This recollection came from Carolyn Fuller, who briefly lived at 2GT and also went on the Soviet Trip in the summer of 1969 in exchange for taking care of me at 5 years old.
Sam,
I tried posting my story on your blog but it disappeared. So here it is now. Keep in mind that I have never had a very good memory. My memory from my days in your life aren’t always consistent with the facts. For instance, I thought you and Mimi were twins.
A bit of history on my life before coming into yours can be found https://tinyurl.com/ycykxbp8.
I first came to Cambridge in the summer of 1968, as a 20-year-old, after a short stint with VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) in Portsmouth, NH. I came with a friend I met in Portsmouth. She was inspired by my leaving home to create a new life for myself and wanted to experiment with doing the same. Initially, we shared an apartment in Boston near Northeastern but, after a few months, my friend was homesick and decided to return home. I couldn’t afford the apartment alone and I wanted a place in Cambridge where all my friends lived. I was actually living most of the time with my boyfriend in his Harvard dorm, which, of course, was against all the rules. I needed to find a backup place to leave my belongings. My boyfriend heard that a Harvard professor, your father, Alex Lipson, was renting rooms in your Victorian home on Garden Terrace.
I moved my things into your home sometime late in 1968. I didn’t know anyone and, for many months, was rarely in that Garden Terrace attic room. Then in the spring of 1969, my boyfriend and I broke up and I began to spend more time in the room. One afternoon, as I was hanging out in my room, I heard a young child crying. I expected that someone in that big rambling house would go to the crying child and comfort them but the crying went on unabated. Finally, I came out of my room and wandered around the house until I found a 5-year-old child, all alone and frightened in that big, empty, rambling house. That child was you. I discovered you and I were the only people in the house, which astounded me.
I comforted you by bringing out one of the children’s books that I collected and reading it aloud. Within a few days both you and your 12-year-old sister, Sonia, started coming to my room to read the books. I don’t remember which of my books were your favorites but I do remember that Sonia’s favorite was Suzuki Beane by Sandra Scoppettone.
I soon learned that your mother, who I’m pretty sure was living in the house when I first moved in, had gotten up one morning and left with your sister, Mimi, and 9-year-old brother, Nathan, leaving you and Sonia with your father.
I was planning on moving out and into an apartment with friends at the end of May 1969. On that last day of May, I was still cleaning up my room and moving the last of my things out when your father knocked on my door. I thought for sure he was unhappy I had not already vacated the room but, no, he actually came to offer me an amazing alternative summer experience. He told me that he led 12-week trips to the Soviet Union and Eastern block countries every summer and wanted to take you and Sonia on the 1969 summer trip. He asked if I’d be willing to come along to take care of you and your sister during the trip and then continue in the job back in Cambridge for the coming academic year. I didn’t have to think about it for very long. I said, “yes!”
I have many blurry memories of both the highlights and lowlights of the 12-week trip with a bunch of gaps between.
One of my first memories was the day your father said he’d take you for the day to “give me time off.” My memory is that was the day we were in Stockholm. While your father was “taking care of you,” he left you asleep on a park bench while he conducted “important” business elsewhere. The police found you, a 5-year-old child wandering around lost, alone and terrified in Stockholm, many hours later. I never wanted a day off again. I felt like every time your father looked after you, I was left desperately attempting to mend the abandonment fears you experienced.
I remember setting up specific times when I would leave you and then returned at the precise time I had promised. I remember trying to set up check-in times with Sonia so we knew where each of us was. I remember trying to bring consistency, reliability and predictability into your lives and how frustrating those attempts were. The harder I worked at bringing reliability into your lives, the more I perceived your father to be stubbornly distant, unreliable and, in my eyes, uncaring.
When we returned to Cambridge, I told your father I could not continue to work for him. I couldn’t continue to pick up the emotional pieces left behind from what I saw as parental neglect.
And now, 56 years later, I’m so impressed with the lives you and Sonia have craved out for yourselves.
Our son, Alan McAvinney, had few unsupervised, on-his-own, independent times when he was growing up even though we did give him a great deal of freedom to make his own decisions. I think the things that our son had in common with you and Sonia were his 8 years at Graham & Parks (the continuance of the Pilot School) and a village to raise him, our collective home and Dance New England. You can see more about what Alan is up to today https://tinyurl.com/yrvftm2v.
You see, your father and I didn’t quite see eye to eye on childrearing practices but you, Sonia and Alan proved that children are incredibly resilient and adaptable.
P.S. I also had some experiences from that 1969 trip that didn’t involve you or Sonia. There were many.
There was the time that a herd of water buffalo surrounded the VW bus we were in. I so wish I had a photo of that.
There was the time another young man on the trip & I danced with great abandon in a Moscow plaza to the Beatles’ “Back in the USSR” surrounded by a crowd of Russian onlookers before the authorities broke us up.
There was the time, we all walked into a restaurant in a small Soviet town and food and drinks were delivered to our table before we had ordered. Another table of patrons had ordered the food and drinks as a welcoming gift to us.
There was that night somewhere in the Balkans we camped out in a barren bowl surrounded by cliffs watching the most amazing shooting star sky display anyone can imagine.
There was that day in the Balkans when I became overwhelmed with travel and just wanted to hang out indoors at a library reading and studying a photography book by Alfred Stieglitz - all his photos of his muse Georgia O’Keefe. I fell in love with Georgia O’Keefe’s hands long before I became acquainted with her artwork.
And then there were the final days of the trip. Somehow I
found myself with a few other young adults with no money, sleeping in the loft
of a Montessori School and shop lifting a loaf of bread in Germany.
