ilene

Ilene looks like fun: curly, brightly dyed hair and thick-framed white plastic glasses. She gets into Milo and cheerfully introduces herself straightaway as a Dominican-Jewish drummer from the Bronx. I’ve picked her up at a high school in Springfield, where she teaches kids who have had substance abuse issues. So I ask her about that. She says the drumming was healing for them. 

On the way to Holyoke, she tells me that her drumming regularly takes her from this area to New York City in the summer and south Florida in the Winter. She is about to head back to Miami. She loves Miami.  

“Five years ago, when I was there,” she explains, “I married myself to the ocean. I had a beautiful white dress. I walked into the ocean. A wave came toward me. I opened my arms and me and the wave hugged each other. When the wave passed, I saw a dolphin. Then I knew for sure the ocean and I were married.”

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