It can’t be fifty years because, quite seriously, I recently calculated my current age in the steam while showering, and the result caught me by surprise.  I can’t hold onto the idea. Just as I can’t believe how old I am, I can’t believe I wrote this much.  But since I did, I’m sharing it.

Critical facts:  I graduated from Yale College in the first class to include women, and stayed on at Yale for many years:  to garner first a Ph.D. in History (Mrs. Kreiser, though not my biggest influence, told me I would do that), then as a post-doc in child development and social policy, as a junior faculty member of the Child Study Center in the Yale Medical School, and finally went to Yale Law School in my thirties. I guess Hunter taught me how to do school!

I married Jon Rieder (a sociologist at Barnard and Columbia) in 1981 (we’re still married), and our son Daniel Ross-Rieder was born during my third year of law school (he just turned 31).  They tell me not to be modest on this point:  I derive so much pleasure from my son and husband.  Daniel, still single, teases me – with some justification – that I am impatient for him to provide grandchildren.   Am I an Isaac Bashevis Singer character? A New Yorker cartoon?   I always aspired to be the “Kool-aid mom.”  I just did it in my own way.

After litigating for several years at a NY firm, I returned to the academy, this time in law.  I’ve been at George Washington University Law School for more than twenty years – commuting weekly from Larchmont NY during the academic year (in D.C. 3-4 days half the year, home writing, and in years past serving snacks and driving where the kids ordered).  I teach constitutional law, especially the First Amendment, family law, and children’s rights (including education and poverty).  In 2016 I published Lessons in Censorship: How Schools and Courts Subvert Students’ First Amendment Rights (Harvard University Press 2016), the culmination of longstanding  interests in free speech, democracy and the rights of young people.  Over the last year and a half, this led to lots of speaking about the conflicts over free speech and diversity on college campuses, which I have thoroughly enjoyed.

I had cataract surgery on both eyes in the last half year, and can walk around without glasses!

I’m still curious, still politically engaged.  I am currently on the legal advisory board of impeachdonaldtrumpnow.org. You’ll find the petition online.  I work too much, and am trying to cut back.  I know many of you have done that, and I look forward to hearing how you did it, and what this next stage is like for you.  I’d love a new adventure.

In my “spare time” I’ve been doing clay sculpture, which I hope to do more of after I retire.   I love to swim outdoors, especially in lakes, but any water will do; I try to swim daily in the summer.  I enjoy long walks and lattes with friends.

Several of my Hunter friends are still an important part of my life, steadily or sporadically, always picking up where we left off.   In particular, Mirilee Pearl and I have remained close, though thousands of miles apart, helping each other through losses and joys.  Ellen Dolnansky and I have spent wonderful time together, first in New Haven when she was in medical school and I was in law school, and last year in Boston, where Jon and I spent a sabbatical.   A highlight was our afternoon visiting Irving Kizner, who was in fine spirits and sharp as could be; he shared all sorts of stories from the faculty side of Hunter – still felt slightly illicit and thrilling to hear even after all these years. (In response to Pat’s question, he was the teacher I think of most often).  He passed away only a few months later.  And Mari Miya and I, after years out of touch, reconnected too, as if not a day had passed, though we have not done as good a job of seeing each other.  Another plan for post-retirement.   

Here is a question that nags at me after every reunion: How did so many of you (really, almost all of you) manage to move so far from NY?  I switched careers at least three times, which takes either a form of courage or of cluelessness, but it never really occurred to me to move farther than Connecticut, and I still wanted to come home.   Today, I don’t know that I’d choose NY—it’s not the city we grew up in.  I recently read a piece in the NY Times by an Indian émigré, who said NY is “the last home for those who have no other.”   That made sense to me, as my father’s family arrived here in 1940 and there was no place to go back to.   So I am standing in place.   There’s a theme here (see above, all those years in New Haven). After moving what seemed like annually in our youth, Jon and I have been in the same house (our first) for a quarter of a century. 

Other questions for reunion, email or other venues, in no particular order of importance: Whether, when and how to let hair go grey? Will sugar really kill us?  Why did some of us talk about how we wished we had lived in a time that demanded heroism?  Anyone looking forward to the privilege of indulging cantankerousness?  Co-housing in our 90s?

What difference did Hunter make?  I still feel it physically, arriving in seventh grade to a place where it was safe – even wonderful – to be a smart girl.  The “girl” part was important, but so was the “smart,” loving ideas and reading.   It was like crossing the bridge from New Hampshire to Maine in the summer – all the burden rolled off and we were in a comfort zone from which to explore what was possible.   And, it turned out, so much was!  Liberating, and a secure base from which to venture forth, as long as we didn’t take Sarah Maria at face value and remembered to laugh.