I Will Follow You...

I Will Follow You to Virgie, a beautiful song about a young man going back to his hometown for the funeral of his high school buddy's grandmother. A woman who was a supportive person in his younger life. “Yeah, I reckon we were heathens, but in her eyes we were saints.”

Anyone who, when young, had an older person in their life, hold them in a higher light, deserved or not, understands the emotion of this song.

I can come up with many adults from my childhood who were instrumental in some way. But the one who pops up fondly throughout my life is the mother of one of my summer childhood friends. For three to four summers until I moved from Long Island, NY, I had two girlfriends who I hung out with, as thick as thieves. Laura was the person who told me what a Jewish princess meant. I only heard that phrase because she told me that is what people told her she was. And while Tara and I both attended St. Patrick’s School and are from large Irish families, that’s where our similarities ended. Tara and Laura were at least a year younger than me and lived in Huntington Bay, on the Long Island Sound, in the neighborhood that included Nathan Hale Beach Club. Some families belonged to the club because they were wealthy enough to. Others, like my family, who didn’t live in the neighborhood, belonged because it was a great place to connect with other families from our church, who happened to live in the Bay. I'm sure the Ohmlers and the Glackins were in conversation with my parents to join the club because it's a great place for the kids and for the parents to meet up for sunset dinners on the water.

I took to the water like a fish. I have no idea why Laura, Tara, and I stuck like glue together as best friends, but we were. The club was in the middle part of the half-moon edge of the bay. It collected most of the seaweed. It was not the prettiest club among the clubs in the bay. But we had the most spirit. We had the best swimmers. Probably because we didn’t have a whole lot more to do but swim at our club. We didn’t have an additional swimming pool with a slide like Head of the Bay Beach Club. Or fancy tennis courts like Bay Crest Beach Club. Our summer swim coach and lifeguard doubled as a high school teacher for the rest of the year. We didn’t have swim practice per se. Our days were loosely structured to include our daily laps. We all just seemed to know we had to get our laps in at some point during the day. Practice makes perfect. We got faster without realizing it.

Huntington Bay was filled with kids. My neighborhood was too. Maybe that’s why I felt so comfortable to slide right into the clan of kids there. I had my own paper route, inherited by one of my older siblings, which included riding my bike to deliver the Newsday newspaper. As soon as I was done delivering the paper, I’d ride my bike to the beach. I’d either go straight to the beach, or to Laura’s house if we had talked on our landline phones to make a plan to meet. Or meander into the Glackin house, with no prior plan, because the Glackin house was always open to the twelve Glackin kids and the rest of the neighborhood. They had an old, smelly dog and a huge un-airconditioned old beach house converted into a year-round house. Lots of windows that welcomed breezes. It sat atop a hill. Its front door faced the Sound. The lawn descended right to the beach club. From Tara’s bedroom, on a clear day, we could see Connecticut. A scene I remember staring at with Tara, tears in our eyes when I told her I’d be moving there at the end of the summer. Her house was a seamless kind of second home to me. It was where I could make a peanut butter and strawberry preserves sandwich for myself, paired perfectly with a glass of chocolate milk. My house did not have strawberry preserves, nor chocolate for chocolate milk. That combination was a special kind of heaven for me. One day, Mrs. Glackin walked into an otherwise empty kitchen. She looked at me a bit puzzled. Why was Katherine in my kitchen all by herself eating a sandwich as if this is a perfectly normal thing to do? She asked me something. Maybe it was, “Where’s Tara?” But my answer didn’t satisfy her confusion. She walked away still perplexed and I remember thinking, She has no idea us kids feel so comfortable in this home that it is perfectly fine in our minds to make ourselves a sandwich! Plus, she has no idea what a treat this is for me because I don’t have the same bread, or jam, or delicious chocolate syrup.

She also has no idea and will never know, how she brought me out of my own young-teen, self-centered mind for just a moment.

Tara had lots of older siblings who had tons of records. We listened to many of them. We learned all the songs from Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young's, Four Way Street Album. As I write this, I can hear the live version intro to Pre-Roads Down. So good. We were also clueless about what any of the songs meant. We just liked singing and listening and learning all the lyrics.

Four Dead In Ohio was playing while Tara, Laura, and I sat on the well used antique couches in the huge living room. At our feet, worn Persian rugs, smelly from years of wet, sweaty dogs on humid summer days. The living room also housed a Baby Grand Piano. I’m sure one or more of the Glackin kids played it, because mixed with the dog smell was the smell of education. And quality. Quality wafted in the house from NYC, a place I knew about, but was not terribly familiar with. Only that there were museums and plays and operas there and the smartest of the smartest people from Long Island commuted there. And Mr. Glackin was one of those commuters. I really didn’t know what he did. I think he was a lawyer. Laura told me Mr. and Mrs. Glackin were given this house as a wedding gift, which was Mrs. Glackin’s family’s summer house. Who knows if that was true. I never thought to ask. I really didn’t care. They were adults and who cared about their lives. Only ours mattered.

Mrs. Glackin walked into the entrance to the living room. Much like she did when I was eating my sandwich in her kitchen, she asked what song this was. We told her the song. She asked who was singing it. We told her who was singing it. Pretty dismissively, as teens typically are. And then I saw it. She wiped tears from her eyes. She may have been telling us that it was a song about college students who were shot and killed by our own National Guard. But all I comprehended was, Mrs. Glackin understood this song way deeper than us silly girls. That was the moment. And it was just a moment. I perceived she cried because we were sunny, innocent girls, happily singing away with the song, oblivious to its meaning, contrasting with the darker world we would soon enough, know more about.

I moved away from that little pocket of the world where I fit in so comfortably, across the Long Island Sound, three hours away. It may as well have been a million. I would be in a high school where I knew no one and no one knew me, nor that I had three older smart siblings whose reputations I could coast on for a while until the teachers saw I was less of a student than they were. Life got pretty hard for me. All these years, Mrs.Glackin's kindness remained with me. Twice, she could have easily popped my bubble and set me straight. Katherine, it’s not okay to walk in here and make a sandwich whenever you want. And, Don’t you girls understand what this song is about? She could have lectured us about what the world is really like. Instead, she allowed me to be the king of my own little hill. I was always grateful to her for that because, for many years after, I didn’t feel king of anything.

Mrs. Glackin is my Follow You To Virgie woman. I didn’t go back to Long Island for her funeral. I don’t know if she is still alive. But this song reminds me of her and now I am the one with tears in my eyes.