Jean-Pierre Jordan – 50th Reunion Essay

Jean-Pierre Jordan

24 Wolfpits Road

Bethel, CT 06801-2921

jeanpierrejordan@sbcglobal.net

203-300-0847

Spouse(s): Myra Drucker (1973)

Child(ren): Alexander (1983); Nicholas (1984); Rachel (1986)

Education: Yale BA, 1969 (cum laude); Columbia MBA, 1975; Princeton MA, 1980

Career: Father, husband, investor

Avocations: My family, writing, cuisine and wine, old-house restoration, woodworking, gardening, tennis, travel

College: Berkeley

Not everybody gets a second chance in one lifetime.

Before I came to Yale, my family of stateless refugee immigrants led a hardscrabble itinerant life; all you had was family. We left post-war Europe for a crummy garage in the suburbs of São Paulo. Ten years later, life in Brazil’s tropical mayhem hadn’t panned out. We moved on. First to shabby attic apartments in Peoria, and eventually to seedy Tenderloin hotels in San Francisco. We came to rest in the Sunset district, as far west as we could go, the end of the line, in a little box house built on termite-ridden sand dunes, wet, foggy, treeless. Bleak. The sand, the sea, the sky, just various shades of gray. The roar and hiss of the ocean and the bleating of the foghorns were the only poetry, easing the ballast of my depression.

Our parents brought the war with them, and continued to wage it at home. My mother’s angry narcissism and my father’s violent rage at her adulteries might have been fatal. We children, incarcerated in this family, were complicit in our own misery, somehow believing it was all our fault. Wasn’t family all you had? Our parents’ repeated betrayals of their children lasted into our adulthood.

Miraculously, Yale took me in, just in time. I faked my origins, of course, since some of our classmates weren’t quite ready for people like me. Yale offered me an escape from my venomous parents, and in the bargain, from the soul-killing malice of the Jesuit thugs who ran my high school. At Yale I was home, even if there were many setbacks to come: betrayals of friendship, professional disappointments, lovers treated shabbily.

Let me count my blessings. Yale gave me a new world to inhabit, one filled with grace and gentility, curiosity and revelation, peace and possibility, simply by asking me to come in and sit by the fire. I never felt entitled, only grateful. It was at Yale that Kosta introduced me to Myra who, seven years later, took my hand and said, Come with me. Her mother, Marci, who was all love, had already adopted me. Yale and Marci and Myra saved my life, and taught me love. How I resisted.

Alas, my parents had one final betrayal for me, causing the accidental death of my beloved cat, Max.  In that instant of violent passing, Max cut me loose with an oceanic force, and I knew that I had to create a family of my own, and my own expression of love. Fifteen years after graduation, Myra and I had three kids in quick succession. The moment Alec arrived, I was free. I held the little creature in my hands, and realized that there had been a plan for me all along, my second act. I became the father I had been searching for. Nico and Rachel quickly followed. I was their primary caregiver, and never looked back. They are still teaching me that love is all that matters, yet not always easy.

My only sorrow is that it took me so long to find my way back to Yale. I owe Yale so much, more than I will ever be able to repay. But I’m here now, armed with my glorious family, rooted, no longer nomads. And, who knows, I might finally fit in.

In the end, I had to live the life that I was given. In Max’s own words, “Je ne regrette rien.”