With Patience and Fortitude: A Memoir Read Free

when I was in elementary school, she put me on a doctor-supervised diet. I’d go once a week to get weighed. That made sense. And then if I lost weight, I’d be rewarded. That sounds good, in theory, but my reward was an ice-cream cone that I could eat on the way home. See what I mean?
    T hings were a bit disorganized in the house. It just wasn’t my mother’s focus. Keeping things in order wasn’t a priority for her. For example, if you were looking for scissors and tape, you’d never find them in the same drawer—you were lucky if you found them at all. Dinner at the Quinn house was almost always determined by the route home from the last lesson of the day. If it was ballet in Port Washington, for example, we passed Burger King or Roy Rogers on the way home, so it would be Burger King or Roy Rogers for dinner. I guess it’s no surprise that my kitchen skills are less than stellar, although I recently taught myself to bake. I like baking because you follow the recipe, you do what you’re told, and it largely works out.
    My mother, who as I’ve said hated to drive, spent much of her day behind the wheel of our car taking us for lessons. Glen Cove and the neighboring towns at the time offered a lot of chances for lessons. When I was just a month old, my mother started schlepping me with her in the car. She laid me in a laundry basket in the backseat and tied the basket’s handles to each of the doors. “You went everywhere with us,” Ellen told me. “One time I turned around, and you were standing up in the basket.” The first time I ever stood up was in that basket in the backseat of the car. For the first few years of my life, I was just along for the ride, picking Ellen up and dropping her off. And then when I was three or four, it started for me, too.
    Long before the concept of overscheduled children existed, my mother had us rocketing around. We took every lesson she could find: horseback riding lessons, swimming lessons, diving lessons, French lessons, ballet lessons, and ice-skating lessons. Then there were the painting classes, pottery-making classes, and an array of nature courses in the summertime at the Cold Spring Harbor Lab. (That’s what sparked my sister’s interest in geology.) Sometimes we’d have several in one day.
    My mother would pick me up at school, and then in the car I’d change out of my Catholic school uniform and into my horseback riding clothes. Then after that lesson, off came the blue jeans and on went the ballet leotard—all in the back-seat of the car. (It’s a skill that has come in handy in my life as Speaker of the City Council—sometimes I have to go to five different events in a day. While going from a parade of some kind to a public hearing and then to a political dinner, I often have to change in the back of the car. The only difference is that now I also have to put on makeup while the driver is navigating New York City streets and traffic. One lesson I quickly learned is never try to put on eyeliner while the car is moving. I do it anyway.)
    Whether I liked the lessons or not, I had to go to them. I loved the nature classes, and I liked painting. My father’s apartment is still full of paintings that I made when I was in elementary school.
    What I liked best was going to the stable. I started riding when I was four and rode until I went to college. When I was growing up on Long Island, horseback riding was available to just about everybody. Stables were all over the place, and the lessons were not very expensive. At first we rented a school horse, and then when I was in junior high school, they bought me a horse of my own. My first horse was named Classy. I loved her. And then I got Arthur, my second horse. I would take lessons year-round and then go to local horse shows, where I got to compete against other riders.
    In summers, when I was old enough, I spent the whole day at the stable. It was like going to camp. Whether I rented a horse or had my own, I had to