Day 352, self quarantine:
The summer I turned 15 was one of misery. I wanted to be free of my parents and old enough to live on a commune, where I’d smoke weed, bake banana bread and write all day. Gary and I weren’t in an adult relationship yet.
I was angry and impatient that it was taking so long to grow up.
I was a baby hippie wannabe, obsessed with leaving home ever since hearing the Beatles sing about it two years earlier.
She’s Leaving Home was my fucking anthem.
I formulated a plan. I wasn’t old enough to leave for good, but I was old enough to leave for the summer if I could find a job as a mother’s helper at the Jersey shore.
In 1969, comfortable middle class Jewish families in Philadelphia would rent homes for the entire summer in Atlantic City. It was before legalized gambling. Moms didn’t work. The dads would stay in Philadelphia all week for their jobs, but every
Friday night they would drive to the shore where they’d stay til
Sunday night.
That’s where I came in. Mother’s little helper.
I only got paid $15 a week, but I had room and board at a beach house. All I allegedly had to do in return was help out with child care, especially when dad arrived.
And I also had a day off to spend that $15 weekly fortune and go wherever I wanted with no rules, because in Atlantic City, I had no parents.
I found the job in the Evening Bulletin, our nightly newspaper. Can you imagine a 14 year old cold calling strangers via a want ad? To apply for a job to live with them?
You might think my mom was insane to have let me do it, but life was so different and innocent back then.
Though even without the benefit of the internet, this family was easily identifiable. The dad owned a popular beauty salon in northeast Philadelphia. The mom went to the same high school my mom and I went to.
There’s no way they could have been as bad as my crazy family, with my jazz musician druggie father and my mom who did naked yoga in our living room.
That summer, one year after the Summer of Love, my parents and I were bitterly arguing every day. I think they were happy to get rid of me.
Plus they were worried I was getting too close with my boyfriend 😂
Anyway, gah, how do I even begin to talk about my adventures on my own that summer.
I had a one sided love affair with a twenty one year old life guard and also inexplicably decided that I wanted to be a ballerina. I enrolled in a morning beginner class where I stuffed my chubby body into a leotard and twirled around the room with a bunch of eight year olds who giggled at me.
Also, I managed to blow going to Woodstock. Not that I’m even sure I knew exactly what it was.
I mean, I heard a few cool bands were gonna play and we could drop acid and sleep in tents.
Sounded good to me!
Woodstock fell on my 15th birthday. If I wasn’t a total idiot, I could have gone but honestly, I wasn’t devious or worldly back then and I never would have gotten away with it. I doubt I would have been savvy enough to even make it to the actual festival but a plan WAS in place and I was set to go but at the last minute, I called my mother for permission.
I have no idea why I did that. I stopped asking my mother for permission for things from the age of eleven when she cancelled a hotel reservation I’d made for a sleepover party at a local Howard Johnson’s.
The nerve.
Alas, my mother had already heard about Woodstock.
“What about your job?” she shrieked.
“I’m gonna quit, it’s the end of summer anyway.”
Well, I was...
“You can’t do that! You have responsibilities. If you don’t want to stay there I am coming now to pick you up! But you really shouldn’t leave, you made a commitment!”
Yeah, yeah.
So I didn’t go to Woodstock, I stayed in Atlantic City until Labor Day as promised.
The other thing I wanna tell you is that’s the summer I decided I’m never having kids.
😂😂😂
Welp, the family who hired me had three boys, ages 3, 5 and 6. It wasn’t humanly possible for a 15 year old stoner to enjoyably take care of three little boys.
Oy, not only did I babysit, I had to give them baths, feed them, and put them to sleep.
It was IMPOSSIBLE.
And after they finally went to sleep, I had to do the family ironing.
So that was another thing I learned.
If it needs to be ironed, I don’t want it.
I don’t even want to own a fucking iron.
Anyway, you can’t even believe what happened.
That family loved me.
Omg, they wouldn’t leave me alone. They called me all year, begging me to come back the next summer.
Their three little boys worshipped me, probably because I would be totally off the wall like Otto the Bus Driver meets Mary Poppins. I’d make up crazy games and stories to tell them and sneak them candy and cookies in between meals so I wouldn’t have to cook them a lot for dinner.
I mean, I wasn’t much older than they were.
And because they loved me, I loved them back, kinda. I had zero confidence and couldn’t believe anyone liked or wanted me around.
At night, after I was done ironing, if she was feeling charitable, the mom, Roz, would have girl talks with me.
I felt like we related in ways I could never relate with my “much older” mom.
Too funny, I just realized my mom was only eight years older.
I thought Roz was so beautiful. She was tiny and had thick red hair cut into an edgy Vidal Sassoon courtesy of her husband and she wore white frosted lipstick and “designer” clothes from Ladybug/Villager.
My mom was messy and wore jeans and really didn’t care about clothes that much. She had a killer voluptuous figure, though, but I didn’t know from stuff like that when I was young.
Naturally because I was a teenager I made comparisons.
Actually, that first summer, I kinda wanted to be Roz. I wasn’t used to a family that laughed all the time and talked about clothes and makeup and spent money freely without arguing.
The family offered to double my salary, Gary and I still weren’t in an adult relationship, and I needed money for college and/or my commune.
I used to be smart and skipped third grade so 1970 was the summer before my senior year of high school.
I was now a full fledged hippie.
The summer of 1970 was difficult. The Viet Nam war was raging. I suddenly looked at my employers not as a loving successful family who adored me but as plastic people, the establishment. I couldn’t believe their middle class values. I even sneered they had three kids, I believed in zero population.
I didn’t think Roz was beautiful anymore, either. I wore my hair long and parted in the middle, and wouldn’t be caught dead in makeup. Roz with her dyed flame colored hair and shiny white lips made me sick.
But okay okay, I was completely smitten with those three little boys. We were the musketeers, partners in crime.
So I felt bad when halfway through the summer, I called my mom to come get me.
I just couldn’t go on, “working for the man.”
I was young and irresponsible and anxious to start my senior year and plan my final escape.
But you don’t live with a family for almost two summers at your most impressionable age and forget about them.
And as time went on, I felt terrible that I walked out on them. They were pretty pissed. At my mom’s insistence, I sent them a letter of apology but they never responded.
So being creepy stalker girl, once I entered cyberspace you know I had to Google them.
Right away I learned the oldest and youngest boys were dead.
I literally gasped out loud.
I can’t even...it almost killed me reading about them.
The dad died of cancer in 2002.
The middle boy married a doctor and ironically has three beautiful daughters all close in age. The two summers I watched over him, he was a wiry, freckled redhead.
He’s now a pudgy, bald 56 year old.
Roz moved to Florida after her sons and husband died.
I still think about her all the time, especially our girl talks.
I’d been meaning to Google her and check up on her, what with Covid down in Florida.
Instead, yesterday I read her obituary in the Jewish Exponent.
That’s 12 people close to me who’ve died this year.
Crazy, huh.
It’s fucking mind boggling.
Life changing, even.
I’m never going to get used to it. If anything, each new death hits me harder.
I’m really tired of thinking so much. Gary and I are hitting the road the minute we can safely see our kids. We’re planning an open ended trip.
I’m working on a one year apocalypse anniversary post for
March 13. There’s a lot I have to fill you in on.
But for now, I think I am just going to close my eyes and remember what it was like to be 15 and living at the beach during the summer of 1969.
Cue the Woodstock soundtrack, please.
Somebody bring me a bong and a jug of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill.
I’ll light the candles and incense.
RIP, Roz.
