Everyone Has a Story

 Meditations upon reading Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr.'s Gay Poems for Red States:

Everyone has a story. Everyone has pain. Everyone has fear. Everyone gets scared. Everyone has doubts. Everyone has obstacles. Yes. Some people’s obstacles and pain are objectively, measurably worse than others. Being unable to walk in a world built for walking people. Being black or brown in a society so deeply based on whiteness that white people never have to think about being white. Being LGBTQ+ in a world where every religion every society is grounded in the idea of male/female dichotomies and relationships.  Being non-Christian in a society that is drenched in the forms (if not the deep ways) of Christianity. These are objective obstacles. But they are not the only obstacles. They are not the only pains.

Everyone has a story that should be heard. No one story should be privileged over any other story. Giving others the right to be heard, to be seen does not silence other stories. Stories can co-exist. So much of what we see now feels like people whose stories have been privileged for hundreds of years, are feeling that somehow their story will be erased by new ones. They won’t be. The fear is baseless. We are all richer by having more stories, more flavors, more colors, more modes of being.

The best thing about hearing more stories, is suddenly discovering that there are many, many people out there with similar (and yet unique) stories. Women discovering “me too” was a revelation. Adults finding similarities to others childhood stories and realizing, ah, that’s why I was different as a child (previously undiagnosed neurodivergence, or PCOS, or gender dysphoria, or many other obstacles).

We learn about others from their stories. We learn about ourselves by being free to tell our stories and by seeing little pieces of ourselves, our emotions, our fears, our anxieties, in the stories of others. Our enemies have stories. We need to hear our enemies’ stories too. We have to know them as people with stories. We do NOT have to privilege their stories over ours, but their stories have a right to exist.

Everyone has a story.

A good society is one that is open to all the stories. 

 

What Got Me Here

 

When I read Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild several years ago, it affected me as no other piece of writing had done before or since. There was one paragraph in particular that really struck me a chapter or two before the end of the book:

“What if I forgave myself? I thought. What if I forgave myself even though I’d done something I shouldn’t have? What if I was a liar and a cheat and there was no excuse for what I’d done other than because it was what I wanted and needed to do? What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn’t do anything differently than I had done? What if I’d actually wanted to fuck everyone one of those men? What if heroin taught me something? What if yes was the right answer instead of no? What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn’t have done was what also had got me here? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?”

Except for the reference to heroin, everything in that paragraph struck against my mind the way a clapper does on a bell, causing my mind to reverberate for days, the vibrations echoing through my life in a way that changed the way I saw everything, felt about everything both past and present.

I had sex with a lot of men between the ages of 20 and 40. How many men? How much sex, well it depends upon whether you accept Bill Clinton’s definition (“I did not have sexual relations with that woman…Ms. Lewinsky”) or the definition of Bill Clinton’s detractors.  Until the late 90’s my definition of “having sex” was pretty much on par with President Clinton, but after his impeachment I found it necessary to revise my list of men I’d “had sex with” upwards by 3 or 4 names. And it wasn’t just the sex, it was the emotional attachments, the stalking behavior; the men, often friends, that I wanted to sleep with but couldn’t who sometimes got hurt because of my impulsive behavior. I am genuinely sorry for pain that I caused. Yet I’m still glad for the experiences, because they all taught me something. They made me into the person that has negotiated this wonderful yet turbulent, nearly 30 year marriage to my soul mate.

 

New Things

    I started writing journals when I was 12. I had read The Diary of Anne Frank and decided like her to create an imaginary friend that I wrote to regularly. My friend was named Margie. Like Anne I wrote a lot about my feelings. Unlike Anne I did not do a very good job of describing what was actually going on in my real life. No one reading those "Margie letters" today would learn much about what life was like in suburban California in the early 1960's. 

    The "Margie letters" were written on binder paper, making it easy for me to write the letters during class periods when I was bored. I stored them all in a large three ring binder. I started in 1963, and continued that practice through my sophomore year in college. I still have the binder with all the letters packed away in a box somewhere.  They may have been cathartic to write, but they hold little content of interest to me as I aged.

    At the end of the summer of 1971 just before my junior year, I made a change. I purchased a hardbound record book, 12" x 8.5" format, and began writing a different kind of journal.  There was still a lot of internal emotional reflection, but I began to write much more about  the world around me, observations of the world, people, events, and activities. Writing in a bound journal seemed to me a much more serious undertaking than my "Margie letters" had been. It suggested permanence and the possibility that others somewhere in the future might read what I had written. 

    That December (1971) in my first bound journal I began what became an annual tradition that lasted for the next two decades: my firsts or new things list. Each December I would think back over the year and write down everything that I had done for the first time, every new experience I had encountered. In my twenties, thirties and even early forties, my lists of new things were quite lengthy. I traveled quite a bit in the U.S. visiting far flung friends and relatives, attending scholarly conferences, doing research. I moved from one state to another, from my parents home in California, to college in Ohio, a summer job in Connecticut, graduate school in Kentucky, professorships in Pennsylvania, Virginia and Kentucky. I worked a variety of jobs, went to graduate school, started a career, got denied tenure and started career jobs. I married, divorced and married again. 

    Then at some point in my fifties, I stopped doing this recording of new things. Part of it was because there weren't as many new things. As we age, we generally have fewer novel experiences, things we've never experienced before. Moreover, the new things I began to experience in my fifties and sixties were generally not fun things: hysterectomy, cataracts and surgery, developing rheumatoid arthritis, and type 2 diabetes. I got out of the habit not only of my annual new things list, but of journaling in general. 

    This year, however, was an eye opener. A very big "new thing" happened, not just to me but to all the people around me: a great flood that devastated vast stretches of eastern Kentucky. While this is not a "good" new thing, it is important, significant, and affected us in profound ways, even those of us who lost little or nothing directly in the flood. It has made me want to pay closer attention again, journaling again, even my year end chronicle of new things. 

    

What is old?

 I keep waiting to feel old. 

I'm not talking about my physical body. That's been aching and creaking, and dysfunctional since my early 50's. Between osteo-arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, bursitis, type two diabetes, asthma and obesity my health has been rocky for some time. 

But my spirit, my being doesn't feel old. I thought maybe when I reached 65 and got on Medicare I'd feel old. Nope. Or when I retired a few years after that, but no. Nor do I expect turning 70 in less than two weeks will make me feel old either. 

I spent most of my life working with young people, college students (most, but not all, younger than myself). I always felt more akin to the students than the "grownups" I saw around me. Took me some time to realize that many of those "grownups" really were not, any more than I was. There were some faculty, almost always men, who seem to have completely lost touch with what it was like to be 19 or 20 and in college. Who were always grumbling about "what's wrong with kids these days." So maybe some people do feel old, and lose touch with their young selves. 

But I think that maybe I'm never going to feel old, never really going to feel like a "grownup," and never really going to know for sure what I'm going to be when I grow up. 

My brief life as a farm worker Part 3

What was most important to me about working at Yoder Brothers during the summers of 1970 and 1971 was my fellow workers. It is also the hardest thing to write about. One reason for that is that 50 years later I recognize how self-absorbed I was at 19 and as a result I did not learn very much about the women with whom I worked, nor did I do much to keep in touch with them when I went back to college. Yet those women touched my life and my ways of thinking much more deeply than I realized at the time. It was their fellowship that brought me back to the job for a second summer, not the $1.30 that we earned per hour.  

This is something I haven’t mentioned yet. Minimum wage in 1970 was $1.65.  At college working as a waitress and in the cafeteria, I earned federal minimum wage.  I knew what it was. When I applied for the job, I was told we’d be paid minimum wage; when the first paycheck came, I was flabbergasted. We were being paid $1.30 an hour. My first thought was that this was illegal, that they were taking advantage of the fact that most of the workers were immigrants who only spoke Spanish and could not really advocate for themselves. I called the same Cooperative Extension agent that had told me about the job in the first place, and he explained reality to me. There was a separate, lower, minimum wage that applied to farm workers.  Therefore $1.30 was completely legal, but my view that it was exploitive and taking advantage of immigrant workers was also true.  I learned later that the men who worked there earned $1.65 because they had more options as to jobs and would have left to work somewhere else if paid less than non-farm minimum wage.

The First Summer

 When I started work there in June 1970 all of the other women who worked there were Hispanic in that they were all native Spanish speakers – despite significant differences in dialect. They came from several countries. The largest number were from Mexico, but there were women from both Central America and South America, the four countries that I am sure about are Guatemala, El Salvador, Columbia, and Peru. All but one of the women had come to the United States as either teens or adults. That one woman, Conchita, had come to the U.S. as a very small child with her parents and had attended school entirely in the U.S. While she had grown up speaking Spanish at home with her parents, she was truly bi-lingual and spoke unaccented, colloquial English like anyone person who went to school here.

Connie as she was called, was my life-line in the beginning, helping me get up-to-speed in my Spanish. Like most kids growing up in California in the 1950's and 1960's I learned some Spanish vocabulary in grade school, and by middle school was taking formal classes in Spanish every year.  I studied Spanish in school for 4 and a half years (middle school, high school, and a semester in college) and earned mostly A's (except in college) but really wasn't fluent until working at Yoder Brothers. Connie helped me with the work specific vocabulary, that hadn’t been covered in my classes. She also helped ease me into the social network by inviting me to her home for dinner twice, where I got to meet her mother, husband, and six-year-old son – and have my first truly authentic Mexican cuisine! Yoder Brothers was a temporary stop for Connie who with a high school diploma and other skills soon found a less physical office job somewhere else.

It was harder to be part of the group after Connie left since everyone else spoke only Spanish, but nothing teaches a language faster than necessity and total emersion. I soon made my best friend at Yoder Brothers, Gloria. Gloria had come to the U.S. because her brother suffered from a congenital illness than could at that time only be treated properly in the U.S. Like the vast majority of immigrants, she had not really understood how difficult it would be for her to find skilled work like she had in Mexico, especially lacking English language skills. She was having difficulty saving up enough money to bring her brother to the U.S. working as a field hand.

Gloria was breathtakingly beautiful. She looked like the fairy tale description of snow white: ivory pale skin, ruby lips, shining dark hair. One of the things that I was quick to observe at Yoder Brothers was that “Hispanic” covers a very wide range of racial and ethnic groups. Gloria looked like she would have been at home on the streets of Madrid. By comparison the oldest, most senior worker at the plant, Irene from Peru had the deep bronze skin and high cheekbones that we Americans associate with native Americans. The rest of the women ranged somewhere in between those two poles, representing a wide mix of indigenous people and European invaders.

In many of their home countries these differences in racial and ethnic heritage mattered a great deal, social status and opportunity varied based on a person’s degree of European heritage. Here in the United States those differences were largely obliterated; from the point of view of the larger society and employers they were all Hispanic immigrants, they could not speak English, and they were vulnerable to deportation, even documented immigrants though the undocumented were especially so. Here tenure in the U.S. and knowledge of how the system worked were the primary forms of status, not racial and ethnic differences within the group.

Sitting and talking with Gloria before work, at lunch, and after work really pushed my Spanish fluency. Unlike the other women whose conversations revolved around their families or their relationships, food and clothing, Gloria wanted to talk about music, politics, and religion or perhaps more properly about beliefs. She wanted to tell me about her life in Mexico and her family and learn about my life and my family. We explored our similarities and differences and we taught each other songs.  I can only remember one of the many songs she taught me, because I have sung it often over the years to cheer myself up.

Ven a contar conmigo,

Si tristes estas.

Cuando te sientes deprimido

Ven a contar conmigo

Y el sol saldra.  

Translation: Come sing with me if you are sad. When you are feeling depressed sing with me and the sun will come out.

One of the funniest things that happened to me that first summer was due to an odd lacuna in my Spanish vocabulary. Gloria lived in an apartment with Bonita another one of the Yoder Brothers workers, about a mile and a half from the Yoder Brothers plant.  It was walkable, there were sidewalks the entire distance. But there was heavy traffic and in the summer it was hot. So early on, I suggested that I at least give them a ride home at the end of the day.  It was on my way and not at all inconvenient.  Our first ride was quite comical.  Neither Gloria nor Bonita knew the name of the major cross street where I would need to turn, so I told them to let me know before we reached the intersection. So I’m driving along, and the first major intersection is coming up so I ask izquierda [left] or derecha [right],  they replied “derecho” which I took to mean I should turn right, so I started to signal and make the turn and they started yelling “no, no, no” and pointing straight ahead.  We went through this two more times. Finally, I stopped the car and looked at them and gestured to the left saying “izquierda?” they nodded, then I gestured right and said “derecha?” they nodded. Then they pointed straight ahead and said “derecho!” In all my years of studying Spanish I had learned left and right, but I had never learned that “straight ahead” is derecho.  For days afterwards this was the subject of much discussion and laugher at lunch time.

In addition to providing Gloria and Bonita rides every day, I several times invited them to come to my parents’ house (where I lived) for meals, providing transportation to and from. At least once they both came, but two other times only Gloria came. They would invite me to eat with them, and I would accept their hospitality as to do otherwise would have been rude and insulting, but I would try to eat very little because they had so little. I felt very close to Gloria and I think she also felt close to me despite all our differences.

fairy stone crystal

At the end of the summer of 1970 when it was time for me to go back to school, Gloria and I exchanged lots of hugs and tears.  She also gave me an amazing gift one that I felt terribly guilty about accepting but knew that to refuse it would hurt her immeasurably. We had talked a lot about our religious beliefs, and one of the difficulties that I encountered in doing so was that for Gloria, a Spanish speaking Catholic, no distinction in her conversation was made between Jesus and God, she referred to both indistinguishably as “Dios.” As a consequence, I had been unable to explain to her satisfactorily how while I had a deep and abiding faith in God, I was not a Christian. This was probably made more difficult because I wore a necklace that had a small locket and a fairy stone cross on it.  I wore the fairy stone not because it was a cross, but because it was given me by my favorite Aunt and reminded me of trips on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

I was overwhelmed when at parting she gave me the exquisite gold crucifix that she wore all the time when not at work. It had been a gift to her from her deceased mother.

At that point in my life I was pretty sure I wanted to be a Jew even though I was still ten years away from formal conversion to Judaism, I would have felt sacrilegious wearing a traditional Catholic crucifix with a tiny Jesus impaled upon it.  In response I removed my own necklace, removed the small locket, and gave her my fairy stone cross, explaining how it was a natural mineral that grew in the shape of a cross, and who had given it to me.  I kept Gloria’s crucifix close to me for the next 12 years, never wearing it, but holding it often and thinking about her. In 1975 my first graduate school roommate was a physician from Belgium, Arlette Lepot.  Arlette’s primary language was French, but she was fluent in Spanish and German. We discovered quickly that I was marginally more fluent in Spanish than she was in English, so we sometimes spoke Spanish together rather than English. For a variety of reasons Arlette reminded me of Gloria and I ended up telling her the story of Gloria’s crucifix and gave it to her, because she would wear it and honor it.

Gloria was the only woman at Yoder Brothers that I kept in touch with after I went back to college. We wrote letters to each other in Spanish. Mine were pretty simplistic. So I learned that after I left that she and Bonita had been able to get better paying (but still very hard, hot and miserable) jobs at a laundry. Then the letters stopped and my last letter was returned. I lost touch with her and it was not until the next summer that I was able to learn why. Both Gloria and Bonita were undocumented so an INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) raid on the laundry where she worked, caused her to go underground and leave the area. I’ve always wondered what happened to her after that.

A Concerted Cultivation Childhood

Sociologist Annette Lareau developed the concepts of "concerted cultivation" and "the accomplishment of natural growth" as two different patterns of child rearing practiced by different social classes with "concerted cultivation" being the preferred child rearing style of the middle and especially upper middle class parents, and "accomplishment of natural growth" the preferred child rearing style of working and lower class parents.

Although I grew up in a blue-collar, working class neighborhood, where my father, a machinist, was one of the lowest earning workers, both of my parents had come from middle class families. My father was the only one of his siblings who did not go to college (due to his having graduated high school in 1930 just after his family was financially devastated by the stock market crash), and my mother had gone to college and gotten a teaching certificate and spent seven years teaching school before marrying.

The result was that my childhood experiences were highly controlled, scheduled and focused around education (concerted cultivation), while those of my neighborhood peers were unstructured, largely free of supervision and centered around fun (accomplishment of natural growth).  This was most obvious in the summer time.

When school ended each June, my neighborhood friends were usually pushed out of the house each morning by their mothers, who didn't want their children in the way while they were cleaning house and watching soap operas. This was California, in the SF Bay Area, where rain was non-existent in the summer time, so bad weather never forced kids inside during the summer time. The children were left to entertain themselves and only grudgingly allowed back in their houses to use the bathroom, get something to drink or eat, then encouraged back outside.  Every child had a bike, most children had roller skates (the metal kind that clamped on to shoes) and the neighborhood had excellent level, continuous sidewalks on which to ride and skate; games of tag, hide and seek, four square, kickball, catch, and many others spontaneously erupted.  Girls also played jacks, hopscotch, played with dolls outside. Boys had comic books, and some access to tools and wood to build things like skate boards and other small items.

While our friends spent their summers in almost total freedom of unstructured play, our summers were quite different. Our mornings were always organized into some type of educational activity.  My mother's obsessions changed from year to year. One summer she focused on math, and we spent several hours doing math problems. Another summer our lessons focused on learning Spanish. Another year we spent a lot of time reading the Bible and memorizing Psalms. Whatever the focus, two to three hours of every summer morning were organized around some type of learning activity.

Every summer involved substantial time for reading. My mother took us to the public library near us (about 3/4 of a mile away) at least once a week, if not more often. Each of us selected books that we would read ourselves, and my mother selected books that she would read aloud to all of us in the evening - all of the books by P. L. Travers (Mary Poppins and more), Beverly Cleary's books (Beezus, Henry and Ramona, etc.), as well as classics like Treasure Island, Swiss Family Robinson, etc.

Even when we were allotted playtime, we rarely had the same degree of unsupervised freedom as our friends. My mother would recruit the other children to come to our yard and teach everyone games from her childhood. She taught us  Red-light/Green-light, Simon Says, Duck-Duck-Goose, Puss in the Corner,  and many more whose names I've forgotten.

Unlike the other mothers in the neighborhood, my mother had little interest in housekeeping (beyond the necessities of cooking and laundry). Moreover, our household furnishings were old and shabby second had pieces, and we lacked carpeting.  So unlike the other mothers she did not mind having dirty, noisy, children tromping in and out of the house. She encouraged other neighborhood children to play in our yard, and to join us indoors for afternoon for organized arts and crafts activities.

My father was also unlike most of the other fathers when he was at home. He cared little for having the perfect lawn and put little energy into yard work. As a result he did not mind having children digging holes in our yard, or building forts or other things in the yard.  He preferred to spend his time at home in his workshop building things, and liked showing children how to use tools and make things.

My family's relationship to television was different from the other neighborhood children as well. In the other households the television reigned supreme in the evening hours, with both adults and children watching programs during prime time. Our television was almost never on in the evening. My father took classes at the community college through our entire childhood and he was often studying in the evenings. He had little interest in situation comedies or the other staples of 1950's and 1960's TV. My mother on the other hand loved TV and comedies, but in deference to my father did not watch TV in the evenings. Instead she watched TV during the mornings when the popular situation comedies of the day were "stripped" five days a week. Almost all of my familiarity with television in my childhood came from watching with my mother on summer mornings.  When I was really little  we watched things like O Susannah (Gayle Storm), George Burns and Gracie Allen, and George Benny; as I grew older her favorite shows became the Dick Van Dyke show, Bewitched, Donna Reed, Father Knows Best, etc.

As a child I was often envious of my friends and their freedom in the summer.  It was only as an adult that I came to appreciate the was in which my mother shaped our time around learning.

In Memory of Mat

My cousin Matilda was 8 years older than me. Growing up she was an exciting, awesome figure in my life. I didn't get to see her but every couple of years, but each encounter was fraught with significance. She was smart, funny and sassy and I admired her enormously.

I have a number of extremely vivid memories of Mat from childhood.

One summer when we were all together in our parents' childhood home of Troutdale, Virginia, Mat (then a young teen) took a whole troop of children including me and my little brother Charlie as well as several local children on a hike down to the creek and the swimming hole, without telling the parents where we were going. We came back hours later, hot, sweaty, sunburnt, our legs scratched from the brambles, and deliriously happy with great memories of water striders, newts, crawdads, and wading in the cold stream. I think the grownups yelled at Mat for scaring them.

A couple of years later, also in Troutdale, I remember Mat showing me how the neighbor's baby goats like to climb on things by getting down on the ground and letting the goats climb on her back.

When Mat was 18 (and I was 10), she had a VW Beetle - a convertible VW Beetle! This was the most awesome thing I'd ever seen. This was about the same time that I learned that Troutdale a little town I knew and loved was in located in "Appalachia" - a place that took on mythical proportions in the early 1960's. I made a vow about that time in my life that when I grew up, I was going to be a school teacher in Appalachia and have a VW Beetle (maybe even a convertible!).  It was by no means an accident that my first car (in 1975) was a VW Beetle, and I drove it all over Appalachia while I researched my Masters Thesis and Dissertation.

One of my best Mat memories is from when I was 18 (Mat was 26) and I graduated from high school. I had my very first trip on my own as an "adult" to visit Mat in San Diego where she was a Navy nurse. She took me all over San Diego, to all the tourist spots (Marine World, the San Diego Zoo, etc.), in her sporty little MG convertible. The best part of the trip was the party she and her roommate threw: they invited not only their nurse friends but a whole bunch of young Navy men! Men, dancing and beer! How could one not idolize a cousin like Mat.

As we got older the age difference mattered less. We became friends, who wrote, called, and visited. Mat's the reason I got on Facebook, she kept bugging me because she wanted to share pictures. Another way that we were able to keep touch with each other.  I will miss my cousin Mat. May she rest in peace.

Beautiful, Useful Things

            My father made beautiful, useful things with his hands and his tools. As far back as I can remember he had a well-equipped workshop in the garage which included a 1949 Shopsmith, an amazing multiple purpose woodworking tool that could saw, drill, sand, and best of all be a lathe on which he turned many intricate smooth objects like the posts and spindles on my brothers’ bunk beds, table legs, chair legs, candlesticks, and other decorative but useful items for our home.  I liked spending time with him while he worked, especially when he turned some blocky 4 x 4 post into a smoothly rounded, fluted, curving piece of beauty. I loved the smell of sawdust mingled with oil and the faint burning smell as his chisel cut into the swiftly turning block of wood.  I enjoyed the task of using fine sandpaper to further smooth the objects he turned on his lathe, luxuriating in the feel of the wood.

            After thirty years of knowing my father, I should have realized when I asked him drill 9 holes in a block of wood as a makeshift Chanukkiah* for my first Chanukah that he would not pay attention to my instructions, but instead create something incredibly beautiful that violated all traditional Jewish rules for a Chanukkiah.  A Baptist turned Methodist by marriage, my father knew nothing about my adopted religion. I think he wanted me to know that he supported me as I made this major change in my life, unlike my mother who took my conversion as a rejection of her and my childhood.

            I sent my dad (in California) a sketch of a plain, flat, block of wood with nine holes in a row. A few weeks later, I received (in Kentucky) a large box in return. Carefully wrapped in layers of tissue paper and newspaper was a work of art.

My first discovery was that he had chosen to use some of his precious chestnut wood instead of a scrap as I had suggested. The wood had been scavenged in the late 1970’s from his childhood home in Virginia. In the late 19th century before the blight destroyed most of the American chestnut trees, my grandfather had built the family home with chestnut paneling, stairs, railings, doors, molding, and other adornments.

Within the box was a block of wood, but unlike my sketch it had been carefully laminated in half inch layers of decreasing size, creating a double staircase effect with four steps on each side and a ninth platform at the top.  There were nine holes drilled, one in each step.  However, those holes were not for candles, for in the box, individually wrapped were nine perfect wooden cups, each with a stem to sit in the stair-stepped holes. Each cup had been turned separately on the lathe to perfect smoothness. They were all the same size, same diameter, same depth. The bottom of each cup had been curved like fat brandy snifters.  Each of those little wooden cups had to be turned on the lathe separately; checked and rechecked to make sure they were the same diameter, the same height, the same, length stem, so that when set in the stair-step block they would form a perfectly graduated holder for candles rising on both sides to a point in the middle.  I lifted each cup, turned them in my hands feeling the smoothness of the fine wood grain and placed them in the block one by one.

My father had carefully cut green felt and glued it to the bottom of the main block of wood, so that the bottom of it would not scratch or scar any surface it was place on. Then in the center of the bottom, he had left an opening in the felt, and in it he had burnt the words:  To SUE/from DAD/DEC 1981.

Thirty-seven Chanukahs have come and gone. Sometimes I consider getting a “proper” Chanukkiah. Jewish law and tradition say that all the candles in a Menorah or a Chanukkiah should be at the same height, because no day, and no person is more important than another. Also, Jewish law and tradition call for a new candles every night or a total of 44 candles, so most Chanukkiah are designed for small candles less than ¼ inch in diameter and only about 4 inches high. My father designed his candle holder for regular sized candle tapers - 2/3 of an inch in diameter and eight to ten inches in height. The cost of 44 regular sized candles is getting to be a little prohibitive these days even at Walmart.

But in the end, every year I use this cherished gift from my father. It may not meet the standards of Jewish law, but it is still beautiful and a product of love.

______________

*Most people refer to these as Menorahs. However, a Menorah is a seven branched candle stick used in synagogues and homes on the Sabbath. A Chanukkiah is a nine branched or holed candle holders used only for the eight days of Chanukah.

Old Dogs (and Humans) Learn New Tricks

Eight years ago today (February 23, 2009)  I posted the following "25 Random Things About Myself" on Facebook:

In the last two days I've seen the 25 random things lists of two very different people (a fellow baby boomer poet and a 19 year old college student) which got me inspired to try. I'll bet I'd come up with 25 very different things a week from now.

25 random things about me: 

1. The best portrait I ever drew was of my best college friend’s dad, George Porter – it was a tiny sketch that looked so perfectly like him it was almost as if some outside force had worked through my hands. 


I hate asparagus – if I even attempt to eat them I start gagging. 
The most thrilling experience I ever had was riding as a passenger on pilot check rides, where the pilots did touch and go landings at Half Moon Bay airport. Once at sunset, a pilot made the sun “set” and then “rise” by swooping down and then up above the fog bank. 
My favorite city to visit is Boston – I love the MBTA and I always had the right change to get back off. The best hot fudge sundae I ever had was at Bailey’s in Boston (long since gone out of business). 
I never spent a night alone in the house I grew up in until I was 19 years old, and found I was unable to sleep listening for every little noise. 
My favorite book in childhood was Little Women, and my favorite character in the book was “Beth” – the one who dies before adulthood. My favorite book in adulthood is Beauty by Sherri Tepper in which she blends fantasy and science fiction in a moral tale about the destruction of beauty in the world, and really made me think about the choices we make. 
As long as I have a nice warm house and no place I have to drive, the best weather is what I can see out my window right now – deep fluffy snow. The world simplifies down to the stark basics of white and black. 
The person I enjoy talking to most in the whole world is my husband, John. 
I love Cinderella stories. My favorites are Eleanor Farjeon’s book The Glass Slipper and the movie Ever After with Drew Barrymore, but I’m also found of the movie The Glass Slipper with Leslie Caron, the Rogers and Hammerstein television version from the 1960’s with Leslie Ann Warren (and her crooked smile), and movie musical The Slipper and the Rose from 1976 with Richard Chamberlain as the Prince. But I will read and watch any version of the story at least once.
I cannot go to sleep unless I read first. My preferred bedtime reading is mysteries, especially police procedurals, detective fiction, and legal thrillers. 
I’m not sure I was really “in love” with my first husband, although I certainly loved him. 
Until I was in high school and was earning my own money, I had only three “store bought” dresses. All my clothes were hand me downs from older cousins, from rummage sales, and thrift shops or hand made by one of my aunts. I learned to sew at age 10 in self-defense and made most of the dresses I wore from fifth grade on. By the time I was in my twenties I was an excellent tailor, and made the wool suits that I did my job interviewing. 
I haven’t sewn a dress or skirt or blouse since 1988 when I discovered credit cards and catalogs. 
I never went on a date in high school. My best friend wanted me to come to the junior prom with her and her boyfriend, so she set me up with an old friend from junior high school (who went to a different school). I was so anxious about the date, that I worked myself into illness (supposedly strep throat but I don’t think that was diagnosed by a doctor) and cancelled out on the whole event. I never finished sewing the evening gown for the event. 
My first kiss was at 16 from a college boy who was a counselor at a day camp where I volunteered. I was so terrified by the sexual feelings that were evoked that I actually blanked out the experience completely for more than twenty years. If you’d asked me at age 20, I would have said my first kiss came in college at age 18. 
I hate grading essays. It’s the one thing that I really dislike about being a college professor. But nonetheless I think that students learn more from having to synthesize ideas from various sources into an essay, so I persist on assigning multiple essays in every class, every semester. 
The only thing that makes being “pre-diabetic” tolerable is Russell Stover sugar free mint patties in dark chocolate. The thought that I might never be able to eat another box of See’s Candies dark Bordeaux chocolates is almost unbearable.
I have not made any new close friends in fifteen years – a fact that I very much regret, but don’t quite know how to over come, as everyone I know locally these days has their life sewn up with children, grandchildren and other family ties. 
Most of my interaction with people (other than my husband), including students is over the Internet or by long distance telephone, which I value but still miss the face-to-face connections. 
In the winter, I’m obsessed with looking for sycamore trees, with their white limbs standing out against the brown of the forest. In the spring, my obsession is daffodils. In college, we could buy huge bunches of daffodils for 50 cents at the local grocery store. In graduate school, unable to find any to buy I would go out at night during spring break and steal daffodils from Fraternity row. 
Currently my favorite color for clothing, flowers, and household stuff is yellow. But giving me a bright fire engine red car any day. 
I don’t know which I regret more, the things I did do that I should not have, or the things I did not do that I should have. What I do know is that I try not to spend too much time regretting either thing – it detracts from living.
People’s faces I can draw with ease, but I can’t draw a cat worth a darn. Their bodies always seemed distorted and too long and narrow. I’ve never tried drawing my dog. 
During my senior year in high school, while working in the city library, I saw a girl I’d never seen before on the far side of the library’s main floor – more than 100 feet away, and knew instantly without a doubt that her name was the same as mine. I walked across the room, and asked her “are you Sue Greer?” and she said “yes.” So I said “hi, my name is Sue Greer, too.” She went to a different high school at the other end of the city, and was two years behind me. We were not related in any way. The only way I could have know who she was, was some form of extrasensory perception.
I love television. I love sitcoms, dramas, movies, soap operas, 24 hour news channels, home improvement shows, the Weather Channel, even commercials, although I don’t watch as much as I once did. Nonetheless, my evening doesn’t seem quite complete if I don’t watch some TV.

What I find fascinating is that quite unexpectedly a number of those have changed in just 8 years.
#2 I've actually eaten and loved locally grown asparagus, turns out it all depends upon the quality of the food and the cooking!
#7 I have become much more active out of necessity to stay healthy and now don't much care for snow or cold weather (which mess with my asthma), now my favorite weather is anything above 50 degrees where I can be outside and moving - doesn't matter if its sunny or drizzly as long as I can walk, I'm happy.
#13 I've been doing more sewing in recent years, including making a skirt this past fall.
#17 Turns out sugarless candies give me gas. I did develop diabetes - now well under control - and it turns out I didn't have to give up See's dark bordeaux chocolates completely. What I did have to give up was being a couch potato and that is more of a gain than a loss.
#23 Gotten a lot better at drawing cats, and have done drawings of dogs.
#25 I don't care for television as much now that I am more active, and there are now many days during that the television does not get turned on at all. When I do watch it something specific that I share with my husband.

The Working Life - Part 1

As I begin thinking seriously about retirement I have been reflecting back over all the jobs that I have done in my life time. I've done a lot of different things and learned a lot in the process. 

My mother started me in the working life at age 11 by arranging for me to babysit the next door neighbors' infant while they went out for an evening each week. Her intention was to enhance my childcare and nurturing skills, but what she did was created the desire in me to earn money and be financially independent. By the time I was 13, I had multiple regular babysitting gigs that kept me occupied and earning money every weekend. I continued to do babysitting work until I was 30 years old, although in latter years it was primarily only for good friends who were single parents and needed the occasional release time. 

In junior high school (grades 7 and 8) I added five day a week employment in the school cafeteria. The cafeteria paid in free meals, but my parents said that they'd give me the money they would have had to spend on my meals: 35 cents per day.  I worked a total of 2 and a half hours a week and earned $1.75 each week. I also earned small amounts of cash working in the school library filing book cards. 

On my 16th birthday I applied for and received my social security number...this was long before numbers were routinely distributed at birth...and began working for the high school library. The summer between sophomore and junior year, I had my first regular job in the high school library with a time card to punch, minimum wage, taxes and a bi-weekly pay check. I spent my time typing the pockets and cards that went into books for circulation. 

My earning capacity as a babysitter increased after age 16, as I became capable of driving myself to jobs. I had been sewing almost all my own clothes from age 12, now I was able to pay for the fabric and patterns myself, and to purchase other clothing items such as a camel hair coat that were beyond my sewing skills. 

At 17 during the summer between junior and senior year in high school I got a paid position at a two week summer day camp for disabled children at a local park.  It was difficult and stressful, but interesting.

At age 18 I began working for the San Mateo Public Library after school and on weekends. As a "page" I reshelved returned books, and kept the books orderly in my assigned area (the 600's and 700's of the Dewey Decimal system).  I spent 8 months working in the public library until I left home for Oberlin College in Ohio. 

Part of my financial aid package was a part-time job working for the college...we didn't call it "work-study" back then, but that's what it was. I was assigned to be a waitress in a large dining hall that still served "family" style meals where the food had to be carried out to tables, coffee and tea fetched for diners, and dirty plates and glasses removed from the tables.  I was a disaster as a waitress. The first night I worked I dropped two different filled trays of dishes and glasses, breaking nearly everything.  I survived four more months of that job without breaking anything, but it was nerve wracking. I was so pleased when the dining hall shifted to cafeteria style service after Christmas, and I was shifted to stocking and maintaining the salad bar. I continued in the job of "salad girl" in my sophomore year as well. 

I also eagerly substituted for other student workers "sitting bells" which involved answering the central dorm phone and ringing students rooms to alert them to a phone call. I also worked in other cafeterias and other shifts than my own substituting for other students who got sick or had conflicts. I also typed other people's papers for 10 cents a page. My freshman dorm directors were a young couple with a five year old, and I became a regular babysitter for them, plus two other families associated with the college that lived within walking distance of my dorm.  I earned all of my own spending money for books, long distance telephone calls, clothing, laundry and entertainment. In the four years that I was in college I never asked my parents for any money other than the lump sum the college required them to contribute (about $700) at the beginning of year and in my senior year, I actually paid my parents share myself. 

During the two summers after Freshman year and Sophomore year, I returned to California and my parents home, and found a job as a field hand in the commercial horticulture industry growing chrysanthemum plants (not the flowers, just the plants).  For three months each summer, I spent 8 hours a day in steaming, hot greenhouses, picking and planting, getting muddy, and (unfortunately) becoming heavily exposed to pesticides. I learned that the minimum wage for agricultural work was lower than the minimum wage for office/factory work, AND that the minimum wage for female agricultural workers was lower than that for male agricultural workers. My first real awareness of systemic, institutional, and, at that time, legal sexism. I also learned to speak Spanish fluently, as my coworkers were almost all immigrants (both legal and illegal) from Central America and Mexico. 

My junior year in college I became a "floor counselor" (what most schools call an RA or resident adviser), a paid position that was challenging and interesting. I was the sympathetic ear for freshman on my floor and helped settle roommate disputes. I was awaken in the middle of the night for personal crises.  I still did cafeteria work, that year in German House where I picked up a bit of basic German, and I continued regular babysitting jobs for two families that I had been working for since Freshman year. I  also had the opportunity to work as an artist on a mathematics faculty member's project.  The mathematician was attempting to enter what had not yet been labeled "distance learning" by filming his lectures and needed clear, crisp diagrams and equations that would show well on a screen.  It was interesting and it provided me with my first marvelous Koh-I-Noor Rapidograph pens that became my favorite tool for pen and ink drawings for many years. 

Summer after Junior year, I accepted a job as a nanny with a wealthy family in Greenwich, Connecticut, giving me the chance to see a whole new part of the country, and the whole different lifestyle from what I'd grown up within. The job was hard, 12 hour days of child care, and more housework than I had expected. The pay $100 a week plus room and board. I had several opportunities to go into New York City, where I spent almost all my time in art museums and Central Park...NYC was a great place for a person with no money to entertain themselves. 

My final year in college, my employment was as "senior resident", the student head of a college dormitory, who was suppose to be responsible primarily for activity programming and counseling. But due to the last minute retirement of the paid, non-student dorm director, I ended up with management responsibilities that were overwhelming. I stuck it out for five months, then resigned and demanded that the college replace me with two students, so that no one would be stuck with the 24/7 responsibility that had nearly done me in.  

By this point I had such substantial savings so that between my babysitting, substituting for other students in cafeterias and sitting bells I did not need to have another formal work-study job, but I did find informal jobs in the college anyway. I didn't like not working. I spent some time working as a lab assistant for friend who was doing an honors research on the effect of learning on RNA in rats. The research itself was interesting, and it was useful to learn about the various measurement tools and centrifuge. 

My plan for post-graduation was a graduate program in College Student Personnel Administration which carried with it a paid assistantship working in a university student services area such as housing, financial aid, etc. But just before graduation that plan fell through when that university's state legislature cut their funding for assistantships (recession of 1973). So instead I went home to San Mateo, California, and looked for work. Despite the recession, it took only two weeks of looking to land a secretarial position with a small charter airline. They were a do-everything type of operation called a fixed-based operator: their primary business was flying charter flights, but they also sold aviation fuel, had a maintenance operation, a flying school, a parachute school, , and a plane sales division. I started out typing letters and answering phones.  Economic times got tighter, and many employees were let go, but my job expanded.  I learned to do the company's bookkeeping and some accounting work on payroll and taxes.  I learned to wash planes and fuel them. After nine months however, the recession took its toll and the company closed down. 

During this period I took a number of the pen and ink drawings that I had made with my Rapidograph pen and found a printer who would turn those drawings into cards.  Most of the pictures were of buildings at Oberlin College and I entered into an arrangement to sell my cards in the Oberlin College bookstore. I didn't make a lot of money selling the cards, but enjoyed the feeling of being an artistic entrepreneur. 

One of the aviation company's clients immediately hired me to take over as accounts receivable bookkeeper in his small manufacturing business (March 1974). I learned double entry bookkeeping on the job. And learned about the business of headers for automobiles and motorcycles. Not only did I keep the accounts, but I ran the order desk, as car and bike shops around the country called us to order headers. I finally learned what that "duce coup" the Beach Boys sang about really was!

After 6 months of deepening recession, that business too felt the bite.  I moved both on and back to work for the San Mateo Public Library, but this time in the circulation department, where I had the fun of interacting with everyone who checked out books. I was hired as a part-time worker, but because I was hired late in the year (August) they could actually let me work full-time, because I wouldn't accumulate more than the maximum number of hours by December 31. 

And that is all the paid jobs that I did between the age of 11 and 23!  More in future installments. 

In Memory of Friends Long Gone

Twice in the week I've had reason to think a former student and long time friend Bradford Clay Jones who died twenty years ago this spring. First when the Supreme Court announced their decision on same sex marriage last Friday and  then again on Monday when I learned that the community college system that I serve (KCTCS) had nominated me for a state-wide teaching award (my academic dean says I've "won" it, but officially I've only been nominated, and I like to hold off celebration until things are official).  Both times when I heard the news I thought of Clay and wished that he had lived to see it. 

Clay was a student in my SOC 101 Introductory Sociology course at the University of Kentucky in the spring term of 1981. Clay had come to UK from Russellville, Kentucky a small farming community in the western part of the state. He came with his best friend, a red headed freckled young farmer, whose name I sadly can no longer remember although I can see his face as clear as it was yesterday. They joined the Phi Delta Theta fraternity together, took their general education classes together including sociology, but had different majors and different career/life paths. Clay was brilliant, articulate, wild, crazy, daring, fun, charming. He was clearly a leader among his fraternity brothers.   Clay got his degree in education from the University of Kentucky's department of Kinesiology and Health Promotion.

After graduation Clay entered the Air Force  as a 1st Lieutenant and began corresponding regularly with me. He wrote long chatty letters about work and life. He loved serving his country and was posted on first at Dover, Delaware and then near Kansas City. His job involved providing healthy exercise and activity programs for people stationed at the AF Bases. 

Clay also had an active personal life outside work. He participated with local community theater groups in the communities near the AF bases where he was stationed. I remember how much fun he had with a production of Oklahoma! Although Clay had explored and experimented with his sexual identity in college, it was not until more than a year after graduation that Clay finally "came out" to himself and to friends and family, but not of course to the USAF. This was well before "Don't ask, Don't tell."

While stationed near Kansas City, Clay met the love of his life Gene and entered into a committed relationship. A local minister officiated at Clay and Gene's vows which they considered just as binding as if they had been legal. Rather than face being separated from Gene by the Air Force posting him outside the U.S. Clay allowed the Air Force to learn of his sexual orientation and discharge him in 1984. 

Clay entered the Master of Public Administration in Nonprofit Management at the University Missouri, Kansas City and received his MPA in 1986.  In 1989 he became the Executive director Kansas division American Cancer Society.

Diagnosed as HIV positive in the late 1980's Clay maintained his health for a number of years.  He advocated for AIDS research as a board member of the Kansas City AIDS Research Consortium. In the early 1990's his HIV infection became full-blown AIDS. He suffered among other things from a histoplasmosis infection that spread from his lungs throughout his body. In June of 1995 I received the sad news from Clay's spouse Gene that AIDS had taken its toll and Clay died May 1, 1995. 

I wish that Clay had lived to see same sex marriage legalized across the nation; for him and Gene to have had the full legal rights of married couples. They were married for a decade before Clay's death and yet Gene received none of the benefits a married person should have on the death of his spouse. 

I also wish that Clay could have lived to see me receive this state-wide teaching award for "inspiring" Kentucky students to become contributing members of society. Clay was one of the earliest and most enthusiastic supporters of my teaching career.  I met him while I was still an "apprentice" graduate student instructor, and his friendship over the next 14 years was very influential in my development as a teacher.  By no means the last student to become a life-long friend, Clay was the first. 

Thanks for the memories, Clay. 

No regrets, no do-overs...

I am who I am today because of the all the choices I have made, all the actions I have taken, all the feelings I have had. Every moment, good and bad, wise and foolish, caring and uncaring, silly and serious, creates the unique pattern of my life. To regret even one action, to wish to undo even one choice is tantamount to saying I do not wish to be me, as I am today. 

Two things I've seen recently center around this theme of the inseparable threads of a person's life:  the movie "Wild" which we saw in the theater yesterday and one of my favorite Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes (Season 6, episode 15 "Tapestry") viewed again just a few weeks ago.  Both carry this same message, that we are all a sum of every event, every second of our lives, and even the tiniest change would make us someone quite different. 

Some years ago I chanced to re-read a journal from my junior year in college and was disturbed by words I read. [I have learned from such re-readings that I was exceptionally  accurate in  chronicling events - like the sociologist/ethnologist I  later became, I  captured verbatim conversations, and the details of action and gesture of others within hours of their occurrence - even when I was unable to fully understand their meaning at that time.] 
It was painfully clear from the journal account that my younger self was blithely unaware that these actions caused pain and sadness to someone else. A budding relationship was ruptured and faltered because I unwittingly betrayed a trust I did not know I had.  

For some years I have obsessed over the hurt I had unknowingly caused. Until one day not long ago I finally asked myself the right question: If I could go back and change the past, would I do so? And the answer is no.  I regret the hurt I caused, I feel bad about causing pain, and I know that I cut short a very promising potential relationship.  However, my actions brought me some of the sweetest, most joy-filled memories I have from my college years of singing in the snow, laughter and tender kisses, and launched a different life-long friendship that brought many other good memories over the years. Moreover, had the relationship I short-circuited happened, my life almost certainly would have taken a very different path and I would be a very different person. 

Nuclear Nightmares

When I was growing up in a blue collar neighborhood in California I was aware that my experience of the world was very different than that of the children around me. I was preoccupied with issues and concerns to which most of my neighborhood playmates seemed oblivious.  A few decades ago I read Annie Dillard's An American Childhood, and was taken aback to discover that Dillard too had little awareness as a child of the international and national economic and political issues of the 1950's and early 1960's.  

One topic obsessed me more than any other between 1956 and 1963: nuclear war. My father possessed a huge volume of photographs collected by Life Magazine that included thousands of pictures of the death and destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (it also contained many photos of the horrors of the Holocaust in Europe but that's a story for another day).  The images of cities utterly flattened by atomic bombs, and picture after picture with piles of bodies haunted me day and night.  

http://records.photodharma.net/notices/the-bombing-of-hiroshima

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/atomic-bombing-hiroshima-nagasaki-69-years-gallery-1.1892958?pmSlide=1.1892944

Along side my father I watched dozens of television documentaries on the use of atomic weapons in World War II, the current testing of atomic weapons, and the future possibilities of nuclear weapons. Supper conversation often involved discussions about the cold war and the likelihood of nuclear weapon use.  Sometimes family Sunday drives in the late 1950's and early 1960's included visits to local bomb shelter retailers.

Every week when my parents took me to the public library, in addition to the children's fiction I checked out each week, I would sneak copies of all the pamphlets on the librarians desk about how to recognize the signs of nuclear attack, what to do in case of attack, and how to fashion a bomb shelter in your garage. I read each of these pamphlets repeatedly and memorized every smidgen of information they contained.  (I am grateful that I did not know as a child how absurd and futile such advice was). 

Each night, I would lie in bed awake, wondering if each plane that flew over head was an enemy bomber carrying nuclear weapons. Since my house was positioned near the landing approach for San Francisco International Airport, there were dozens of planes passing overhead every night.  I would freeze motionless, listen to the sound of the engines, trying to guess which one might be delivering death from above.  Any flashes of light, or distant rumbles made me imagine that a bomb had been dropped nearby. 

As I lay awake I thought my way through constructing shelters from lumber and plywood (which we had) and sandbags (which we did not).  Sometimes I would hunch in bed under the covers in the "duck and cover" position that we were taught in school during earthquake/bomb drills.  

At some point, after the nuclear scare of October 1962, the intensity of my fears faded.  The sleepless nights and nightmares slipped away. But I never lost my anti-nuclear, anti-war convictions, which translated in adulthood into political action and advocacy. 

Pictures in My Mind

This morning an old friend posted a beautiful picture of a transitory moment when sun through a window was captured by an elegant, blue blown glass vase and then scattered across the room.  Without his picture I am sure that you are having difficulty imagining the fragile luminosity of this moment. 

It has been said so often as to become trite that a picture is worth a thousand words. But trite does not mean untrue. Well crafted words, whether poetry or prose can evoke elaborate mental images, even whole worlds in our minds. But the right single photograph can fix one moment, one experience that defies adequate description  and make it available for sharing and keeping for several lifetimes. 

Richard's picture was taken with his cell phone camera because as he said if he'd taken the time to go upstairs to get his good camera the angle of sunlight would have changed and the moment would be gone. The ubiquity of cell phone cameras and small pocket sized digital cameras has made the capture of such fleeting moments of beauty, wonder, delight, and humor easier than ever before. 

I am suddenly saddened as I think about dozens of astounding images in my mind, stored with hazy imprecision from a life-time of paying attention that cannot be shared with anyone else, and become fuzzy even to me. 

I particularly wish that I could borrow a TARDIS or some other vehicle of time travel and take a digital camera back to my 22 year old self, standing on the top of a hill in San Mateo, watching the setting sun slide beneath the gray marine layer and for a few brief moments turn the city of San Francisco into sparkling gold sandwiched between a lowering fog and a leaden bay. 

In praise of my life and times...

Back in 1991 for a few brief weeks a wonderful little jewel of a television show flashed like a comet briefly across the airwaves and died away into obscurity. Its title was My Life and Times. In the year 2035 an elderly man named Ben tells about episodes in his life (out of sequence) cover moments from the late 1970's to 1999. 

The show starred some amazing (at that point quite young) actors including Tom Irwin in the role of Ben, Helen Hunt as Ben's first wife Rebecca, and a glowing, ethereal Claudia Christian as his star-crossed love Jessie.  Only six episodes were aired between April 24, 1991 and May 30, 1991, but those few episodes made a significant imprint in my psyche. 

But this post isn't really about the TV show My Life and Times but rather about the wonders of my very own life and times, and how the Internet has transformed my personal experience of my own life. 

Yes, the TV show My Life and Times left me with memories, images and themes that have frequently surfaced over the past 23 years...but I could not remember the name of the series itself. Nor did I know the name of the actor who played the title role, although I would never forget his face, and always thought of this series whenever I encountered him in TV and movies. Yesterday, watching a rerun of Castle there he was, that familiar face, and it reminded me again of how I'd loved him as a young man in that short lived series.  

I wanted to find out if with all the movies and television shows now on-line was that half-remembered series out there to be seen?  But I didn't know his name, and I didn't know the series name. While I was pondering this problem, I happened to be reading recent posts on Facebook and  noticed that one of my friends had shared something from the page of Claudia Christian. Ah ha! I did remember that Claudia was in the cast (a name that I do remember because of her four years with Babylon 5). 

Armed with Claudia Christian's name it was off to IMDb.com the most useful tool for fans of television and movies. A quick scan of Claudia's filmography turned up the name of the series, My Life and Times, which I was surprised to see aired in 1991, some four or five years earlier than I imagined. Click on the link to My Life and Times on IMDb and there were all the other actors names, including Tom Irwin...so nice now to have a name to go with that so very familiar face. 

A Google search of the series title lead to some interesting things, including some articles written about the series at the time it aired. Best of all was a post on the blog Television Obscurities http://www.tvobscurities.com/articles/my-life-and-times/#comment-1080674 that provided me with a wealth of information, including the fact that: "My Life and Times was never repeated nor has it ever been made available commercially."

Having already done a quick search of Hulu.com and Netflix.com I suspected that to be so...but there was still Youtube.com to consider.  Sure enough someone named maureenkh1 has collected all six of the broadcast episodes broken into two acts (minus commercials) and shared them for everyone.


And because my life and times include blogs, and embedded video, I can share the first part of the first episode with you all.

When this series aired, in the spring of 1991, the Internet existed, and e-mail existed. But most the tools and resources that I used to aid my failing memory and bring that moment of my past back to life and share it did not.  The time I live in are both marvelous and perilous. 

The Magic of Digital Books

I was a voracious reader as a child.  Mostly I read young people's "classics" (Alcott, Wilder, Sydney, Porter, Montgomery, Lovelace, etc.), science fiction (Heinlein, Asimov, Clark, Norton), and British fantasy (Nesbit, Lewis, Arthur) but cared very little for the contemporary teen romances of the likes of Stoltz and Cleary. In other words, I was a fan of the past, the future and the imagined but not so much of contemporary reality. 

The San Mateo Public Library had rich resources for a child of my temperament. Every week we went to the public library and I came home with stacks of books, all of which would be completed and returned for a new stack the next week. The children's department in the old main library held full series many of the old books that I loved, such as all of Louisa May Alcott's young people's novels, and every one of Edith Nesbit's magical children's adventures. I could read not only The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, but the Peppers "Midway" and "Grown Up" and the books for each of the five children. 

Times changed, demands of library space increased, and slowly all those old books disappeared. Libraries would keep The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, but none of the subsequent books; they'd keep Alcott's Little Women and possibly Little Men, but not Jo's Boys, or An Old Fashioned Girl, or Eight Cousins, etc. Most of Nesbit's books disappeared entirely. 

Early in the age of the World Wide Web and Amazon.com I began looking for my childhood favorites, but most were out of print, and unavailable even as used copies from second-hand bookstores. Until the digital book revolution of recent years. With the spread of e-readers, across the country groups of volunteers have begun digging through their stashes of old children and young people's books and painstakingly transforming them into digital content. Amazon makes these public domain books available free of charge to Kindle readers. 

Suddenly I am able to revisit Lucy Fitch Perkins'  The Scotch [sic] Twins and American Twins of the Revolution, and Alice Turner Curtis' delightful A Little Maid of Massachusetts Colony and A Little Maid of Ticonderoga, as well as Edith Nesbit's The Enchanted Castle and The Story of the Treasure Seekers.  

The greatest delight, however, is that some older books that I searched in vain for in childhood, can be found digitally today. 

I loved movies as well as books as a child, and was an enormous fan of Haley Mills, making an effort to see all of her movies (not just those she did under the Disney franchise). One delightful concoction, released in the summer of 1963 was Summer Magic. I was 12 and I was enchanted. In the credits I saw that the movie was based on a book by Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin called Mother Carey's Chickens (most people are more likely familiar with her popular Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm).  I looked for Mother Carey's Chickens for years, no, for decades, unsuccessfully. It had been out of print since the 1930's. 

Now, thanks to the hard work of dedicated volunteers who found and transcribed this classic work, I am presently reading Mother Carey's Chickens before bed at night, and thoroughly enjoying the adventures of Nancy, Gilley, Peter, Kitty, Mother, and Julia in the yellow house in Beulah.