April 3rd, 2007
Filling in the Background - Section 3
by Sigrid Peterson in Unedited material, Sectional work
What was my world like, the day that driver failed to clear her windshield on a wintry day, and ploughed right into me?
What comes first? Surroundings? Social Status? Religion — after all, I lived in Salt Lake City, even though I grew up on Long Island in New York State. No, I didn’t belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. I never belonged. I would tell anyone from back East who talked about what pests the Mormon missionaries were, “We live in the safest place in the world, in terms of answering the door to Mormon missionaries, and losing an afternoon in fruitless discussion. Mormons don’t send missionaries to Salt Lake City. That would be carrying coals to Newcastle!” Actually, sometime after my accident in 1989, the LDS Church did start sending missionaries out to proselytize in Salt Lake City, Utah, the home of the first Mormon Temple.
I had lived in Salt Lake City for fifteen years before anyone who of Mormon heritage asked me to visit him and his wife in their home. That was Reed Merrill, my first Ph.D. advisor, in the University of Utah School of Education’s Program in Counseling Psycholoy. For most of his life he had been substantially noncompliant with the Mormon Word of Wisdom. He drank and smoked. That was fine with me, of course. He had returned to the Mormon Church–the short name for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints–a couple of years before his death, in approximately 1986.
Reed had died, and I said kaddish for him. The rabbi said, when I asked him if I could, “You can do that if the person has done something nice for a Jew.” That he (Reed Merrill) certainly had, in catching a mislaid admissions file and pushing through my admission to the Graduate Program in Counseling Psychology.. Yet anyone reading this who knew Reed Merrill would say, “Reed must be turning over in his grave. He was a terrible anti-Semite.” I had graduated in 1981, and with the help of a friendly board, and with Reed Merrill as clinical advisor, I had started Bridges Interfaith Counseling Center. Since it would take a year of supervised practice before I could be licensed as a Psychologist–in Utah, Counseling Psychologists and Clinical Psychologists held the same license. They were (are?) both Psychologists. My license number was #430; I’m proud that I still remember it. Now the contents of the licensing exam, which I don’t remember, I walked out of that exam room, in 1982, with the sense that all I knew about psychology had drained out of me.
Changing my faith to Judaism in 1985 lost me support for Bridges, and I turned it over to an able Clinical Social Worker. I continued to practice as a psychologist; one of the side jobs I had had was with Catholic Charities. They had a couple of affiliated psychologists; if I were to identify them by their specialties, I would be saying “the only blank psychologist in Utah.” That doesn’t seem necessary, though.
I also worked at the Utah State Department of Health, writing many of their statistical and policy reports, especially based on Census Data. I had found learning statistics excruciatingly difficult; I persisted, over ten years, and as my first dissertation shows, did master much of the more complicated concepts.
When I first started Bridges, I had two gay clients who each had the goal of changing their sexual behavior toward monogamy. They had in common what seemed to me to be an uncommon fear of death, yet neither of them told me about AIDS. And I hadn’t heard about it.
Later, of course, I figured it out. I watched the statistical rise of cases in Salt Lake City and in Utah, as a statistician in the State Department of Health. That sort of watching was the job of the State Epidemiologist, not a policy statistician, yet I never stopped being interested in AIDS, thinking of my clients and their fear I had never recognized for what it was.
One early spring–I still remember the chill in the air at the mountain resort–the Statewide health organizations held a fair of sorts. For some reason, they invited people from the State Department of Health. In walking around and looking at the tables and exhibits, I saw one table manned by Ben Barr, then the director of Aids Project Utah, an AIDS Prevention Organization. We talked about the problems of preventing AIDS in Utah, and talked about what needed to be done. We both saw the State Epidemiologist as a barrier to AIDS prevention, since his take was that AIDS would run its course among Utah’s very small population of gay men, they would all die off, and the problem would be solved. He was later to say this or similar words in a legislative hearing discussing AIDS legislation, so although it seems a harsh attribution on my part, I believe I am accurately representing his views at the time. Ben Barr and I agreed that because of the stigma against gays in Utah, and the pressure in the Mormon Church for young people to marry young, many gay men resisted the discovery of their sexual identity, and once sexually active would have intercourse with both men and women. I knew this from clinical practice; Ben knew this from his work with people with AIDS, and with AIDS prevention primarily among gay men. We mutually deplored the views of the State Epidemiologist. Then, too, we agreed that prevailing fears and prejudices made the task of AIDS prevention especially difficult in socially conservative Utah. By the end of that day, Ben Barr had enlisted me in the battle to prevent HIV/AIDS in Utah.
We had more conversations, of course. I remember that at that first meeting we discovered we both were Jewish; Ben mentioned that he had even celebrated Passover with friends, not family, in Weber City, lying on the floor resting on pillows.
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Early in the 1980s my daughter and I moved into an apartment in a wonderful old polygamist house. We lived in half of the second floor; the living room looked out toward the Eastern Mountains, brilliantly visible in winter, pleasantly obscured by a huge hazelnut tree in the front yard. The window was not one window, but five, taking up each of five panels of an octagonal tower in the southeast corner of the house. We did need, or thought we needed, curtains–at least in winter. I hunted stores for the right kind of cloth that would fit the antique appearance of the house, and found a pattern we both loved. What remains of that lovely place to live? What happened to that patterned cloth for curtains? It fits into my story later.
INTERLUDE - Mountains
In every chapter so far, the mountains have intruded. I have and will describe every scene as indoors, or oriented in some way to the mountains. When I remember my favorite places, I remember the view of the eastern, southern, or western mountains from that place. The annual oppression of smog, that would hang thickly over the valley from sometime in December to sometime in February, depressed us because the smog robbed us of the mountains.
Later, when I was about to leave Salt Lake City, I would travel around the city to the places with the best views, to drink in, inhale, the mountains and hold them, somehow, in my vision. Growing up in the east, we had had mountains, we thought. My mother told of horseback trips through the Berkshires; we spent time at her family’s cabin in Northfield, Massachusetts, beautifully set on a ridge overlooking the Connecticut River Valley. We set out for a family excusion one summer day in a foggy drizzle that my mother called “river mist”–which turned into rain and stayed as rain.That is how we saw the White Mountains of New Hampshire, drowned in rain.
In Utah, in contrast, the mountains looked like some giant had spilled her picture postcards across the landscape. Like picture postcards, they always faced the sun, or perhaps the moon. My ex-husband and I, in the summer after arriving in Salt Lake City for graduate school, planned a hike with the baby. The year before, on Long Island, it had rained every weekend we went camping, to practice for carcamping across the country. Here in Utah, he asked me, “Did you check the weather report?” “Of course not,” I said. “The weather is always the same, sunny and dry.” He agreed, “What a difference from last year!”

Smoothing Out - Section 4

If the period after The Accident was “In the Rough,” I can term the next period one of smoothing out. It meant gathering together what I had been able to accomplish, learning more about the difficulties ahead, and particularly solving the practical problems of living alone, except for one cat, and the occasional daughter.
In the four months before the accident, I had studied Modern Hebrew. After I and the rest of our committee had finished writing the proposal to the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation for an AIDS/HIV prevention grant, and while we were waiting to hear, we talked about what each of us wanted to do next, given that we were both committed to, and identified with, AIDS/HIV prevention in Utah. Such commitment would mean that we would be unable to obtain jobs in Utah outside of AIDS/HIV prevention. I thought that I wanted to study languages to do research in religion, or religion and psychology. So I enrolled in/sat in on a first-year course in Hebrew at the University of Utah, taught by Yael Maschler, who had just graduated from the University of Michigan Linguistics Program. She also was an Israeli teacher of Hebrew, Ulpan style. One of my classmates was Margaret Toscano, a woman struggling to bring about a fresh understanding of women in the LDS Church. Margaret and I, of a similar age, had similar goals - to research and teach in the field defined by the biblical time period and the Mediterranean region.