Martha, the Pal (not Pol)

Martha and I were best pals at Williams College and have remained close through the years.

I owe Martha much. She taught me how to make the best roast turkey ever (rub under and over the skin with olive oil and stud with many many cloves of garlic). As a Jewish girl from the New York suburbs, I needed Martha to teach me what a hair shirt is; freshman year she had me believing that she wore one through Lent. (Another mutual lifelong friend, who met Martha in an interstate high school debate competition, tells of being received strangely by a number of Martha’s high school classmates: Martha had them believing that the friend was entering the convent.)

Whether we would meet in the Berkshires (usually staying at the Wagon Wheel in Lenox, where our annual summer picture was taken next to Trigger, our name for the rather weather-beaten horse statue in front) or in the Boston area, where no visit was complete without Sunday breakfast at Linda Mae’s, it felt as though little time had elapsed since our last visit together.

Being friends for more than 38 years means a lot of gifts have passed between us. (This is not a matter for the Election Commission!) I think that my (and Martha’s) favorite gifts to her have been:

• the rather scruffy rubber chicken that, like Martha and me, was proclaiming itself “still a spring chicken”
• the Eleanor Roosevelt finger puppet, to remind her of one of her role models, and
• any number of representations of giraffes, to add to her vast collection. I particularly like the child’s watch with a giraffe on the face and the band, which Martha told me she has worn as Middlesex DA and as AG when children come to visit her, “though not when [she] was negotiating with insurance companies about the Big Dig.” Why the giraffe collection? Because giraffes stick their necks out, a lesson she always imparts to those visiting kids and emulates daily in a life dedicated to public service.