Returning - Lovers/Places

June 9th 2026 - Nostalgia

This theme really began with a place but it swerved into other territory. The place was my old school, Mary Ethel Costello School in Gloucester City, New Jersey. I had taken my dog for a drive down to Proprietor's Park aon the East bank of the Delaware River, after picking up my car from the garage where it had been given an oil change.

As I type this, I realize that I have been retired and away from M.E.C. now almost as long as I taught there. From around 1974 to 1984, I worked in the Library at Gloucester City in an Outreach Program. After my daughter was born I had to find a better paying job and fortunately my Library job had given me a connection with the School Superintendent who had accompanied the Outreach staff on many of our lecture tours. He helped me a few times during my career changes. The Library Outreach job was a grant program and part of the requirement was that we present our project at Educational conferences.

My next job from 1984 to 1994 was to teach Basic Skills and Compensatory English at the high school. From 1994 to retirement in 2006, I taught art at the grade school, M.E.C. an old brick three story not vastly different from the old brick school I had attended in South Philadelphia, The D. N. Fels School on Broad Street. In fact the population of Gloucester wasn't much different from that of my childhood on Warnock Street, working class white people, many with alcohol problems and a bar on every corner.

Driving past the now closed and abandoned building (a new school has been built since I retired in 2006) I remembered those summer end-of-school days, packing up my room for the summer and making arrangements for the school custodians to water the dozen or so poinsettia that I rescued from the main office after Christmas each year when they were no longer beautiful and no one watered them. They thrived on the room length counter in the Art room beneath my large windows overlooking the rooftops of the row homes of Gloucester. I could see down to the Delaware River and the bridge.

My favorite play is OUR TOWN by Thornton Wilder. It perfectly captures my sentimental nature and the way it feels to live in a place all your life, or most of your life and the way it feels to re-visit your life.

When I go to lunch at Maritsa's in Maple Shade, I pass the houses my family lived in when my parents were alive and we all lived as a family, my first bank account, the road I drove down with my boyfriend Mike in his sports car from his home in Pennsauken to mine and back. I pass my own old high school, Merchantville H> S., another old three story brick building - this one now a grade school.

Always when I meet my regular lunch buddies at Maritsa's in Maple Shade, I also revisit the little white bridge over the Pennsauken Creek, site of swims and ice skating. All these places make a feeling not unline a kind of bruise on my heart, because it is the end of my life.

Since it has been 40 years since I moved from Philadelphia, I never re-visit those places in the City that were part of my life, the street where I grew up and floated paper boats in the gutter streams after a good rain, Warnock Street. Nor do I pass 8th Street where I had my apartment after my divorce and where I spent time with my two great loves after the love of my life, my former husband.

Truly, my ex-husband, Mike, was the love of my life. I adored him the way a teenage girl can - with that intense focus and the innocence. He seemed brilliant to me and admirably competent, and it wasn't all the 'look of love;' he really was extraordinary. He was a genius - certified! (Member of Mensa) and I have to tell you that for someone like me, his brilliance was intoxicating, mesmerizing. But that love was poisoned because with his brilliance came his madness.

Finally, I tore my heart in half and returned to the safety and peace of independence which I had discovered when I had left home at 18 and gotten my first apartment and removed myself from my father's intemperant control. My solitude didn't last long though, soon, I found another extraordinary man and the dance began again.

Rob Sweetgall, though, was a whole different kind of extraordinary. He was a kind, mild and thoughtful man but so thoroughly self involved and obsessed that inevitably, I became his assistant and ceased to be the star of my own show. But before long he was gone on his enormous adventure on the open road - his 10,000 mile ultra marathon around the USA.

While he was gone, I fell in love again, with an artist from the city, also both beautiful and extraordinary, also self-involved. This was the romance that took my train off the scheduled track and diverted it to the life I would lead from then on, because this romance ended in pregnancy. And when I say 'ended' that is exactly what I mean. We parted - he went his way and I went to New Jersey.

My daughter became the focus of the rest of my adult life until she, like me, left home at 18. Again, my heart was torn - I hear Janis Joplin singing "Take another little piece of my heart."

They are all gone from my world - the lovers, the schools, the houses before this final one, my daughter in England. Karl, the artist still lives happily married in Pennsylvania, and Mike still lives in Colorado. Only poor Rob Sweetgall has died out west in Idaho.

I saw a photograph once from an art show or a book on photography and it was a box of black and white photos spilled out onto a bed and the caption was, "She loved me once." I loved all of those men once, those extraordinary men, and once they loved me too. Once we were all beautiful and there are photographs to prove it.

Now they are ghosts haunting an idle afternoon in summer while I drink a chocolate milk from the Heritage Convenience Store on Hudson Street in Gloucester, that I bought on my way home from the Delaware River where I went to look at the other bank, where I was born 80 years ago, and began to gather all these memories.

Happy Trails!

wrightj45@yahoo.com