A Tribute to Dorothy "Dot" Connors

As women, we are confused. When "sheroes" come to mind, it's hard to capture them, quantify them, and collect them. They are made up of so many small acts in the play, bit parts, fragments of language, a spoken word here, and a resolution there. Many of us are sheroes. But there are standouts. These are the ones who have taken life by the tail - who have thrust themselves into their own private adventures, unscathed by social convention, managing feats of sheer magnificence. These are women whose will is greater than circumstance, who cannot be thrown off their chosen course.

My Shero

How could I walk up a winding drive, into a house in the woods and see a woman standing there that was so brave, so strong-willed, so centered in herself and so funny that she will remain with me forever? What luck was with me that day, the day I met Dorothy?

"Dot" was bold, a homebody and an adventure junkie. She consistently and clearly defined herself, although she was married for more than 30 years. Gender was a small thing in her book. What mattered were her principles. And, good grief, she could do a man's work anyway. From her kitchen table, she went after what she believed in, with a persistence and diligence that was astounding. For many years she thought globally, and acted locally. She was an absolutist, an iconoclast in the best sense. Her judgment of people was nearly impeccable. She had an irrepressible sense of justice, and voiced strong opinions. Her spectacular eye for written detail could have made her a renowned lawyer. Instead she judged high-class horse shows. Not an easy task.

But most things happened from her kitchen table. You see, Dorothy was a modern version of a hermit. She didn't visit me. Instead, she waited patiently for my call. When I moved across country, that was it. No new best friends for her (I'd never imagined I could be irreplaceable). Loyalty was in her blood. Want fresh quail's eggs on a Saturday morning? Hers was the house to visit. Need a shoulder to cry on? She'd have a few profound words of wisdom. She taught school in a nearby town. She could terrify with a just a few well chosen words in her cool voice. She could, and did, scare the be-jeezus out of grown men who crossed her sense of justice. But if she chose you, her heart was enormous. With a crisp word or two, you knew you were at home. Her children and her animals were all her babies, everyone special. She was a New Englander to the core.

That was the Dot I met.

But, like all of us, she had her fears and her idiosyncrasies. Housework was barely on her list. Grocery shopping - forget it. She hated crowds and cities. Agoraphobia had her in its grip. She "shopped" in her mother's cupboards, a couple of miles away. Finally, she worked up to going grocery shopping at the local store after 10 p.m. She lived just north of Boston. She never went into the city. I couldn't convince her. All those wonderful things we couldn't do. So we sat by the kitchen table, and talked. I watched her muck out the stall of her Morgan. We'd take out maps and wish all the places we wanted to visit. We'd look at the stars through her telescope.

She had killingly flat dry humor, with a twinkle in her eye. I'd laugh over the drollest things, or the deadpan funny things. One day she killed a rooster that was abusing the hens, their backs were deep cuts. We made sick jokes as we plucked his feathers and cooked him into stew. Another night we told alien stories, and saw strange blinking lights in the night sky. After a harrowing hour tracking the lights by car, they seemed to dip right toward us. I was so nervous I was a wreck, reacting to the many science fiction shows of my childhood. She, of course, was the brave one. We laughed ourselves silly when we learned it was a blimp hovering over a high school football game.

Shero Gifts

Dorothy went on to bigger challenges. She found the Iditarod, the great dog sled race in Alaska. For this, she challenged herself and won. She conquered her fear of flying, of crowds, and yes, even of Boston itself. She went alone to Alaska, knowing no one, and made a winter life for herself there. Year after year, she returned, melding her love of children and animals into that dog sled race. It embodied her belief in the beyond, in the strength of challenge, in the beauty of math and science and precision, in wonderment, and in the vastness of a cold land and a warm people. Already an indomitable woman, she spent a month or more each winter in Alaska, bound up in Alaskan furs and big mitts.

She put her teaching job on the line, many times, to make the annual pilgrimage. She allowed herself the ability to say, "Fire me, if you must." They folded. She developed a wonderful math and science curriculum with the Iditarod at its core. Schools and teachers followed across the U.S. She worked with a volunteer force of hundreds, scored the sled races, and directed internet responses from the Iditarod to a far-flung web audience. She worked herself into ever greater positions of responsibility, just as she had in the horse show arena.

Later, she brought her mother and daughter to Alaska, to travel in small planes across the state, meeting her scattered friends. They saw the glaciers from something much better, she quipped, than a cruise boat. Her husband, son, and soon to be daughter-in-law followed. She wanted them to share the joy she'd found. And in all of that, she made the physically impossible, possible.

For Dorothy went to Alaska with her extraordinary courage. Self-contained, confident, she embodied the sturdy, rocky New England soil. Dorothy was solid, but spirited. With a dangerously low white blood cell count, she traveled from her 2nd grade classroom in Massachusetts to the Iditarod in Alaska and back, for 5 years. She held the cancer at bay, many times, until she got home, sometimes going directly into the hospital upon arrival in Boston. She withstood doctor's warnings, and ill health. Instead, she grew strength from her cancer like a mighty mast, her Yankee roots setting sail into the headwinds. The Alaskan dogsled ride became a symbol for her, over treacherous conditions, failing weather, hardship. Into the sunlight, she drove on - and gloried in the trip. With laughter, she claimed that voyage. When it would have been so much easier, so much more expected - to withhold.

At last she said to me, she wished she had spent more time in Boston. There were so many things to see. She regretted all the good food she hadn't eaten. So I brought her a spiffy Asian take-out dish, an authentic meal. She loved it.

I had my own regrets. I wished I'd gone to Alaska with her, where she'd invited me so many times. Even so, we laughed in those final weeks. Her daughter, her son, and family carried on with humorous family traditions, to lighten our load.

Dorothy died of ovarian cancer at 53. The small New England church was overflowing at her funeral. Many stood outside. A special eulogy was posted on the Iditarod website. Till her final days, calls came incessantly from Alaska, loving her.

"She was a super person. We still think about her at Iditarod time, and miss her."  - Joanne Potts, Race Director, Iditarod Trail Dog Sled Race

The Shero Pathway

We all strive to become sheroes, in our own way. It's not the easy path. Seeking to overcome our interior and exterior limitations, we angle our fingers to grasp stolen moments of self, fishing for our centers. Striving for the best of the feminist notion, we collect idioms of "womanliness." In the great gray matters of our brains, we struggle with emancipation, overt proclamation. Scaling the thin edge between what is appropriate and what is humane. Ultimately, we live in the spirit world of ourselves, and that's where we have to make a final accounting. We have to make things right in our own heads.

That is the foremost challenge. Somewhere, deep inside, is the sense of justice, fair play, the game being open to all - rules of inclusion, not exclusion. Others before me, with me, and after me, face the same demarcation, even though we have erased and rearranged it so many times, so many ways.

Yes. We see our peers plainly. We see their pitfalls and the occasional ascents into heights of actuality. We are endlessly reclaiming ourselves, nesting a space that is truly an exterior reflection of our interior, one that will allow us to make the quest, a space we must gift us, given our teachings.

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