Rhoda Orme-Johnson

As I am in my eighth decade it is fun to look back and see where I came from and how I got here.

I was raised in Cleveland, Ohio, first East Cleveland, then Cleveland Heights, in predominantly Jewish neighborhoods, and I frequently heard Yiddish spoken at home. When I first ran into anti-semitism in college, I was astounded. What were they thinking? It made no sense to me. I had heard whispers of such things when I was growing up but they didn't seem related to me.

High school was pretty boring, wasn't it? Real life went on afterwards and over the weekends as I prowled around the area with friends, first on foot, and then by car when I got my license at 16. When it came time to apply for college, I had no idea where I stood. We all took tests and I was amazed to hear that I was near the top of my class and a Merit Scholar finalist, and I could pretty much choose where I wanted to go. And where was that? My cousin and his friends recommended Vassar, an elite girls' school in New York. I got interviewed by the Cleveland Vassar Club and got a scholarship. My Dad and my uncle put it all together financially and off I went.

Vassar was a whole new world to me. There were girls who were debutants (a brand new concept) and who stumbled back to the dorm after weekend coming-out parties in New York City. There were girls who had gone to prep schools, not a huge high school like I attended, girls from broken homes, girls with divorced parents, alcoholic girls, girls who liked girls rather than boys, all kinds of girls. And weekends were filled with boys, boys from neighboring colleges, boys from West Point (you had to go there, they weren't allowed out), boys from Harvard and Cornell, places you could travel to and experience.

And then there was school. Oh, yes, studies, writing papers, taking exams. The teacher of my French lit class spoke only French to us and we started out the year reading Le Chanson de Roland, in medieval French. OMG. I had to run fast to keep up. I learned to write, and rewrite. I majored in Math because my father thought it would get me a good job, he who had to work hard to take care of the family and couldn't manage to go to college. I was the first to do so. Doors opened, windows opened, roofs blew off. I was in a new world and loving it. I hated to graduate. I wasn't finished. I didn't want to leave.

I had a brief stint as an engineering assistant as New England T&T. I met my future husband, got married, and we moved off to the DC area so he could attend a PhD program at the University of Maryland. Soon I was in one myself, got a PhD in Comparative Literature, and started an academic life.

I learned TM and off we went to study with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi all around the world. What a life! You can read more about it in my books.