A Trip in Time
EDITOR’S NOTE: In July, Barbara Phelps-McMichael of Ulster Park, N.Y., will travel to Rochester, N.Y., to reunite with her eighth-grade classmates. It’s a straight-line day trip of 206 miles, but it comes after a half-century that traverses several worlds.
A Trip in Time
I remember singing “The Farmer in the Dell” around the alphabet circle on the floor of the Our Lady of Good Counsel kindergarten in 1949-50. I have only happy memories of that room and my new friends. I still remember my mother holding my hand while walking me to my first day of school from our Genesee Park Boulevard home.
In that year, my mother was pregnant, and as I spoke so much about Jerilyn Kunz, my parents named my youngest sister after her. They liked the name and hoped that it would create the loving relationship that Jeri and I still have. She and our middle sister, Valerie, who was one year behind this class in school, still live in Rochester.
Sisters Patricia Ann and Anne Francis evoke memories of young, kind teachers. We all remember Sister Anna Mary. I was delighted to leave her and the eighth grade to go to West High in 1957.
I moved to New York City in 1967, a divorced single mom with my four-year-old son, Scot McRae. There I wrote advertising copy and PR stories on Madison Avenue and in architecture while attending Hunter College at night. My social work studies and internship as a staff psychotherapist under Dr. Sidney Rose, followed by bioenergetic training, led to my independent practice as part of a group cooperative.
In 1974, we moved to Rhinebeck, N.Y., and lived a true country life on a 93-acre, 200-year-old former pioneer dairy farm for several years. We chopped wood and hauled water in the bitter winters when the water pipes froze underground. I cooked on a wood/coal-burning stove and loved it. The other three seasons were paradise as we swam in a stream, walked the meadows, grew organic food and kept free-range chickens. We loved our dog, Buttons, and our cat, Victor. One year, we kept a pig named Chevrolet. We drew and painted, wrote poetry and journals, danced and sang with friends of all ages. Scot and his friends rode dirt bikes on the former cow paths and played their guitars. He is a gifted musician. During some of those years, I was a social worker on a high school dropout program and attended Marist College.
During a winter storm in February 1982, I was a backseat passenger in a critical auto accident in Rhinebeck. I was clinically dead four times and paralyzed and in a coma for 10 days. My spiritual life and studies accelerated as a result of this “cosmic boost.”
I retreated with and was initiated into the Sufi Order in the West, whose ancient universal tradition honors all religions, blending East and West. Some of my Sufi teachers were former Catholic nuns and monks who showed me the beauty of the ritual and mysticism of my Catholic roots. I also retreated with nuns and priests at our several local Catholic retreat centers.
In 1995, I was ordained a priest in the Order of Melchizadek, a non-denominational spiritual peace corps. As a legal minister, I have officiated several weddings and funerals. My ordination vow was the Buddhist one: to teach love and healing wherever I go. I try to live by this vow and am not now affiliated with any denomination.
I studied at CUNY Hunter College, Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and SUNY Albany, earning a master’s degree in clinical social work. I became New York state-licensed for practicing psychotherapy. I was an independent practitioner of transpersonal psychotherapy/hypnotherapy in New York City and Kingston, N.Y. My skills include mind-body-spirit healing techniques such as bioenergetics, relaxation and visualization, energy healing, meditation and rebirthing/breathing.
My death experience, rehabilitation and self-healing skills led me to new specialties in areas of post-traumatic stress disorder, grief and bereavement, rehabilitation and their often subsequent drug and alcohol problems. In 1989, after seven years of accident rehabilitation and recovery, I opened my new psychotherapy practice in Kingston.
I met John McMichael there through mutual friends whom he knew from the Unitarian Fellowship. We were each divorced for many years and had adult children. John and I married in 1991 on a cliff overlooking the Hudson River and live in a cozy home on four acres, three are wooded, on the outskirts of Kingston. We have seven grandchildren ages 8 to 18 through my son, Scot, John’s son, David, and his daughter, Laura.
We are a successfully blended extended family wherein parents and stepparents celebrate special times together in harmony and good will. We actually enjoy one another and loving and supporting our shared grandchildren and their parents.
In 1997, I retired as John, who was diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis in 1981, was waiting to receive a lung transplant. He received a new right lung at New York Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in 1999. I am very content and happy, wife of the man I dreamed of since childhood. John was an IBM mathematician for 27 years. My miracle man is doing well and plans to accompany me to our 50th class reunion.
Upon my retirement, John and I realized that any major travels on my part should be undertaken immediately before he couldn’t be left alone. We had, and since have, vacationed in Wellfleet on Cape Cod for a total six weeks in each of 14 years. As nature lovers, we’ve felt blessed by sweet, communicative whales on 22 watches of those magnificent creatures.
I have loved social studies and geography since my first exposure to them at Our Lady of Good Counsel School. I particularly enjoyed drawing maps (and diagramming sentences, which to me were maps of sentences). When we were studying South America, specifically, the Pampas in Argentina, I decided that I would attempt to travel to as many parts of this earth as possible. I’ve done pretty well at it, but still, alas, have not yet made it to Argentina.
In 1997, we went to India, Nepal and Tibet with a 29-member group of the Order of Melchizadek. The highlight of our three-week trip, and my life, was a meeting with His Holiness the Dalai Lama at his home in Dharmsala, India. That was a true blessing. We spoke with him of our Tibet experience, discussing China’s politics and Tibetan refugees. He is an approachable, intelligent and humorous holy man. He even posed for a photo wearing a red clown’s nose, a gift from an amateur clown in our group. Our momentous meeting was concluded with the taking of a group photograph in which I held my hand on his shoulder.
The Dalai Lama’s security process was much more thorough than any of the airports of this trip. Men and women were separated, hand-pat frisked and required to leave all belongings in a secure room before meeting him. We gave several of our cameras to his attendants who photographed our audience with him.
Dharmsala is also the home of his International School for Tibetan Buddhist Studies and one of his many Tibetan refugee orphanages for which we brought medicine, money, school supplies and toys. We were honored guests at the celebration of their 35th anniversary under the Himalayan Northern Lights while watching a memorable international Tibetan dance troupe performance.
For several recent years, I lived the life of a busy artist showing and selling my expressionist and abstract watercolor, pastel, acrylic and oil paintings in the Mid-Hudson Valley and New York City. This realized a lifelong dream. I was mostly self-taught since childhood and took three years of high school art classes. This was followed by art classes in college and private studies as an adult.
Today, our health, given our medical histories, requires constant attention. Our nearest grandgirls, 18 and 16 years old, are the light of my life. I provide Mama Barbara’s Taxi Service many times per week and love being with the girls. Three other “grands” are 1.5 hours away, two are in the San Francisco Bay area. We see them annually here or there.
We now travel through the U.S.A. and Canada only, due to John’s post-lung transplant medical concerns. Our celebration of his first new lung anniversary was to take a trans-Canada Via Rail dome car trip from Toronto to the Rockies where we spent a week followed by days in Vancouver and Victoria.
We enjoy train travel and last September took Amtrak to Montreal for a couple of days to visit with friends and tour the city. We took Via Rail to Quebec City for two days and then on to Cape Breton for two weeks.
John and I often take the two-hour express bus ride into New York City for dining, theatre and socializing with longtime friends. In March, we saw Vanessa Redgrave in “The Year of Magical Thinking.” John’s mobility and stamina are impaired, so I also go alone for several days to visit art museums and galleries and to shop. I love New York!
Family, friends and relationships are most important to me.
I hope this reunion will bring some new friends into my life.
I am eagerly looking forward to being with each of you on July 14.