Our daughter, Deborah Lynne, was born on September 26, 1959, in Tompkins County Hospital in Ithaca, New York. I fell in love with her, immediately. But several adjustments were needed along the way.
The first adjustment occurred on her arrival at our Floral Avenue apartment. Growing up as an only child, I had never held a newborn in my arms. Suddenly, as we were driving home in Fritz, I realized I would have to hold our child, while Karen maneuvered herself out of the bug. There was no alternative to the anticipated action. Somehow, I did it. I held my daughter for the very first time. Back then, fathers were excluded from the birthing process; they looked through the glass but had a very limited opportunity for any direct handling. It was, obviously, not the last time I held her.
All parents in the fifties relied upon Dr. Spock and his Baby and Child Care, the Bible consulted every day, during the months following the birth of a first child. Parents required at least two kids in order to confirm that almost everything they experienced was normal: including crying. Crying every night. Crying for no observable reason. Crying that could not be stopped. Crying that might be alleviated, slightly, with movement. Movement. Carrying an infant for hours every evening, while pacing from the tiny bedroom through the tiny living room, with its lime-green walls, into the tiny kitchen with whitewashed drainage pipes crossing the ceiling – and back again – and again. Dr. Spock called it “Periodic Irritable Crying.” Karen and I called it the hellish walk of new parents. Dr. Spock claimed the condition would self-correct at about three months of age. It did!
Our life became more manageable after those first three months. It was about then that we moved from our basement apartment to one on an upper floor. Our new bedroom was large enough to accommodate Debbie’s crib and the living room had space for her playpen. The disadvantage was that, to get from one to the other, we had to pass through a hallway we shared with Peter and Linda Jackson. They used the same common space to get from their living room to their own kitchen. At least our kitchen joined our living room. We shared a common bathroom. Somehow, Karen was the one who cleaned it. Linda never had the time, and, of course, neither Peter nor I had ever been trained to do anything like that. During the next two years, Karen, for a small stipend, also tended Michelle, the Jackson’s daughter, while Linda worked somewhere outside the apartment. Peter was also a student, an undergraduate.
Judy and Larry Lazarevitch moved into our old apartment. Larry later changed his name to “Hudson,” in honor of the car he loved. Another student couple had a first-floor apartment. The eight of us would gather together at least once a week for an exciting evening of Monopoly and popcorn. If anything was left from our student budgets, we might also drink a beer or two. Entertainment was merry and cheap for Cornellians in the nineteen-fifties.
Our hobbies were few. We did manage to buy a semi-dilapidated, black coffee table onto which we glued white, red, and yellow tiles in a modernistic pattern. It occupied our time. So did reading: biochemistry for me; mysteries for Karen. We constructed bookshelves from red bricks and pine boards.
Other brief recollections I have of our hours together were also about periods that were free-of-charge. For example, our bedroom was in the front of the house, overlooking the major street leading out from Ithaca towards the north. It was located at the exact spot where every passing truck shifted into the next gear either entering or exiting the town. I spent many evening hours counting trucks rather than sheep.
We were allowed to use the landlord’s front foyer for mail delivery but were not permitted to mount the inside stairs to the upper floors, since they passed through the domain of the landlord and landlady. Those student couples who lived in the house used the back doors and a semi-covered, outdoor staircase with its own challenges created by Ithaca’s changing weather patterns. However, this external passageway did give us access to the Inlet, frozen in winter, where late-residing geese would march up and down with their own frozen tail feathers clinking on the ice they transversed. During the unfrozen time of the year, our landlord might take us on his motorboat, usually docked on the Inlet, for a fast ride across the Lake.
Viewing Lake Cayuga was among the pleasant, inexpensive ways to pass the free time occasionally available to a young couple with a young child. The town park at the southern edge of the Lake had a favorite place for Debbie to play on swings and red-wooden horses, and to view animals in a small, domestic zoo. However, her favorite animal was “Meow,” a white, stuffed toy kitten with real-life fur which wore off to yield a bald critter she carried by its tail until she was given a very small suitcase for this purpose. On the other hand, “Meow” did have less hair than its owner possessed. For her early years, Deb wore headbands and flower-clips to reinforce that the cute, round face did belong to an adorable little girl. A series of Christmas card photos, and others now stored in an electronic achieves, confirms this non-biased viewpoint.
The time of our days in Ithaca passed neither too slowly nor too rapidly. We enjoyed our leisure where and when it could be found. Debbie learned to crawl, stand and walk. We did the same.