EMILY PRATT SLATIN

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She/Her/Hers Lesbian

Retired Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer, living in Vermont.

Nothing Worse Than A Heart Forbade To Fly

October 14, 2026—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)

This evening, I found myself with an overwhelming desire to stay awake late into the night for no other reason than to write down all the things I have been thinking about lately. My mind is always changing, it seems. Sometimes I find myself reconsidering things I thought I understood years ago, while other times I remember people, places, and conversations that have not occupied my thoughts in decades.

Yesterday, Amelia returned to the farm in Vermont.

The same Amelia who swore she would never, ever return to Vermont. Apparently, never is a considerably shorter period of time than either of us anticipated.

She arrived yesterday and spent the night. Today, she collected the last of her belongings before returning to Mom's house in Stamford, where she will stay until tomorrow before making the drive back to her house in Buffalo.

I also asked her to take some of my things to Mom's house for a few projects I have planned.

When Amelia returned to the farm, it was as though nothing had changed. We simply resumed our friendship exactly where we had left it, as if the intervening months where our schedules overlapped from time to time had been nothing more than a geographical inconvenience. We talked all day, catching each other up on everything that had happened in our respective lives. There was no awkwardness, no need to reintroduce ourselves, and no reason to account for the time we had spent apart.

For a day, I had my friend back.

I have missed Amelia terribly. Not simply the companionship of having someone living here at the farm, nor the familiar routines that once made up our everyday lives together. I miss Amelia herself. I miss her personality, her company, and the particular kind of friendship that existed between us.

Amelia never really belonged in Vermont. She tried, and for a long time she remained here because she knew how happy I was living on the farm. But the truth is that she was never comfortable with rural life. She grew accustomed to the city long before we met, and eventually she realized that the life she wanted was not the one I had chosen for myself.

I have never particularly cared for city life. I enjoy the pine trees, the mountains, the quiet, and the freedom of living somewhere that does not require constant interaction with other people. Amelia prefers the activity, convenience, and familiarity of the city. Neither of us is wrong. We simply have different ideas about what makes a place worth calling home.

I would be perfectly content living in a cabin in the middle of the woods, provided it had reliable high-speed internet.

The greatest thing that my career taught me is to never try to force an outcome.

There is nothing worse than a heart forbade to fly.

I could have spent years trying to convince Amelia that Vermont was the perfect place for her. I could have argued that the farm was beautiful, that our life was comfortable, and that we had everything we could possibly need.

I know what it feels like to have someone else attempt to dictate the direction of my life. I spent much of my childhood and early adulthood living under precisely those circumstances.

My late father, Harvey Slatin, had very specific expectations for me. He wanted me to become a surgeon, specifically a trauma surgeon, and was absolutely obsessed with my education. He regarded academic achievement as the foundation upon which every other aspect of my life should be constructed.

Writing, according to him, was something I could pursue if I had time left after my studies, provided it did not interfere with my education.

I hated school. I especially hated college.

During my senior year of high school, my English teacher told me that one day I would become a writer. He encouraged me to continue writing even if I never pursued it professionally. At the time, I had no particular interest in becoming the accomplished professional my father envisioned. I wanted to be a free-spirited lesbian, take road trips with my girlfriends, and enjoy whatever adventures happened to present themselves along the way.

Apparently, this was not an acceptable career objective. Dad wanted a trauma surgeon. My femininity offended him. My sexuality offended him. My refusal to conform to his expectations became an ongoing source of conflict that continued until the day he died.

Even when my professional accomplishments began appearing in the local newspapers, he continued dismissing me as a failure. He could read about my career, see that I had accomplished things worthy of public recognition, and still regard my life as unsuccessful because I had not followed the path he prescribed.

It is a strange thing to be recognized by the public while remaining a disappointment to someone who knew you from birth.

Fortunately, not everyone in my father's life shared his opinions.

Dr. Patrick H. Meanor was a Distinguished Teaching Professor at SUNY Oneonta for more than five decades. He was also one of my father's closest and most trusted friends. I knew him simply as Patrick, and for a considerable period of my life, he was unquestionably my biggest fan.

Patrick believed that I possessed an incredible gift for language. He argued repeatedly with my father that I should devote my life to writing rather than medicine. He even suggested that I could probably write for The New York Times or The New Yorker if I cared enough.

Dad disagreed, of course.

According to my father, I needed to complete my education, become a surgeon, establish a respectable career, and then perhaps consider writing during whatever free time remained. Patrick saw things differently. He believed that writing was not merely something I happened to enjoy, but an ability that deserved serious consideration in its own right.

Their disagreement became an ongoing dispute between them, yet somehow their friendship remained intact. I suspect Patrick understood that arguing with Harvey was unlikely to change his mind.

My father was a man who could defend an incorrect assumption long after the available evidence had rendered it indefensible. He possessed the irritating confidence of someone who had never seriously considered the possibility that he might be wrong. This was a quality he demonstrated with remarkable consistency throughout my childhood.

What I remember most about Patrick, however, was not his academic standing or his opinion of my writing. It was his genuine interest in me as a person.

He would ask what kind of music I liked, and he was particularly interested in hearing about newer music that he had not yet encountered. He listened to my selections, asked questions, and seemed genuinely interested in understanding why I enjoyed them. Here was a distinguished professor who had spent decades teaching, yet remained willing to learn something from a young woman whose interests were considerably different from his own.

That meant more to me than I probably understood at the time.

Over the years, my parents and I shared many dinners with Patrick. Sometimes his close friend Anne Federlein, who was president of SUNY Oneonta, joined us. Other times they came individually. These were ordinary social occasions, the sort of dinners that families have without considering that a particular conversation might remain in someone's memory for the rest of her life.

I remember one evening when my parents and I were having dinner with Patrick at Number 1 Chinese in Oneonta.

Dad began criticizing me for being too feminine. He complained that I didn't sit upright like a man, and continued listing the various ways in which I had apparently failed to conduct myself according to his expectations.

Patrick listened, then turned to my father and said something I have never forgotten.

"Harvey, maybe you simply have a child who is different. That is a gift."

I have thought about those words many times over the years.

My father regarded my differences as evidence that something had gone wrong. Especially the autism. Patrick suggested that those same differences might be valuable.

Years later, I wrote Patrick a letter. I never heard back from him. He died in 2024 from brain cancer.

I have no idea whether he ever received it.

Recently, I began thinking about writing a similar letter to my former high school English teacher.

He lives near Amelia, and I was able to find his contact information online quite easily. I thought perhaps I might write to him and tell him that the student he once encouraged to pursue writing eventually became a published author.

Then I reconsidered.

My former teacher is seventy-five years old now. His wife passed away many years ago, and decades have passed since I was a student in his classroom. I have lived several lifetimes' worth of experiences since then. I became a firefighter, a paramedic, a lieutenant, a master photographer, and eventually a writer. I moved around New York, traveled, fell in love, lost people, made friends, helped raise a child, got married, moved to Vermont, and somehow ended up living on a farm surrounded by pine trees.

I wonder whether he would even remember me.

Perhaps he would recognize my name immediately. Perhaps he would vaguely remember a student who enjoyed writing. Perhaps he would have no recollection of me whatsoever.

We cannot determine how other people will respond, what they will remember, or whether they will return.

That uncertainty becomes more apparent with age. People who once occupied an important place in our lives gradually become memories. Some remain reachable. Others move away, change their names, retire, disappear into different lives, or die. Entire relationships can become confined to a handful of conversations that one person remembers vividly while the other may have forgotten them entirely.

I have been thinking about how strange it is that Patrick's words remain so clear in my memory after all these years. I remember the restaurant. I remember the conversation. I remember my father's criticism, and I remember Patrick's response. Yet I have no way of knowing whether Patrick himself considered that evening particularly important.

Perhaps, to him, it was simply dinner with an old friend and his family.

To me, it was another occasion when someone recognized the person I actually was rather than the person my father demanded I become.

I don't know whether I will write to my former English teacher. Part of me would like to tell him that he was right. Another part wonders whether reaching backward across so many years would accomplish anything beyond satisfying my own curiosity. Perhaps that is reason enough. Perhaps it isn't.

My mind may change tomorrow, and it probably will, at least once.

The older I become, the more I realize that the significance of an experience does not depend entirely upon whether someone else remembers it the same way.