INSIDE THIS EDITION:
- MEET THE NEW MEMBERS OF THE LLC BOARD: Ruth Mills (Secretary), Susan Baugh (Member-at-Large), Donna Kerner (Member-at-Large), and John Brezack (Finance Committee)
- CELL PHONE PHOTO CLUB SPRING 2024
- From the Memoir Class: TOO MUCH by Jeanne Medeiros
- From HONEY LOCUST by Mary Oliver
Click on the links to jump to the article.
Meet the New Members of the LLC Board
Ruth Mills: Board Secretary
I spent most of my career as a Credit Analyst, most recently at TriMark and Honeywell. I also taught English at the high school level for several years. My favorite job title, however, is Grandma. My grandchildren, ages six and three, live in New Jersey, making Hoboken my favorite travel destination. My daughter Rachel and son-in-law Jeff are both attorneys in North Jersey.
I joke that I am almost a native of Rhode Island. I moved to the top of this state from the top of New York State in the mid-seventies. While I still have a strong attachment to the Adirondacks and the St. Lawrence Valley, I have developed a strong affinity for my adopted state too. One thing I won’t adopt, however, is the New England accent. I will never give up my R’s!!!!
I first learned of LLC when reading an obituary that listed the Lifelong Learning Collaborative as one of the deceased’s favorite organizations. Recently retired, I was looking for a writing group. I found the LLC website and soon became a member. That was four years ago. I never intended to get involved beyond taking classes, but thanks to Pat Nickles and her persuasive skills, I am now a co-coordinator of the Writing a Memoir and Beach Reads classes.
I love the opportunities LLC offers to learn, explore, read, and write. Most of all, I love the new friends I have made. I never intended to get involved with the Board either, but when the request went out, I knew it was something I could do. LLC succeeds because its members are willing to step up. I am taking my turn.
Susan Baugh: Member-at-Large
I was born and raised in New York and bookended back again in New York with the first decade of retirement. In between came college (BA in English from Wesleyan University) and career (thirty-five years with American Airlines). My career brought opportunities to live essentially border to border/coast to coast, and travel to several continents. American Airlines - a wonderful career with a great company - afforded me a livelihood, independence, and opportunities to grow and learn.
Retirement came with a lot of positive energy and time to discover what else in life there was to explore. It may not have been pursuit of “wildest dreams,” but it was time at least to indulge creative drive, curiosity, and lifelong learning. More specifically, a fascination for technology in art and design quickly came into focus - an idea that precision tools in the hands of artists enable greater creative freedom, enhanced functionality, and elevated aesthetics. Access to symposiums at FIT, Parsons, Fordham, and Cooper Union led to an opportunity at Glasgow Caledonian University’s NY College. My joining their inaugural cohort, as the school earned New York State accreditation, was the next chapter. International Fashion Marketing/Concentrating on Sustainability and Fair Trade, although a mouthful, was an intensive eighteen-month program. It combined hard work, learning a lot, and the bonus of making new friends.
My love of ballet, opera, music, and theater has been central to an active retiree lifestyle. It has been a privilege whenever possible to support the arts and other philanthropic interests, such as wildlife and other animal welfare causes. Moving to Providence two years ago from Sea Cliff, NY became another project: an impulse, but also a carefully considered whole-health imperative. Though I was partly spurred by the post-Covid era, exiting the sphere of NYC congestion, stress, and what might be called “too much humanity,” my goal of replicating the natural beauty and serenity, lovely architecture and small-town ambiance of Sea Cliff was also important.
Providence has exceeded my hopes in so many ways and checked every box: it is a capital city, and a college town, strongly invested in arts and culture, highly walkable, so easily inhabitable, inspiring, and friendly!
Discovering LLC…was like a little sprinkling of fairy dust… New in town, and inspired to get out and discover, a last-minute ticket to RI Philharmonic, a stranger in the next seat, friendly conversation…and a recommendation to look into this unknown organization… The name “Mary” and her pleasant conversation are all my memory retains of the person who offered such an important tip! Following up has unfolded in all the right ways! LLC collaborations in Memoir, Fashion Icons, Flâneurs, and Tutoring SECOND GRADERS(!) have connected a newcomer to the heart of a Providence lifestyle! One favorite pastime is personal journaling, strictly as a hobby. Although I am no longer able to actively participate in the sport, my love of horses and my having been an avid rider for nearly twenty years are the most important highlights of a lifetime!
Donna Kerner: Member-at-Large
I am a cultural anthropologist who has lived much of my life in East Africa and the South Pacific conducting field research. My research projects have focused on: Gender and Famine; Education and Class Mobility; Material Culture and Memory; and Women’s Entrepreneurship/Micro Finance. I am a Professor Emerita at Wheaton College where I taught for thirty-three years and held the William Isaac Cole Endowed Chair, Department of Anthropology.
Three passions have driven my learning and life’s work: Anthropology, teaching, and social justice. I began to be interested in human evolution and the archeology of pre-historic human settlements around age 8. Through the Upward Bound Program I had opportunities to tutor high school students in New York City and Utica while in high school/college. Through graduate school I worked full-time at Catholic Charities as a group home counselor. During my time at Wheaton College I became a mentor for the Posse Foundation and supervised many undergraduates teaching in English language enrichment programs in East Africa.
I grew up in New York City (Manhattan) where I was educated from elementary through high school and attended college in upstate NY (Kirkland, now Hamilton College). I married a dual citizen [Canada/US] while still in college and spent my senior year in Montreal attending McGill University. I then returned to NYC to attend NYU for my Masters and CUNY Graduate Center for my MPhil/PhD degrees, all in Anthropology. My husband Jon completed his PhD in Psychology at NYU during this time and took a full-time job at Albert Einstein School of Medicine while I embarked on 18-months of doctoral fieldwork in Tanzania. We separated and divorced while I was in the field.
I returned to New York to work on my doctoral dissertation in 1984 and in 1986 moved to New Hampshire to take a one-year teaching position at The University of New Hampshire. This was followed by a one-year teaching position at Tufts University. I moved to Providence in 1988 when I completed my doctorate and took a tenure-track teaching position at Wheaton College, (MA), about 30 minutes north. Initially I lived in the College Hill neighborhood for four years and then moved to Norton for the next fourteen years to be part of the Wheaton College community where I raised my daughter Rebecca whom I adopted as an infant in Fiji in 1994.
Throughout my teaching career, we had many opportunities to live and travel abroad (summers and sabbaticals for research) in Africa [Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, S. Africa], in the Pacific [Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Australia, New Zealand] and Mesoamerica [Mexico, Belize], as well as Europe [UK and Netherlands]. I am not a particularly strong language-learner, but I can get by in Spanish and French which I studied in middle/high school. I have intermediate+ fluency in KiSwahili (the lingua franca of Tanzania and spoken throughout E. Africa), and some familiarity with Pidgeon, Fijian, and a couple of Bantu languages. Rebecca studied French in Middle School and Spanish from elementary school through college. She is a much better language learner and picked up KiSwahili easily. We consider ourselves to be a trans-cultural family.
When Rebecca enrolled at The Gordon School for middle school we decided it was a good time to move back to Providence. We bought a first-floor condo in a 100-year-old Victorian and we have lived in the Summit Hill neighborhood with our two cats, Lucy and Harry ever since. Rebecca attended The Wheeler School for high school and then Wheaton College (majoring in Anthropology
). She has worked in a variety of RI non-profits focused on social justice and the arts in a development and program capacity. She has just taken on a new position as a Community Manager for Big Brother, Big Sisters, Southeastern, MA.
I joined LLC in 2022 the year after I retired. Retiring during the height of the COVID pandemic upended my well-laid plans to spend part of each year continuing my research and volunteer projects in Tanzania. My good friend, former Wheaton colleague, and LLC member Kersti Yllo suggested that I think about looking into LLC around the time we were emerging from the pandemic and I mentioned that I had been exploring various local organizations to decide where I might want to continue to build community and thoughtful engagement. So, I became a member and then proceeded to take my first class which I picked for the convenience of the time slot in my schedule (Friday morning). It turned out to be an auspicious choice, “Design and Deliver Your Own LLC Course.” What a wonderful, if somewhat backward, entry to LLC! On Linda Shamoon’s advice, I chose my next classes by topic (“Westerns” and “All that Jazz”) before embarking on trying to coordinate a class myself (fall 2023 “The Social Life of Objects” and spring 2024 “Being Human.”)
What I love about taking and coordinating LLC classes is the wealth of knowledge, experience, and enthusiasm of its members. I really enjoy the engaged dialog and the unexpected turns a class can take that teach me something new each week. I find LLC to be a really welcoming and warm community. I’m honored to join the Board of Directors as a member-at-large so I can continue to learn more about the history of LLC and be a part of its future. My first assigned task in my new role is to try to get as much feedback as possible from our members about how to enhance member collaboration in classes. We hear rumors that not everyone loves to prepare (or listen to) a PowerPoint. What are some of the other creative ways that members have shared questions/reflections/information in our classes? What can we do to facilitate inclusive class discussions? How can we broadcast these alternatives more effectively? I would love it if you would share your thoughts with me about your most enjoyable learning experiences in LLC classes ([email protected]).
John Brezack: Finance Committee
John Brezack, the newest member of the Finance Committee, received his three degrees in Boston universities: 1976 - BA in Sociology at Boston University; 1978 – MA in Urban Planning at Tufts University; 1988 – MBA at Suffolk University. He worked at various planning positions for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in their Division of Capital Planning and Operations and at the Department of Community Affairs from 1976 to 1985. He then left government to work at his family’s medical products manufacturing company, Dale Medical Products Inc. in Massachusetts, a company that designs, produces, and sells niche market specialty, patient-care products that reduce complications and help get patients discharged from hospitals faster. There he held various management positions including President and CEO and helped the company grow to nearly $30 million in sales. He sold the company in 2022 to the Employee Stock Ownership Plan that he had formed. He remains on the Board of Directors.
He has two sons, Joshua 39 and Zachary 37. “My wife of 39 years Gayle passed away in 2015. I live with my companion, Laura Strauss.”
“I really enjoy travelling the world and did for many years in my role as manager of the international side of our business. We would often extend business trips so that we could take extra time to journey through the more interesting cities and natural sites of the countries I was visiting. We now take an international trip 1-2 times per year and visit states and landmarks in the U.S. whenever possible.”
His myriad interests include “skiing, fishing, bicycling, pickleball, hiking, playing guitar, watching baseball and basketball, swimming, teaching ESL to African migrants, theater, travel and writing, learning. Reading, volunteering, and serving on the Board of my condo homeowners’ association.”
John has been a member of LLC for three years. He learned about LLC through email and word-of mouth from friends. The excellent subject material, the distinguished presenters from all walks of life, and stimulating discussions all appeal to his dedication to being a lifelong learner. Among his favorites are any books by John Irving or Cormac McCarthy and visiting Italy. If he could, he would like to sit down for a conversation with either Winston Churchill or Leonardo Da Vinci.
His response to the prompt If you knew me well, you would know that… ”I have a sharp sense of humor and am always looking to find the humor in any situation.” Appropriately, for the upcoming fall semester, John will be coordinating a course on “Absurd Movie Comedies.”
Cell Phone Photography Club Spring 2024
On May 28, the Cell Phone Photography Club hosted an exhibit of their work at the Temple.
“I felt very lucky to have a chance to join the enthusiastic, creative members of LLC's Cell Phone Photo Club as they celebrated all that they had learned over several semesters. It was great fun to hear them talk about going out on group photo shoots around the state and to share their excitement at discovering the amazing effects they could achieve with different photo editing software. To me it was a wonderful example of what LLC provides for us all – a chance to come together to share the enjoyment and satisfaction of acquiring new knowledge.”
– Sheila Brush
Ellen Fingeret
Linda Shamoon
Toby Liebowitz
Martha Nielsen
Eric Cohen
Karen Lee
Jane Lancaster
Katy Gilchrist
Anne Caldarella
Mel Shelly
Shirley DiMatteo
From the Memoir Class:
Too Much
by Jeanne Medeiros
My first nightmare when I was a little girl was of Roman centurions. You know, those scary guys with metal breastplates, red bristles that looked like Mohawks on their helmets, and six-foot-long spears. My dreams were not haunted by vampires or ghosts or serial killers like any normal child’s. Not mine. I apparently lived in mortal fear of the guys who crucified Jesus. I was tragically over-exposed to Catholicism at a young age.
We were not your run-of-the-mill, go-to-church-on-Sunday type of Catholics. We were hard core. We were there for every holy day of obligation, First Friday, and the feast day of every saint we were remotely connected to. We went to Mass every day during Lent. That’s 40 consecutive days!
We said the rosary when anybody we knew was sick, every night during the month of May, and on any car trip lasting more than 10 minutes. We even had to say it in the car on the way to the beach. I remember hearing rumors that other families listened to the radio while they drove to the beach, but these rumors were never confirmed.
Saint Michael’s, the church where we spent what seemed like half of our childhood, was no light-filled, welcoming, post-Vatican II beacon of God’s loving presence, either. It was full Gothic, with every niche in the wall holding a suffering saint or martyr. The crucifix above our altar bled copiously from five wounds and the crown of thorns. One of the side altars was dedicated to Senhor Santo Cristo, the most venerated statue in the Azores. The altar held a copy of this statue, which depicted Jesus after he had been whipped, spit on, crowned with thorns, and robed in red. It is the very image of humiliation and pain. We sat in front of this statue every time we went to Saint Michael’s. Nearby in the congregation sat a number of old Azorean widows, draped in black from head to toe, whispering prayers in Portuguese as their rosary beads slid through their wrinkled hands. I guess I was a sensitive child, but this was all a bit too much. If Saint Michael’s were a movie, I’m pretty sure it would be rated NC-17 for violence.
My brother and sister both suffered from Catholic over-exposure, too. To this day, Tommy bitterly recalls the year he couldn’t go trick-or treating with his friends because we had to go to some obscure service at our church. Apparently, none of his friends’ families, all Catholic, had to observe this tradition. Tommy is 72 and he’s still angry about that missed Halloween.
My sister’s over-exposure might have taken the cruelest form. Kathy suffered from severe eczema as a child, and sometimes had to go to school with both her hands and forearms covered with ointment and bandaged. This would be very upsetting for any little girl. But my poor sister, immersed as she was in stories from the Bible, decided that she must really be a leper. My parents and all the other adults must just be hiding this from her.
Believe it or not, the three of us seem to have survived our religious upbringing. I now realize that my parents were trying to pass on to us something they considered precious and essential. The terror was unintended. Today, Kathy loves that old-time religion and goes to Mass daily – voluntarily. Tommy and I give it as wide a berth as possible. My differences with the Catholic Church are profound and irreconcilable. Oh well, Mom and Dad, one out of three ain’t bad. If this were baseball, you’d be batting .333. You’d probably be in the Hall of Fame.
From Honey Locust
by Mary Oliver
Who can tell how lovely in June is the
honey locust tree, or why
a tree should be so sweet and live
in this world? Each white blossom
on a dangle of white flowers holds one green seed–
a new life. Also each blossom on a dangle of flower
holds a flask
of fragrance called heave, which is never sealed.
The bees circle the tree and dive into it. They are crazy
with gratitude. They are working like farmers. They are as
happy as saints. After awhile the flowers begin to
wilt and drop down into the grass. Welcome
shines in the grass.
Photo by Ilya Yakubovich on Unsplash