Patricia A Mills Koschara

As we enter double doors, we climb a flight of wide stairs to the beginning of a very long hallway with very shiny wooden floors. When we walk we can hear our footsteps and everyone else’s, too. We are in a stream of mothers and children. In a small yellow room on our left as we proceed down the hall is the children’s library with low bookshelves and round tables. The next room is a larger, blue room with tall bookshelves, regular size tables and chairs. My mother tells me it is the library used by the high school students. We pass the Principal’s office where we came before to register. Mr. Furlong, the principal is standing in the door watching as we parade by. He is a tall man with dark curly hair and dark intense eyes in a narrow face. He smiles. The mothers say hello, but they are not smiling. They are holding on till the last minute. . . .

I sit down at the table in the kid size chairs and look at the faces of the others. We say nothing. They look back at me and at each other. We wait. I guess a box in the corner of the room with all color blocks is for boys to build things. On a small table I see a metal tea set like mine. I think I might be able to have a real tea party with a real friend. I notice a girl with long braids and eyeglasses sitting at another table, and a boy is pulling on one of her braids. She begins to cry and I feel sorry for her. I’m glad I don’t have braids and will remember to ask my mother if I can wear my hair different so they won’t get pulled. My mother still stands at the door looking in at us. She waves good-bye and I wave back and try to smile but my mouth is still. She waves again, turns, and disappears.
Suddenly, I am a stranger among strangers in a strange place. I am lost. Tears begin to well in my eyes and I think I may cry except two children are crying already and I promised I wouldn’t be a baby. I use my sleeve to carefully blot my eyes and remember I’m in kindergarten now, and I’m here to make friends, have fun and learn. I’m thinking I would like to be in my yard right now, making mud pies or helping my mother in the garden. I am about to cry when I see someone I know across the room at the opposite table – my friend from Sunday school, Betty Sprague. I smile as our eyes meet and she smiles back. She is sitting next to a blonde girl who I also recognize from the same Sunday school class. Joan Sharp. Betty tells Joan to look at me and Joan looks over and smiles and we wave to each other. I have two friends already.

“I love the picture we have of our second grade class because I stood tall and proud and smiled my heart out. That was before life brought me to my knees and I really enjoy seeing myself in that image.” The happy years of Pat’s girlhood in Sea Cliff making mud pies and playing with friends crashed suddenly with her mother’s death when she was twelve and her sister Janet fifteen. Her father handed Janet over to an older brother in California and Pat to an older sister who lived with her husband in an apartment at the bottom of 12th Ave. in Sea Cliff.

Pat says of the following years in school that she was not very obvious, "I just was." But that is not how others in the class thought of her. She had made fast friends with many including Sandi Freedman. “I loved playing the piano but there was no means for lessons in my family. She lived on Cromwell Place, as I recall and whenever she had piano lessons, I would watch and go home and practice. I question who's lessons her parents were paying for. When I ate over at Sandy's, they served Hebrew National hotdogs and to me, they were the best hotdogs I ever had.”

She also remembers the guys who sat on the parking lot railing on Sea Cliff Avenue. “We always had to bolster ourselves to walk by, even across the street. It was embarrassing and yet flattering at the same time.” One of her admirers was Dave Schweers who says he “didn't realize she was beautiful till she started dating Steve Kalakoc.” Steve was the only boy she was allowed to be with. “My sister was very, very strict, and was going to make sure I didn't ‘look for love in the wrong places.’ In order to go out, I had all sorts of rules and regulations. Everyone and anyone was criticized for whatever reason, which made it easier to give in and do nothing. Fortunately, Steve was a friend and he admired me a lot. She somehow trusted him. I was allowed to associate with him (he was safe).”

When her sister’s husband moved them to a home in Bethpage in our sophomore year, Pat found herself working hard to adjust to the new school that considered her a suspicious city stranger. She also found herself in great demand at home where her sister was “busy having babies.” Pat decided to chart her own course. “I got a job in a dime store called Neisner's (to pay my room and board, and get away from constant baby-sitting.” When in March her sister said she had to move with them to California, Pat had just turned eighteen and decided to stay put. “I desperately wanted to get to college, even if it was Farmingdale Agricultural and Technical school to be a dental hygienist.” She took a room and graduated, but even her boyfriend Steve failed to attend when his car broke down. “I graduated with NOBODY even there to clap for me. To this day, I clap for EVERYONE when I attend a graduation.”

Pat and Steve saw marriage as a good fit for their situation. But she never did get her college diploma. They moved with Steve’s Air Force posting, then back on Long Island Pat worked from ’61-7 as a secretary at Grumman’s. Looking back she says, “It was almost the only way out for each of us from our "unhappy" (or lack of) home life. My father was not pleased I was dating a Russian, but he wouldn't have been pleased with anyone his daughter's dated.” Pat and Steve adopted two children, Lisa and Steve, and after they had moved to Florida Pat gave birth to their son Greg. Four years later their seventeen-year marriage ended in divorce. Pat and the three kids returned to New York. Her former boss at Grumman, Jim Koschara, had taken on the renovation of a family chicken farm in Suffolk County and suggested she join him in that enterprise. They married a year later, adding Jim’s son to her three children. They found themselves working around the clock seven days a week raising 16,500 chickens in the middle of high rise developments. In 1978 they bought 68 acres near Nellysford, Virginia where they built a house, airstrip and hangar. The airstrip caused a bitter battle in the community, and Pat said she never felt welcome there.

When the buyer of their LI farm defaulted on the mortgage, they changed plans and opened a Southern States hardware store in town to make ends meet. With two other investors they also built a six store shopping center that included their store. When they sold out in ’86 Pat went to work in the Medical Photography department at UVA and Jim flew a tax service from their airstrip to Washington, ferrying executives who had second homes in the Wintergreen ski area. When the children had grown and left home Pat and Jim built a new log home on their land, but in 1995 their marriage failed. Pat’s self-confidence plummeted, but again, she took charge and began climbing out of the hole. Part of it was climbing around the local mountains with a young friend. One day after a many hours of boulder hopping up Old Rag they reached the top. Pat looked around and felt sure not many fifty-five year old women had made it.

Soon Pat packed up everything in a rental truck and moved to southern California for a change of scenery and the warmer weather. She took a job as Program Assistant on a National Institute of Health study of Statins (Lipitor, Zocor, etc). Five years later she wrote, “I'm 61 years old, but feel better than when I was at 40. I somehow lost my identity (which is common for women our age) and gave it all away. . . .” But she also had thought long and hard about the course of her life from her mother’s death to her divorce, and she came to understand it in new ways. “I'm ever so grateful for the enlightenment, regardless of my age. Most people never find that in a lifetime. So... I, too, feel I have loved and lost, but... found myself in the struggle.”

The story does not end with the loss, however. After a knee replacement a few years ago Jim came to visit and talk. They decided to remarry and on Thanksgiving 2008 in Maryville, TN where Jim had built a home for their new life, they said Thanksgiving with their four children and their grandchildren gathered around them.