Helena Clare Pittman, one of the Center’s most dedicated teachers, has written, painted, and taught her entire life. In her monthly Helena Writes series, she shares a lifetime of wisdom, one pearl at a time.
In her 74th post, Helena recalls a trusted adult who eased her fears as a small child, and what it’s meant to her over the years. Enjoy!
Harriet Ferber—Sullivan County
I remember Harriet’s open face when she looked at me and paused before she put her arm around my shoulders. It was the end of long hot summer day at camp, full of meetings and children and activities, hard work. Her skin was shiny, greasy with the heat. She was putting herself together for the evening. Harriet was off duty, ready to take her own time before sleep and the next day’s responsibilities. I think in that moment she made a choice—I think that’s what I saw in her face. Maybe her own childhood was still alive inside her. She was an adult in a sea of adults and children who seemed not to notice the world around them or each other. That was my child’s view.
At one terrible moment, Harriet Ferber became my connection to life, to myself. Could she ever have guessed her immortality?
*
A child, born frightened, sees the moon. Her white moon, now an orange disk at the edge of the black sky over camp. No one else seems aware of the way the moon has changed. She’s isolated in fear and in shame for being afraid.
Everyone in her bunk is changing into their pajamas, folding their clothes into their cubbies, or putting them into their laundry bags, back and forth into the bathroom to brush their teeth, when that moon is coming out of the sky. Her feelings are so big; she’s got to find a way to safety or she’ll die.
Harriet Ferber looks like Ethel Merman. The child knows she is kind. She doesn’t say to herself, Harriet Ferber is kind—she knows, the way children know who is open, available, and who is closed to her—remote, people who don’t see her, don’t see these big feelings inside her, don’t know she exists. Intuition, existential, to be decoded much later by the act of her writing—translated into the thing she’s always known, of the world, into recognition of herself in that child.
*
Harriet Ferber had once laughed, a with-you laugh when the child had responded to something Harriet had asked. It was a lovely laugh, an acknowledgement of her eight- or nine- or ten-year-old sense of humor, already there, promising. There, the child is free and sure, easy with herself. Fear buried so far down she almost forgets. The child had sung: me me me me meee! How did she know that opera singers’ voice exercise? Television. It’s a cliché.
Harriet, the division head, older than the young girl’s counselors, head of intermediate girls, head of Inters, had come to her bunk’s table in the dining hall at breakfast. It had to have been breakfast because there are boxes of cereal on the table, and the girl is serving herself cornflakes, a handful of them taken directly from the box, and dropped carefully into her bowl, the heavy camp china with the sitting “Indian,” a green outlined figure on the reverse side. If the “Indian” was filled in with color, she could make a wish.
Harriet is leaning, her two hands supporting herself on the table. Her back must have ached, her bones must have been tired—older than the others, with more weight, she is resting herself, talking about a play, or a group sing. She’s inviting the children in her bunk to audition. The child responds, Me me me me meee! Harriet turns to the child and laughs that with-you laugh. She enjoyed the child’s joke. The two connected. The moment will stay with the child, a moment out of time.
And when that terrifying orange disk appears in the night sky over camp while her bunk mates are getting ready for bed, the child, unable to bear her fear, seeks Harriet, who sleeps in her bunk, though she isn’t her counselor, but is counselor to the young, inexperienced eighteen- and nineteen- and twenty-year-olds who don’t know about children and their fears. Harriet has children of her own.
Quietly, the child stops at Harriet’s bed, the first in the line of beds, in the front east corner of the bunk. The screened open window faces girls’ camp, faces the sky, and that moon. Harriet is doing something, preparing to go out for the evening. The girls will go to sleep and one of their counselors will stay, the OD—on duty. Maybe Harriet is finding the brown eyebrow pencil she uses to draw those thin, arched, surprised Ethel Merman lines. Maybe she’s looking for her comb to run through her short auburn curly hair. Ethel Merman, yes, who the child has seen in the movies. She moves close to Harriet and, very softly, so no one else will hear her question, asks, Why does the moon look that way?
“The moon?” Harriet repeats, looking at the child, then turning to the screened window, bending a little to look out at the sky. Harriet’s heart is open to her. The child is looking up at her face; she doesn’t turn toward the window. The woman, so tall, puts her arm around the child and draws her in close to her side. The child feels her protection. “That moon? Why that’s a harvest moon!” And like Ethel Merman in character, she looks down at the child and she sings: Shine on, shine on harvest moon, up in the sky—I ain’t had no loving since—Harriet is swaying, pulling her, inviting her to sway along with her. At last, the child can breathe. She looks up at the woman and smiles too, moving along with the woman who is looking at her, and then looking outside, pointing at the orange moon. Her face is wide open, and the child can look too, she can look at the moon with Harriet. And she isn’t afraid.
Could Harriet Ferber guess, can she imagine her importance to that fear-ridden child? Does she know that the moment is a moment of the immortality of kindness? That child would love Harriet Ferber for all the moons and harvest moons that would rise and set for the rest of her life.
Kindness, the immortal.
A simple act of kindness—is there one you remember from your childhood, one you’ve carried with you all these years? What did you think of Helena’s latest column? Share with us in the comments.
Related reading: Helena Writes
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