Memory submitted by Anna Nardo

When did you meet Mickey?
1947

Where did you meet him?
I am Mickey’s younger sister. He was 5 years and 4 months old when I was born.

Memory of Mickey
All but a few of you knew Mickey as an adult, and you may not know much about his early life. So I want to share two memories from my youth that evidence the empathy and ability to read people that made Mickey a great therapist.

During summer vacations from U.T., he found a job selling suits, ties, and shirts at an exclusive men’s store called The Gentry Limited. The owner was a Jewish tailor with a German accent whose wife had escaped the Holocaust. There weren’t many Jews in Chattanooga, so the family was pretty isolated. Since the store was doing well, the German tailor decided to buy his wife a new house. But when moving day arrived, she completely freaked out. The tailor had no idea what to do, so Mickey simply took over, escorted her away from the chaotic scene where strange men were entering her house to haul off her belongings, and stayed with her until the move was completed. Although as yet untrained, Mickey intuitively recognized that the wife was experiencing a psychotic break because the confusion of moving had revived traumatic memories from the war years.

Thinking back, I see a second sign of Mickey’s future career success in his efforts to teach me to water ski. We always had a boat for Dad’s fishing excursions, and on summer weekends we sometimes joined him for trips to Chickamauga Lake. All the cool kids could water ski, and I wanted to be one of them. The way the process is supposed to work is that you get in the water, put on the skis, crouch with your knees pulled up to your chest, hold onto the rope, and let the force of the boat pull you upright. But the process didn’t work for me. While Dad drove the boat, Mickey stood in the stern, watching me fall over every time Dad gunned the motor. I was mortified and in tears, then he yelled to me, “Stop trying!” I had been trying to pull myself up instead of letting the boat’s force pull me upright. His advice worked like a charm, and I experienced the exhilaration of zooming across The lake with the other cool kids. In his early twenties, Mickey had intuited one of the major psychological cruxes of my life. When I get myself tied in knots, I try to remember that it once worked to “Stop trying!”

Goodnight, Mickey.