Not Exactly As Planned

by Linda Rosenbaum

  I sat calmly, inexplicably riveted to the article in Maclean’s debating whether Calgary or Edmonton was Alberta’s hottest new city. As if I really cared. But that’s what I did. I read, keeping my head buried in the weekly newsmagazine. I stayed calm all the way to our safe landing back in Tampa. Upon arrival, I didn’t mention to the other passengers what I saw, nor call my parents to tell them I was back in town.

  Wardair rescheduled our flight for the next day. I happily dined that evening on rib eye and Merlot, compliments of the airline, before nestling into sleep, wrapped in white Egyptian linen.

  I woke early the next morning with my heart pounding. I was so shaky when I pulled myself out of bed, I didn’t know if I’d make it to the bathroom, let alone out the hotel door. I didn’t know what was happening to me, but whatever it was, I had to get myself to the terminal and back to Toronto. No way could I stay in Florida and be with my parents feeling like this.

  I managed to dress myself and pull myself down to the front desk to checkout. I then slowly and carefully walked from the hotel, dragging my suitcase, until I reached the terminal.

  The moment I walked through the sliding glass doors, my physical symptoms grew worse. I began to sweat, my heart beat faster, and I felt light-headed and dizzy. But these symptoms paled in comparison to the near-unbearable terror consuming me — terror from what, I didn’t have a clue. My palms were soon soaking and my heart wouldn’t stop racing. Fearful thoughts darted chaotically through my mind in every direction. I had no control over what they were saying. It felt like I was going crazy. My thoughts were telling me the same thing.

  I was alone, utterly afraid and desperately in need of someone to help me. I walked towards the checkin line for my flight and parked myself in front of a complete stranger standing at the end of the row. “I think I’m going crazy,” I blurted. “I don’t know what’s happening to me. I’m supposed to be on this flight too, but I can’t get on the plane.” I was now pleading. “Can you help me?”

  I wasn’t screaming, but from the look on the gentleman’s face, the poor guy didn’t have a clue what hit him. This lunatic had approached him out of nowhere telling him she was crazy, then expected him to do something about it. Sure, lady. He raised his arms in the air and motioned wildly for an airline employee to come quickly.

  “I saw the engines on fire yesterday,” I said to her, flat as the nearby tarmac. “I think I’m going crazy.”

  It didn’t take long for the woman to make the connection. “You’re probably having a panic attack,” she said reassuringly. I had never heard the term before, but welcomed it. If my condition had a name, it meant at least one other person in the world, maybe even two, had had the same thing happen.

  “Sometimes it takes a while to register the affect when you’ve had a big scare,” she continued. “Most likely you’re reacting to yesterday’s flight.”

  She was convinced my body was telling me how deeply scared I was about getting back on the plane. “You don’t want to be in a situation again where you feel you can’t escape.”

  Eureka. My body was telling me I was scared out of my mind. I was experiencing viscerally what I had blocked emotionally: if I’m in an airplane that’s on fire, I can’t escape. Fight or flight. I’m trapped. There’s no way out. Until I land, that is. If I do.

  My body had to scream to get my attention. “Get me out of here,” it was telling me in a way that forced me to listen. Unfortunately, that meant board the plane and go home.

  With the handholding of a stewardess and anti-nausea medication she hoped would deliver mild sedation, I forced myself onto the plane. It took all the will I could muster. If I was going to be a crazy person, it certainly was not going to be in Florida.

  Back in Toronto, I phoned my best friend Barbara the second I walked into my Toronto Island house. I was living by myself at that time, and didn’t want to be alone. “Something’s wrong,” I said. “Can you catch the next boat over? I really need you right now.”

  My symptoms hadn’t abated when she arrived. Surviving the airplane trip home wasn’t good enough for my body to tell itself “you can settle down already.” Instead, it felt like a gush of fear was flooding my gut, then dripping drop by drop through my body until every cell was permeated with the message: stay on guard.

  But scariest of all was what was happening with my mind. My thoughts were obsessively self-absorbed. I couldn’t get away from myself. Nothing distracted me. I was consumed by my crazy, darting, uncontrollable thoughts. Being so scared made me more scared. I plummeted further. One of my uncontrolled thoughts was telling me, “You’re going to be like this the rest of your life.”

  I kept asking Barbara, “What’s happening to me? Why do I feel like this? Why can’t I make it go away?” And my biggest worry: “Will it last forever?”

  She was as confused as I was.

  “I’m calling Michael,” Barbara said. Our close friend Sybil had moved to Vancouver with her boyfriend, a therapist. “Maybe he can tell us something.”

  “It’s anxiety,” he told her. “She’s still in panic mode. Make her drink lots of chamomile tea,” he recommended. “Take deep breaths and soak in hot baths. If that doesn’t do it, she may have to see someone.”

  The symptoms remained, unbearable. My panic increased every time we tried something that didn’t work. “What if this never goes away?” I kept asking.

  “Please take me to the Clarke,” I begged Barbara. The Clarke Institute of Psychiatry was Toronto’s mental health facility, not a place people normally beg to be.

  “Please take me there. They can shoot me up with heroin to make it all go away. Please.” Barbara wasn’t taking me to the Clarke.

  “I’ll find a good therapist. It’s time.”

  She didn’t want to worry me more, but there was another problem. It was Christmas Day. What doctor works on Christmas?

  Hours later, I approached the tall, heavy oak door with trepidation. A kind-looking elderly Jewish man with grey hair and white beard answered my knock. He stood there, wearing a thick wool tweed suit with matching vest and dangling gold pocket watch. A pince-nez fit snugly across the bridge of his nose. He welcomed me in with what I assumed to be an Austrian accent and ushered me into his office. I later learned that he had studied under Sigmund Freud in his youth. I had no idea if this was a plus or minus. I just knew this man had to save my life.

  He seated me in a large soft brown leather chair facing him in a book-lined office. His desk was a cliché, covered with messy piles of medical journals, books, correspondence, files and half-drunk coffee cups.

  “Tell me about your symptoms,” he said in his thickly accented voice. “When did they start, and do you know why?”

  After my short synopsis about the airplane fire, he said, “I believe you have not dealt with some past trauma in your life. The experience in the airplane has brought back feelings from that former experience. The airplane was traumatic, of course, but that is not the root of your problem.” He said I had to deal with the real experience before these symptoms could go away. “Feelings don’t stay down forever. They usually come up when a person is ready to deal with them,” he explained, “or when forced back to the surface, as in your case. Down or up, they still cause suffering. They are here for you to deal with now.”

  Though he spoke gently, I lowered my head into my lap, covered my face and sobbed.

  “So I now ask. Have you ever been in a situation before where you felt the need to escape? Or trapped?”

  I sat in silence for a while. I finally took a big breath and gathered the strength to mumble. “Ten years ago. In Washington, DC.”

  I stopped. I wanted him to say something. I wanted him to tell me I wouldn’t have to go back “there.”

  “Do I really have to talk about it? I don’t want to.”

  “I’m afraid so.” He was firm. “You must look at your life before, during and after this incident. You need to see where it took you and why. It will be hard, but e
ssential. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” I whispered.

  I moved to Washington, DC, in 1968 when I was twenty, after two years at Michigan State University. I decided to leave on April 4, the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. It was one month before the end of my second year at college.

  My first move away from home had been to an “experimental” liberal arts college at Michigan State called Justin Morrill College. Justin Morrill’s raison d’être was quintessential 1960s. The school hoped to teach their students to think, love knowledge, lead a life of self-discovery and become broad-minded, socially conscious citizens of the world. According to the Justin Morrill website developed years after the school was integrated into the larger university, the college had been the “Legendary Proving Ground for Wandering Minstrels.” I was eighteen, earnest, eager, curious, empathetic and impractical. I was made for Justin Morrill, and it for me.

  The school attracted bright, politically conscious students from all over the United States. Many were black, longhaired, politically radical or living outside mainstream society. While other college students stayed up nights playing bridge, going to frat parties and participating in panty raids, we draped ourselves across deep-cushioned green leather couches in the student lounge sipping chocolate malts, smoking cigarettes, talking politics, reading excerpts aloud from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and feverishly debating with our comrades whether non-violent tactics could really bring our brethren and native sons home from Vietnam.

  Going away to college wasn’t only a move away from family. I was also parting ways with Judaism, or what I thought at the time was Judaism. So, unlike other Jewish students I started college with, I didn’t join Hillel, the campus organization where Jews go to meet Jews of the opposite sex while pretending they’re there to participate in community service. I didn’t choose a residence with large numbers of Jews, nor did I pledge a Jewish sorority.

  This was partly because I approached the world with an increasingly unrestricted heart, and was ready for a break from elements of the post-Holocaust Jewish world in which I grew up. I did not yet know that by leaving the stifling parts of my childhood world and religion behind, I was relinquishing the precious security, familiarity and comfort both had also given me.

  It was sunny and hot the day after Dr. Martin Luther King was murdered. Classes at Michigan State had been cancelled, allowing students to mourn or attend rallies, speeches, lectures, films and demonstrations in honour of Dr. King. I was one of many on campus whose world had been rocked five years before by Dr. King’s fiery rhetoric in his inspirational “I Have a Dream” speech made on the steps of the Washington Monument. Beyond being devastating for us personally, we knew his murder would be a turning point in the country’s black–white relations.

  As I made my way across the university’s huge campus from one tribute event to another, I saw hundreds of students sprawled out on the grassy greens, clad in bathing suits or madras plaid Bermuda shorts — laughing and playing in the sun, throwing Frisbees and footballs, treating the day like any other.

  What stood out most were all the white people lying on beach towels using the sun-tanning fad of the time to darken their skin. As they held self-made cardboard and aluminum foil reflectors against their faces, the sun’s rays hit the reflectors and bounced back with intensified rays to brown them faster.

  The irony of their action on this particular day did not escape my twenty-year-old earnest mind. I wanted to get away. I needed somewhere else to go. Justin Morrill, for all its liberal and open-minded ways, was still an ivy-covered academic enclave in the middle of rural Michigan.

  I had been to Washington, DC, several times when I was young, and more recently for anti-war demonstrations at the Washington Monument. Front and centre, in the thick of turbulent American politics, was just where I wanted to be. I applied and was accepted to George Washington University for my third and fourth years of college.

  Washington was an elegant city, with a grandeur and energy that felt more European than American to me. It was just what I was looking for. But as in love as I was with the public face of Washington, I didn’t have to look far to know there was another Washington — the one whose neighbourhoods had gone up in flames to the cheers of “Burn Baby Burn” on the April night Martin Luther King was murdered, five months before I arrived in the city. Crime rates, including murder, were staggeringly high. Guns were easy to buy. Sections of the city weren’t considered safe, especially at night.

  When my parents asked me, just before I moved down, “Where will you live in Washington?” my answer was rebellious and petulant, “I don’t have a clue.”

  “You know we just want you to be safe,” my mother said.

  “I do too, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to close myself off in some lily-white suburb.”

  I knew I should take racial tension and crime into consideration when looking for a place. But ever since I was thirteen, I had been marching, campaigning and verbally fighting at the side of black people. When push came to shove, what did it mean? That I didn’t want to live next door to them?

  “I’ll figure it out, Ma. It’s hard to know from here what I’ll do.”

  The first year, still new to the city, I moved into an apartment downtown with a fellow student. Living in an unfriendly high-rise didn’t feel right for me, but it did have one perk. Through my roommate, I was introduced to a handsome, curly haired, opera-loving graduate student from Washington State who had recently arrived at GWU for a master’s degree in history.

  At the age of twenty, I had my first real boyfriend. It was about time. My childhood dream of having a family by that age had been steadily vanishing due to the choices I was making, as was any trajectory towards marrying a Jewish man. Maybe Jeffrey might help me get back on track. Or maybe not. Though he was non-practising, Jeffrey, my first love, was raised by Christian fundamentalists.

  My second year in Washington, I was ready to find somewhere else to live that better suited me. My first taste of living in a commune brought me closer to the university.

  I was happy living in a racially mixed neighbourhood, too. It had a lot more buzz, street life and visiting back and forth between houses than in my previous neighbourhood. Our commune was in a once-elegant three-level Victorian brownstone with hand-polished staircases and twenty-foot-high plastered ceilings with thick wooden moldings and trim (the latter painted, in a moment of psychedelic madness, day-glo orange and purple).

  Life on our street was intense and fun. Busy front porches played an essential role. At our own house, the porch seldom emptied. Before, during and after classes and usually way into the night, at least three or four out of the nine of us living there would move outside to watch the world go by. We sat, sometimes eating, sometimes drinking, sometimes making music and sometimes smoking marijuana, but always laughing, arguing, debating and plotting how we would fix all that was wrong in the world.

  Like everyone else I knew, I kept inching away from mainstream politics, attitude and dress. We young people were cranky in our rebellion, and our disdain for government, war, police, corporations, capitalism, money and materialism was loud and overt.

  My father was philosophical about how I dressed during that period. My rag-tag hippy look wasn’t working for my mother, however.

  “Why can’t you be proud your daughter looks like a poster child for Hair?” I half-joked, referring to the hit musical on Broadway. She thought I looked horrible. My long, thick, frizzy brown hair hung down my back and out to the sides like an unpruned hydrangea. I wore floor-length, Indian-print gypsy skirts with scarves, bangles and hand-embroidered peasant shirts from Morocco and Mexico — usually braless underneath. I always wore large, ornate earrings and left my face make-up bare. Like all the other young, budding feminists around me, I was defying corporate America’s cosmetic industry.

  On trips home from university to visit my parents, I’d get a relatively war
m smile when my mother first greeted me. Within seconds, though, she’d put me through her full frontal visual body scan, resulting in a look of marked disappointment on her face. What was she thinking? That Mamie Eisenhower or Jacqueline Kennedy had somehow become my role models since I was last home?

  On one return from school, my mother opened the front door, and before even saying hello, let the refrain “We’ll go shopping tomorrow” slip from her lips.

  “Thanks, Ma. It’s really nice to see you, too.” I said, seething. Sarcasm was my usual mode of defense with my mother.

  “You know I’m glad to see you. I don’t have to say it. I just want to make sure we have enough time to shop and get your hair cut. You’d look so much better with that hair off your face.”

  That hair? That hair told the world who I was and what I believed in. “Ma, we’ve been through this a million times before. You don’t stop, no matter what. You’re acting like you’re from Mars.”

  ”Well at least on Mars they know how to make themselves look good.”

  I began to think seriously about staying in Washington after graduation, at least for a while, to see what I could make happen. After two years together, Jeffrey and I had moved into an on-again, off-again stage. Even though he still had another year of grad school at GWU, I wasn’t going to decide where to live or what to do based on our relationship.

  I had no plans for the future, nor did I think I needed any. My degree in French literature hadn’t prepared me for a job, but it was 1970, the spirit of the sixties lived on, so who cared? The words “upward mobility” and “ambition” hadn’t yet made their way into my vocabulary. It never entered my mind to think seriously about how I’d pay rent or buy my next Joe Cocker album.

  I felt I could do anything. Not only was I white and educated, I was also young, smart and enthusiastic, all of which would help me in the world. As Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young reminded us burgeoning baby boomers: We are stardust. We are golden.