Many women have disapproved of me. None has done so in a fashion likely to win my gratitude with the exception of Suzan Erem, whom I met during Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and who became my managing editor and friend. Knowing Suzan well, I have no idea whether she will react well to this appreciation. I once told her I was sorry for something I had done or not done and she said that she does not like apologies and I should not appologize again. It would not surprise me if she said, “Joel; I never want you to express your gratitude again.”

Suzan Erem is, to those of you who do not live in the currently freezing hothouse of State College, PA, the managing editor of Voices of Central Pennsylvania. Suzan will be leaving Centre County to move to Iowa City. The exact date of her planned hegira was published on the cover of the November monthly hard copy issue of Voices, in part as a way of forcing the Voices Board to name a successor, but subsequent conversation causes me to suspect that she may leave earlier than June 2011.

Last month, Suzan published the news that Lucy Green will be the next managing editor, succeeding to a publication whose existence over the past two plus years that I have been writing for it, often depended upon Suzan’s effort and Suzan’s efforts alone. Since this is not a blog posting on the future of Voices, but is instead focused on me and how Suzan has helped me, I trust that Lucy will succeed despite the difficulties of replacing someone whom I have come to regard as irreplaceable. The fact that Lucy is the daughter-in-law of Gary Green gives me cause for hope. Gary Green runs Capital Heights Exxon with a commendable blend of autocratic benevolence, and without Lucy’s father-in-law my aging but miraculously still running Buick, with its rotting wheel chair lift in the rear, would be a memory.

Monthly editions of Voices are available for free at the Corner Room and other downtown and county-wide locations. I will not attempt here to describe either Voices or the community it serves other than to say that in a small community like this one being published in Voices is tantamount to being a celebrity.

Although I have tried to write exclusively about issues regarding disabilities and old age, I have occasionally strayed. At the local grocery store a while back, the manager came up to me and said, “Are you The Music Critic?” a question that caused me to do a double take. Then I realized he was referring to my profile of a local band; the girlfriend of the band leader worked as a cashier in the grocery store, and band members had told the manager how much the band hated me. After 20 minutes, the manager said that while he had not read my review, he heard what the band members said about what I had written and he agreed with me and wanted to know whether there were any special vegetarian foods he could order for when my daughters come to visit.

**

As a rule, I find people either like me or hate me. My personality is such that few people who know me (even for 15 minutes) regard me in a neutral fashion. Suzan, in my experience, manages to both like me and hate me at the same time in a behavioral cataclysm that could be compared to the merging of matter and anti-matter.

The best example (the one that brought us together both as editor/writer and friends) concerns my efforts to write a cover story on Medicare medical oxygen regulations—a story so inherently boring that only I who has devoted most of my professional life to boring subjects, could bring it to life with a lot of help from Suzan: http://voicesweb.org/archive/09feb/09feb-cover-editorial-contents.pdf

One thing Suzan taught is never to digress from the point.

My first published work was in elementary school, where I published a monthly newsletter on the activities of the private Jewish orthodox school I attended in Miami Beach, Florida. The most persistent skill I learned from my education, where I was supposed to learn to read Hebrew from the Old Testament, convert it into Aramaic, and compare my interpretation to the teachings of the Talmud, was how to digress--a skill reflected in my writing for the Hebrew Academy Monthly

Over decades I had deluded myself into thinking that the most effective form of communication is one that digresses constantly. My readers and friends have a long history of waiting for me to get to the point, often in vain.

William Faulkner is one of my favorite writers.

Suzan taught me to stick to the point and make it brief. But it was hard work on Suzan’s part.

Let me now digress, recognizing that in doing so this digression (or perhaps not a digression) is certainly a form of expression Suzan clearly disapproves of.

No, I cannot digress yet. Suzan has trained me too well. So, the sequence will be as follows, in reverse chronological order:

1. A demonstration of the virtues Suzan inculcated in me (evidence in no small part of my knowing what Suzan approves and disapproves of).

2. The Sturm und Drang of the oxygen cover story that lead to my reform.

3. The pre-Suzan Joel and how the current Joel is an improvement.

1. In demonstrating the virtues, I plead with the reader to accept what I write on faith. Do not assume that the hallucination I am about to describe is anything other than organic or perhaps even therapeutic.

When I wrote my first column for Voices on disability- and elderly-issues, I had a fantasy that Suzan had metamorphosed into a parrot, sitting on my right shoulder (my arthritically painful shoulder) telepathically communicating with me. My sole act of resistance was in the course of writing the headline. Suzan’s notion of headline writing comes directly from God and requires, at a minimum, a verb. My notions of a headline quickly became—why bother; Suzan will only change it anyway.

From then on, I complied. The hardest part was boiling down my column to 800 words—fewer than three computer printed pages double spaced. [I have now written 551 words in this blog posting and have barely gotten stated; in my column, this is the spot where I have already said what I am going to say, given an example or explanation to illustrate the point, and get ready to leave the reader with a flourishing finish.]

So there the Suzan as parrot is, sitting on my shoulder, telling me I have already wasted 551 words and start again.

I start again. The first word of the first sentence appears on my computer screen. I look at the parrot. The parrot shakes her head knowing what I am going to write and telling me in advance that it will not do. I start again. The parrot does not disapprove. She never approves; she just does not disapprove and 759 words later I am done. When I am done she vanishes.

From October 1990 to February 1992, about half my columns were written with a metamorphosed Suzan on my shoulder. Finally, I was able to internalize what she wanted; the hallucination disappeared but the product was the same.

Eventually, it got to the point where Suzan, the real Suzan Erem, made it clear that it was a waste of her time to read my column. She had, she said, bad writing to fix. One summer I asked whether she had read my column before she published it. She said, “I know it is good. I have better things to do than read your column.” Praise, indeed.

2. Regarding Sturm un Drang, we must return to the oxygen story. The story was published in February, a month after Obama was inaugurated. The story described the policies of the Bush administration to reduce the oxygen supplies for patients who require home medical oxygen and its equipment to live. The Bush administration boasted of its cosmetic Medicare Part B costs (simultaneously raising considerably Part A costs). [It should be noted that President Obama who expressed concern for the elderly and disabled during the election has made things even worse for those of us dependent on oxygen, scooters, power chairs, and other home medical equipment.]

I, of course, wanted to start the oxygen cover story at the beginning, with Lyndon Johnson, the creation of Medicare, recent developments in the oxygen industry, long hours of research on home medical suppliers not only here in Centre County but throughout the county.

At the same time, I wanted to check in with Suzan to see if my approach made sense to her, to discuss different methods of telling the story, to besiege her with mind numbing details about the oxygen industry, its equipment, its regulations….

I sent emails, each thousands of words long, each longer than the story itself, calling between emails, discussing journalistic practices, suggesting that perhaps a Tom Wolfe or Norman Mailer or David Halberstam stylistic approach might work better, gobbling up large quantities of her time while trying to find direction.

Months later, Suzan told a Voices editorial meeting of reporters and editors that anyone working with me should be cautious because Joel nearly destroyed her marriage with my demands on her time, her daughter refused to give her my phone messages because I was such a pest. “If Joel calls you,” she said, “make sure you have plenty of minutes on your cell phone because he will use all of them and bankrupt you.”

By then, of course, I had already reformed.

For the COVER oxygen story, Suzan had insisted, well past deadline, when I had only written twice as many words as required and wanted to write more, that I hand over what I had written, coming over to my apartment door, banging on it, waiting at my door while I printed out what I had written, grabbing it out of my hands, and indicating without words that she planned never to have anything to do with me ever.

Suzan made her usual helpful editorial changes, published the Oxygen story, and eventually toned down (not to zero tolerance of course) her dissatisfaction with me.

We have been mutually respectful colleagues and friends ever since. I rarely call. My emails are relatively short. Our conversations are occasionally tinged with the kind of argument friends have, but the conversations are distinctly cordial.

During periods before and after Sturm un Drang, whenever I have been sick (something I do frequently because in curing me of cancer the physicians devastated my immune system with radiation), Suzan expresses concern and offers to bring me soup.

3. Regarding pre-Suzan: The scene here begins with my exiting Schlow Library with a copy of the American Diabetes Association’s official handbook which had ONE comforting paragraph telling the reader that living with diabetes is complicated, one cannot do everything at once, but that it is important to have FUN—the word FUN jumping off the page.

I had just been discharged from Mt. Nittany Medical Center after a sudden diabetic attack that nearly killed me. As someone who cannot walk and whose income comes from Social Security Disability Insurance, I had recently moved into an independent living facility populated by a large number of people in their 70s, 80s, and 90s after having lived in graduate housing with an unusually large number of young people in the peak of their beauty, health, and optimism for the future.

I looked up, saw the political headquarters across the street, remembered how much fun I had as an election observer in Uganda a while back, decided to turn my old age home into a political empire, wrote an article for Voices on absentee ballots (a subject of tremendous interest to me ever since learning that absentee ballots was how Lyndon Johnson stole the 1948 election for senator from Texas), organized the old people who became my friends, and invited politicians to speak to us (lured to assembly by Elaine Meder-Wilgus’ graciously donated food from Webster’s when Webster’s was on Allen Street—Webster’s and Voices being joined at the hip, as it were; Voices offices are wherever Elaine decides to house Voices offices for free).

What I needed then, so to speak, was a voice of my own. My attempt to get a master’s degree from Penn State failed amid a combination of bad health and a lack of understanding regarding how I needed to behave as a graduate student decades after I had graduated from college in the height of the Columbia 1960s Revolution where aggression, interrupting professors in mid-sentence, condemning academic miserable writing by tenured professors had once been rewarded. Similar behavior was little appreciated at University Park.

Then, a man in his 60s, I was prepared for failure and Suzan gave me access to the necessary key to my success. I know what those of us who are old and disabled in this society require. I know how to express what I know.

I have a debt of gratitude to Suzan than can never be repaid and which she will never fully understand.

Thank you, Suzan.

Joel Solkoff