rewritten from previous post

A Fair Memory

On a NYC bus,
hired for a trip to the 1964 World’s Fair,
were sophomores and juniors from a dingy, gray high school
on the Lower East Side of Manhattan
that was shaped like the letter E:
It housed the middle class and the poor.
On a beautiful Spring day we were going to Flushing Meadow Park,
in Queens, New York.

There weren’t enough seats; some of us had to stand.
I was near the well by the door, holding onto a pole
facing the people in the seats nearby:
one was my English teacher.
He was a young man of slight build
with dark hair and intense eyes.
He knew Salinger’s work well
and led me to a life-long appreciation.
Seated with him was his wife, so they said.
I remember that a warm breeze blew in from the open windows
and played with my hair
while my English teacher
held his wife’s bare feet
in his lap. He was massaging them.
It was an act of intimacy in public
so confusing ― I didn’t know if I should look or avert my eyes.
I looked.
It was the sixties.

Not many years later,
my childhood friend ― from school, from summer camp,
whose creativity I envied, whose humor and soft beauty were remarkable,
appeared next to me in a writing class at C.C.N.Y.
in a tattered, light brown, over-sized, leather bomber jacket.
It was the sixties.

I opened Gourmet Magazine and saw
my English teacher was now
married to my friend. They had become successful restaurateurs;
they were written about as pioneers of nouvelle cuisine.
I found her, wrote ― she responded:
there was a brief, warm, joyful and fascinating written reunion.
Despite all the success,
all the ratings of stars and the fame,
she wrote,
“We do not have financial security.”
It was the eighties.

In 1997 my friend appeared again
in The New York Times;
on the obituary page.
She was gone from breast cancer;
never made it to fifty.
She produced two children,
she wrote two books.
She left these behind
along with her husband,
the English teacher,
who gave me Salinger.

(hundreds of tweaks and changes … a poem is never done)