Sonia Meyer, Author
fenced-in city garden that seemed to enclose this new world of mine. Writing took a back seat now, but I returned to my love of learning, so close at hand. Meanwhile, the normally peaceful academic town is breaking out into upheaval, protesting students were marching against the war in Vietnam. During lock-up at a Harvard Yard, I found myself barred from the exit along with groups of screaming students. I tried in vain to convince a big Irish cop by the big iron gate, that he was keeping me from breast feeding my baby, and to let me out.
In fact, breast-feeding was another issue under scrutiny in those Cambridge days. Intellectual women of my new circle of new friends and neighbors were on the march to self-fulfill, scarcely into breeding, let alone the feeding by breast. As to myself, I was hooked on creating new life. In fact I needed more space. We bought a beautiful house with land in open valley of Vermont. I started breeding Golden Retrievers, dogs that go well with children. And cats, they needed no encouragement. Then looking at the lush forest that surrounded us and all that open land, I decided what it needed was horses. The first horse was for me, I started riding with a friend who is an Olympic rider of dressage. Together we bought a stallion, the breeding started in earnest now. Soon there were twenty plus horses peacefully grazing but unlike the Gypsy ponies, they were fenced. And then of course there were my children, happily racing through the open valley on ponies of their own. Soon I was on the road, traveling with horses in a shiny van, showing and selling.
In a happy marriage time has a way of flying by, my children started leaving, first to boarding school and on to college. The nest was empty. The time had come to concentrate on writing. My mind turned back to those with whom I had always felt at home - my friends the Gypsies. Their mistrust of the written word, had not only kept their own culture clean of unwanted infiltration, but a secret to outsiders. When I started out, over fifteen years ago, there was little material available in universities or major libraries. However in the stacks of Harvard’s Widener Library I discovered a translation of a novel by a Russian Gypsy, by the name of Matteo Maximoff, about Russian nomadic Gypsies. It was self-published and listed his telephone number in back. I called him, we hit it off. I went to Paris where he lived, and we became close friends.
After that, I slipped back into the lives of Gypsies as easily as a hand into a well worn glove. Before long I traveled to Macedonia, where I was received by a so-called Queen of the Gypsies, and lived with a family in the Gypsy section of Skopje, where some Gypsies were very well off. I crossed the border into Kosovo, where I huddled with them in their beleaguered shanty villages fearing for their lives. When asked what I do, I told them “I am dealer of horses”. With nostalgic smiles, they had been forcibly settled for many generations, they told me, “that is the noblest profession of all, a dealer of horses.” On to Budapest, where I sat down with educated Roma activists discussing how we could further the fight for their people’s human rights. I was welcomed into a deeply religious American tribe.
I often wondered what makes me long for them, when they are not nearby. So before my mother died, I asked, “That grandfather of mine, the dark and skinny one, was he in reality a Gypsy?” She looked at me with her stark eyes, their darkness faded, “I was not born under a wagon,” she whispered. “So I decided long ago to declare myself a Rhinelander. Besides,” she softly added, “as you by now should know, reality is like a rubber band. You can stretch it any way you desire.”
Cont.: Time to Settle Down . . .
I turned my back to life in Europe, and decided to return to the States, to stay this time. Once there my writing intensified. I started a novel, writing in English this time. To get by and get excess to Harvard libraries for research, I took a summer job at that University. During the last days of that job, I met a man, he had a child. It was an unlikely match, but something deep within connected us, that I could not leave behind. I came to realize I loved them both. I overcame my greatest fear of all, although it took three licenses, two expired, we got married on the third. For the first time in my life I felt the calm that comes with happiness settle in. The wild goose of the Romani legend had found her mate. Next came our nest, a pretty house in Cambridge, followed by a cat and a dog, and shortly after by the oldest and most exhilarating miracle of all – our first child, followed immediately by another. While sitting in my cozy house, peacefully nursing my babies, I watched the snow fall onto a porch outside, or spring explode in our
