Posted by Marge Nelson on January 04, 2001 at 21:48:59 from 64.12.106.29 :
IN THE TIME OF THE REVOLUTION, as comrades and lovers and finally good friends, we started a conversation which continued up until the present. Two lonely middle aged people coming out of long marriages, Ed and I were so many things to each other: scholars, activists, and passionate radicals who dreamed that it was possible to create a better world. We shared guilt over children and failed marriages, while I comforted Ed over Nita’s illness and death. I was a housewife from Akron Ohio, a feminist who challenged his assumptions about women, while he challenged my silences, my fears of speaking out, my own assumptions about men. We were sponges for each other, soaking up what we needed to grow, to create, to go on living. In those days, when I was reading Emma Goldman, he talked about the anarchists, and admired them. “ Seize the moment, let the people speak !” In warm weather, we’d drive out to Zoar Valley or one of the beautiful parks where we’d make love in the meadows and swim naked in the streams or lakes, building roaring fires at night to roast a chicken, drink wine, make more love and always, always talking, laughing, arguing..
We struggled with everything: late nights out walking or sitting in a tavern with a pitcher of beer talking, laughing, dreaming.. We found the best in each other, and reflected that back. When my children came to Buffalo to visit me, I took them over to Ed’s “hippy house” to introduce them to a life they’d never seen with me in the suburbs of Akron, Ohio.
It was Ed who encouraged me to go to Washington, D.C. to meet Alice Paul and Mabel Vernon, the old militant suffragists, and when I was invited to spend the year there lobbying with the Woman’s Party for the Equal Rights Amendment and researching their archives for my dissertation, Ed became my primary supporter. He loved the stories about those old radicals and continued urging me to publish my book about them. It was during that year, 1970-71, that he discovered his delight in working at the Library of Congress; a love that led to his participation in the sit ins there.
Ed helped me apply for my first big teaching job at Antioch in Yellow Springs-teaching women’s studies. He often came to visit me there, taking part in the resistance of our local anti-war activism. He and I were thrown out of Wright Patterson Air Base together. When the sociologists met in Denver in 1971, and our feminist group demonstrated against sexism in the profession, it was Ed who stood by urging us to take our demonstration onto the floor of the assembled group interrupting the new president’s speech. I led the demo carrying a 7 foot red white and blue penis. Ed was delighted.
During the long years of Reagan, Bush, Ed sent me his leaflets, his plans to create a new and more alive, and relevant sociology.
It was Ed who introduced me to parapsychology. Nothing was too far out for his hungry mind. A few nights ago, in the middle of the night, I awoke feeling a great restlessness in the air around me. I called out, Ed? Ed? Although I couldn’t see him, I felt his presence so powerfully that I talked to him for hours. I believe that we will continue the conversation for the rest of time. He was a unique and extraordinary man. I feel blessed to have known him.