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From Michigan to N.Y.: A New Job, a New Life
MARY MAGDALENE ROBERTS was an interior designer with a big house in a Detroit suburb and three grown children. Her friends were starting to retire and move to Florida. But that didn't appeal to her. Instead, she answered an advertisement for the New York City Teaching Fellows, which takes people from a variety of careers and puts them in classrooms, while paying for them to get their master's degrees in education. Ms. Roberts, 60, was accepted in the program, and last September began teaching emotionally disturbed children at a middle school in the Bronx. For about nine months, while she was waiting for her house to sell so she could buy an apartment in Manhattan, she was living with Patricia Dugan, a broker at Corcoran. Ms. Dugan had heard about Ms. Roberts through another Corcoran broker, Katherine Slattery, who had connected with Ms. Roberts through a mutual friend and was helping her find a place. So Ms. Dugan offered Ms. Roberts the opportunity to share her home. The time stretched out, however, and it took longer than anticipated to sell the house, in Bloomfield Hills. What seemed likely to be a three-month stay with Ms. Dugan grew and grew. "I lived in her apartment with just my computer and my clothes," Ms. Roberts said. Finally, though, in December, the house sold and Ms. Roberts bought a one-bedroom apartment in a white brick building at 69th Street and Third Avenue for $325,000. She recently moved in, filling the apartment with objects she has culled from her decades-long passion for beautiful things. On one wall, for instance, is a drawing by Alexander Calder, and although it's not a significant one, she said, she just enjoys having his signature in the room. Next to it is a photograph of a tree in her Michigan backyard that she used as the invitation to her farewell party. And nearby is an elaborately painted radio cabinet that came from her mother's home in Detroit. Some of what she had, of course, had to be sold or given away, because it couldn't fit in her new small space. Still, she acts like someone on vacation, excited by her new surroundings and a schedule that sounds grueling but is apparently satisfying. All day, she teaches children who are unable to function in regular classrooms. "They can't sit in regular seats, or they talk out," she said. "Often they are very smart." In the evening, she attends classes at City College, where she is getting her master's in special education. She has no regrets about the world she decided to leave. Ms. Roberts, who is divorced, said that living as a single person in Bloomfield Hills for 17 of the 26 years she spent there was "not real comfortable." SHE found the homogeneity frustrating as well. "Everyone dressed alike where I was," she said. "Everything was so predictable and orderly. I had to work hard to make it exciting." Eventually, it was just time to move on. "The town was changing," she said. "My peers were leaving." Occasionally, she hears from old friends about sleeping problems or memory problems, but she's not having problems like that. "My memory has improved," she said, because she is tackling so many new things and reading texts for graduate school. "It's such a good exercise." She likes walking down her leafy new street and hearing the sounds of birds. In the evenings, after a day of working in the South Bronx, she sometimes sits on one of the two slipper chairs in the corner window of her bedroom and has a drink, looking toward the greenery she is sure is Central Park. One of her two daughters lives in New York, but the daughter wasn't the reason Ms. Roberts moved to the city. "I have no need to rely on her," she said. "It's like whipped cream when we get together." Her children are a satisfaction, but they have their own lives. "They are all married, and they all have medical insurance," she said. "What else could a mother ask for." In September, when she starts teaching again, she may be in a different setting. "I have asked to teach the physically impaired next year," she said. Deformities, she said, do not bother her, and yet she knows that they are difficult and depressing for some people. She figures she ought to make use of the fact that she doesn't react as others do. "It's a gift," she said. The terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 did nothing to deter her from the idea of making a home in New York. "It cemented me here even more," she said. "I have a job to do."FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Global Action on Aging distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107. 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