Twelve Steps To Marriage (Step 3)

Step 3                   PAULA

So here I am in the Berkshires, another Summer gone by and I am moving from the Summer Camp to Pittsfield in order to finish up my Associates Degree in Environmental Science at Berkshire Community College. It's January and it's cold as hell (?) here in the Berkshires....and it's quiet and compared to the Summer not many people around. I am rooming with two guys Tim and Tom , in a third floor apartment
on Brown Street. I am lonely as hell (?) and I miss my friends and the weekend retreats of the Eisner Institute.

It's 1979 and Disco is big here in Pittsfield.  Erma Bomberg just wrote about Pittsfield in her infamous book,
"If life is a bowl of cherries, what am I doing here in the Pitts." and now that's where I am at deep in the "Pitts" .......no more cabin in the woods, no more private 600 acre playground, no more car, no more room and board...no more stealing gas! After three years at the camp, all I had was a motorcycle, bicycle, three trunks of clothing and a couple of dozen plastic milk crates full of books.....oh yes and the purpose for my moving here, I would  finally finish up my studies and earn my Associates Degree in Environmental Science from Berkshire Community College, which would in fact guarrantee me entrance once again to the world of accredited colleges, this time at the University of Massachusettes @Amherst.

Yet in the mean time I had at least six months more to go in this one horse town, so starkly cold and devoid of culture. The town had fallen on hard times ever since General Electric, the largest employer in the Berkshires had started moving it's operations elsewhere. General Electric had badly polluted the Housatonic River with PCB's and I remember them under court order removing hundreds of 55 gallon drums with huge back-loaders, drums that they had just burried in the dirt alongside the riverside.

I had a full load of courses mostly about Water. There was a course in Wastewater treatment, one
in the Chemical Analysis of Water, one in Hydrology , one in Water Management. By the end of the semester I was swimming in water. Berkshire Community College was actually Academically Rigourous and I was kept fairly busy with classes, however there is only a small campus, and students were on their own socially. I was a litlle older than the rest of the class....

I went to the music festivals and the bars! As it was the late 1970's and there was some Great Music around
I went to concerts in Lexington and at Arlo Guthries Place in Lenox....I used to go to "Alice's Restaurant " for breakfast which was still around at the time in Stockbridge. You all know "Stockbridge" with the biggest Hotel in the Berkshires "The Red Lion Inn"...well downstairs they had their "Lion's Den"  where we would sit for hours  drinking beers and listenning to the best Jazz and folk singers around........another claim to fame "The Norman Rockwell Museum". I spent countless hours visiting the museum....Stockbridge is where the illustrator lived.....

and then there is the  "Griggs School" where James Taylor spent the best years of his life in Rehab......and wrote "I've seen Fire and I've seen Rain".....remember the lines "though the Berkshires seemed dream like on account of that frosting, with ten miles behind me and 10,000 more to go...". well if you ever hitch hiked up Rte 7 from Lenox to Pittsfield in the Snow....you know what J.T. is talking about......

But Pittsfield???  There wasn't anything to do! They didn't even have a working Movie Theatre back then.
There were beautiful lakes, and one could go ice fishing if you had the mind....or maybe some X country skiing.....but Pittsfield was basically a cold, un-hospitable place to live in the winter........that's how and why I met Paula.

We met in one of these incredibly huge Disco Bars that lined Main Street at the time.....I mean huge......
like the size of a football field!!!  With chairs all along one side and a bar all along the other........maybe two dozen people in the whole place....and loud music....really LOUD!! It was S T A R K !

One Satuday night, in the middle of winter.....I walk into this Disco.... and there's Paula , whom I
recognize from my Chemistry Class at B.C.C.. Paula's got it going on, she's an RN at Pittsfield Hospital,
and has been taken Continuing Education Courses at night. She is a well put together woman. I figure her to be about five years older.......she is a  GOOD LOOKING woman....has a GREAT ASS......and by the way happens to be the perfect height and weight for me! At the time I was super attracted  to this lady......

We bought each other some drinks, danced a little Disco, and then we Hooked-Up for the next 12 weeks......Paula was from Brooklyn and as a I am a Native New Yorker, we naturally got along.......We kept each other warm at night...we shared meals, evenings, weekends, mostly in her Queen Sized Bed, ......and we also kept our relationship to ourselves.......the sex was Great! The company was FUN!........but I wasn't writing home to Mom about Paula.....we weren't thinking long term.......we just knew it was good at the time, better than being alone.......but we were never "magically-in-love", and after all I was going to be finally leaving the Berkshires and heading East for UMASS and the Pioneer Valley  in the fall....

Paula slipped out of my life as effortlessly as she had slipped into it.......and she didn't leave much.......not
even as much as a photo or a memento to remember her by......her image and the times we spent together, ...... have been thoroughly etched in my mind........ .............if not my heart!