Today is the end of a week of ice-storm and its aftermath, that was supposed to end the day after it began, with a torrent of rain. Instead there were five days of intermitten (and intermittent) snow and sleet that layered the roads and sidewalks with treachery. Because the storm would pass us by, I figured I had enough on hand to make it through. I had one prescription that had to be refilled. I called it in the day before the storm was supposed to start around two PM, figuring I would pick it up around noontime. By noon the sidewalks and streets were covered with ice pellets and snowflakes, and rain was no longer in the forecast, though forecasters struggled to overcome a similar lack of accuracy. The problem? Every twenty-block area had a different mix; forecasters went crazy trying to tell us what and where, and often relapsed into incoherent generalities about what would happen.

By the end of the sixth day, yesterday, I could see that the sidewalks were clear all the way to the grocery store that’s a block away. So today, as I planned it, I would go to the grocery store and stock up once more. And then go to CVS, which is out of sight, but even closer. The hazards are the areas at the street corners; sometimes they are shoveled out, sometimes not. I found mostly clear pathways on the way to and from the market; for CVS, I had to go out into the street to circle around the still icy, unshoveled corners. There was one exception: the street corner for the building where I live. Thanks, Tom or Bob or Eugene, for doing such an exceptional job in shoveling the corner.

Two days ago I had to go out, just as the worst of the weather had cleared, but before real snow removal took place. I had garbage that had collected; usually I would take it out to the balcony leading to the fire stairs, that overlooks the parking lot and area for the dumpsters. A left turn on the balcony and about four steps brings one to a pull-down trash chute. One pull, a quick stuffing of the trash bag through the too-small opening, and the well-tied garbage bag goes tumbling and clanking on its way. With the weather still bad, and the sidewalks not cleared, I figured it would be better not to try to use the trash chute. I would take the garbage down to what is not euphemistically called the “trash room.” So I did.

Today–I’ve been bitten by a cleaning bug as a consequence of being shut in by the storm–once again I had a garbage bag with which to do something. Since I had already been out to the grocery store, a sign that the worst of the storm was over, I blithely went back to the usual practice of taking the garbage to the trash chute.

I opened the door and my feet were on ice, slippery, bumpy ice. In fact the four or five feet to the trash chute consisted of a slippery, uneven surface that belonged in a “fun” house, for those of green and flexible limbs to have fun negotiating. On my feet were my second pair of shoes–I’ll tell you a story of shoes someday– with smooth rubber soles. I thought “Oh, these are the wrong shoes!” But then, I thought, “If I go back to the apartment to get my first pair of shoes, who is to say that those shoes will be that much better on this ice.”

And there, right in front of me, was the goal, the pull-down opening where I could deposit the bundle of garbage I carried. With the goal in sight, rational alternatives didn’t occur to me. It became a challenge to navigate that icy bumpy treacherous surface without falling, to cling to whatever support was available to help me keep my balance as I made my way.

Never mind how I got there, never mind that I could go back and get different shoes, never mind that I could take an alternate route and put the garbage in the trash room, never mind that I could even take the garbage back to the apartment and wait for warmer weather. There was that goal, that silver door with the pull-down handle, that pulled me into action, that drew me toward it. Take a single step in its direction, and there was no rational way back, no turning around without the leverage of reaching the silver door.

Leaving Salt Lake City, where I was part of a community, although rejected by many parts of the community, and coming to West Philadelphia, where I knew no one and had no resources, was the same kind of perilous trip over a slippery flat.

Enrolling in graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania was equally hazardous. I knew no one except Martin E. P. Seligman, now known as the founder of Positive Psychology, but then as the researcher who had defined and operationalized the relationship between Learned Helplessness and Depression. I had met him acouple of times in Utah, because my dissertation had shown, in 1981, that one could use psychological testing to assess the extent to which individuals did not feel helpless, but rather felt in charge of their lives, able to accomplish what was needed. I think I called it “Learned Efficacy.” I had given him a copy of my dissertation; who knows whether he read it and later recalled it in developing Positive Psychology. Perhaps you could say I knew him, and because of his theories, at that time working on how people recovered from major problems, perhaps you would say he might have been interested in me and how I came to be at Penn. It might have been; except that the offices for the Department of Psychology were upstairs in a building without elevators, where they have remained to this day. And all descriptions of him did not portray a kindly man who would go out of his way to help me negotiate the icy bumps of the Unversity of Pennsylvania.

I also sort of knew Bob Kraft, Dr. Robert A. Kraft, a professor of Religious Studies. He had not seen me, and I think seeing me, picking me up at the airport, was a complete shock. I think I looked to him like a little old lady with tennis shoes; I had to wear oxford shoes or sneakers, with a “riser” inserted between the sole of the right shoe and the upper part of the shoe. The dress I wore was one I had chosen for the layover in Chicago, where my daughter, then living in St. Louis, introduced me to her soon-to-be fiance/. The colorful print on the dress attracted babies at synagogue, so I wore it frequently on Shabbat, and got to hold many babies as a result. The dress also seemed appropriate for meeting a potential son-in-law. For meeting a Harvard-educated Penn professor, not so much. He took me out for a meal, and tried to learn something about me; soon, though, he fairly obviously lost interest in making conversation. That was a slippery bump.

We did work together in the next few days on the task of finding me housing; he took me for a guided tour by car of the University City/West Philadelphia neighborhood that was within the Handivan-defined area around Penn. We checked out whether I could manage to live in one of the row houses he then owned, in the area. What I would need in housing depended on whether it was, first of all, wheelchair accessible. I already knew from talking on the phone to Alice Nagle that there were only two buildings, outside of the Penn graduate student housing that was much too expensive, that had wheelchair access, the Fairfax and the Garden Court Plaza. The Fairfax sat much closer to Penn, and a one-bedroom apartment there cost less than at Garden Court Plaza. No real contest there, I’d say. So Dr. Kraft and I investigated the three or four apartments at the Fairfax, and used the wheelchair to work out angles negotiating doorways and hallways and the various jogs into bathrooms. Also a factor–I don’t quite know how he knew, to this day–mentioned by Bob Kraft was distance from the central elevators. The apartment I settled on was very close to the center of the building, looking out over some trees at a lovely hundred-year-old church on a hill, with a spire that was later to come tumbling down.

At this point I needed a one-bedroom apartment because I had come from a one-bedroom apartment. Well, that’s not the only consideration: I also was not sure whether I would still be called upon to make a home for my daughter, who was then trying out her wings in St. Louis, where she had gone to “follow her man.” The first year had been very difficult. Both finding a job and finding an apartment had not been easy for her, and during one 48-hour stretch she was nearly homeless. She found shelter with a woman who fostered twenty-something women in about the same predicament as Alyssa; otherwise she was pretty much a stranger, except that Alyssa and boyfriend belonged to the Society for Creative Anachronism, the SCA, as did this woman. (Otherwise one might suspect her of strangeness–except this was St. Louis, the honest and level-headed center of the country.)

I had brought Linus, my cat. My cat was not really my cat; I was affectionately fond of Lucy, not Linus. But Lucy was a proven mouser, while Linus tended to run in the opposite direction from mice. When it came time to find one of them a home, the only candidate home for cat adoption wanted a mouser. So Lucy went, and Linus stayed.

The next icy hollow in the irregular surface of graduate school at Penn came with the first “Colloquium,” a once-weekly meeting of the academic elements of Religious Studies at Penn, faculty and graduate students and the occasional fellow-traveler. This first Colloquium of the fall is for Introductions; the faculty and graduate students already there get to meet the new crop. The person who at that time was the Chair of Graduate Studies–there is also an Undergraduate Chair–led us in introductions.Then he laid down the law. We had to take four courses each semester; we could not take incompletes; we could only take a reduced load if we also taught. Sometime in the first or second year we had to present a paper to the Colloquium; we would have to pass a hurdle known as “??” before we could be admitted to Ph.D. status. This hurdle included our Colloquium paper, plus four other papers. Three papers had to be about methodology. One paper had to be in either South Asian or Far Eastern Religion, if we focused on Judaism-Christianity-Islam, or the opposite. One paper could be in the historical or textual area in which we hoped to concentrate.

In the same week, the same Graduate Chair spoke to me alone, and said “Don’t talk about your disability” though as far as I know he had no idea how, and in how many areas, I was disabled. That meant that contrary to the Americans with Disabilities Act, I could not ask for reasonable accommodations, which might have involved taking fewer courses, or having more time to complete them, or other measures which might have reduced the stress from sky-high limits. Later, when under the stress of a dying mother, unfinished papers, and the question of whether my funding would be renewed for a second year, I fell and fractured my tibia and fibia, he was the brave faculty member who came to me in the hospital to tell me that I had a full tuition scholarship for the semester that was about to start. “Fine! Tell me how I’m supposed to do this!” I might have said. I just politely thanked him. In that semester to come, I traveled by handivan, and lost my mother to cancer. Worse than newly crippling injury, as bad in its own way as losing my mother, about as horrifying as waiting for renewal of funding, came the news that the School of Arts and Sciences expected to close the Department of Religious Studies and several other departments.