DAY 19. WHY THIS STORY?

Write what comes to mind as you think about the following questions.

• What made you angry?

• What was your secret desire?

• Who loved you?

• Did you crave attention? Were you shy?

• What frightened you?

• When did you feel most content and secure?

• Who influenced you in a positive way?

• Who influenced you in a negative way?

 

Examples

           

During my grade school years, I was lucky enough to live a few blocks from a branch of the Trenton Free Public Library. In those days, Trenton had branches in different parts of the city. Reading was still a big form of entertainment. My parents bought me books, but walking to the library and browsing and selecting my own novels was especially satisfying. The building had two floors. The second floor was for kids and the first floor was for adults. I don’t think I got inside the first floor more than once or twice. It was considered forbidden territory for my friends and me. That didn’t matter. The second floor was mine. It offered loads of books to choose from, and I did. Once a week during the summer, we walked down Sherman Avenue to St. Joe’s Avenue past Houghton to ???? Street to Clinton Street. There at the corner stood a white building with a black roof. Inside it held the stories and characters that would become my friends and open up the wonders of reading for me. I would get three books each visit. And I would read them all, sometimes before a week had passed.

 

Of course, television was becoming more popular at that time, and I eventually spent more time watching it. Both books and TV led to my telling stories in my head to create the life I wanted characters to have and the life I was too shy and afraid to have for myself. But the joys of reading that library delivered to me stuck with me and led me to become an English teacher.

           

           

I was frightened twice in my younger years by what seemed to be other-worldly occurrences. The first time happened when I was in eighth or ninth grade. I often stayed home alone at night when my parents attended my brother’s high school basketball games. TV was the reason. My favorite show was titled Occasional Wife and it was on Tuesday nights, the same night as many of his games. Most of those evenings were uneventful. I did my homework then watched that show along with some others. Before I went to bed, my parents were usually home. On one particular night, though, I heard what seemed to be snoring coming from the second floor where the bedrooms were. I was sitting on the first floor in the living room just below the stairs that led up to those rooms and that sound. But I was not going to investigate. In fact, I was not even going to move because I couldn’t. I was frozen in fear. I sat that way for the two hours or so before my parents came home. The snoring stopped, but my sense that someone or something shared the empty house with me did not. Finally my parents came home, and I was able to move off of the sofa where I had been stuck. But I never discovered an explanation for the noise. Was it my neighbor’s snoring which was so loud it came through the walls between us in the semi houses we lived in? Was it some floorboards or other wood creaking in the old house? Was it an animal tapping at the outer wall creating a low level sound? Or was it the spirit of my dead grandmother with whom I shared that bedroom for six years?

           

My second fright occurred when I was about twenty years old. We lived in a different house, a newer one that had no history for us. My parents with whom I lived were away at the shore vacationing. I was a college commuter, so I stayed home because classes had started. On one Friday night, I settled in with my dog Duke to watch TV. All was fine until I got up during a commercial break to go to the bathroom. Duke, of course, followed me as he usually did when no one else was home. When we returned to the living room, the TV was turned off. I froze in place again. How did that happen? I searched my brain for the possible explanations. Did we have an electrical outage? None of the lights had gone out, so not likely. This was before cable TV, so an interruption of service was not even a consideration. Neither was a malfunction in the remote control. We had no remote control. Could the weather have caused it? It was a calm, warm fall night. I didn’t wait around too long before deciding to pack Duke and my overnight bag in the car and drive to the shore where my family was staying. But I continued to wonder. Was there a logical explanation? Or was it another spirit letting me know I was not alone?

 

           

My secret desire, or I should say, one of my secret desires was to own a shore house as a second home. I had spent family vacations in Seaside Heights and Seaside Park. We often stayed for two, and one glorious summer for three, weeks. The Park was my favorite. It offered a beach within a block, a boardwalk free of amusements for quiet contemplation and walking as well as, fifteen or twenty blocks north, a boardwalk full of honky-tonk stands, rides, arcades, and people. I wanted to spend every summer at the beach and work as a beach badge attendant. When I started to work as a teacher and save some money, I dreamed that I would buy a house there in a few years. In the meantime, I found a friend, Nancy, who wanted to live at the shore during the summer. We teamed up, found an apartment, and spent one summer in Holgate on Long Beach Island. That turned into three more summers in Ship Bottom and Surf City, all on LBI. I realized that I could not afford a shore home on a teacher’s salary, and so the dream was pushed way back in my brain. When I married and had kids, it almost disappeared. Instead, I had the opportunity to spend a week or so with relatives of my husband who graciously welcomed us for our stays or at my brother’s shore home during the weekdays when he and his family were back in Trenton working. My dream was resurrected when my kids got older and I neared retirement age. I started to scan online sites like Trulia to see what shore homes cost. My choices were limited. Fixer-uppers were in the ballpark as far as price, but my husband and I had no desire to take on the challenge a lot of them presented. Everything else that we might be able to afford if we really had no other expenses was too small or too ugly. I finally gave it up, and we decided we would rent a condo for two weeks each summer and have money to play golf, travel a little, and take short overnight vacations to various places. And I’m happy!

 

           

I craved attention from the obvious people like my parents and brothers. And I usually got enough to be satisfied. But one person beyond my immediate family who I wanted to please rarely took notice of me. My cousin Marcia. I don’t really know why I wanted her to notice me. Maybe it was because she was the only female family member close to my age. (Her stepsister was twenty-five or so years older than I and was married with a family when I was born.) Marcia must have been the possible sister I never had. She was doted on by her mother and father. She got everything she wanted, from a new car at eighteen to an expensive, elite college education, to summer study in a foreign country (Canada). She also put on airs and acted as though she was far above the rest of us. She wasn’t physically beautiful, but she was very feminine. She couldn’t hold a baseball bat, let alone take a swing. Still I wanted her attention. Why was it so important for me, somebody who knew how to be a boy better than how to be a girl, to be accepted by her?

           

So these memories stick out in my mind forty and fifty years later. The security of reading and the library, the frightening experiences of being home alone, the secret desire to own a shore home and my love of summers at the shore, the craving for attention from the one possible sister-figure in my life. What do they have in common? How did they shape me to be the person I became--a shy, introverted girl who became an English teacher and writer who struggled to find the group where she belonged, to have friends and be popular?

 

When I retired, I wrote about the difficulties I had in my last two years of teaching with my principal and one of my colleagues/friends. This would be my breakout novel. In it, I created fictional characters based on them, as well as other people who had annoyed me during my career. It made me feel better to get it all out and put my spin on what were two very upsetting relationships, one with a friend and one with my principal. When I finished the novel after fifteen months and several revisions and drafts and rewrites, I planned to self-publish. I hadn’t gotten any favorable response from agents or publishing companies, so I found a self-publishing company where I could publish it as an e-book for less than $200. I went for it and paid the fee. Then I had second thoughts. Was I being too critical? Were the characters too close to reality and would that open me up to being sued by them and anyone else who might think they saw themselves in a particular character even if I didn’t? Added to that was the fear that some of the references to literature I made might lead the people who owned the copyrights to those stories to sue me, too. Finally, after some soul-searching, these concerns both practical and emotional or moral, led me to pull the novel from publishing. While it was therapeutic for me to write it all down and go wild with the fiction, it might be hurtful to those real people I based it on. I had been friends with the colleague, but a rift split us apart. I blamed her for not being a good friend when she refused to talk with me about trying to repair our relationship. If I published, wouldn’t that show me to be a heartless friend? In my gut it did. And so that first novel became, thanks to a partial refund from the publishing company, a $99 therapy session available for reading by only a few friends and family. Still, I sleep good at night.