Heidi Watts

 It’s true that I was born and raised in the Boston area, but I hadn’t heard of Joan Baez when I returned to Boston in the fall of 1957 to get a master’s degree in education at Harvard and, subtext: (catch a husband).  I was returning from Tacoma, Washington where I had been teaching English at a select girls boarding school. A part of that story is on my blog with the title (“A Date with Vergil Peterson.”)  As soon as I got to Cambridge I found an apartment on Boylston street, just a few blocks from Harvard Yard and appeared on Sunday morning to become a regular with the Cambridge Quakers. Since volunteering is a good way to meet people and get drawn into an organization I volunteered to teach First Day School (Sunday school) - after all, I was supposed to know something about teaching and about adolescents. There was another newish member of The Society of Friends who also  volunteered. His name was Al Baez, a mathematics professor of Mexican descent, working at M....

“Tell me about quarantine and I will tell you mine.” I have been quarantined before. That first time a big red sign appeared on our front door which read QUARATINE in large black letters and was signed by the Board of Health. It said in effect, no one can enter here, and no one can leave. Our whole family was in lock down though not by that name. I had come home from first grade, age 5 (because my birthday was late in the year ) with a sore throat and a fever. My mother called the doctor (in 1936 doctors came to your house, as a matter of course). The doctor pronounced my sore throat,  “Scarlet Fever,” a potential killer for the old and the young, and an illness which often led to other infections in the ears, eyes, and respiratory system. Groceries were delivered just off the road at the entrance to a long walk which led up to our front door. I was allowed another big red sign to put above my bed. “Board” and “health” were among the first words I leaned to rea...

I had complained to the doctor: I get so tired and when I go upstairs, I get out of breath and kind of   dizzy. “ Hmm”, he said, taking in my white hair, aged skin, and no doubt the easy way I sat down, upright in the chair next to his desk.” Hmm” he said again, not surprised but not concerned, and took my wrist to feel the pulse. For several minutes neither of us said anything as he stared fixedly at the clock. Then he released my hand and said, “Did anyone ever tell you you have an irregular heart beat?” “No. Taking my cue from him I am also not alarmed. “What does that mean?” “Well,” he said, it’s like this. You have four chambers in your heart, two on the bottomed and two on the top. I think, What kind of chambers: the judge’s chambers? My ladies’ chamber? The place where the chamber pot is kept? Images flick by like slides in the projector on the screen of my mind. “The blood comes into the bottom right chamber and is pumped into the left chamber.” Pu...

The Chair of the Putney School Board, and a member also of the John Birch Society, pounded his fist on the table and roared, “We can’t have Heidi Watts in our school because Heidi Watts is a Quaker and Quakers are passive people.” It was 1966 and protest against the Vietnam War was heating up.  Corresponding rhetoric about the threat of communism was also on the rise, and the two forces were being played out over my contract renewal or non-renewal at the small elementary school in Putney, Vermont.  The audience was town’s people, some of them my outraged supporters who, nonetheless, could not suppress a smile at the confusion between pacifist and passivity. But they were not all supporters, either that evening in the library or in a later meeting in the school auditorium ,or in the letters to the editor and the General Store conversations. Earlier in the month a large sign appeared over main street saying, “Communists, aliens and pacifists, go home!". My husband was British...

The small white card, a little tattered on the edges, was tucked in with other notes and cards requesting services or offe.ring things to sell: “Gas cooker – nearly new!”; “Tutoring: only advanced students”; a pram, a sofa, oddments of furniture. I stood on the windy corner of Highgate Hill and scanned the notices on the board outside the news agent. I was recently divorced, living in London for the year with my two daughters on a salary of $400. a month supplemented by a per diem expense account of £7 a day – hardly enough for a family of three, even in 1978. I habitually scanned the board hoping to find something an American without working papers could do to earn a little extra money. “Educated Walking Lady Wanted” the card proclaimed. Well, I was educated. And I could walk. I liked to walk. When I called the number on the card a rich, heavily accented voice curled out of the receiver, “Hell-o.” I fumbled a few sentences: had seen the ad on the Highgate notice board, was...