SOLTuesday: Personal Archives

            I’ve been writing essays about all of the jobs I’ve had in a very checkered career, in between (and following) three different bouts of undergraduate education. Sometimes I was working and going to school at night at the same time, so it seemed appropriate to mention some of my classes.

            This took me to a set of files in my personal archive, a folder containing all my grades while I was at City College (in New York City), as well as a couple of folders of papers I wrote for those classes.

            There are courses on my transcript I have no memory of: Constitutional Law—Individual Liberties; Metropolitan Government and Politics (I was a history major, so those political science classes make sense, but they left no imprint in my brain); Russia Since 1855 (don't remember much of this, either, though this is probably when I read Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s “What Is to Be Done?” about 19th century Russian socialism).

            My school papers, though, are priceless because of comments from professors. On the midterm for the history class on the Progressive Movement is this note: “When will you start speaking up in class?!!!” 

            I’m not sure I ever did, not back in 1966.

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It’s Slice of Life Tuesday over at Two Writing Teachers. Check out this encouraging and enthusiastic writing community and their slices of life every Tuesday. And add one of your own.

 

 

SOL March (5 and) 6: History

Just a week into the daily slice of life challenge, and I’ve already lost a day.

            Yesterday I could have written about going to the doctor about my eye (nothing serious, it turned out), but I didn’t want to go into the detail. So let’s say this paragraph stands in for Slice of Life 5.

            Today I am searching through old journals to find out what I can about the sale of my mother’s condo in Florida in the months after she died 11 years ago. Why am I doing this? Because last week I received a check in the mail, a check dated July 28, 2010 (11 years ago!), with an unsigned handwritten note on the stub saying, “Please note this is for the wire payment for the purchase of unite #680” — my mother’s condo. The amount of the check is far more than the amount I actually received at the time and the amount in the documentation I have. What is going on?

            So I am searching through my journals for that period to see what I noted at the time. What the journals are full of are my notes of going through my mother’s papers, mixed in with worries about the fate of the magazine I then worked for, which was either going to be sold or killed by the global corporation that owned it, in the midst of the Great Recession, as that corporation was selling or killing others of the hundred or so print trade journals.

            Death of people, and institutions.

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I’m participating in the 14th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 6 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!

 

SOLTuesday: Ancient Bug Bites

A slice of life from the 1950s.

            I’m 11. It’s a drizzly summer day in West Haven, Connecticut. The neighborhood kids are wondering what we can do on such a dreary day. A pile of logs in the field between Joanie and Karen’s old house and new house gives someone an idea. “Let’s build a cabin.”

            Joanie picks up one end of a log and I pick up the other end. Immediately we are beset by a swarm of insects, biting insects, stinging insects. 

 

            “Run!” someone yells, and everyone else runs, while I’m trying to swat the stingers away, to scrape them off. There are too many, they just keep coming back for the attack. Finally, I run to the end of the field, and the dampness and air brushing my body as I run wipes the yellowjackets away. But stings are painful.

 

            “Put mud on them,” I’m advised. “It will pull out the stinger.” So I slather mud over my painful arms and legs.

            

            When I get home, my mother threatens to hose down my mud-caked body, but lets me take a shower instead. Four scar, one on each arm and leg, remain for decades. A dermatologist diagnoses the spots.

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It’s Slice of Life Tuesday over at Two Writing Teachers. Check out this encouraging and enthusiastic writing community and their slices of life every Tuesday. And add one of your own.

 

SOLTuesday: My Life in 50 Objects, part 4

I’m trying to document the objects I have that my relatives may wonder about after I die and am no longer around for them to ask. (I’m not planning to die anytime soon, but it’s better to do this before I need to. My mother said she’d do it for her jewelry, and she never did.) So here are some small objects, mostly sitting on my bureau.

            The penny jar is a holdover from my college days. At Antioch College, we were given several booklets of “food stamps” to use in the cafeteria, campus coffee shop, and the Inn, the campus restaurant for visitors. The stamps were in denominations comparable to coins, but there were no penny stamps. So students would accumulate pennies over the course of a quarter (no semesters at this school), and since many of us had empty Chianti bottles, those became our default “penny jars.”

            Once I left school, saving pennies had become a habit. This jar holds around $12 worth when it’s full, and as you can see, I recently redeemed its contents. Since the pandemic lockdown, I haven’t used cash for anything, and who knows when I will again. Maybe there won’t be anymore pennies for this jar.

           

This sadly tarnished silver dumbbell was a baby gift for our daughter from the parents of a very old friend. They lived in Memphis, Tennessee, and we met them only a couple of times, but we really appreciated the gift, a teething object that Christie used quite a bit as a baby. I’m bad at the kind of maintenance this would require. Maybe putting a photo of this in public will force me to clean it up.

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It’s Slice of Life Tuesday over at Two Writing Teachers. Check out this encouraging and enthusiastic writing community and their slices of life every Tuesday. And add one of your own.

My Life in 50 Objects: The Ring

             The ring sat among other rings in a cotton-lined box on a crowded counter in the gift shop. The shop was just a couple of blocks from campus, near the corner of Xenia Avenue, the main street in Yellow Springs, set back from the sidewalk behind a zigzag paved path amid bushes and flowers. The door tinkled from an overhead bell when Connie and I entered.

            Connie was my hallmate, another East Coaster, from Long Island, and it was just a few weeks after we’d arrived for our first year at Antioch College. On this warm day, we’d gone exploring, and here we were in an overstuffed gift shop, looking, just looking.

            The shop had a mixture of goods: scarves, vases, rings, earrings, tea boxes. I gravitated toward a ring. It had a green stone, mottled like the surface of a brain, in a round silver setting surrounded by a moat lined with a faint braid, further surrounded by 16 silver knobs, and its silver band was incised by curlicues. I tried it on, and it fit. Then I asked how much it cost.

            “Six dollars,” said the proprietor, a woman on the other side of middle-age with frizzy graying brown hair. Too much. (The equivalent of $51 today.) I put the ring back. That was too much. Connie came over and rummaged through the box of rings, while I wandered over to the tea table. There was a black and orange tin labeled Constant Comment, with orange rind and spices. That sounded tasty. I bought a tin. Back at our dorm, I noticed that Connie was wearing the ring I had tried on and wanted.

            The next day I went back to the gift shop and looked for the ring. The one with curlicues on the band was gone, but there was another one, almost the same except the silver band was plain. I paid the six dollars—and I still wear the ring, almost 60 years later.

My Life in 50 Objects, 2: Vermont

[In October 2018, I posted the first of what I intended to be a series. As you can see, I'm good at starting projects, but not so good at continuing and completing them. Let's see how much I can get done in April. Not poems, but writing nonetheless. 

             I don’t know yet whether there will be as many as 50 objects or more than 50. We’ll how it develops. What I am aiming for is to describe the objects in my apartment and why I have kept them, what they mean to me, so that after I’m gone (which I don’t expect to be any time soon) my younger relatives won’t be able to say, “Why did she keep this old thing?” My mother said she would do that for her jewelry, but she never did.]

             This painting and the photos are from Vermont. My Uncle Ben painted this portrait of the house he and my Aunt Nita bought in 1960, when he started teaching history at Goddard College. The house is in the village of Adamant, a few miles north of Montpelier, in the town of Calais (pronounced callous). Built around 1840, that same house is in the old photo (below), taken somewhere between 1890 and 1910, judging from the women’s clothing. Nita found it in the upstairs storage room, and she may have known the names of the people in it, but I don’t.

            It’s actually a photo of a photo; I’m guessing the original was in poor shape, and Nita wanted to make sure she had a survivable version. The sapling next to the woman on the right is the big maple on the right edge of the painting. I wonder if the grandchild or great-grandchild of the baby in the carriage is the person who sold the house to Ben and Nita.

            Between the trees and the house in the painting is a grassy drive, up a slight incline from the dirt road, nameless as far as I know. The snowy photo (left) was taken looking down that drive toward the road and the fields, a beaver pond, and hill beyond, in November 1995. I was housesitting, while Nita had gone to Paris to visit old friends and spend the pension money she had earned while working in Paris in the 1950s. (She had worked there for about six years and accumulated a small amount of pension, but she could only collect and spend it in France.) By this time, she and Ben had

been divorced for 10 or 12 years (a long, somewhat tawdry story for another time), but after long bargaining she got to keep the house, and as she was my mother’s sister, she’s the relative we kept in touch with. I was just a couple of years into writing the first draft of a novel (that still sits in very old Word files in my computer) and took the opportunity to turn feeding Nita’s cat into my own private writing retreat.

           The final photo is from inside the kitchen (the room behind the porch to the left in the photo and painting). The dancing cats is an ironwork, probably made by someone Nita and Ben knew. And the tree outside beyond the window is the larger maple on the left side of the painting. (I've tried to avoid the reflections from the glazing on these last two photos, but not entirely successful, and that's why they are at an angle.)

            Jack and I began visiting Ben and Nita for a week, or two or three, almost every summer from 1967 until 1997, when Nita died. (I’ve never been quite sure who or what I missed more, Aunt Nita or her house.) The house was sold to a friend and neighbor, whose son now lives there. For a time, after Nita was diagnosed with lung cancer, I thought of asking her to leave me the house, contemplating turning it into a writing retreat. The New England Culinary Institute was just down the road; perhaps they could provide meals. One of the upstairs bedrooms was big, with lots of light; perhaps it would suit a visual artist. But then I thought of how much rewiring would need to be done, for phones and for computers, as well as making Internet service available. I would either have to live there or be an absentee landlord, and neither choice was appealing.

            My sister would have loved living in that house, but she never developed a relationship with Nita and Ben. That was partly because Ben intimidated her. He had written a rather unflattering portrait of her in his second book, Down and Out in Academia, and my parents never quite forgave him. At the time, I thought it was fairly accurate, and I must have already realized that writers use whatever is in front of them for whatever purpose they want. Your only defense, if you don’t like what they’ve written about you or yours, is to write your own version.

(To be continued)

SOL18: Where Do Memories Belong?

            For about a year after Jack’s memorial, this photo board was in the living room, across from where I sat, in his chair. I would see it every day, and it was almost (almost!) as if he was still here. It was also an occasion for people who came over to talk about him, if they wanted to. I always wanted to.

            After a year, I thought, maybe it was too much, to leave it where I would see it whenever I looked up from whatever I was doing, on the computer, reading a book, watching a baseball game (the photo board was right next to the television). So I moved it into the bedroom. That was also more appropriate, considering how much enjoyable time we spent in bed over the decades.

            In the bedroom, it stands in

front of a cabinet holding linens. So I have to move it once a week when I change towels and sheets. Yesterday, when I moved the board, I was pricked by irritation. This should not be the way Jack still exists in this world, pinned to a board in bits and pieces. It felt wrong that he is dead. Yet that is still a fact.

            I’ve just finished reading Kate Atkinson’s A God in Ruins, which is in many ways all about death, and life, and death in life and life in death. I am still struggling with the reality and immensity of all of that.  

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I’m participating in the 12th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 1 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!

#52essays2017, Essay 10: K Is for Keep On Keepin’ On

(I’m way behind the essay a week writing challenge, and have clearly not kept up with the daily Blogging AtoZ Challenge for April. So I will combine the two for my essays and try to catch up, which could mean writing two or three essays a week for the rest of the year. Haven’t checked a calendar yet for a real schedule.)

My husband died last year. I keep saying that, and it’s probably getting boring for other people. But it still feels like the most important thing that’s happened in my life recently.

            It was a moment, the moment Jack died. Up until that moment, our lives were entwined. We were not the joined-at-the-hip type of couple, like my husband’s brother and his wife. We had our own friends, we traveled separately often, we shared housework—and we kept our money separate. He went to the gym almost every day, I went maybe three times a week. But we both loved baseball and went to games together, went to the movies, had some friends in common. And we were both storytellers, though he was much better than me.

            When he got sick and said things like “if I’m here next year,” I ignored the implication. I continued to believe our “moments before,” alive, would go on forever. Denial, much? It’s the “moments after” that continue to mount up, to add on, to move me steadily away from those moments when Jack was alive.

            Yet I have to keep on keepin’ on. Remembering the past is not the same as living in the past. But integrating the past into the continually-moving-forward present is a paradox when one member of that past is no longer present to continue that work. His memories have evaporated, or live, imperfectly, in the memories of others. I don’t want to be stuck in the past, I don’t want to lose the past, and I want to keep on keepin’ on with the past as companion. 

#52essays2017

SOL Tuesday: A Blast of Memories

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Putting away my new carry-on suitcase after my trip to Paris, I decided it was time to get rid of the small purple wheelie with the handle too short to be comfortable. As I pulled it out of the closet, I noticed there was stuff in it. The “stuff” turned out to be relics of my mother’s, her sister’s, and my sister’s after they died.

     There’s a Google map to Stratford, Connecticut, where several of the family stayed when we went to my sister’s memorial in Westport. Stratford was close to her home, and family and friends gathered there afterwards. There’s a printout of two kinds of meditation, with the hand and with light; my sister became an interfaith minister late in life and loved meditation. I must have thought I might try these, though I am not much of a meditation-person. There’s a letter my mother wrote to me in 1981, about a book of China photos, a Russell Baker column annoyed about the New York Times style book accepting pinyin spelling (stemming from my mother’s Sinophilia), and a hint to my parents’ divorce two years later, only clear to me now. There’s the program for my aunt’s memorial, as well as cards from her friends to my mother, along with two notes my aunt, who lived in Vermont, had written to my mother, revealing her interests in ballet (she’d seen Giselle in Montreal), cooking (she’d taken a class in low-cal French cookery at the nearby New England Culinary Institute), movies (she’d seen Babette’s Feast), and politics (it was right after the 1988 presidential primary).

     There’s a copy of my aunt’s will, now almost 20 years old. I know why my mother would have kept it (she kept almost everything), but why did I? Did I want her list of charitable bequests?

     There’s a journal my sister started two years after her third breast cancer diagnosis, which she titled “Morning Pages”; she kept it for five days. I know now that she had two more years, but she didn’t know. She writes about her bodily feelings, but also her spirit as different from her body, prayer, positive thinking, visualization – all areas I feel little connection with, but find interesting to read. I think I’ll see if her older daughter wants the notebook.

     Lots of photographs, family and otherwise. some I have, but others are of people I don’t know and don’t know why I took them. A clipping from the Miami News, December 19, 1975, is about my mother's talk at a local YWCA about her recent trip to China, one of the early visits organized by the U.S.-China People’s Friendship Association.

      Finally, the stash included recipes, two from my aunt, her Vermont baked beans and a Spicy Rice & Nuts from Montpelier’s Hunger Mountain Co-op. I can barely deciper my aunt’s handwriting for the baked beans, but the Spicy Rice & Nuts looks like something I will try out for my vegetarian days. There are also two recipes in my handwriting that I must have sent to my mother, one for Ghivetch, a Balkan vegetable stew, which I remember making, and another for poached bass with sweet peppers. I made this dish for dinner tonight, though I had to use cod since no striped bass was available. It was delicious. 

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It’s Slice of Life Tuesday over at Two Writing Teachers. Check out this encouraging and enthusiastic writing community and read their slices of life every Tuesday. And add one of your own.

SOLSC Day 10: Old Mail

Jack’s first e-mail account was with AOL, back in the days when you had to pay for it — and he never changed it. Of course, I have to close that account so it’s no longer a drain on the pocketbook. But first I wanted to download all of his Sent mail. He used to reread his Sent mail, and I wanted to see what was there.

            It took the computer know-how of my niece and brother to accomplish that last Monday. Today I started browsing. The old mail only went back to 2009 (I guess AOL only saved back that far), and it was fun to read the exchange of e-mails between Jack and our daughter when she was on a solo trip to Glasgow. Also an exchange from an English friend who attended debates organized as the Battle of Ideas; it used to have a New York partner called the New York Salon that Jack and I attended a few times, but it no longer exists.

            But when I opened some e-mails about my mother moving up to New York into an

assisted living apartment, I was overcome by melancholy. My mother had been living independently in Florida, but at 91, she’d decided it was time for more help, and she was willing to move back to the cold weather to be closer to me and my sister. Reading those e-mails only reminded me that she’d been much sicker than I had realized, and just a month after she arrived, she was dead. We had both been looking forward to long talks about memories — we’d even started, with my mother tellilng me her fascination with science began with a college anatomy class visit to an autopsy. There were so many questions that never got answered, one more life ending with an incomplete.