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Like a Rolling Stone

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The Invisible Woman

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Working Girl

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My Immigrants

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A Sense of Community

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Two Weddings

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Working Girl

One small and unexpected delight in getting older is having access to my earnings record on the social securty website. 

I marvel at the fact that the first two entries in 1967 and 1968, ages 15 and 16, the record shows earnings of $14 and $7. (Was I mostly paid under the table? I hope so!) Those first jobs, during summer vacation, proved to be tortuous intros to working life. 

Days spent watching a slow-moving clock, feet aching, earning $1.40 an hour, waiting for my shift to end so I could join my friends. I grew up on the Jersey Shore, our house a few blocks from the beach, the center of all summer activity. 

My first job was as a counter girl at a boardwalk concession working for Mr. and Mrs. Isola, a middle-aged couple who ran a tight ship. The stand, which sold typical beach fare— burgers and fries, soda, ice cream and candy— had no seating. One counter was open to the boardwalk and the other to the beach. 

Customers in bathing suits walked up a ramp from the sand and I took their orders, my gaze often distracted by the scene beyond them: the hot sand dotted with umbrellas and the sparkling Atlantic beyond, accompanied by the muffled shouts of kids playing in the surf. 

I would dutifully take orders, pass them to Mr Isola, the cook, and quickly do the math in my head...3 burgers with fries and sodas, plus a creamsicle and an ice cream sandwich. Marching over to Mrs Isola at the register, I would hand her the money, tell her what the bill was and then she would ask me what they ordered. This interrogation persisted for weeks, until my math skills were reliably established. 

The worst days were when my girlfriends were basking on the beach in full view, as I did the endless math exercises in the hot greasy shack, just yards away from the fun and my friends. My next job was worse and thankfully short-lived. My girlfriend Dana and I answered an ad for aides at a nursing home, early shift, starting at 7. In our white uniforms, white stockings and shoes, we showed up expecting what, I don’t know but certainly not the assignment we were given. 

Our job was to change the bedding and clean up the patients after a night of soiling the sheets. It took two aides, one to roll the patient over and the other to wipe. The men and women, all bed-ridden and a few with bed sores, emitted odours that turned my stomach. We tried coverering our noses but the visual impact was equally shocking. 

We quit soon enough but in retrospect, the patients deserved far better than squeamish teenage girls tending to their basic needs. I will skip the details of my next job, a two day stint as a chambermaid in a musty motel located on a highway outside of town. From the detritus of bottles and used condoms left behind, the motel appeared to be a rendezvous spot for truckers and prostitutes. 

I had my limits, however low the bar. In 1970, the summer before college, I started a job that paid real money. The record shows I made $1013, over $6000 in today’s dollars, an ample amount to start my college career. My mother had arranged the job. I was to be a nurses aide at Marlboro State Mental Hospital, where she volunteered and served on the board. I was assigned to work in the childrens “cottage” as all the institutional brick residences were called. I worked the day shift, 7 to 3, and again dressed in white down to my shoes. 

The day began promptly at seven, with a staff meeting in the nurses station where the notes from the night shift were read and discussed—who “evacuated” their bowels, who had to be restrained. Next, the young patients lined up for their meds, each dose kept in a small plastic cup, exactly like a scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. 

The drug of choice was Thorazine and the only hope for controlling the often self-destructive behavior of the children. After breakfast, we all ajourned to the playground, where the autistic patients hairtwirled or rocked in silence while the older children, some just a year younger than myself, hung out in groups and talked. 

It was a surreal and unsettling experience, especially as I got to know the teenagers. Delilah, sixteen, with jet-black hair and a pretty face, had attemped suicide. 

As I got to know her better, it became apparent, that her parents had committed her to Marlboro for expediency’s sake. The line between mental illness and teenage rebellion was too thin for comfort. 

With the recent Kent State shootings, the Vietnam War raging, and the emergence of the women’s movement, I felt a kinship with Delilah, my own rebellion taking shape against the hypocracy of the older generation. 

This was the summer when I first experimented with drugs, running with a fast crowd, often staying up all night, only to don my uniform at dawn to make the trek to Marlboro. 

By the time I left for college that September, I knew I would never again take a job that required a white uniform. My record shows earnings of $999 for the summer of 1971, an unlikely amount which must be chalked up as an accounting ploy by my employer. 

The summer after my freshman year, I joined a group of college friends renting a house in Ogunquit, Maine. I had visions of a Waspy lobster-filled summer, fueled by my discovery of preppies at college whose families “summered” on the New England coast. The reality was that I biked the hilly two miles into town (and back) where I worked for a nice Jewish family from Brooklyn at their variety store. 

I sold flip-flops, inflatable rafts, beach towels, and other summer gear. My friends were busy with their summer jobs. Few lobsters were consumed and I left Maine feeling decidedly unWaspy. I have no memory of the work that earned me $530 in 1973 but I clearly remember the summer job after graduation in 1974. 

By this time, I was living on West 102nd Street in New York City with my boyfriend Woody who drove a cab. Topping out as the best job of my youth, I served as a lifeguard on a rooftop pool on East End Avenue overlooking Gracie Mansion. 

Again, I biked to work but this time, it was a flat and fast cross-town express. Once at the pool, which was almost always empty on weekdays, I would swim back and forth, counting the laps until I hit a mile. This was also the summer of the Watergate scandal and the memory of listening to Nixon’s resignation on my transistor radio on that sunny rooftop is still vivid. 

By summer’s end, I was incredibly fit, very tan and clueless about what to do next. In another 2 years, I would be working full time. Acording to my earning record, I broke into a 5-digit income catagory for the first time in 1976 —$10, 058— and from there the numbers continue their satisfyingly-upward climb. 

My Social Security earnings record reminds me how work has helped define me, opened some doors, closed others, and paid me for all of it.

[nancybutkus]

My Immigrants

Like living and breathing relics from the 19th century, my immigrant grandparents never totally adapted to their new country. From language to home cooking to hygiene, they were firmly set in their old-country habits. 

Back in Lithuania, bordered by the cold Baltic and icier Russia, theirs was a hardscrabble existence as evidenced by the only surviving family photo from that time. The old black and white picture shows a couple of burly men in a open wagon, identical to the buckboards often seen on TV Westerns. An ox was tethered to it. There are no houses in sight, just dirt and brush. 

They are not smiling for the camera. I don’t know the story behind my grandparents decision in the early 20th Century to sail across the ocean. I assume there was a sense of desperation but also a strong drive to better their lives. 

Having met on the boat, where my grandfather was mistakenly told my grandmother was a princess, they married soon after and planted themselves in the Ironbound section of Newark, in a neighborhood of fellow tribesmen as well as Poles, Germans, and Italians, with whom they did not mix. Their language and customs remained intact as they lived an insular existence those first few years in America. 

With the birth of my father, their only child, in 1919, a gradual process of assimilation into mainstream America began. My grandfather worked as a saloon keeper, bootlegger, butcher, and finally, liquor distributor, all in the Ironbound section. He could not read or write English, but could speak Polish and German to his customers. 

Some early photos show him wearing a bloody apron behind the butcher shop and pushing a wheelbarrow full of bricks. With his heavyset build and thick mustache, he bears a slight resemblance to Stalin. 

He does not smile in any of these photos. By the time my father became a teenager, my grandfather’s liquor business was flourishing. Like so many immigrants before and after them, their small family left behind their Lithuanian enclave for the leafy Jersey suburbs. 

The sketchy details provided by my father indicated that this move was somewhat misguided. They found themselves in a posh house, so grand that it contained a library (without any books) and no doubt, neighbors with whom they had little in common. My father was sent was sent to a boarding school in Connecticut, a move which has always puzzled me. 

My grandparents had risen financially but they were still rough-mannered people without formal education and very much stuck in their old customs. After boarding school, my father did not continue his education. His father wanted him back to work in the liquor business. World War Two intervened and my father joined the army. 

He once told me that the day he left for Europe was the only time his mother ever hugged him and told him she loved him. When the war ended, a few of the Lithuanian families from the Ironbound neighborhood moved to Long Branch, New Jersey, a resort town on the Jersey Shore. 

Joining this looseknit group, my grandparents bought a tumbledown Victorian hotel on the ocean. The interior was either half-built or had been deconstructed by my grandfather. There were a handful of tenants who lived there permanently in a cluster of apartments on the second floor, including my grandparents. All the large downstairs room which might have once served as reception rooms, were overflowing with junk. 

My grandfather collected things as only someone who had experienced deep privation does--nothing was thrown away--car parts, large pieces of equipment, lumber, odd bits of furniture, all piled on in musty-smelling jumbles in the large dusty rooms. The wide hallways on the upper floors--it might have been 4 or 5 stories high--were ghostly, abandoned spaces. 

As a child, I ran down them scared witless that a hand would come from behind one of the closed doors and kidnap me. In 1947, much to the consternation of both families, my parents got married. Not only did my father not marry within his tribe, he chose a college-educated 2nd generation Italian Jew. 

The union did not rest easily with either family, thinking each had married “down.” This cultural clash never abated. By the 1950’s my parents had produced three children and we were all living in Long Branch, close to both sets of grandparents. Every Sunday my father would take me and my old sister to visit his parents at the tumble-down hotel. 

Too young to accompany us, my baby brother stayed at home with my mother, who never, then or in the future, ever made this trip with us. I perceived my grandparents home and habits as singularly foreign. Entering their apartment, a large table, covered with a stick vinyl tablecloth, took up most of the floor space. 

Their lives revolved around this sturdy old table. When my grandfather took his place at the head, a liquor bottle and shot glasses quickly appeared and my father and his parents quickly moved into speaking and often yelling in Lithuanian.

My grandmother, a rotund woman with thick arms and legs, her hair dyed a coppery red, wore house-dresses and lace-up thick-heeled shoes into which her chunky legs spilled. She would often retreat into the tiny corner kitchen and produce kukulias, greasy dumplings served with farmers cheese which I could not stomach. 

On a sideboard, however, there was a glass jar filled with Hershey kisses which was more than enough sustenance for me. I must have been a very picky child as I remember not drinking out of their glasses because they had a greasy film on them. 

Nor could I use their bathroom, a closet-sized room off the kitchen where the primitive shower, next to the toilet, emptied into a hole in the floor. There were two bedrooms, each opening into the room with the table but neither invited much curiosity with its dark furniture and dreary walls.

In 1967 when my grandfather had not returned to the apartment for lunch, he was found lying among his piles of collected junk downstairs, dead of a heart attack. My grandmother, who had never expressed much emotion or opinion, was bereft. 

Her entire life revolved around the care and feeding of Stanley, her husband of over 50 years. She did not drive, have friends, belong to a church group or dote on her grandchildren. 

Nothing in this life held much interest to her except her husband. My father sold the hotel which was deemed by the town a candidate for slum clearance. My grandmother moved into a small apartment above one occupied by my mother’s mother, a convenient solution for both widows. 

But whereas my Italian grandmother, who had been born and raised in New York City and therefore already 2nd generation, flourished with her gardening and church group and many friends, my Lithuanian grandmother did not. 

She lived on another dozen years, homebound but displaced in a fundamental way. She was rooted in the past and the old country, and with the loss of her husband, that fundamental link was severed.

[nancybutkus]

A Sense of Community

My earliest memories are playing with the neighborhood gang in the woods behind our house in Long Branch, N.J. We were a mixed group—different ages, boys and girls—the older kids the acknowledged leaders, and the rest of us a ready and enthusiastic army of plebes. 

Once I entered elementary school, I became part of a clique of girls whose loyalty and whispered secrets kept us close and secure in our very small world. In high school and college, I became more particular, choosing friends based on common interests, shared values or just plain affection. 

At the start of my career, I became a member of a new cohort. Young and single, we were ambitious and given to working late, sharing office gossip, messy romances, and much alcohol. 

At the next stage of my life, with two small children, yet another group coalesced. They were fellow parents who shared tips and playdates, advice and support. As my children got older and entered high school and college, this group fell away, no longer a part of my daily life. 

My career moved into its fourth decade, and a new work contingent formed, most of them a generation younger than I. They were the young, ambitious ones now, and I held the position of the veteran— available for advice and the occasional after-hours meetup. 

Then, 3 years ago I was laid off. I decided to leave the city and begin a new chapter on the North Fork. It was an exhilirating yet unnerving move. Free of any circumscribed routine, how was I to become a part of my new community? I did not want to moulder at home. 

I moved during Christmas, and early that January, a story appeared in the local paper about a new coffee roastery opening just a few blocks from my house. Previously, my morning coffee ritual had been a pleasant way to kickstart my workday. Now, fresh roasted coffee would be at hand within walking distance of my house. 

The ads for the shop, officially the North Fork Roasting Company, reported the opening for Valentines Day. I waited. At 7 a.m. on the appointed morning, I approached the front door and peeked inside. Two attractive young women busied themselves behind the counter. I was their first customer. I can’t remember what I ordered but I do remember telling them how I had been avidly awaiting the opening. 

I also asked if they would be selling The New York Times (no, just the Suffolk one.) No matter, I would make do. That first winter, often a fire was going when I walked into the roastery and baked goods, steaming hot from the small kitchen, were a welcoming sign. 

It took me awhile to stop mixing up the co-owners names, Jenny and Jessie, but they always remembered mine. Sharing the overstuffed sofa with their chocolate Lab, Sinatra, Dirty Chai in hand, early morning attendance at NoFoRoCo eased me into an entirely new community. 

I got to know the other baristas, who were astonishingly friendly and so young, some still in high school. With dogs welcome and babies often in tow, the atmosphere was intimate and friendly. I got to know people from wildly different backgrounds than my own. 

They were farmers and beekeepers, construction workers and restaurateurs, old and young, gay and straight, left wing and alt-right. Some members of this new group have already impacted my life. 

The dispatcher at the local fire station convinced me and my two daughters that life was not complete without a visit to Riverhead Raceway. 

One warm, summer night, we went, mesmerized by the spectacle of the School Bus Demo and the harrowing figure 8 oval — a shape designed to increase the rate of collision. Another regular at the roasting company convinced me to go boogie boarding last month in the Atlantic while she surfed. 

Battling the waves in my wetsuit and borrowed boogie board, I experienced thrills and sensations that took me back to my childhood. I’ve had the benefit of a private tour of the local organic farm who’s owner is also a regular. When my new rescue dog was problematic, worthwhile tips and advice emerged from a whole new cohort of dog lovers. 

Need home repairs? My new group has me covered. After many years of city living, I am ensconsed in small town life. The threads that connect me to this community are stronger and reach wider because of the roasting company. 

The space that Jessie and Jenny have created with their enlightened hospitality welcomes everyone. You don’t need a fancy job title or to be a parent; you just need to smile.

[nancybutkus]

Two Weddings

My brother recently posted a video on Facebook of his wife Lisette salsa dancing. His comment, “Mi bonita,” made me smile. 

At age 60, and after 3 failed marriages, he seemed to have at last found marital bliss. I thought back to that Labor Day weekend thirty-two years ago, when I watched hopefully as he married his first wife. 

On that same weekend, purely coincidently, I met David, my future husband at yet another wedding. Those few whirlwind days of romance and ritual are fixed in my mind as a kind of turning point. 

On that one magical weekend in September, I too got caught up in wedding fever. Meeting David that day, I felt a gravitational pull. I believed it was kismet. I had attended my brothers wedding at the Jersey Shore on a Friday. 

My brother’s ceremony was short but not neccessarily sweet. Only the two families attended as there was some lingering discomfort over the presense of the couples now-six-month-old son. 

At the dinner afterwards, my father managed to insult the bride with a sarcastic toast which met with blank stares and disbelief. It was appalling. I left that evening to drive back to the city, disturbed and feeling an ever-growing chasm between myself and my family and glad for the distraction of the wedding the next day.

The wedding of my boss, Jane, held in the Hamptons, would be far different in both style and substance. Having never been a Hamptons type, I grossly misjudged how long it would take me to wend my way down molasses-slow Route 27—on Saturday of Labor Day weekend no less. 

I became increasingly anxious as the hour of the wedding approached. Jane had worked for years at the Washington Post and the renowned editor Ben Bradlee (the Jason Robards character in All the Presidents Men) was not only walking my boss down the aisle, but hosting it at his beautiful beach house, the similiarly famous Grey Gardens. 

As a wedding gift, I had promised to take Polaroids and create a keepsake album and now that assignment was looking seriously compromised. I pulled over and called the house to ask them to delay the ceremony. Ben answered the phone and after I explained my situation, he said, in his inimitable voice “Butkus, get your ass over here. Now.” 

I obeyed but not without picking up a ticket for driving on the shoulder of the road. Only a few minutes late, I parked outside the distinctive shingle-style house and rushed to the door. Sally Quinn, Ben’s wife and a writer for the Post, opened the door, took a look at me and announced “The photographer’s here.” 

Perhaps it was my Betsey Johnson spandex bustier dress but I instantly felt self-conscious and out of place. It was an afternoon wedding and all the other women were wearing conservative floral tea dresses. 

My outfit seemed to broadcast Jersey Girl to the decidedly upscale crowd. Thank god for my Polaroid camera—and my “job” as photographer— as I quickly ran upstairs to photograph the bride and groom getting ready. 

Then I meandered out to the verandah to shoot the guests, many of them distinguished journalists whose relish to have the camera turned on them was conspicuously absent. It was hard to get them to pay attention to me, let alone smile for the camera. 

As I tried to infiltrate various groups intent on ignoring me, one guest at last turned and smiled. It was David and he couldn’t have been more charming. I suddenly felt at ease. He didn’t seem to mind my woefully out-of-place dress. The ceremony was lovely. 

Jane walked down the center hall staircase and into the living room to stand before a large fireplace whose mantle was bedecked with flowers. Vows were exchanged and then everyone relaxed outside with drinks and hors d’oeuvres. The gardens were simultaneously lush and tasteful. 

Masses of hydrangeas still held their blooms and the warm early September afternoon enhanced the perfection of the setting. I managed to find a few friends from work to talk to and abandoned the Polaroid. 

After all, I was a guest too and wanted to have a good time. After this bit of socialyzing the guests were instructed to head over to Sag Harbor for a formal dinner at the American Hotel. The wedding party had booked a room large enough to seat the entire guest list. 

After a short drive, I entered the restaurant, armed with more Polaroid film knowing there would be toasts and lots of opportunities for memorable pictures. I found my place card and watched as my table filled with a few co-workers and the rest strangers. 

The seat to my right was empty until the charming man who hours earlier was my willing Polaroid subject, sat down and gave me a smile. He was handsome but not in the cute-boy way that usually attracted me. 

David was manly, with a cleft in his chin, dark hair and meticulously dressed, like a Cary Grant character in a 30’s rom com. What’s more, he had perfect manners as I soon realized when I spilled my wine on him and he made the incident playful and fun instead of mortifying for me. 

The evening proceeded marked by inventive toasts, great food and many bottles of wine. Our table was raucous, aided and abetted by Davids roaring laughter. I had never met anyone like him before. With his attention trained on me, I’d never felt so desirable. But he also exhibited a vulnerability which made him endearing. It was odd to feel so at ease with someone and so connected after such a brief amount of time. My head was spinning. 

A couple hours into the dinner, I ran out of film and announced I’d be right back after a quick trip to my car. He volunteered to go with me. Sure, why not? Once we got to my car, we both got in and he started to kiss me. Wow, a good kisser too! Who was this guy? Prince Charming and studliness all wrapped up in a bespoke suit! 

Once back inside, the fun at our table continued. There was a brief moment when David’s hand seemed to go for my bustier top but by then, we had all had so much to drink that the stories now greatly differ. My feelings however, were solid. I wanted the night to never end but then, a look at my watch, told me it was high time for the ferry back to the North Fork. 

Just like Cinderella, I rushed out, abruptly leaving David who only knew my name and that I worked for Jane. I don’t remember the ferry ride home but I recall that after getting back to my summer rental in Southold that I woke up my house mate and best friend. 

I told her I had met the most amazing man and that I needed to see him again. I thought he was The One. Dear reader, yes, I did marry him and we had two beautiful and intelligent daughters. But like the other two marriages that weekend, ours too ended in divorce. 

But for the that one bright shiny weekend, romance was in the air and hearts were wide open.

[nancybutkus]

Like a Rolling Stone

Rolling Stone is for sale. Not that I have looked at it in years. It was and is a magazine primarily for young men. There was a time, however, when I read it religiously. On my way to the stacks in my college library, I was often waylaid at the periodical section for hours as I studied the magazine. 

The gossip (James Taylor and Joni Mitchell broke up!), the record reviews, and the political coverage informed my point of view and gave me entree into a much cooler world than the one at my women’s college where we still had mixers with the nearby men’s colleges and guessing which dorm mates were still virgins was a popular passtime. 

When I landed a job at the magazine in 1976, it was transformative. Initially, I worked in the photo department, keeping a wall of filing cabinets up to date with the daily blitz of record company PR shots and concert pictures dropped off by hopeful young photographers. 

Annie Leibowitz, the staff photographer with a whirlwind presence, only added to the allure. Stopping off in the photo department between her travels on the road with various touring groups (the Allman Brothers! the Stones! Fleetwood Mac!) her unfettered access and art school training produced eye-popping images. 

Somehow, just looking at her pictures made me feel part of the whole wild and wooly youth culture. I was privy to photos of my favorite artists—mostly young men—captured backstage, off-duty, and sometimes half-naked. 

The office was on the top floor of an old brick warehouse, south of Market Street in San Francisco, a seedy ungentified area. The staff, uniformly young, were a motley bunch, some with names that strained the imagination. I was too intimated to ask if Bond Francisco, Jeanne Jambu or Pinky Black were their real names or some drug-induced invention. Reputations preceded many, like the writer Charlie Perry who was UC Berkeley roomates with the Grateful Dead’s acid cooker Owsley and played midwife at the birth of psychodelia. 

There was plenty of outrageous behavior: writer Chris Hodenfeld driving his Harley into the elevator to park it at the reception desk; the friendly guy who walked around the office selling pot brownies and cookies; the deadline antics of Hunter Thompson whose endless stories pouring out of the mojo (a hog size telecopier machine) kept us up all night to finalize the pages for the printer. 

Those of us who actually produced the magazine— copy editors, fact-checkers, paste-up artists, designers, photo lab technicians— took pride in getting our jobs done and done well, knowing that the magic fairy dust of rock and roll was spread all around us. 

My next job was in the production department, as assistant to the newly hired manager, a young woman from LA only a couple years older than myself. 

Mary was impressive in that she was not at all outrageous, quite the opposite in her calm and orderly behavior. She, like me, was a product of Catholic schools and we soon began dressing in what only could be described as uniforms, not our old Black Watch plaid jumpers but pretty designer overalls, loose fitting in soft creamy cotton. 

She became a mentor, teaching me all the intricacies of marking up galleys for the typesetter and a new language of picas, points, leading, drop caps, justified type, rag right, caps with small caps. 

I was falling in love with type and started collected old speciman books with beautiful old French, British and Italian fonts, often shown with ornamental flourishes and the oddly-named dingbats. 

It was all an arsenal to create beautiful pages and I was an apprentice, eager to learn and master the artistry. Outside the office, my friends were struggling artists, waitresses and students, all of us transplants to this hub of hippie subculture. 

The city was dotted with rock and roll landmarks like Haight Ashbery, the black Jefferson Airplane mansion or the locus of the infamous Summer of Love, Golden Gate Park—be sure to wear some flowers in your hair! The music culture was dominant and even with my peon job, I carried a certain je ne sais quoi by association. 

The magazines founder and owner, Jann Wenner, a Steve Jobs wunderkind type eventually decided that his ambitions were bigger than the funky warehouse South of Market and moved the entire operation to New York City. The new offices in a beautiful Art Deco skyscaper on Fifth and 57th, were slick and spotless and camera ready for the advertising execs who were making Jann a very rich man. 

I had chosen to stay behind in San Francisco to work on Jann’s new magazine called Outside. Still, I could not shake my connection to the mother ship and often came to New York, to hang out in the office, and socialize with my friends. It was a like a club that granted life time membership. 

From high school reunions to future job interviews, that membership was a notable perk in my life for years. In 2007, I attended a reunion in San Francisco, marking the 30 years since the magazine moved east and changed its DNA. I was now an art director at a New York newspaper, was married and divorced and a mother to two teenage girls. 

Although I had stopped keeping up with the magazine, i realized that it’s impact on me was unmistakable. As I greeted old co-workers, some in academia, some in the digital world, and a few still living the dream in San Francisco, I was struck by how these people and that time had left their fingerprints all over me. 

That heady time (no pun) had not only given me an amazing soundtrack for my memories but a belief that my opinion mattered, that individual voices could and should speak up to institutions of power. Flower power lives! 

And the music? I am now the proud owner of a vintage Dual turntable with a record collection that grows with $1 yard sale finds. Listening to Bob or Mick or Aretha on vinyl, the thrill is definitely not gone.

[nancybutkus]

The Invisible Woman

I moved back to New York City from LA at the age of 32. A new job awaited and I was happy to be back East after eight years in California. I had missed the changing seasons, the culture and the vibrancy of city life. Back on the city sidewalks, there was something else too: the male gaze. 

In LA, stuck in my car most of the time, contact with strangers was limited to honking horns or, at that particular time, the phenomenon of drive-by shooting. Now, walking to lunch in Midtown, often with my editor Jane, also 32, it was impossible not to notice the looks from dark-suited men, construction workers and delivery guys. 

It was just part of being a young woman in the city. It did not feel threatening. After all, these were split second occurrences, unnoticeable to anyone else. We kept walking, always, but the eyeballing was a fact of life, ignored but not unnoticed. 

My attitude about the male gaze changed considerably when my daughters reached their teens. Walking down Broadway with them on the Upper West Side, those glances, now directed at them, were ugly threats and sexist objectifications of my sweet innocent children. 

As a mother, I had joined the ranks of the anonymous, blending into any crowd, noticed only by other mothers who were also accompanied by a couple of straggling kids. My hectic life revolved around my children’s schedule--getting them to the bus in the morning, after school sports, homework--and all the tiny details that kept their lives running smoothly. 

Meanwhile my own personal style devolved into an assortment of baggy pants and tee shirts. My office uniform of crisp, white shirts and dark slacks, now too snug for comfort, hung in the closet, awaiting my return. In my fifties, with my daughters older and more independent, I returned to full time work. I had aged into the next level of invisibility. 

No more male gaze as I walked though midtown. No cat calls from construction workers or surreptitious glances in the elevator. It was a kind of freedom, this middle-aged state of being unseen, undetected by the male species. It did not diminish my desire to dress smartly, in fact, it opened up a new world where I could experiment with shapes and materials for a more playful approach to dressing. 

Rather than feeling over the hill, I felt like I was on top of the mountain, claiming what was rightly mine...my own appearance. This new freedom was not without its bumps. The first time someone offered me a seat on a crowded subway, the reality of other people’s perceptions hit hard. Somewhere in my head, I was still a thirty year old yet to the outside world I was clearly an older woman. My middle aged face gave people permission to ask if I needed help carrying packages. 

I automatically got the Tuesday senior discount at the super market. The male gaze had morphed into concerns of strangers for my safety and convenience. No one really prepares you for any of this. Now retired, I headed south for the months of January and February last year. 

I rented an apartment in Cartegena, a jewel of a city on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. Close to the equator, the temperature in the afternoons hovered in the nineties with a heavy dose of humidity. 

Most of the population stays inside for lunch and siesta and then, at dusk, the old cobbled streets become thronged with vendors and tourists enjoying the cool night air. Because it’s the major port for this mostly landlocked country, the beaches leave much to be desired. 

I am a dedicated swimmer, and was desperate for a place to cool off and swim laps. A block from my apartment was an 17th Century convent that had been converted into a four-star hotel. Curious, I walked into the lobby one day and asked to see the spa. No problemo. 

As I walked through the interior courtyard, a sprawling pool, laid out among palm trees and cabanas, beckoned. It was mostly empty and the surrounding lounges each had a perfectly folded white towel and a small table where the uniformed staff dropped off tropical drinks and snacks. I took note and left, wondering how I might take advantage of these nearby amenities. 

The next afternoon, wearing a loose dress over my bathing suit and a big straw hat, I walked into the lobby like I was walking onto a yacht. I walked straight to the pool area, put my belongings down on a chaise, and as unobtrusively as possible, swam my laps. Returning to my chaise, a waiter came by and offered me fresh fruit which I munched on as I read my book. 

I could not believe my luck. For the next two months, I visited the pool regularly. No one ever stopped me in the lobby or poolside. I was invisible to the young men behind the front desk or serving drinks. I looked like every other older woman who visited the hotel, one indistinguishable from the next. 

To prove this theory, I took my twenty-something daughters there one day and within minutes of sitting down, a white-uniformed employee asked for our room number. 

Panicking, I answered “Uno uno dos.” 

He gave me a funny look but who would ever suspect an older woman of crashing the gates? For the rest of my stay, I continued to use the pool, happily, invisible to all.