Pine Valley '62: A Summer Idyll

The summer the locusts came we made them our pets. The endless July days would begin the way they ended – with the resonant song of the cicadas. Jackie, Jennifer and I, then ten would capture the cicadas, carefully remove their wings then gently loop the colorful finger-knitted leashes around their necks. First we’d name them. Then we’d walk them like dogs and race them too. Soon we’d watch them die. They were so easily replaced by the millions of others who, like rainfall, landed daily upon our Pine Valley lawns. This memory of three girls playing together outside of our split level homes is one of my most vivid recollections from this time of wonder in the summer of 1962 – the last season of innocence in my soon to be tumultuous childhood.

My parents purchased their piece of the American Dream on a semi-suburban cul de sac in 1960 for $19,995.00, trading up from a brick and mortar post World War II rowhouse to a three bedroom two and a half bath aluminum sided shingle roofed split level. There were two models being marketed in this development of former farm land on the outer fringes of Northeast Philadelphia: the Debutante which sported a front to back design and the Suburban whose living room and dining room were placed side to side.

My parents selected a 3 bedroom Debutante with white siding and red shutters, situated on a quarter acre of gently rolling hills. The summer before we moved in, each Sunday, we would take a drive to this emerging neighborhood and watch the progress of our new home being erected. My sister, brother and I would lay claims to rooms or spots in the yard as my mother and father inspected the quality of the carpentry and the installation of their upgraded appliances.

Our house was on Grace Lane, a stretched out horseshoe of a street, which connected at each end to the more linear Darlington Road. The rear of the houses on both streets faced each other, their back yards blending one into the next. With newly minted cement patios, (perfect for roller skating and playing hop scotch), above ground swimming pools, basketball backboards, volley ball nets, sand boxes and swing sets, this expanse of land contained all of the equipment for a summer day camp with none of the supervision or regimen. We children who lived here were free to plan our own days, play with whom we pleased and make use of everyone else’s property.

Jackie lived directly across the back from me and sometimes at night we could talk to each other through our tin cup and string “telephones” that we ran from our bedrooms. Jennifer lived further down on Darlington and was often the first one outside in the morning, appearing on the side of Jackie’s house where we housed the locusts in jelly jars with holes drilled in the lids and leaves and water placed inside to keep our pets alive for as long as we could.

You can go back and visit the site of our summer idyll. But it’s really not there. You can look out the window of my mother’s house, the place where I grew up and see no further than the end of her property line. My mother never built a fence nor planted a single tree between her and her neighbors. Yet, her yard too became defined – surrounded on all sides by her neighbor’s border markers. This one stopped talking to that one, so the spruces went in. This one’s son hit that one’s daughter so wooden spikes were hammered into the ground. This one didn’t want that one coming to swim in their pool because she was wild and splashed the other children, so another and then another line of trees were planted until the world of my childhood was completely cleaved.

There is little in the lawn’s current landscape to recall its past sumptuousness. Nothing to suggest the fertile glory of the expanse of the Eden-like greenery that once comprised our collective playground. From the Weiss’ white shuttered house on the corner of Grace to the Polakoff’s house with the red roof on the other end of Darlington, our lawns, like our lives were connected, each to the other and adding up to something greater than all of us alone. The size of three football fields, this communal backyard made up our entire world. And in 1962, the season of the 17 year locusts, the summer before the British invasion, the end of Camelot and the dissolution of my parents’ marriage, it was all the world that we needed.

Casting Off

****

Cast Off

1 – To throw away or aside
2 - To throw out a lure or bait
3 - To complete the final row of stitches
4 - To set sail

I have cast off my identity as a teacher – the person who I was for thirty-four years. I walked away from the classroom at age fifty-five with a partial pension and no plan for the future except the possibilities of life without alarms clocks that sound at 6:OO AM, bells that ring every 50 minutes, lunches that begin at 10:13 or 2:03, and the connection to and interaction with hundreds of people in an intimate setting on a daily basis.

I loved being a teacher and I had a very fulfilling career. But one day, about three years ago, I began hearing a voice from somewhere deep inside insisting, “Mrs. Pincus doesn’t live here anymore” and another softer, just as resonant one urging, “Let me out.”

I started teaching when I was 21 years old. I wasn’t Mrs. Pincus then. I was "Miss Rose" or "Miss Frozenfrogs" to the students who actually attempted to pronounce my full name.

Becoming a teacher was a casting off of sorts too – a walking away from poverty, from uncertainty and the volatility of my childhood and adolescence, into the comfort of a stable and predictable routine.

Mrs. Pincus is Dead
Long Live Mrs. Pincus.

In a spurt of existential angst fueled by a propensity for melodrama, I fashioned a ritual to say good bye to my former self. I bought a batch of multi-colored helium balloons, and attached to each a picture of my teacher self in my different classrooms, and with students from all the phases of my career.


Looking at these pictures, I could watch my hair styles change, along with my clothing. Platform shoes and flowered shirts with tight curly permed hair in the Seventies, gave way to maternity dresses with bows in the back in the early Eighties, followed by colorful shoulder padded blazers and big hair morphing into the sleek sweater sets and straight tresses of the new millennium.

Once, a long time ago, a student told me how much he appreciated that I always got dressed up to come to school. He pointed out "the slobs" to me - mostly aging white guys in worn out jeans with uncombed hair and smudges on their glasses.

"They don’t respect us,” he said, meaning the African American students I taught for most of my career. “If they did, they’d never come to work looking like that. The way you look makes us feel good about ourselves. It's like you care.”

That was one of the countless memories and life lessons that came back to me two years ago as I sat alone in my garden, letting go of one balloon after the other. I watched them rise high above the trees and as each one disappeared, I said good-bye to the parts of myself that made up Mrs. Pincus.

If only.

Life doesn’t work that way. I may have tried to kill her, or imagined that she had died prior to the retirement party my husband had made for me, where nearly one hundred people including former students of all ages and stages of my career joined friends, family and colleagues to celebrate my career.

I come to praise Marsha Pincus not to bury her.

Yet.

Old selves, even ones we have tried to banish, find their way back home, dragged to our doorsteps by those who need to remember us as we were.

They write to me on Facebook. Sometimes the messages come in the middle of the night.

“Mrs. Pincus, you helped me become the man I am today.” ( I did??)

"Mrs. Pincus, if it weren’t for you, I would never have learned to believe in myself. ( Really??)

When I was at the AERA conference last week in New Orleans, feeling alienated from what I was hearing at the talks and presentations by the education elite, I skipped out and found a Tarot Card reader. Before he even had me select a single card, before I said anything about myself, he looked me in the eye sternly and said, “Why aren’t you writing about it?”

I’ve been talking about writing this story for a very long time. Pam, a former student of mine with a newly minted PhD. has been encouraging me. But she knows the emotional toll it will take to tell it real.

“Get yourself right first,” she wisely said. “You’re too shaky to do this right now.”

This.

Retrieving the selves we all left behind.

Twenty years ago, they wrote plays in my class. The plays they wrote were about their lives as they were being lived in that moment. Teenagers, they were struggling to have their voices heard, wrestling with important and life altering decisions, trying their best to make sense of their pasts, and hopefully constructing their futures. Their plays went on to win contests and receive professional productions on local and national stages.

What a roaring.

In her dissertation, Pam revisited the process she went through in writing her play and claimed that she never would have even imaged herself capable of writing a dissertation had she not been affirmed as a playwright.


Another student, a few years ago, had called me and asked if I could find a copy of the play he’d written in 1988. “I feel like Oedipus,” he said. “ I don’t have all of the information I need about myself. I have a feeling there’s some clue to the mystery of my life hidden in my play.”

“Get yourself right,” Pam said. “Gather yourself and make yourself whole, then come to us, and we will make this journey together.”


To re-cast our lost selves.

To write ourselves whole.








The painting, Lunch With Marsha (above) was painted by Tobi Zion February, 2011.

Live

I don’t know what I expected, really, when I got the idea to take him to the theater. But once he told me that he hadn’t seen a live production for decades, couldn’t even remember the last time he’d been inside a theatre, I knew I wanted to give him that experience. He was in town to see a specialist; he had been ill and in pain with no clear diagnosis for over thirty years and he was hoping this time, he'd find some answers.

When I learned of his struggles, I became obsessed with a desire to help him, engaging in round the clock, obsessive research, googling websites and reading books about sinuses, facial neuropathy, Ear Nose and Throat specialists, holistic medicine, alternative therapies, chiropractic, root canal, ozone treatments, biologic dentistry, the effects of iodine deficiency, desiccated thyroid medication and the importance of keeping one’s body alkaline.

This research had lead me to the only Ear, Nose and Throat specialist on the East Coast who also practiced holistic and alternative medicine and that’s why he was here, in Philadelphia, and available to meet me at the theater.

During the past two years, he had sent me dozens of his favorite movies and recommended hundreds more. He would take exquisite care with each selection, only suggesting the “great ones” – films that moved him to the core of his being. Not much for comedy, he’d suggest dramas and documentaries that took me to the depths of the heart and to the edges of human possibility. Admonishing me for never having seen The Deer Hunter, Requiem for a Dream, Scent of a Woman, Million Dollar Baby and other heavy hitters, he’d relish my responses which I’d email to him, immediately after viewing each film while the emotions ignited were still fresh and raw.

And as he would tell me what movies meant to him (he’d been watching them for years and years, every single night, alone in his darkened bedroom on an old- fashioned TV that set atop his bureau, until recently when he’d finally purchased a large flat screen set and installed surround sound) I would tell him about my love of live theater – how seeing something deeply moving, in the company of strangers in a public setting where the emotions generated by the actors on stage jump like an electrical current from person to person in the audience was a peak experience that I believed no one should miss.

And I wanted more than anything to give that experience to him as a thank you for all of the wonderful moments I had had with his movies.

Our choice of plays was limited to what was currently being staged in Philadelphia, and there had to be a matinee because he really wasn’t well enough to stay out late for an 8:00 curtain, and there had to be available seats on the few particular days he did not have doctors’ appointments in the short time he’d be here.


Which is how we ended up at the Arden Theater in the last two available seats for the matinee performance on the closing day of Eugene O’Neill’s Moon for the Misbegotten.

I hadn’t read this play and quickly did some research, learning that it was a sequel to Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and that like most O’Neill, plays, especially the autobiographical ones, alcohol and alcoholism would play a major role. I pushed down the tiny feeling of dread I got when I read that, remembering that even though he was thirty years sober, he saw himself as an alcoholic and regularly attended AA meetings.

Still.

During the first act, I gave up on my quest to have him have a cathartic experience. The dialogue was humorous, face-paced and delivered in a thick exaggerated Irish brogue. The actors’ movements were broad and farcical, as we watched an elderly subsistence farmer and his aging daughter argue with each other while they schemed up ways to get the drunkard son of their landlord to marry her.
I kept looking over at his face throughout the first act only to find it impassive so I settled into my seat and my disappointment.

During intermission he said kindly, “Don’t feel bad. I’m still enjoying myself.”

“But you don’t like it, do you?” I asked, knowing that he would give me his honest answer.


"They seem like cartoon characters to me,” he said.

"Like they're outlined in black." I replied, knowing exactly what he meant.

"I can’t get lost in this, like I can with a film, when I am alone," he continued. "I’m constantly aware that I am watching people perform. Still, interesting though.”

“Maybe the second act will be better,” I said with a false bravado, knowing as I do that second acts are always difficult and only in the very rarest of plays are act twos ever better than act ones.

So neither of us was prepared for where Eugene O’Neill took us in Act Two. As the daylight of the first act faded and the misbegotten moon rose in the silver sky, Josie, the daughter of the farmer, and Jim Tyrone, the alcohol soaked landlord’s son have one of the most harrowing, intimate and revealing encounters I have ever seen performed by two actors on a live stage. Drunk and stripped emotionally bare during this long and touching encounter, Jim Tyrone finds solace, hope and comfort in Josie’s arms, only to wake the following morning unable to acknowledge what had happened the night before between them, and thus, turning his back on the one last chance he could have had to let love save his life.

The end.

When the lights come up I see that he is crying softly. Wiping his tears away with the back of his hand, he turns away from me as others slowly exit around us. “That moved me,” is all he is able to say as we walk in silence towards the car. Once inside, he begins to cry. I have never seen a man cry like that before – not out of anger or frustration -- but from some deep, knowing and eternal place of grief and sadness. I feel something move inside of me.

“He reminds me of myself,” he says through his tears. “How this illness has kept me from living my life. I’m so embarrassed that I’m making this personal… making it about me.”

“It’s about all of us,” I whisper, reaching over, like Josie, to hug him through his sorrow and help him weather his first live catharsis.

Writing: From Loretto to Grace

“If you don’t stop [fill in the blank with any of the usual misbehaviors of a rebellious and angry teen-aged girl] I will send you to live at 8309 Loretto Ave. Is that what you want?”

The person making that threat, usually at the top of her lungs with something big like a broom raised above her head was my mother and the person staring coolly back at her as if daring her to strike while acting as if she were seriously weighing the benefits of the proposed change of address was 14 year old me.

Sometimes shortened to simply 8309, or referred to in casual conversation as “that place where The Bastard lives with THAT BITCH,” 8309 Loretto Avenue was a two story twin house in a working class section of Philadelphia where my father (aka the bastard) had taken up residence with his new wife Arline (that bitch). This domicile of domestic duplicity was located approximately fifteen minutes from 9234 Grace Lane, the upscale split level single home in a residential neighborhood that my mother won in the property settlement of her divorce from my philandering father, along with the custody of their three surly and unruly children. There were many moments, I am sure (like the one represented by the hysterical admonition above) that my mother wondered if being left on her own to raise three teenagers in a house whose mortgage payments were more than she could afford was really winning at all.

It was commonly considered that my father had lowered himself in every sense of the word when he left my mother. He sunk to the depths of moral depravity by becoming a liar and adulterer, breaking the solemn vows he had taken before God and family. He traded down in women, replacing my mother who was beautiful, kind and smart with my step mother who was ugly, spiteful and narrow-minded. And in giving up the semi suburban dream house in Pine Valley for the semi-detached small brick box in Bell’s Corner, my father’s net worth had taken a nose dive. No wonder he was permanently dyspeptic.

I made it through my high school and college years without being exiled from Grace to Loretto. I was finally sent there after graduating college at age 21 with no job and no plans for my future by my mother’s second husband, a manic depressive, who, when he forgot to take his Lithium, became violent at the prospect of having to share his domestic space with anyone as depressed as he.

For years, I found it hard to forgive my mother for allowing this man she had married while I was away at college to throw me out of the only home I had ever really known and deliver me and all my worldly possessions to my father’s doorstep where after a show of humility wrought from sheer desperation, I was whisked downstairs to the basement – a cold spare place off of the laundry room that I called home for the next nine months while I attended graduate school to get certified to teach. Now, however, I understand that in her own way, my mother was protecting me from her husband’s rages and misplaced wrath, an anger and self loathing that finally aimed its full fury at her, his wife, when there was no one else residing there for him to abuse. She divorced him a year later.

Where 9234 Grace Lane had an air of shabby elegance borne of my mother’s reduced financial circumstances after her first divorce, at least it felt welcoming and lived in. 8309 was a cold and strangely uninviting place despite the presence of some of the plushest sofas and chairs from my father’s wholesale furniture showroom. Smoked mirrors that had been installed on two of the four living room walls presumably to make the small room appear larger had the opposite effect. They repeated the reflections of the overstuffed sofa and chairs with brocaded slip covers, the gold plated armoire with the ceramic knick knacks, the flowered wall paper and the gilded framed photographs of Arline’s odd looking deceased relatives over and over again, the images bouncing off of one another making the room feel as if it were in conflict with itself. The heavy draperies were always drawn and the air in the room was stagnant. Bo, an old, flatulent dog Arline had rescued from the streets limped and farted across the sculpted gold wall to wall carpeting, stopping periodically to groan and yelp at its sickly image in the smoky mirror. During the nine months I lived there, I often found myself struggling for breath as I climbed the basement stairs, emerging from my solitude to become a bit player upon the stage my father had erected to live out the next act of his life.

And what a stage it was, peopled by an array of characters. My father himself, the self-ordained patriarch ruled over his domain with a cold heart and an iron fist. Like most men small in stature, my father was a bit of a bully – a coward of a man who would pick fights with those powerless to defend themselves. Then there was Arline, who thought of herself as pure as the driven snow and in competition with Florence Nightengale for her selfless devotion to others. She did an enviable job of caring for and protecting her two sons, who had the misfortune of having my father as a step father. Fortunately for them, unlike my bother, sister and I, these two boys had the undying devotion of their own father as well as their mother’s unbridled affection to gird them through my father’s pointless and predictable tirades.

Sometimes after dinner, I would try to join my father in the living room where he watched television on the couch. I would sit on the chair and pretend to watch, sticking to the plastic slip covers. Every once in a while we would even have a civil conversation, I can’t even remember about what but as soon as that would happen, Arline would scream from the kitchen, “Bill! Don’t let her upset you. She’ll make your ulcer bleed.” And I would say, “We’re not fighting Arline, we’re just talking about the TV show” And she would say, “Shes’ lying Bill, don’t let her do this to you.” And he would never ever tell her the truth.


I wrote the best paper of my college career while living in my father’s basement that year. A Jungian analysis of Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories, Ligea and William Wilson, this paper made the connections between those characters and Jung’s descriptions of the shadow and the animus. Writing by lamplight at a the card table in dead of night in my father’s basement as the wind growled outside, I felt very much like one of Poe’s characters, maybe even a little like Poe himself – forlorn and tormented, driven to the edge of sanity.

I got an A on that paper, perhaps the first sign of light – that maybe, this year was not going to define the rest of my life but begin to reshape it.

Mother and Daughter: Reading Each Other's Lives

"This is not about you, Mother," I say but of course I know it is. "Didn't you see the title of this blog? I call it "her own terms" for a reason."

I had been writing this blog for over two years and for all of this time, somehow, I'd been able to keep it from my mother. After all, at a healthy and active 81 years of age, she'd managed to live her life without computers or the Internet. This, despite the fact that my sister and I had bought her a computer when her husband died six years ago, with the promise that she could be in regular contact with her grandchildren via email.

That wasn't enough of a motivation and she sold the computer along with much of the other contents of her home when she remarried and moved into the house of her new husband, a very hearty octogenarian, who is actively engaged in the world- including cyberspace -- which he visits regularly.


So I'd been writing about my life, my family, my childhood, with little concern that my mother would ever see what I'd written. Her using the Internet seemed as unlikely as her suddenly swimming or riding a bike - two things that she'd never learned how to do during her Depression era childhood.

It was at the family Hannukah party where my seventeen year old niece announced, "Aunt Marsha, I have been reading your blog and I really like it. It's very enlightening."

I was totally shocked that Sunni, a pre-med major and freshman in college would have found anything of interest in my writing. But she told me she was most interested in the pieces about teaching and writing and that were she not studying to be a doctor, her next choice for a major would have been English.

I was gratified by this conversation, happy that my niece would find something of value in my blog, but it was my mother whose ears had perked up.

"How can I read this blog?" she asked and I got a queasy feeling inside. For the past few months, I had been writing pieces about making peace with my childhood and the impact of my parents' painful divorce on the trajectory of my life. Most recently, I had written about the devastating effect my mother's brief yet harmful addiction to prescription drugs, during the period immediately following my father's abadonnment of his family for another woman had had on my life.

I had written other pieces too, more positive ones about transition and change, the life lessons I had learned from her as well as other pieces about my grandmother and great grandmother and the impact their lives have had on mine.

"Next time Irving's at his computer, ask him to type in www.marshapincus.com and you'll get to it," I said.

"Why did you do that?" my husband asked later. "You know what's going to happen." And sure enough, two days after the party, the phone rang.

"How could you do that?" she screamed into the phone. "How could you shame me like that on your blog??"

I knew exactly which line in which entry she was referring to.

"It wasn't you," I said. "Did you read the whole thing? The villain in that piece was the doctor who presribed the valium to you as if it were candy."

"How can you say I didn't love you? I was doing all that I could to keep a roof over your head and food in your mouth."

"I know that," I replied. "But it doesn't change the way I experienced what was happening as a loss of love. I was eleven years old."

"You know, a psychiatrist at the time told me that you would always blame me for your loss of a father. That you would always see it as my fault," she said, softening a bit and becoming more reflective than defensive. "You're fifty eight years old, when are you going to get over it?"

"It's always been less significant to you than it is to me. For you it was a lifetime ago. He was your first husband. You've had others - good marriages and you've had a good life. But he was my father. My only one."

There was silence on the line for a bit and then I heard my mother say, "I read the other one too. The one you called Chasing a Dead Man's Story."

In that piece I had written about how I'd finally been able to see my father's refusal to tell me why he'd left as a gift that fueled my mightly need to know, my insatiable desire to get to the bottom of things and how that had helped me in my professional and personal lives.

"You know, he told me," she said.

"Told you what??"

"He told me why he left."

"He did?? When"

"Sometime before the divorce, when Arline had broken up with him, before she took him back and they got married."

"And...?"

"He said it wasn't me. It was him. That he just couldn't live as an imposter any more. That he was tired of trying to live up to the expectations I had of him. That he was never the man I thought he was."

"He said THAT?? Did you understand what he was telling you? Did you believe him?"

"Not at the time. I was just too hurt."

"And now?"

"Well now I realize that I could have gotten over the betrayal a whole lot faster... I could have moved on with my life. It was the poverty that destroyed me. The worry about money and survival. How I was going to take care of you three kids on my own."

"Tell me more. I need to know."

"He bragged to me about how when he went to court for the child support hearing, he wore old clothes and didn't shave so he'd look like a bum and the judge would believe he didn't have any money. And after it was over, when he'd won and had the support reduced, he laughed in my face and told me how he got his boss to pay him under the table."

There was silence on the line again, as I let her words sink in.

"That's just another thing I will never know. How could he do this to his own children?? Trick the judge. And brag about it!!!"

I couldn't get the image of my father , wearing baggy pants, and a torn flannel shirt with two days' growth and a self satisfied smirk on his face, out of my mind.

"What kind of man does this? God, I'm fifty eight and this still hurts."

"I'm sorry," she said and in that moment, something happened between mother and daughther that had never happened before.

The conversation sparked by my mother's foray into cyberspace and the story of my life on my terms lead us both to a place where we were tentatively if only momentarily on the same page.


* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Before I posted this, I asked my daughter Ali to read it. I wanted her to know the story but more importantly, I wanted to ask her if it seemed fair. This blog works both ways, I know. Mothers and daughters from different generations, reading each others' lives without shame - with love and understanding.

Terra Bound and the Poetics of Space

Last night in writing group, the prompt was to write a fifteen line “mirror” poem in which the first seven lines are repeated in reverse order. Here is what I wrote:








Her celestial husband is not terra bound
as he makes his home in the sky.
Each night, she climbs the stairway of trees
entering their bed of secrets in the clouds.
They do not always find themselves there.
Sometimes they bounce from sirius to cumulus,
adrift in the intimate expanse of the heavens.
Adrift in the intimate expanse of the heavens,
sometimes they bounce from sirius to cumulus.
They do not always find themselves there
entering their bed of secrets in the clouds.
Each night, she climbs the stairway of trees.
As he makes his home in the sky,
Her celestial husband is not terra bound.

I spent the entire day reading The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, losing myself in his meditations on the ways poets daydream through, within and beyond the spaces they inhabit.

Most intriguing to me was the distinction between metaphor and image. The metaphor, he writes, comes into being after the idea has been formulated. The poet dresses her idea in imagistic language, to enhance the concept she wants to convey.

The image presupposes nothing. It just is.

Bubbling up from the depths of the unconscious, the image arrives unheralded in moments when the poet allows the walls between her conscious and unconscious to lower so what lies beneath can be seen.

Once when I was having terrible writer’s block, I asked my friend Tobi, a painter, if she'd ever experienced a similar phenomenon. She said yes, but she’d recently developed an antidote.




She’d stand before the white canvas and ask it questions waiting patiently for the answers. She might inquire, “What would it look like if I painted a hand coming through a wall?” or “What would happen if I coiled lines of purple and green around on another right here?”

And she’d wait in wonder, while the canvas would tell her what it needed to see next or what story it needed her to tell. Then she and the canvas would engage in a reciprocal dialogue until before she knew it, she was deep inside of her own creative process, bringing images to light.

I tried the same thing recently. Just sat in front of my computer screen and asked it what it was seeing and what else it wanted to see. That’s when a stone house at the edge of the forest appeared inhabited by the woman with a stone fetus inside of her body, looking and longing for a girl named Ephemera.

The image of the celestial husband came to me while I was reading the Poetics of Space in Borders yesterday, and last night I wrote of a home in the sky with no roof and only the wind for walls enclosing a welcoming bed of soft, warm clouds sitting beneath prattling stars inhabited by two people with no bodies, only voices, singing a home of their own.

Inside the Composition Book: The Stories We Tell

The summer before I entered 7th grade I wrote a book. I wrote it in one of those ubiquitous marble copy books that all American adults of a certain age will forever associate with school. But instead of writing my name, grade and subject on the appropriate box on the front cover in the spaces provided, I wrote “The Blind Love of Kirk and Ellen: A Love Story of Courage and Hope” by Marsha Rosenzweig.
If you opened the first page you would have seen a Table of Contents, the chapter titles written in ink in several different styles of handwriting. At twelve, I was shaping my identity as much as I was crafting my script, experimenting with flourishes and loops on the empty lined paper just as I would play with the thickness of black eyeliner and shades of lipstick on my blank face. Through all of the shape-shifting, there was one part of my identity that was a constant. I was a writer. Even before I had learned to write my letters, my mother told me that I would take a pencil and scrawl inscrutable symbols on whatever paper I could find, then “read” her the “stories” I had written. “The Blind Love of Kirk and Ellen” was just one of many books I wrote during my childhood and early adolescence.
Kirk and Ellen were both seventeen years old when they fell in love. They had known each other all their lives, living across the street from one another in almost identical split level semi-suburban shingle roofed homes, not a whole lot different from the one I lived in. Ellen’s bedroom, where she would talk to Kirk for hours on the telephone, hiding under the covers so her mother wouldn’t hear, was painted the same lavender color as mine and her bed spread resembled the flowered comforter I had wanted my mother to buy for me instead of the white chenille cover that didn’t provide nearly enough privacy when I would call my girlfriend Jackie on the phone and read to her by flashlight the latest chapter of my burgeoning oeuvre.
I don’t remember whether it was my idea or Jackie’s to send my manuscript to Berkeley-Highland. All of the books we owned at that time were published by Berkeley Highland Books. With authors like Rosamond du Jardin and Betty Cavannah and titles like Trish, A Date for Diane, Showboat Summer and Class Ring, these books with their signature scotch paid symbol in the upper left hand corner offered their twelve year old readers glimpses into the romance-filled world of their popular boy-crazy older sisters. What I do remember is that with Jackie’s encouragement, I bought a large envelope and lots of stamps, looked up the publisher’s address inside my copy of “A Girl Like Me” and placed my entire marble copy book inside. Along with the marble manuscript, I wrote a letter that said something like the following:

Dear Publishers:
I have been reading Berkeley Highland books for many years and I think it is about time for you to publish books for teenage girls written by teenage girls. We are better able to write about what our lives are REALLY like…. Enclosed is my book….etc.etc.
Marsha Rosenzweig, a REAL teenage girl.

Never mind that this realistic teenage novel was a love story between young adults whose love is tested when the young woman Ellen is blinded after being hit by a car and the young man Kirk tracks down the man driving the car who just so happened to have been Ellen’s estranged father who is then brought to justice, serves jail time, escapes, tries to run down Kirk who ends up paralyzed. The book ends on their wedding day as a brave Ellen pledges to be Kirk’s legs, while a courageous Kirk promises to be Ellen’s eyes forever.

Seventh grade began several weeks after I sent my novel off to be considered for publication (the first and last time I ever sent an unsolicited manuscript to anyone) and I soon forgot about my authorial aspirations, instead caught up in the exigencies of the junior high school social scene. So it came as quite a surprise when several months later, a package arrived for me from Berkeley Highland Publishing Company. I opened it hopefully until I saw the tell-tale black and white markings of my copy book attached by a paper clip to my very first rejection letter.