Chestnut Hill author Barbara Bloom holds a copy of her memoir, “Ephemeral Blooms,” which took 15 years, off and on, to write but was “a real labor of love.”[/caption]

by Brenda Lange

"When the Japanese mend broken objects, they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold. They believe that when something’s suffered damage and has a history, it becomes more beautiful.” — Leonard Cohen, the late poet and songwriter from Montreal.

Although Chestnut Hill author Barbara Bloom’s husband, Bob Rossman, believes she has been working on her memoir, “Ephemeral Blooms,” all her life, she says the actual writing has taken 15 years, off and on, and was a real labor of love.

She was the middle child in a family of three and lost both brothers to suicide — her younger brother when he was 25 and the other one at 52. The younger, Marshall, was an activist during the Vietnam War and a closeted gay man. Her older brother, Alan, “had several bad breaks and two recessions, and his business failed,” Bloom says. “He was conservative and stuck in a playboy mentality, similar to the lead character in the show 'Mad Men.'”

Bloom started work on the book while participating in a writing group years ago. The sensitive subject matter was a topic for gossip, and when she overheard some members talking behind her back, she stopped writing for a few months.

“I was fragile, but then I got past it,” Bloom says. “Writing about it helped me heal, but I didn’t do it for that. The purpose was just to be understood. I wanted people to understand. As the middle child, I saw a lot of different perspectives. I loved both brothers and could sympathize with both.”

Bloom believes her brothers didn’t appreciate themselves enough, and she digs into that premise as well as the question that started her writing initially: “Why was I the one to survive?”

She peels back the layers of her family’s life, chapter by chapter, devoting one to her “challenging” mother and one to her workaholic father and then others to each of her brothers. “For me, it was a matter of unlearning some stuff I’d grown up with and learning how to love,” says Bloom, now 77.

Although Bloom has written for years, including articles for The Chestnut Hill Local and some children’s stories, “Ephemeral Blooms,” published through Amazon’s KDP Select in August, is her first book.

“I’ve gotten wonderful responses,” she says. “I was a bit intimidated to get it out there and have people read it, but all the major characters have died, and so I felt I could be very honest. It’s only a slice of my life.”

Bloom is also working on a children’s book through a workshop she facilitates at Lovett Library in Mt. Airy. The support she has gotten as she wrote her memoir has been invaluable, and she believes she was able to refine her voice through the feedback she received.

Bloom has been active in the region since moving to the east coast from Denver to attend Wellesley College, where she majored in English. Bloom earned a master’s degree in American Civilization from the University of Pennsylvania and worked toward her doctorate degree in Adult Education at Temple University.

She stayed in Philadelphia, where she felt comfortable with the diverse mix of people from different backgrounds, and taught English at Community College of Philadelphia. She also was the director of the Regional Continuing Education for Women Program at Temple and of Non-Credit Programs at the university’s Ambler Campus. After leaving for two years to take a position as director of a women’s resource center at the University of Kansas, she returned to settle in Chestnut Hill. Now she leads the writing group at Lovett Library, volunteers as a reading tutor at local schools and trains others to tutor. She also founded Mt. Airy Learning Tree (MALT), an intergenerational community education program in 1981. When Bloom founded MALT, the community education program offered just 17 courses and enrolled 125 students. Among the first class offerings were “Introduction to Personal Computing,” “Electronic Games,” “Railroads and Mt. Airy” and “Women as Super-Heroes in the Comics.”

“The concept was based on a model started in Manhattan, Kansas, where people with untapped skills were recruited to teach their neighbors.” Bloom told us in an earlier interview. She noted that the idea helped not only neighbors but also local business owners to connect in a meaningful way.

One of the more unusual of the 300+ classes offered this fall by Mt. Airy Learning Tree, founded by Barbara Bloom, was “Sword Fighting for Stage and Screen,” taught by Kenneth Nicholas, seen here wearing his 66-pound, $3,000 suit of armor.[/caption]

Bloom noted that she was one of the first co-teachers of a class that first year. The topic was Wonder Woman. “My colleague was a 12- year-old who knew more about the comic character than I did. It was a great experience,” said Bloom, who taught and also took numerous classes over the years.

These days, MALT classes number in the hundreds and MALT participants in the thousands. The 2018 fall catalog is 80 pages long and offers more than 300 classes in dozens of locations in and around northwest Philadelphia.

The name Mt. Airy Learning Tree came from the autobiographical novel “The Learning Tree” by the late photographer, composer and filmmaker Gordon Parks.

Bloom moved on from MALT, although it recently celebrated its 37th anniversary and continues to serve more than 5,000 individuals each year. She then established a group of volunteers at the Houston Elementary School in Mt. Airy in 2000. Today, more than 30 regular volunteers work with youngsters, helping them improve their math and reading literacy.

Bloom will give a reading from “Ephemeral Blooms” on Wednesday, Nov. 14, 7 p.m. in the Lovett Library, 6945 Germantown Ave.

For more information, email babloom@verizon.net or visit ephemeralblooms.com