DAY 15. THREE QUESTIONS

Write answers to one or two of these three questions.

1. Did you have a security blanket or other security object as a child? What was it? Were there issues related to your using it? When did you need it? What happened if you didn’t have it?

2. What were the best gifts you received, or gave, when you were a child? As you grew older?

3. Identify one or two love interests who were important to you in your teen years and other times, as well. Include idols or icons--real or imagined, dead or alive. Why did you love them?

 

Examples

 

Security object           

As a child, I really didn’t have a security blanket or even something like a teddy bear or favorite doll. I guess that in itself may say something about my sense of independence or maybe of my feeling that I really don’t need anyone in my life. Maybe my not reaching out to others is because, from an early age, I haven’t depended on anything like a security blanket so I had this idea that I really didn’t need anyone.

           

Best gifts

Without a doubt, the best gift I received as a kid was a bicycle for Christmas. I’m sure I received many other great presents, but now fifty-five years later, I remember that bicycle. It was a blue twenty-inch Schwinn with streamers flowing from each handlebar. It became my vehicle to independence and freedom. Once the weather allowed, I rode that bike around the block. The route took me down my street, around the corner, through the alley behind my house, and back around to my street, Sherman Avenue, again. Of course, I had to ride on the sidewalk and dodge people walking, but I didn’t mind. It was my chance to be on my own for the time it took to travel that route. And thus began my steps out into the world! For the most part, they were safe, baby steps. But I did have one or two brushes with injury!

           

As I grew older, one of the best gifts I received was a refurbished portable electric typewriter. I made the jump from handwriting to typing. It was like going from using one of the first keyboards that were attached to the first personal computers to this state-of-the-art advanced, light-touch keyboard I’m typing on right now. I could write easily and quickly. It made writing papers and reports for high school and college a joy compared to the previous methods of either handwriting or using the old, standard typewriter sans electric. And it was the start of fulfilling my desire to be a writer--though it took forty years and retiring from my teaching job in the real world to get further. But my first complete stories were typed on that machine. They never made it to being published. Forty years later, though, I found them and they became the inspiration for my first novel.

 

Idols and icons           

I was drawn to Doris Day movies when I was a teenager. The combination of her appearance, behavior, and relationships with men attracted and influenced me--for a while. Her character was a woman who was smart and attractive and making her way out in the work world of men. Often, she was an independent female--until she met and fell in love with a man. Though the happily-ever-after aspect of the relationship usually ended the movie, the viewer was left to fill in the details of the marriage that obviously took place. Did she continue to work, or did she become a homemaker and trophy wife?

           

Her movies gave me my first picture of what a woman should be and do. It was important and sometimes necessary to have a career. Ultimately, though, the goal was to meet, fall in love, and marry a handsome, successful man. So, I could have both a career--for a time--and marriage--forever. And that stuck in mind for a time. Until I found out about two singers--Melanie and Janis Joplin.

           

These two singers were my idols from the rock and roll and folk music worlds. Neither of them was a traditional woman. Neither belonged in a Doris Day movie. Melanie was a peace-loving, hippie folk singer filling her songs with love everybody niceness. Janis Joplin was probably peace-loving and a hippie, too. But her songs were hardcore rock filled with the realities of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Both women, as I saw them, were independent, making their own decisions and telling anyone who disagreed with them they didn’t care. They committed to their mission of using songs and music to preach their gospel.

I bought into both Melanie and Janis. But I didn’t give up on Doris, either. And those disparate influences created the person I became. In my teens and twenties, I went my own way following the two singers. Often doing so put off men. I came to believe that if I wanted to do it my way, I’d have to do it alone. But I was fine with that. Then I met my future husband, and I found both elements could survive.