To Cindy: So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

Where shall I begin with my memories of Cindy? She was my sister. I knew her for almost my entire life. I remember the first time I saw her, when my Aunt Valerie Somers brought me  to the hospital at the  U. S. Marine Base in Quantico, where she was born.  I remember standing outside and looking in the window at this baby with long black hair, thinking what a strange sister she was! It was quite a while before I realized that the long black hair had been my mother's!


She was a beautiful baby. We both had the Somers blue eyes, but Cindy's were the prettiest -- a beautiful aqua blue. She had my mother's form and athletic abilities.

She was a natural horsewoman. I remember that we both started out together at the riding stables in Closter. I couldn't make it down the rather steep hill from the barn to the riding ring, and that turned out to be my last lesson. Although my mother never pressed me, I'd always felt a little guilty about that until I read in her journal that she'd had the same experience with her first ride, and never got on a horse again! Cindy on the other hand took to riding like a duck takes to water. She'd hang out at Pegasus Stables after we moved to Rockleigh, and actually worked there.

Cindy and Hilly at Pegasus Stable

My parents decided to buy her a horse. She named her horse Question Mark, and he was kept in the old carriage room underneath the house. She developed great riding skills but also had this natural instinct for horses. I'm told that horses can smell fear, which is what I think happened to me, as my horse had immediately started to act up which frightened me even more. I love the story I recently heard from my brother-in-law Henry, about how he and Cindy were sitting on the porch at Hupi Farm -- our house on Hupi Road that preceded the Rock Ridge house --  and suddenly a horse came out of the woods onto the lawn. They figured it belonged to Mr. Lankenau, who lived down the road and kept horses). With a combination of skill and daring, Cindy went over to the hourse, calmed it down, climbed on it, and rode it bareback back to the Lankenau's. Henry said that it was then that he realized how skilled she was, but also how
how this other quality of brazenness combined with her skill to make her the truly excellent horsewoman that she was.

She was a great animal lover. Perhaps she got this from her maternal Grandfather, Harry J, Burlington, who had been President of the New Jersey Fish and Game Commission, and was an early environmentalist and active conservationist. And as a man of the times, he also loved to hunt and fish!

We often laughed about Cindy having inherited the Burlington fishing gene. Nobody in the family loved to fish as much as she did, and she could sit for hours patiently waiting.  She had no problems baiting a hook or removing the fish and preparing it, whereas I tended to be rather sqeamish about those things. Years later, during all her vacations in Maine with her husband and children, she spent most of the time clamming and fishing. It was a tradition for them to bring back fresh steamers and lobsters to my parents' house, something we looked forward to at summer's end, a time to gather for a big fish dinner. In the springtime when the shad was running in New Jersey rivers, she'd cook shad with shad roe, carrying on another Burlington tradition.  If we got lucky, along with the shad would be some morel mushrooms, which were in season at the same time.

Speaking of morels, Cindy had the reputation for being the Family Finder.  I remember she found one morel that was the size of a brain and looked like one.

Whenever anyone lost something they would turn to Cindy, who'd have an uncanny way of finding it. It was better than praying to Saint Anthony, although that sometimes worked as well.  I remember when we were growing up we used to go up the Hudson River in my father's speedboat to these old beaches that used to be open during World War II. The pavilions were still there, but they weren't really open to the public any more. I remember losing my brand new retainer on the beach there. All that sand! By the time I realized it had fallen out, I had no idea where it could possibly be. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack. But my mother called Cindy over and she soon found it. I also remember losing a contact lens once in a laundromat in Great Barrington -- all the mist in the air caused it to fall right out of my eye.  I figured it was lost for good, but Cindy found it in the filter of  a washing machine. These were truly amazing feats in my eyes, and there were many stories like that. Needless to say, she was also good at finding morels, which made her a star in our family.

After we moved to Rockleigh, Cindy, Hilary and I all attended the Rosehaven School for Girls in Rockleigh, and then Cindy and I were sent away to my mother's alma mater,  The School of the Holy Child in Suffern, New York. Cindy tended to be a bit of a rebel there, and would be doing things like borrowing books off my parents' bedstand - I remember the Frog Pond and the Split Level Trap - and sneaking them back to school. Well the nuns didn't go for this in a big way, and much to my mother's dismay, Cindy ended up graduating from Northern Valley High School, which was fine with Cindy. She did very well there, then went on to attend The College of New Rochelle, where she met her good friend Ellen, but she found this Catholic women's college to be too restrictive also, and ended up earning her b.s. degree at Fairleigh Dickenson. It was here that she met her husband, Henry Koeppel. Henry, who had a degree in electrical engineering,  was running the university's computer lab. One of Cindy's teachers, Martin Feldman, was a friend of Henry's. When Cindy was in the hospital recovering from a car accident,  Henry brought her some notes for Martin's class, and that was how they met!

Cindy did very well scholastically when she set her mind to it, and had an aptitude for science. She had a high IQ, having inherited my mother's brains as well as her athletic abilities. At Suffern she had excelled in sports, just as my mother had, making varsity in basketball and field hockey, keeping alive the Burlington tradition set by my mother. And of course Cindy had her horseback riding too. She became friends with a vet named Steve Shaff who lived up the road from us in Rockleigh. Perhaps inspired by him as well as by her love for animals, she decided that she wanted to become a vet, but she was discouraged from doing that, being told that it was almost impossible for a woman to get into vet school. I remember being surprised when she told me this, but recently verified it;

Fifty years ago, women experienced difficulties enrolling at U.S. veterinary schools and there were very few female veterinarians. The practice of discrimination was so accepted that some veterinary schools sent out rejection letters to female applicants telling them, frankly, that the school didn't accept women. Today, four veterinary schools or colleges have female deans, and veterinary classes are on average 75 percent women (sometimes up to and over 90 percent). This year - for the first time in history - female veterinarians outnumber men, according to a news story appearing in the June 15 issue of the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/72612.php


Cindy was always surrounded by pets. In the beginning there were lots of dogs. Of course there was Smoky, our collie, who had been a gift from our Uncle Arthur Burlington when we were living in North Carolina, and followed us to Closter, and then Rockleigh. How we all loved that dog!

Then there was a little dog named Honey who was a mutt but we loved her. Sadly, Honey died in childbirth in a nearby field, because she was too small for the big babies to come out. I still remember that day when Cindy
 Cindy found her lying in the field, and  rushed her over to the vet's, but it was too late to save her.

Cindy and Honey

Our first Borzoi, named Dort, was actually Cindy's pet. Later came the other two Borzois: Daphne and Chloe, that belonged to my mother.

Dort

Then there was a little white dog named Puff that Cindy's friend Chuck Glass had given her, and that she in turn gave to our parents.  Puff started out little but actually grew into a large dog, being part Labrador Retriever.

I think that by that time Cindy was getting into cats -- and there were many of them. I still remember some of her first cats, named Lion and Midnight, but there were many others. Not sure what the total number was, but you could expect to be surrounded by cats when you visited Rockleigh. And sometimes you could find mice too.

Jessie with cat and mice

Then came the ferrets.

Jessie, Henry, Heidi and ferrets

The ferrets terrified the cats. When a ferret walked into the room the cat jumped up on a chair!  Ferrets ruled, There was Beast,  Zaphod, Trillian and Teddy,  Mickey and Minnie, and finally Fat Boy and Skinny Girl, with others in between.

Beast

Zaphod in hat

Mickey

There always seemed to be turtles in the fishtank, and then came the frogs. I remember some albino frogs that looked like they were made of marzipan.  You never knew what you'd find in Cindy's aquariums. You could even find fish!   Then there was the scorpion that had been smuggled in from Oaxaca, and that called for a terrarium.

There was also a backyard menagerie Chez Cindy. Cindy and Henry had the good luck of having their backyard abut Boy Scout Woods, which go on forever, and can never be sold for development. Consequently, there was always plenty of wild life around. Deer and wild turkeys could often be seen wandering through the property.

Deer in winter

Cindy feeding the animals

On a (slightly) tamer level, there was Possie and her brood - the possum that came right up to the kitchen door to be fed!

granola bowl

And then there was the family of raccoons that would come by

and there was White Squirrel,  the albino squirrel that was almost like a pet.

Even a red fox came by. The word was out!

Cindy was also a bird watcher. She had birdfeeders and hummingbird feeders and suet packs on the trees. She loved telling me about all the birds that came to her feeders: the woodpeckers, the yellow finches, the male and female cardinals, the hummingbirds.

When we were growing up there were still lots of turtles and snakes in the wild, and Cindy would find and catch them. While I was squeamish about picking up snakes, Cindy never had a problem with that, and loved to wiggle them in my face.  Most were garter snakes, but I remember one big black snake that took up residence in the walls, and didn't emerge until spring. I seem to remember it disappearing down the toilet!

This great love and empathy for animals no doubt came from her mother Alice and her grandfather Harry J. Burlington. Her Burlington uncles were  all animal lovers, keepers of horses and dogs, and hunters and fishermen. Cindy was a real Burlington.

In 1978 Cindy and Henry bought their house in Rockleigh from my parents, who were now living at Rock Ridge, in Monterey Massachusettes. So Cindy inherited my mother's gardens, and of course also inherited her love of gardening. Like our mother, Cindy had a green thumb. She grew these wonderful indoor plants in her sunny kitchen.

Granny and Grandaddy on a visit

There were huge Birds of Paradise that flourished there for years, and just kept getting bigger and bigger.

Outside there were also many different flowers. I remember the yellow lady slippers that would bloom for Mother's Day.

My mother got them years ago from her two German friends, Hilda and Greta, who were also into mushrooming.  Cindy kept them growing, as well as the gorgeous pink azaleas that our mother had planted years before. In addition, she had colorful tulips in the spring that the deer loved to eat, and many other seasonal flowers throughout the spring, summer and fall. One of the highlights were the ever changing and colorful day lilies.

Cindy was always quite a character. She would "get in trouble" far more often than I would. I remember my mother saying that I was such a "good"
child compared to Cindy, who was always getting into things. When she was little, she was naughty,  doing things like emptying the kitchen cabinets of  all pots and pans. When she was older she actually ran away from home once. She'd overheard her parents talking about how they might take her horse away as punishment for something that was (according to Cindy) more of a misunderstanding than a misdeed. So she took Dad's Sears card  and she and her friend, a neighbor named Richard, drove south, heading for Oaxaca, Mexico. They were planning to visit my Aunt Valerie who lived there at that time, which would have been quite a surprise for her. They got as far as San Antonio, Texas, where their car broke down, before her distraught parents were able to track her down with the help of Peter and Joan Gates, our neighbors in Rockleigh. Cindy baby-sat for them and was great friends with them, and she called them when she got in trouble.  Her father made them come back by bus. What a comedown that was!

So Cindy was always a wild one. I remember when she came to visit me once when I was at Georgetown in Washington DC, and it was time for Cindy to be there and there was no Cindy. I was really starting to get worried when I got the call -- she was in jail in Maryland and needed to be bailed out!  She had been speeding, which was not all that hard to do. We all did it back in those days. I remember being proud of being able to make it home in four hours, by going 80 all the way. Those were the days.

I was talking to our cousin Julianne Keahon the other day, who remembers
Cindy as always being a lot of fun. "She was never boring", says Julie. "We always had a good time when Cindy was around. She'd bring out all the things you'd like to do but were afraid to do." Julie apparently had a rather strict upbringing, so being around her wilder older cousin was an adventure.  I remember Cindy always playing the clown. She had the Somers sense of humor, but with a certain subtle twist that often manifested as slapstick. Perhaps that was the Burlington twist!

Another thing Cindy was known for in the family was her generosity. Not sure how she initially got that reputation, but it was well-earned. She was always easygoing and you could ask her for anything and she would do just about anything for you. She was a wonderful mother to her girls, who never lacked anything. And she took good care of her husband too.

Cindy had a wonderful family life, but I always felt that she didn't get a chance to try her wings. I remember when I was living in Seattle, we were planning for her to come out for a visit. She really wanted to, but Life interrupted. By then she had a man in her life, and things were getting pretty serious pretty fast. I was taken by surprise when the next thing I heard was that she and Henry had eloped! She didn't seem to care about material things, or having a big wedding and getting gifts. Well that certainly did put a crimp on her plans to visit me, and the next thing I knew Cindy and Henry were expecting a baby! Soon Jessica arrived, and I remember the wonderful nursery that was decorated with animals. It was quite unique -- I had never seen a room like that before.   Not long after that, along came Jessica's sister Heidi.

It was around that time that Cindy started getting interested in music. Music
was to be a life-long love of hers. She was having some problems then,
I think coming to terms with being a mother of two with no clear career path before her. She liked to say that she put herself through therapy using the albums of John Lennon. Of course there was Imagine,  and I also remember her singing Mother, so plaintively. Cindy discovered the power of John Lennon years before I did. She resonated with what he was saying while I was still mooning over Paul and Hilary was mooning over George.

Cindy told me once about how I had sparked her interest in music when I brought home some albums from college and left them for her to listen to. Soon she became addicted to Joan Baez, singing Farewell Angelina and Bob Dylan singing just about anything. But in later years she was the one who ended up introducing me to so much music. I remember getting a real musical education when riding up to the Berkshires with Cindy and Henry in their car. They had a great sound system and all these wonderful tapes. There was Jessica by the Allman Brothers, and Angie on the Goats Head Soup album -- I can still hear her wailing Angie! Then there were the early Neil Young albums Crazy Horse and After the Gold Rush, that incredible voice of his, singing:

Well, I dreamed I saw the silver spaceships flying
 In the yellow haze of the sun
 There were children crying and colors flying
 All around the chosen ones
 All in a dream, all in a dream
 The loading had begun
 Flyin' Mother nature's silver seed
 To a new home in the sun

And there was John Fogerty's Fortunate Son - "It ain't me, it ain't me. I ain't no fortunate one." And Steve Earle, and Phil Ochs, and Harry Chapin
and Tom Paxton. And Lynyrd Skynyrd's Free Bird. And the wonderful singer/songwriters Nancy Griffith, and Janis Ian.  Yes, I really did get quite a musical education from Cindy!

She stepped it up when she introduced me to Vin Scelsa, whose  Idiot's Delight was on WNEW at the time.  We both became addicted to Vin's show, which started at 8pm on Saturday night and went until the wee hours of the morning, until whenever Vin finally decided to quit and go home. It would sometimes take four 90 minute tapes to get the whole show. Cindy and I both taped, providing backup in case one or the other had a mechanical failure. And we'd often share. It was exciting: we were being exposed to the best singer/songwriter music of the nineties, and there was so much going on then -- it was a vibrant world. Vin would usually have a live guest, and there would hours of wonderful  music and talk that could not be heard elsewhere. And I had Cindy to thank for introducing me to all that.

I've only known one other person who exposed me to music in quite the same way, and that was Robert Knight, who on his program Earthwatch on WBAI, is always surprising me with musical selections that either remind me of years ago, or that I somehow missed hearing years ago. In fact I was listening last night as he played a lovely blast from the past by Laura Nyro called Stoned Soul Picnic - another song I had first learned from Cindy! He announced that he did not know what got into his head to play that song. I suggested to him that it might have been Cindy! He sent his love and condolences, saying how privileged he had been to have known the greatness and poetry of Cindy, as well as that of my entire family.

The next thing I had to be grateful to Cindy for was my introduction to video games. Yes!!! Christmas at Cindy's was the only place to be -- it brought back memories of enchanted Christmases we'd had as children. Cindy was an early adopter of video games. She always had to be state of the art -- from Nintendo to Sega to Gameboy to the X-Box. And she kept track of all the games that were hot. Oh, the wonder of discovering games at Cindy's house will never be forgotten! How I loved The Ys, and Zelda  and Final Fantasy - the adventures, the puzzles and even the action games like Alec Kidd and Frogger. I'd sit mesmerized for hours, with the same mug of breakfast coffee sitting forgotten in my lap, as I scaled heights, hopped over logs, fought enemies, solved puzzles.   This was a world of such magic, a whole new place to escape to. And once again, I had Cindy to thank for showing me that. I went on to get involved with  computer RPGs like Sierra Online's  King's Quest series and the Ultima series (the story of Lord British). Cindy never really got into the computer games, although of course the game machines were computers.

So these are the things I most remember and miss about Cindy. There were many other things, of course. There was her real estate career, her nursing career. There was her love of yard sales and collectibles. There was her career on ebay, collecting and selling baseball cards, and Ty beanie babies -- she had to get 'em all! I miss getting those beanie baby presents, I miss getting all those cards and gifts at Christmas and Easter, those birthday remembrances. Yes, Cindy did have some problems with clutter, but perhaps selfishly on my part, I loved going to her house precisely because it was  like coming home. There would be all those books up there on the second floor that were the same ones I had grown up with. It would be fun to pick up an old book and have a flood of memories accompany it. I could go anywhere, but everything was still there -- for me -- over at Cindy's house.

Cindy was also a great hostess, and I have memories of wonderful holiday meals cooked at her house. Both she and Henry loved to cook and would take turns making and baking things. At Christmas time she'd always make the traditional Noels and "family secret" caramels that my mother used to make. But I especially enjoyed the seafood meals. As I mentioned before, they vacationed in Maine, and would sail up the coast in Henry's boat, where once there, they'd stay for maybe a month, fishing and enjoying the beauty of Mt. Desert Island and environs. Then they'd come back bearing gifts from the sea, and wild blueberries they had picked themselves and fantastic fudge from Perry's Nuthouse.  Back home they kept their sailboat at the Nyack Boat Club, and they'd sometimes invite me and my friends to go sailing on the Hudson. How did I return the favors? Well
Cindy used to love coming over to my house to watch the Macy's Fourth of July fireworks in my living room. The barges were positioned right beneath my windows, and it was an experience that she totally loved.
 Another little tradition we had was going to Chinatown for Vietnamese food. Afterwards Cindy loved to roam around looking for deals like cheap watches, designer knock offs, 9/11 mementos, live turtles -- all those things that so charmed her that could be found only in Chinatown.

I miss her so much. I had imagined that we would be growing old together, sharing our memories. At least a  couple of times a week now I pause and think that I should give Cindy a call, before I catch myself. But today I've come to say goodbye to her. And so, my beloved sister, until we meet 
again -- perhaps in a restaurant somewhere at the end of the universe -- so long, and thanks for all the fish.

Pamela Somers
Saturday June 30th 2012