The following events occurred when I was 18 years old. I will get to my recollection of Sunday, September 24, but first I need to talk about the following day, the 25th. My grandmother — my mother’s 79-year-old, cancer-stricken mother — died at home. My mother had brought her bed down to the dining room where she had stayed from at least May, in the spring.
(Incidental note: When Freud was dying of cancer in 1939, he had his bed moved down to the living quarters of his house in London so that he could gaze out onto the garden. He loved that garden! He died on September 23, 1939. I remember during the summer of 1972 I had read a magazine article about Max Schur’s newly-published book about Freud: Freud: Living and Dying. Max Schur, M.D. had been Freud’s physician and administered euthanasia. I remember reading in that article for the first time about Freud’s peculiar friendship with Wilhelm Fliess, and thinking, “Was Freud a homosexual?” It was in September 1972 that I purchased the anthology of a selection of Freud’s nonclinical essays, Character and Culture, so Freud was very much on my mind in that time period.)
Monday September 25 was the first day of fall classes at Penn State, where I was starting my second year. My only memory is coming home at about 6:00 PM, my father in the kitchen, alone. My mother, I suppose was tending to issues surrounding her mother’s death. My father’s first words to me at the kitchen sink were “Did you hear the news? Grandmom died.” My father hated his mother-in-law. His reaction to her death didn’t surprise me. That’s all I remember of the 25th.
Today I jogged my memory for any memories of Sunday, the 24th, the previous day. I recalled being alone with my father in the evening. My mother was probably with her mother whose condition was deteriorating. My father and I watched TV at our house. I remembered it was a movie starring the actor John Lemmon. What was the movie title? What was it about? I couldn’t recall. I know it was a comedy. My father and I laughed hysterically. I found it unbelievably funny. I could remember only two things: a scene in Central Park with Jack Lemmon and his wife in the movie as visitors to New York. I Googled “movie + central park + comedy — Lemmon” and came up with Neil Simon’s comedy, The Out of Towners, which follows the adventures of married couple Henry and Nancy Clark as they are vexed by misfortune while in New York City for a job interview. I thought, “That’s it! That’s the movie!” But I confirmed by checking the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Sunday edition television page, which included a listing for ABC Movie, The Out of Towners, 9:00 PM. So this recollection had to have occurred between 9:00 PM and 11:00 PM on the evening of Sunday, September 24. Then my next recollection is standing in the kitchen the following day and my father telling me that my grandmother had died Monday morning.
My next recollection is my grandmother’s church funeral on Thursday, September 28, 1972. It was raining lightly. I was carrying an umbrella. As we left the church, my mother — noticing the sun was coming out — said to the priest as he walked us to the car, “Maybe that’s a good sign.” The priest replied, “Yes, it is a good sign.” I had no idea what that meant, perhaps, that my grandmother would come back? That she would win the lottery? That her death would be found to have been a mistake? People who are caught up in that type of thinking are a mystery to me. A good sign of what?
That afternoon, my sister, who took the day off from teaching to attend the funeral, drove me up to Penn State Abington. I had to take care of an administrative issue. I was dropping the section of the speech course I had signed up for and registering for a different section of the course, taught by one Stanley Cutler. Stanley was the name of my grandmother’s husband (my grandfather) who died in the 1918 swine flu pandemic. All my grandmother’s trials in the U.S. appeared to begin with his death, upon whom she had apparently been dependent. Was The Out of Towners a symbolic reference in my mind to my grandmother’s status as an out of place Polish immigrant who never acculturated? Did I view my grandmother as a symbolic out-of-towner? Who knows! But why did I remember that movie from the evening before my grandmother’s death? I remember meeting with the speech instructor whose course I was dropping. I had signed up for an appointment on his door. When I presented myself as Gary Freedman, the instructor (whose name I no longer recall) said good-naturedly, “So you’re Gary Freedman! I had no idea why somebody named Gary Freedman would want to see me.”
A coincidence. In the fall of 1972 at Penn State I had a choice between the campus’s two male speech instructors, one of whom was named Stanley. (Public Speaking is a requirement at Penn State). I chose Stanley. Stanley Cutler.
But the odd thing is that that was only the first time in my life that I was given a choice between two men, one of whom was named Stanley. It happened a second time. In November 1989, Albert Rothernberg, M.D. gave me two referrals to Washington, DC psychiatrists, one of whom was Stanley Palombo, M.D. Again, and this is coincidental, as in 1972 I chose the man named Stanley. Stanley Palombo. The same given name as my grandfather, my mother’s father, who died when she was three years old.
Click to access letter-from-albert-rothenberg-md.pdf
Does that mean anything? Who knows?
But what also interests me is the dream I titled “The Dream of Schubert’s Final Piano Sonata,” which I associated to Spokane, Washington where I lived during my first year of law school in 1979-1980 and I also associated to my grandmother’s immigrant status. This is striking. I was a Philadelphia native living in Spokane. I was literally an “out of towner” in Spokane. (Freud also died an out-of-towner in London, exiled from his native Vienna.) (The subject of another dream! “The London Dream”).
Does that mean anything? Again, who knows?
The Dream of Schubert’s Final Sonata
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