Freedom

Looking back, maybe that's as free as things get, Doris said, in between the clicks of the oxygen being pushed in syncopated puffs, into her lungs.  She looked out the window, perhaps remembering the feel of being behind the wheel of her convertible Oldsmobile, as she cruised south on Lake Shore Drive from Hyde Park, past the Museum of Science and Industry, past the South Shore Country Club, past Calumet City, past anything resembling the expectations of post war women.

She was born ahead of her time, choosing career and the single life over the silently dictated destiny of wife and mother.  With her brother at war, forcing her mother to help Father in the shoe repair shop on 57th and Woodlawn, her three sisters stayed home to do the cooking and cleaning.

This allowed Doris, who was always eager to amass large sums of money, to learn bookkeeping skills that led to her handling the finances of the shoe repair shop and then to the private finances of her parents, much to the dismay of her leery sisters.

Once she mastered her skills on her family, she headed to the banks, where Wally Mead became her banking guru and most likely, her first paramour.  With her earned monies, she bought a shiny black Schwinn bicycle and in her fearless, carefree and venturesome way, rode over a large curb one afternoon, with little sister in tow, and crashed head first into a brick wall half a block from her home.

Two weeks later, she awoke after doctors tapped her spine to drain the fluid that was swelling her head to the size of a small watermelon.  Her reflexes now slower, her joie de vie reigned in by family and doctors, her fears tapped, she resigned herself to the life she most dreaded, married the first man who asked and fifty-five years, four children and one miscarriage later, her beloved coupe de ville sold, living within the confines of five floors of a retirement home, she sits up in bed, a chronic lung disease slowly taking her breath away, and looks out the window at her freedom driving away, seventy-five miles per hour.