Sue

Sue and Steve in Rockford, Ill., circa 1958

My mother loved to exaggerate.  She was the Renoir, Picasso, and Dali of her art form.  She fibbed, she embellished, she imagined, she went to great lengths in telling her story. That is what I most fear in writing my sister's eulogy: exaggerating the tales of an unbelievable life.

Susan Sara Cowan died at 2:11 pm on Wednesday, October 23, in Tucson, Arizona, after a short illness--or, rather, the culmination of several long illnesses.  She was in hospice care and knew little if anything about her situation.  She had broken both of her hips in the previous month and had had two surgeries, and her body had finally closed down after the second one, after years of fighting epilepsy, schizophrenia, and advancing dementia.

Over the last five decades I have related some of Sue's adventures to friends, but I've never told the whole story.  I will try to minimize the boring details and not exaggerate details that are, in reality, difficult to fathom.  I am sure to leave parts out that I've forgotten, but I still recall most of what she did in her life.

Sue led the most unusual, singular life I've ever known.  See if you don't agree.

Early Years

Sue was a tomboy.  Being only eleven months younger than I, she grew up almost in my shadow.  We were always together, and my friends just accepted her as one of the guys.  She was very good at baseball, basketball, and touch football.  She threw a ball right-handed, but kicked a football left-footed.  Our father had forced her to be right-handed, but her ambidexterity helped her throughout life.  She and I were constantly together.  When we couldn't play outdoors, we created our own games, collected baseball cards, played chess, read childhood mysteries, and tormented our dogs, Buddy and Peppy.

Just a day after Sue turned nine and three weeks before I turned ten, we met our half-brother, Mike, for the first time!  The photo below was taken in our backyard, probably on September 5, 1959.  Mike was nineteen and going to college in Detroit, and we adored him.  Sue and I are wearing our summer baseball uniforms from the Walker Wildcats, the neighborhood team my mother organized.

Sue and I grew up in a fairly poor family, although we always had enough food and clothing.  We shared a room together until our family moved to a larger house in Rockford just before she turned ten, in 1960.  Regardless of where we lived, Sue had very few friends except for my friends.  When I renewed contact with my best friend from childhood, Len Schmeltzer, in 2019, he recalled Sue as being "pretty and feisty."  That was Sue.

An average student, Sue was often criticized by her teachers as "not applying herself"--not trying her best.  My grades in school set too high of a standard for her to match, and perhaps her feistiness came from her wish to be recognized on her own merits.  Of course, none of the kids knew she had learned to play chess at age 5.

Teenage Years

One day Sue and I were playing basketball in our family driveway, when she crouched down as if she were dizzy.  She had to pause for several minutes before we continued playing.  She was about thirteen years old, to my best recollection.  It was her first epileptic seizure--not a grand mal seizure but a rare form of epilepsy where the seizure only occurs inside the brain.  Years later Sue described it as "two great armies having a battle" in her head.

Sue did not tell anyone about the seizures for over three years.  In fact, she had self-diagnosed it by the time she told our mother.  Sue had had bacterial meningitis when she was a baby, and she thought that had led to the epilepsy as a teenager.  Regardless of the cause, Sue's personality changed almost immediately.  She became much more intense and began doing things by herself, not being tempted to follow in my footsteps any longer.  Our parents imagined that she was a rebellious teenager, but I knew there was something else going on with Sue.

My first memory of Sue after the onset of her epilepsy was a day when she came home from school and told us that they'd studied the Declaration of Independence in social studies class.  She then proceeded to recite the entire Declaration, without notes.  It was astounding (and somewhat irritating to my parents).  Sue had a good memory, but not that good.  The epilepsy had changed her brain to be able to recall everything--not a photographic memory, but a complete memory.  It also made her a quieter person, because she couldn't understand her seizures and wanted to hide them.

Over the next five or six years, until our father died when Sue was eighteen, she carved out a pattern of living that stayed with her until she died.  When she found something that interested her, she'd focus on it intently for the joy of personal accomplishment, and ultimately she'd abandon it, when she knew she could master it.  This pattern played out in many ways during her teenage years.  Here's what I recall about those activities:

• When Sue was eleven, our father taught her to play golf.  I had already been playing for a year, and she wanted to join Dad and me on our weekend golf outings.  In the winters we would go bowling with our father, but in the spring that would switch to golf--and we played a lot of golf together.  Without any formal lessons, Sue got really good, and she won two city-wide women's golf tournaments for her age group.  She stopped playing when she was sixteen.

• Sue was about thirteen or fourteen when she got her first guitar as a birthday gift.  She already loved folk music, especially Peter, Paul and Mary albums.  Quickly she taught herself how to play guitar; her finger-picking abilities were extraordinary, and she learned to play most of their songs.  She also played the music of Donovan, Eric Andersen, Phil Ochs, and Judy Collins.  By the time she was sixteen, she began performing in school talent shows and the area coffeehouse, Heather on the Moor.  Her singing was not great, but her guitar-playing was superb.

• Sue always loved to read, but after her first epileptic episodes she began reading the family's encyclopedia.  She'd pick out one of the volumes, open it, and start reading.  This led to a game we started playing with our good friend, Jill Meyer, during summer break.  We composed our own Jeopardy! boards and tailored the format for three people, each giving answers and asking questions.  I'd give a clue from my board, and Sue and Jill would race to answer it.  Then Sue would give a clue from her board, and Jill and I would compete, etc.  We'd play our game in the morning and spend the afternoon creating our boards for the next day.

• When I was sixteen and Sue was fifteen, we wandered into a used bookstore called "The A" and met the owner, Paul Anderson.  "The A" stood for "The Arts."  Paul had already graduated from college and had opened his eclectic bookstore with thousands of his own books.  He always had classical music tapes playing and two or three chessboards set up in the store.  He sold his books and anything legal that a hippie might buy--posters, beads, pipes, incense.  We were beyond captivated and spent many, many hours there with Paul.  Sue and Paul played chess continually, and Sue set aside her encyclopedic reading for serious books.  She tore through Faulkner and Hemingway and Wolfe, Shakespeare and Pinter and Beckett, Plath and Whitman and Eliot.  Paul introduced Sue to Bertrand Russell's writings, and Sue dove into philosophy, devouring the books of Nietzsche and Kant and Schopenhauer.

Sue didn't do anything half-way.  She didn't dabble.  If something interested her, she dove in, much to the detriment of her school studies and social life.  She refused to follow anyone's lead unless it was in something she was totally interested.  That was part of the pattern for the rest of her life.

New York City

Sue never considered going to college.  She said it would slow her down, that she could teach herself much faster than a college professor could.  My father learned that he was terminally ill the week that Sue graduated from high school in 1968, and he spent most of his remaining time in the hospital, so he didn't encourage her to go to college.

Not knowing what she wanted to do, Sue opened her own little bookstore in Rockford the summer of 1968.  Called The Book Nook, it carried only the classics.  She had few customers, which was fine with her, because it gave her more time to read.  Sue closed her bookstore a couple of months after our father died in December, 1968.  She took her two guitars and headed for Greenwich Village in about February, 1969, when she was eighteen years old.

I don't know why Sue chose New York, because she could more easily have chosen Chicago for her folk singing endeavors.  I think she wanted to totally get away from Illinois and live on her own.  She found a tiny apartment on Jane Street in the West Village, and she quickly located all coffeehouses within walking distance.  She began playing at Cafe Feenjon and The Olive Tree Cafe.

She lived over a decade in New York City, interrupted by a month in San Francisco in the late 1970's.  Here's a synopsis of her activities:

• Sue did continue to play her two Martin guitars and even began writing songs.  She played in coffeehouses and busked on the streets for spare change.

• Sue's first job in New York City was working as a taxicab driver.  She liked the work because she could "check out" a cab any time of day or night and drive as long as she wished.  She was initially told to not drive outside Manhattan, but her first fare asked her to drive out to JFK Airport, and he'd give her directions!  She made it to the airport and back within an hour, with two fares and $40 in tips!

• Soon after arriving in Greenwich Village, she met an older man named Yonnel, who ran a chess studio.  Sue dove into studying chess, which came very quickly to her, since she could easily memorize historic chess games.  At one point I asked her how many chess games she had committed to memory, and she said, "Oh, about 10,000."  I asked her to show me some, and she did.  She would quickly move through a game by Capablanca or Tal or Fischer.  (She actually played Bobby Fischer a couple of times in Greenwich Village coffeehouses, always playing to a draw!)  Sue specialized in "speed" chess--playing three- or five-minute games against an opponent and a clock, often for money.  When I visited her in the summer of 1970, we spent a lot of time in chess studios.

• For steady work Sue got a job as a typesetter at a small publishing company.  That allowed her to set her own hours and work at her own speed.  As a manual typesetter she was also allowed to do the work of a copy editor, fixing typos and grammatical errors.  That was right up Sue's alley, because she was already an expert in grammar and word usage.

• Sue did write some songs, which were fair, but her main writing interest was fiction.  She wrote part of a novel, called "The Book," and sent a couple chapters to me.  It was a combination of fiction and philosophy, and it was very well written.  The book posed some very interesting questions.  What would happen if you answered a knock on your door one day, only to find a book left there that was the script of your entire life?  How much of it would you read?  Would you finish it?  The novel confronted those questions.

• Sue was "mugged" multiple times while in New York City, so she decided to take up karate to defend herself.  She chose the Shorei Kan system in the Okinawan Goju-Ryu karate tradition.  Goju-Ryu stands for "hard soft".  Sue achieved second-degree black belt in four years of work.  Her sensei was the founder of Shorei Kan karate, Seikichi Toguchi, shown in this photo:

• Sue was asked by her sensei if she would accompany him to Okinawa to give a demonstration at an international karate exhibition.  While there, she was given private instruction in Okinawan weapons at a Buddhist monastery.  She was also given a special invitation to lead a karate calisthenics class at the U.S. Marine Base.  The Marines thought it would be easy and even laughed at the prospect of a woman leading their calisthenics, until she explained that the first exercise would be fifteen push-ups done on fingertips, each push-up four minutes long.  She told me the last Marine dropped out after about twenty minutes, and she alone finished the hour.  Everyone paid attention to her after that. 

• When Sue returned to New York from Okinawa, she concentrated on Okinawan weapons kata (exercises).  There were six weapons (bo, tonfa, sai, kama, nunchacku, and one other I don't recall), and she became a black belt in each one.  Okinawan weapons were derived from old farm implements.  She would practice in Washington Square Park, and I would watch her when I visited.  In fact, lots of people watched her run through her exercises, and only one person attempted to disarm her, thinking she was only for show.  She bonked him hard on the shoulder, and he ran off.  Below are photos of Sue practicing three different types of weapons—tonfa, sai, and bo.

• As Sue got better and better in karate and weapons, she decided to offer private instruction to students.  All sessions were done in Washington Square Park, where you could find people playing guitars, playing chess, doing drug deals, or enjoying a comfy park bench.  Here's the business card that Sue had made to advertise her services:

• In the mid-1970's, Sue determined that she needed more physical exercise, so she began running long distances.  She'd do loops around Washington Square Park's eight square blocks, often running six or eight miles.  She did this almost every day.

• Studying was always Sue's main focus.  Between her chess and karate phases, she mostly stayed in her tiny apartment and read books.  On one visit, I noticed that friends of hers would bring food and books, so she didn't have to leave her apartment.  She taught herself enough to read books "in their original form," which meant that she could read in Hebrew, Aramaic, and German, in addition to English.  At her most intense period of studying, she was reading five books a day!  I witnessed that this was pretty easy for her.  During this phase in her life, she told me that studying was the only thing that ever gave her true enjoyment in life--and she could be studying anything.
  

• For light recreation, Sue earned some extra money by composing chess problems for various magazines.  The harder the chess problem, when verified by masters, the more money she'd make.  She'd typically do the "White mates in three moves" problems, but occasionally she'd do a "White mates in four moves" gem.  A couple times she showed me her all-time favorite chess problem done by someone else--"White mates in eight moves!"

Of the several times I visited Sue in New York, she always lived alone in a small apartment.  She was primarily asocial; she didn't have time for other people, although she enjoyed my occasional visits.  We would typically talk for several hours without a break.  We might talk about mathematical puzzles, chess problems, classical music, our parents and childhood memories, her noisy neighbors.  All we needed was some coffee and floor space to weave a conversation that lasted all afternoon or evening.

When I think of my visits and our marathon chats, the photo below is iconic for many reasons.  Sue smoked her entire life, from when she was 18, and her drink of choice, if not coffee, was Pepsi.  Her only source of entertainment was a radio and cassette player.  The radio was usually tuned to the local classical music station, and it played twenty-four hours a day!  (Not surprisingly, her favorite composer was Mahler, who led an angst-filled life.)  Also, while in New York City, she kept her Okinawan weapons mounted on the wall of her room and within easy reach.  She always slept on the floor or on a very thin futon cushion.  This is Sue at her most relaxed, "I'm at home" pose.

Jerusalem

In the early 1980's, Sue became disenchanted with Greenwich Village.  Even for Sue, it had become too dangerous and toxic.  Her studies had evolved from novels and philosophy to the next logical area--religions.  She and I had grown up in the Reform Jewish faith, although neither one of us had been devoted to it.  She did a cursory study of Buddhism and Hinduism, but what really captured her was Orthodox Judaism.

Before making the decision to move to Israel, Sue became a practicing Orthodox Jew.  She ate only kosher food and did morning prayers, using the Tefillin boxes and straps to wrap her head and arm.  We never discussed her return to Judaism, although I thought it was more of an intellectual journey than a religious one.  Sue bristled at the suggestion that anyone or anything could determine her life path; she attacked something purely from the joy and challenge it brought her.

Since Sue always had very few possessions, explained by her as "traveling light" in life, moving to another country was not a big deal.  She already had a passport from travels to Europe and Okinawa.  She sold her guitars and weapons, gave away her sparse furniture and bedding, packed her few clothes, and got on a plane for Tel Aviv.  Her plan was to find a small apartment in Jerusalem and to look for a part-time job.  I believe she traveled with a friend, who stayed for a week or two before returning to New York.  Below is a photo of Sue when she arrived in Tel Aviv's airport.

 

For the most part, Sue communicated "newsy" letters with our mother, but I heard very little from her while she was in Jerusalem.  [I may add to this blog when I find letters my mother saved from Sue's travels.]  What I know about Sue's three- or four-year stay in Jerusalem, which I found out from her after her return, were the following remarkable points:

• Sue pursued her interest in Judaism and, in particular, Orthodox Jewish law, as avidly as she had pursued every other endeavor in her life.  She studied the Talmud especially, which is written in Hebrew and Aramaic.  The Talmud is the primary source of Jewish religious law and practices.  She spoke mostly Hebrew and Yiddish in Jerusalem, with some Arabic mixed in.  She began to dream in Hebrew, she said, which was her criterion for really knowing a language.  Most remarkably, she became such an authority on Jewish law that she often had rabbis come to consult her interpretations of the Talmud.  This was technically forbidden at the time, because women could not be Orthodox rabbis or scholars.  Sue didn't care about rules!

• Because she couldn't find the same degree of intellectual stimulation in other endeavors as she had found in New York City, on a whim she began to study thermonuclear physics!  I asked her why she chose that, and she said she was bored and needed something completely new to study.  After six weeks, according to her story, she went to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, one of the top-ranked research universities in the world, to be assessed.  They evaluated her knowledge and told her that she was ready to begin her PhD thesis.  That was Sue's normal pace in acquiring knowledge.

• Sue explored Jerusalem thoroughly and eventually met members of the Jewish Defense League (JDL), which is a radical pro-Israeli group.  She did not like what they stood for, nor did she join them, but she learned much about them.  She did not like the violence they proposed for solving problems; her mastery of Shorei Kan karate was fundamentally based on the concepts of non-violence.

Sue moved back to New York City a few years after she'd left.  She confided in me that the main reason was the amount of anti-Semitism she found in Israel.  It exceeded any other place she had visited.  Jews of one sect hated Jews of another, and there were dozens of neighborhoods and sects.  It so disillusioned her that she ended her study of Jewish law and daily Orthodox practices.  She would rather put up with the dangers of Greenwich Village.

Tucson

In the mid-1980's, Sue's epilepsy got worse, turning into grand mal seizures, and she was forced to take medication for the first time.  She'd always resisted taking medication, because the side-effects would dull her mind.  She would no longer be able to learn disciplines at a fast clip, at least not as fast as she'd like to.  After she'd returned to New York City for a short time, she decided to move to Tucson, Arizona, because the medical center there was known for its epilepsy research.

It was in the early 1990's when I visited her in Tucson to find out her situation.  The place where she lived was safe and secure, but I was shocked at all the Post-it notes she had placed on her cinder-block walls.  She explained that her short-term memory was really damaged, and she had created a system for handling her memory issues.  She kept copious notes and a diary for everything, and she would often consult them to remember something.

Sue was also occasionally delusional on those visits, telling me things that I knew had not happened.  It made me question whether things she'd told me in the past were really true, but I also had proof that they were, mostly in photographs, letters, and statements from other people.  That was the thing about Sue--the things that happened in her life were so fantastic that one could easily think they were fantasy.  Unintentionally, I had already substantiated most of what she'd told me.

When she reached Tucson, her life became more "normal".  She wasn't a stranger in a strange land, as the book title states.  She had met a very odd fellow while playing her guitar at her "station" on a Tucson street, and he helped her get settled in Tucson.  He took this photo of her.

Sue was not like other street musicians; she had transposed several Bach pieces for her guitar, and she would play them at his request.  He turned out to be an attorney, and he helped Sue find safe places to live.  Although she didn't like the hot summers, Sue did like Tucson very much.  She knew the bus routes, spent a lot of time at the University of Arizona main library, and found people to play chess with, including the attorney.  People were relatively sane, compared with New York City.

One day Sue got angry at her apartment manager and started swearing at him.  She was promptly told to vacate, and so the attorney found her another place to live.  This studio apartment was much more convenient for Sue, because it was next door to a grocery store and on a major bus line.  Here are a couple photos in her studio.

Although her seizures really limited what she could do in her life, she did partake in a couple of truly remarkable activities.

• Sue decided to learn to knit, which led to her extensive interest in crocheting.  She worked non-stop on each new project, and soon she decided that the common stitches were boring, so she began to develop her own.  She showed me many formulae that she had devised for her own stitches, and she sent me a couple of her larger pieces.  Below is a photo of some of her smaller projects.  You can see the complexity in the stitches she developed.
  

• For the last ten or fifteen years of her life, Sue returned to studying philosophy and linguistics on her own.  She had once been interested in creating her own language but decided to focus on several existing languages.  She and I had long amused each other by trading linguistic and language puzzles we came across.  (She gave me this puzzle first:  Name a set of homonyms in which there are four words.  Answer:  Right, write, rite, and wright.  I later came up with a second set of words: Raise, rays, raze, and res.)  Sue began to study the only linguistics philosopher who challenged her--Ludwig Wittgenstein.  She read dozens of books and made hundreds of pages of notes on Wittgenstein--probably all of them unintelligible to anyone except her.

Last Years

In the last three or four years of her life, Sue declined very quickly.  My wife, Suzanne, did an incredible amount of work for Sue, providing her with food, transportation, doctor appointments, and cell phone.  Sue was on Social Security Disability from about 2000, and I set up a bill-paying service for her that gave her a weekly “allowance”.  The various medical agencies in the Tucson area were excellent, and finally one agency stepped in and obtained housing for Sue in an assisted living facility.  Unfortunately, in that moving process, all of Sue’s notes, diaries, and small crochet items were lost somehow.

In our last few visits, Sue and I mostly enjoyed reminiscing about our childhood.  She remembered those years quite well.  She remembered less well her years in New York City and Jerusalem.  I would bring up a particular incident that she'd once told me about, and occasionally she'd recall it.  Then something would spark in her and she'd suddenly recite a very long poem or demonstrate one of her chess compositions.

Sue was a remarkable person for her personal accomplishments, but she was never interested in applying her brilliance to significantly help other people or contribute to the world.  She was never interested in marriage or having children, nor was she interested in academia or earning a degree.  She had no interest in the business world or working a nine-to-five job.  She earned money seven different ways in her life, as a bookseller, taxi driver, print typesetter, club and street guitar player, speed chess master, karate instructor, and Jewish law consultant.

Sue did have an odd view of the world.  Seldom did she really know what was happening outside her own existence, nor did it ever occur to her to go out of her way to help others, not out of meanness, but out of not understanding the worth and benefit of such actions.  I think of one particular anecdote....

At one time she decided, while in New York City, to take a two-session class to learn CPR and the Heimlich Maneuver, in case she might ever see someone "choking in a restaurant or dying on the street."  When she got to the first session, they asked for her $40 fee for the class, and she was totally stunned.  She honestly thought they'd be paying her, because she would then be able to help other people.  Immediately she walked out in a state of complete indignation.  When she told me that story, she was still indignant.  That was Sue.

I still have old letters, many photos, and two or three afghans that Sue crocheted, and I still have a thousand memories.  One of my favorites is a story I've told to many people.

In about 1972, Sue and I both decided to surprise my mother for her birthday without telling each other.  She flew in from New York City, and I drove up from Champaign-Urbana to Rockford.  We arrived within the same hour and were delighted to see each other as well as our mother.  After dinner and a couple hours of chatting, our mother went off to bed, and Sue and I continued talking.  This is how the conversation went:

Steve:   Sue, I have to tell you about this incredible dream I had this morning.
   Sue:   You dreamed about when you were in kindergarten and built little toy ships--and how ironic it is that you went on to compose The Ship.  [It was exactly what I had dreamed!]
Steve:   How did you...how did you know that?
   Sue:   Oh, that was pretty easy.  You've been thinking about it all night.

What could explain the event but that she had read my mind?  The dream had been especially vivid.  I had not consciously thought about kindergarten for many years, and I had completely forgotten about the little toy ships I built in that basement classroom, before I had the dream.  And, I had not had the chance to tell anyone about the dream, since it had only happened that morning, before I drove 185 miles to see my mother.

Sue proceeded to tell me about a group she was part of in Greenwich Village.  They would get together every week and practice reading each other's mind, and she'd become good at it!  As the weekend progressed, she read my mind a couple other times, much to my amusement.

Sue was the epitome of "practice makes perfect" throughout most of her life, whether it was guitar-playing, chess, martial arts, linguistics, language, crocheting, or mind-reading .  I guess that's how I'll remember her.