the full moon, watching the tide withdraw a half a mile, then rush in. I have always been a little crazy, a lot lucky, a master of red, dramatic angst and occasional bliss, and just now am trying to stop my joints from degenerating so I can have more.