Kids Today

 

 

“Kids aren’t like they used to be.”

“You can’t raise kids the way you were raised because the world isn’t what it was when you grew up.”

“It takes a village to raise a child.”

These sentiments have been chanted for years now, and I don’t think they’re entirely true.

Kids haven’t changed over the decades. What has changed is adults’ attitudes toward them and the adult expectations. They are no longer seen as moldable pieces of clay without individual personalities. Adults don’t treat them with the “Do not speak until spoken to” rules we were given, and they accept that children have opinions. They’re no longer told, “You’ll do it and you’ll like it,” as we frequently heard on “Leave It to Beaver.”

Instead, they’re allowed to have opinions, and they’re listened to, sometimes far beyond what their experience and knowledge indicate they should be.

In the dark ages, when I was a child, I was more likely to get a backhanded smack on the mouth if I tried to argue once I was told to do something. No, I didn’t come from some repressed family. Most kids in my era had a similar upbringing. And the backhanded slap was more of a flick that startled rather than hurt.

My opinion was only considered when I was choosing what to eat in a restaurant, or what I wanted for Christmas. Even then it was taken into consideration as part of what my parents could afford. When my mother took me clothes shopping (before about age 10), she shopped for the clothes, and once she had decided what clothes were in her price range and what style she liked, I was consulted on which of three or four items I wanted and what color – as long as it wasn’t purple, since my mother hated purple. As I got older, I had more choices, but she had the final say on price range and level of modesty until I bought my own clothes, when I was finally allowed to choose purple. I was never without opinions and desires. They simply weren’t always taken into consideration.

So, it wasn’t kids that were different, it was what was acceptable behavior that changed.

As far as the world being different, yes it is. Of course there have always been differences according to where one was raised.

My parents grew up in the city. There was a certain sensibility one had living in the city that wasn't the experience in the suburbs or in a rural area. Most of my cousins grew up in suburban areas that were more citified than my more rural suburban area, so they had more street smarts than I ever needed. I was seen as the unsophisticated country mouse who didn’t think ducks and chickens in the next yard was any big deal, but was impressed by sidewalks and street cleaners.

Our city parents moved to the suburbs ostensibly to have more room to raise a family, and demonstrate more prosperity than their first-generation parents. What was less apparent to us kids was our parents’ desire to stay in a white neighborhood as the cities became less segregated.

I’m not ashamed of where I grew up. I had no say in that decision. I think I missed opportunities for growth and understanding in my childhood because my parents saw racial segregation as somehow protecting their children. From what? I’ve never been clear on that.

And yes, we’ve thankfully moved beyond people being allowed to refuse to sell their house to someone of another race, so children are exposed to and more comfortable with people of other races and ethnicities. Even still, I heard a couple of high school students complain not long ago that there isn’t as much racial and ethnic diversity in our area as they would wish.

Many of my friends’ adult children are moving back to the city our parents couldn’t wait to flee.

As far as education, children don’t learn in the same way we did. They print and some don’t know cursive. They use chrome books and tablets and not copybooks and looseleaf. Their textbooks are often written in “soundbites” rather than full-length pages or double columns with few pictures. They sometimes sit in “pods” or around tables, sitting on therapy balls instead of chairs. They don’t sit in desks with the chair attached, in long rows facing a blackboard. Many kids today would ask what a blackboard is. (Psst: it's a white board that you use chalk on.)

But my generation was subjected to changes in the curriculum, too. Starting at about age 9 (4^th grade), we had this anomaly known as “modern math” in which we had to organize objects into sets and subsets. What this had to do with math, I still can’t fathom. I never used it in subsequent math classes, but for four years we wasted the first two months of school with a repetition of this nonsense before we got down to the business of learning arithmetic. And it’s only gotten worse, at least in the schools I’ve worked in in New Jersey.

A “new” method of setting up algebra problems made the subject more difficult for me until I finally got a teacher who taught algebra equations “the old fashioned way,” which was what clicked with me.

Education has always evolved, based on what subjects were necessary and what was no longer relevant.

But school education is not about raising children.  Teachers  aren’t in charge – even in religious schools – of forming a child’s behavior, values and empathy. That’s the parents’ job, although there are some who would prefer to dump all learning on the schools.

A teacher’s job is more difficult if parents don’t teach basic good manners and consideration of others’ rights and feelings. While a child needs to learn subtle differences in acceptable behavior in different environments, such as the classroom and the school yard, if the basics aren’t there, the subtleties will be meaningless.

It’s still the parents’ job to instill basic good behavior in their children, just as it was for our parents and grandparents.

So, yes, you can and should raise your child with morals and values and a sense of acceptable behavior. Maybe the morals and values are slightly different, but there are still some,  regardless of how “modern” society becomes.

I believe the greatest disservice we do to children is to raise them with an inflated, entitled sense of self and no manners.

And then we come to the village.

While it’s true that no man is an island, I wouldn’t want the village determining what sort of people my children would become – if I had children. As my mother told me when I went away to college, “I had 18 years to instill my values in you, and if I didn’t succeed, it’s a little late now.”

And the village’s values didn’t always align with what she wanted for me, which is why she taught me to fight against peer pressure. If I complained about not being allowed to do what “everyone else” was doing, she’d reply, “And if everyone else jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you jump off after them?” At the time, I didn’t know where Brooklyn was.

When I was a child, neighbors wouldn’t hesitate to correct anyone’s child who wasn’t behaving. But if you needed correction by the neighbors, you heard about it from your parents when they found out. As the parents saw it, they were being judged by your bad behavior.

I think neighbors trying that now might be in for a good telling off by some parents who think their children are too precious for correction. But they can still tell you to get off their lawn.

While the village was reinforcing what behavior was acceptable, it was your parents who had the final say. Now, sadly, many people don’t even know their neighbors, so the village suffers by not being allowed to help as the guardrails of society.

So, while each of these assertions has some level of truth to it, none is entirely true. We need the village to guide acceptable behavior, not to teach it. And while the world continues to change, kids are kids, and they can and should still be taught basic civility and manners because kindness and empathy never hurt anyone.

 

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

 

 

One of the more bothersome exercises of my childhood was the annual “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” essay we were required to write from about 4^th grade to 8^th grade.

Unfortunately, the only two times my family went on vacation during my childhood happened at the end of first and second grades, and we went to the same place both times.

“My family doesn’t take vacations,” doesn’t make for much of an essay. Hinting that we were too poor for vacations wasn’t something a not-very-popular child would willingly admit, although that’s what my mother would have me believe.

Years later, my brother and I were talking about our dearth of vacations, and he said it had little to do with money. My father simply didn’t like going on vacation.

I knew he hated going to the shore. As a result, I was 13 the first time I ever went to the shore, and it wasn’t with my family. A neighbor I used to babysit for invited me.

Days in the ocean and afternoons at the arcades on the boardwalk were payment for the one or two evenings of watching the kids while the grownups went out on the town without children in tow.

It was great, despite the worst case of sun poisoning I’ve ever had. Those were the days before sun blocks with SPF numbers.

Looking back, the grownups were taking a bit of a risk that probably wouldn’t happen now. In the late ‘60s a 13-year-old could babysit without question. But there were no mobile phones. In fact, I’m not sure there was a phone in the house they were renting. It wouldn’t have mattered. I had no idea where they were going, so there was no number for me to call in case of emergency except the police.

That’s a huge responsibility for a child barely into the teen years watching three children under the age of ten. But nothing happened, so I thought nothing of it.

I also had a good deal of responsibility for the two older children when we were at the beach (the youngest was an infant). I was in charge while they were in the water, although at least one adult was always nearby. I was more the entertainment so the adults could enjoy the beach.

At the time, what was being asked of me didn't seem like much, but  that responsibility now strikes me as too much for the child I was at the time. It’s what was expected then. I wouldn’t have traded in the chance to go to the shore for anything.

The only thing that marred the trip – aside from the pain of glow-in-the-dark, Santa-suit red skin – was a demand my mother had made of me. She didn’t know the neighbor all that well, since she hadn't been in the neighborhood a year. I’d spent that time babysitting for her once or twice a week. Still, my mother didn’t want to be beholden to someone she barely knew for my upkeep for two weeks. She gave me some money and told me not to let them pay for everything I did.

I tried paying for ice cream or amusement park rides, but they didn’t want me spending all my money when they had invited me. They didn’t understand. I thought my mother would be upset if I came home with all the money she gave me.

After being repeatedly refused the right to use my own money, I ended up one night crying in the bathroom. I was found out, and they thought I was homesick. Despite insisting I wasn’t, that’s what all the grownups believed. How humiliating! I was 13, after all, far too old to be homesick because of a two-week vacation. But I couldn’t tell them the real reason I was crying. That was a confidence between my mother and me.

Still, the following September, I finally had an essay to write. Of course, I left out the part about crying, and focused on the amusement park in Wildwood and jumping through waves in Cape May.

My childhood was pretty good, despite the fact that we didn’t go on vacations. We went to local state parks to swim and have picnics, and I had a few friends with swimming pools who sometimes invited me over. There was also one local creek (pronounced crick where I'm from) where we swam on weekends, and my brother sometimes took me with him to swim there during the week. (When I was older I went there on my own, another risky endeavor.)

There was always the hose in the back yard to cool off with on steamy days. On the not so hot summer days there were woods to explore and sometimes blackberries to pick.

I adored the days off from school from mid-June to Labor Day, days where there were no school requirements, when I could sit in my tree fort and read the books I wanted to read, or ride my bike all over the neighborhood.

There were days I accompanied my mother to the grocery store and learned about comparison shopping, and why some products were better to get as the brand name while others were just as good if you had the store brand. I learned estimating totals and reading labels, how to order lunchmeat at the deli counter – and my mother always wanted the American cheese sliced thin – and which aisles to find particular items.

In reality, those things would have been great to include in the summer vacation essay, so my teachers would know I hadn’t squandered my time in the summer. But I was looking for the glamorous vacation – or at least a week at camp – and came up empty. So I tried to glamorize days at friends’ pools and never mentioned the continuing education at the grocery store or the ecological education in the woods and state parks.

At 14 I had the ultimate summer vacation, not because of where I went, but because of how I went.

My aunt, who lived in a suburb of Chicago, was visiting some of our relatives in Philadelphia. During a family get-together, she invited me to come visit her family in Illinois.

As the youngest and only girl, whenever I wanted to do something, the answer was usually no. My parents wouldn’t be going, so the idea of my traveling alone halfway across the country was not likely. But parents can be surprising.

I would have to fly to Chicago alone. That kind of flight was expensive by my family’s standards. But we learned about a program the airline TWA had for teens up to age 21. It was called the 50/50 club (I still have my membership card, even though TWA no longer exists). A teen could fly for 50% off the ticket price. The ticket was stand-by, so I might have to wait for the next flight. But in 1969, especially midweek, mid-afternoon, it was generally expected that I could get on my chosen flight.

My mother took me to the airport, and my aunt would pick me up in Chicago. In those days before the first plane hijacking, family members could accompany the person flying right up to the boarding gate, no security or x-rays, and the traveler could be met at the arrival gate at the other end.

At 14, getting on the plane unaccompanied was exciting. I remember I had a window seat. I must have looked like a wide-eyed country bumpkin to the stewardesses – they all looked like my Barbie doll when she was wearing her stewardess uniform, only without the cotton ponytail – but at least I wasn’t a trouble maker. I don’t think I even took off my seat belt through the entire flight.

I arrived at O’Hare International Airport and started looking for my aunt. I had no idea where I was supposed to meet her. Since I didn’t see her, I began following the other passengers to baggage claim.

I had only gone a short distance when I heard my name called. I turned and came face-to-face not with my aunt, but with my uncle. He’d come in from a business trip and waited until my flight arrived to save my aunt the trip.

While the vacation itself wasn’t extraordinary, traveling solo sparked my love of travel. I spent a month with my relatives where five children – three boys and two girls – provided entertainment I didn’t normally have. At home, one brother was away attending university and the other was back from Vietnam, but still in the army.

Because we had always lived at least a state’s distance away from this set of relatives, I didn’t know these cousins as well as many of my other cousins. I did know that the oldest boy, who was a year younger than I was, hated me.

The girls were quite a bit younger than I, but we got along. I think most little girls enjoy it when an older cousin pays attention to them. We played games together and generally got to know one another. I didn’t have to worry about anyone making fun of me for playing with younger girls since they were cousins.

I also spent time playing with the two younger boys. The one who didn’t like me was away at scout camp or something through most of the time I was there.

The film Romeo and Juliette, with Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey came out that summer. I desperately wanted to see it. I imagine my aunt called my mother for permission – I’m fairly certain it was R rated, and I wasn’t old enough to go unless accompanied by an adult. She said she wanted to see if it was appropriate for her two eldest sons, and would I like to go with her to see it?

What an exciting afternoon! We had a great time, just the two of us, and I felt quite grown up because she thought I was mature enough to see the film. After seeing it, she decided the boys were too young.

As with most women I was either related to or otherwise close to at the time, I felt more comfortable talking with my aunt than I did with my mother. My aunt wasn’t the disciplinarian or the one who usually said no. She was also 10 years younger than my mother, and shared with me the distinction of being the youngest in the family and the only girl (and left-handed) – although she had four older brothers (one being my father), and I had two.

We talked about a lot of different things, and I felt comfortable around her, despite the fact that we had so seldom seen each other. She even recommended me as a babysitter to one of her friends whose regular babysitters were all busy one night. So, I even had the chance to make some money on my vacation.

My aunt went back east for a wedding one weekend, and my uncle took us all to the Milwaukee Zoo. He couldn’t believe that, at 14, I’d never been to the zoo, especially since I lived so close to the Philadelphia Zoo, the oldest one in the country. I told him my father always said if the zoo wanted me badly enough, they could come get me.

The real reason was that my mother was allergic to animal dander, although I don’t think dogs and cats bothered her. But never let the facts stand in the way of a good story.

I also saw the moon landing while I was at my aunt’s, as well as Prince Charles’ investiture as Prince of Wales. By the end of that day, I had his investiture speech memorized – I was quite the monarchist at the time.

After a month at my aunt’s, I returned home, a seasoned traveler. I had taken my first trip ever on a plane, and I’d done it alone.

Unfortunately, after such a monumental achievement, I was about to start high school, where the focus was on the writing of authors like Shakespeare, Ibsen, Dickens and Dostoyevsky, so having finally been armed with the fuel for the summer vacation essay, I didn’t get to write it.

My next plane trip wasn’t until seven years later, when I flew to England for a semester abroad. While I was technically with classmates then, once there I had to navigate life on my own.

The experience of solo travel and my parents’ trust in me to take such a trip by myself set me up to fearlessly travel abroad after college, and if I had no one to travel with, I would simply go alone. Probably because of my lack of going somewhere for vacation as a child, I took every opportunity to go places as an adult.

My mother was never comfortable enough to travel alone. Her biggest solo adventure was flying to Florida to visit my brother, where I took her to the airport and pointed her in the right direction in Philadelphia, and my brother collected her in Florida. She was a nervous wreck the whole flight.

My father grudgingly – probably due to ill health – went with us to Colorado twice to visit the same brother when he lived there, but my dad never really cared to travel. Since I have relatives scattered all over the U.S., his dislike of travel meant that I never met a fair few of my cousins until I was an adult -- and a couple I've never met.

My wanderlust is definitely not inherited from either parent, although both brothers have traveled to the limits of their purse strings. I sometimes wonder if the three of us are changelings left by the fairy folk, and somewhere three other sibling are living with a family that can’t understand their dislike of travel.

 

Life Is Funny That Way

 

 

Life is funny sometimes. A few months ago I was reading through all of the birthday wishes on Facebook, thinking again how nice it is that so many people take the time to say happy birthday on Facebook. 

Yeah, I know, they tell you whose birthday it is and they supply all of the words, in case you don’t have time to think up something clever on your own, or in case it’s someone you only know on FB, rather than as a family member or an in-real-life friend. The internet has made it easy – and sometimes vastly impersonal – to contact people.

I don’t usually single people out for a blog, and I’m not naming names, so I hope this isn’t embarrassing.

The day after my birthday, while I was finishing up thanking people who had left messages on my feed or in my notifications, I noticed what I call a “Facebook email” from a friend. I was surprised by a lot of it, and she seemed a little surprised that we had so much in common politically, socially and even the challenges we’ve faced.

I didn’t know those things about her. She discovered them about me by being on Facebook with me as well as reading my blogs.

A little background. This woman and I were born a day apart in the same hospital. In fact, our mothers were in the same room. I was a preemie, and my mother once told me that her mother said she thought her baby was the smallest she’d ever seen until she saw me. In fact, if I’d been born an hour later, we would have shared the same birthday.

So we’ve kind of known each other since birth. And we were in the same parish, so we saw each other in church on a weekly basis, and then were in school together, I believe for the full 12 years, although we weren’t in many, if any classes together in high school. I’m not even sure if we were in the same class every year in elementary school.

I always considered her my friend, and said hi to her as we were leaving church. We were friendly in elementary school, but we lived a town apart (actually less than a mile apart, but I didn’t know that growing up), so she had friends from her neighborhood. My so-called neighborhood friends were not in my grade, so at recess, I generally did not have friends. 

I did the rounds of the recess yard until I found someone who would let me play with them. If that didn’t happen, I played Jacks by myself or wandered around imagining. I was never me in the recess yard. I was one of my characters.

Since she had her friends, we didn’t often play together at school. It was enough for me knowing that I knew her, and we had our birth “friendship” that somehow always made me feel a connection to her.

When high school ended, I went to Penn State, and she went – wherever it was she went. We lost contact. For me, that happened with most people, although I do have a core of three other people I went to at least part of elementary school and high school with that I’ve generally kept in contact with most of the time since high school graduation. I even went to two of their weddings.

It never seemed strange to me that I didn’t keep in contact with people. Most people thought I was weird or boring or whatever they thought.

I had a friend a year younger that I met in high school. Everyone thought she was my sister. I don’t have any sisters, but even my mother thought this girl looked like she could be my sister. Well, the fake sister moved away at the end of my sophomore year in high school. I was devastated because we had a blast together. I think I was at my funniest when I was around her.

We pledged our undying friendship, like Anne of Green Gables and her bosom friend, Diana, promised to write, and then she moved. We had each other’s addresses. Yet somehow, we never managed to get around to writing. I’ve often wondered what happened to her, and I do think of her often.

And like my “fake sister”, my “birth friend” and I, while not pledging unfailing friendship or promising to write, went our separate ways, and every time there was a class reunion, I’d wonder if she’d be there. I went to most of them.

I only recently discovered how much we had in common. I knew we were both left-handed (I always know which of my friends are left-handed; it’s a lefty thing.). She’s the oldest and only girl in her family, and I think she has two brothers.  I’m the youngest and only girl in my family, and have two brothers. That was pretty much what I knew of our commonalities.

It turns out we both married later (late 30s), never had kids, and we both like big dogs. Apparently we also have some of the same challenges I’ve written about in my blogs in common. It could have acted as a bond between us had we known.

I just never thought people were much interested in me or the things I did.

I don’t know many people who write or are as passionate about writing as I am, so there aren’t many people I can talk with about writing. Most people get bored once you start talking about your characters. After all, according to them, the characters aren’t real. It’s not like them talking about their children. (I suppose they’ve never read The Velveteen Rabbit to know what becoming real really is.)

It made my day to hear someone who, until our reunion in 2023 hadn’t seen me in 50 years, express similar anxieties growing up that I’d had, someone I thought was so together and talented. The idea she expressed, that my writing touched a lot of people was something I never really considered. I don’t think of many of my topics as important.

I always think of myself as being a bit of a nuisance announcing my blog on 3 group pages, my own page and my author page on the chance that a couple of people want to read them. I picture people rolling their eyes and saying, “I wonder what she’s on about this time.”

Yeah, some people may be interested in some of my topics. But I do get worried when the readership numbers drop considerably. I think, oh, did I say something offensive last time? How do I rectify that? Because I get few, if any, comments on my work.

Yes, I try to take into consideration that between Thanksgiving and New Year’s people are busy and just don’t have time to read some silly blog. And I never know what people are behind the readership count.

I always feel like I come off as a bit self-absorbed when I talk about my books and where people can find them. It’s not like I have a real publisher. They’re all self-published, and you won’t find them in bookstores – there are still bookstores, right? 

And I also have to mention my pen name, Bridget McGowan, since you wouldn’t find my books by looking under my given name. So in my defense, I have to let people know about my books if they’re ever going to find them.

I do like talking about my books, though. It isn’t a, “Hey, look at me, I’m some bigshot author,” though, especially since I haven't sold more than 10 of any of them. It’s “Let me tell you about my current best friend.” And that would be the main character of the book.

People look surprised when they ask how many books I have on Amazon and I say 17. I guess they’re expecting me to say one or two. 

The thing is, I’ve written 25. I just don’t have covers for the rest (people who do covers are very expensive, so my husband, Blue Scream of Jeff – read his blogs – has done most of my covers.) I designed two, but he had to do the computer stuff to them, since he won’t teach me how, and I don’t have the program, anyway. So I’m waiting to have covers done for the rest. 

Meanwhile, I’m working on the next novel, with two that I’ve promised to write in mental storage, and another idea in its 5^th month of gestation.

But my birth friend gave me encouragement to keep going, knowing that somehow I’ve touched others with what I had to say. Wow. Who knew?

Senses and Sensibility

 

 

Several months ago, a friend of mine that I’ve known since I was about 15, asked me in a text if I might be on the autism spectrum. The question was based on something I’d said in one of my blogs, but came so out of left field that it was a true WTF moment, and kind of gave me mental whiplash.

While I believe what I said is that I often don’t pick up on social cues, which, while it can be part of an indication of autism, is also an identifying characteristic of several other “disabilities,” including attention deficit, with which I was diagnosed as an adult. An autism diagnosis requires at least three identifying characteristics, and where you are on the spectrum is dependent on how many characteristics you exhibit, and the severity of those characteristics.

So to the question, a resounding no; I am not remotely autistic.

I also tend toward lower muscle tone, but that doesn’t mean I have Cerebral Palsy. I do not. Having been a 34-week preemie, it’s generally the norm to have slightly lower tone, which expresses itself in hyper-extension of fingers, knees and elbows. The hyperextension has decreased with age, but not because I’m cured. Rather, arthritis has a say in what my joints do now.

I suppose, as a therapist, I’m keenly tuned in to my sensory sensitivities.

My two strongest senses are taste and smell.

I often think I was born with too many taste buds -- but not necessarly too much taste. I have been told several times in biology classes that I can’t taste bitter because I don’t have the receptors. 

Oh, but I can. Either my bitter receptors are in the wrong place or I’ve developed a keen ability to combine a couple of other receptor types to interpret bitter. In either case, a bitter pill is just as hard for me to swallow. I can't, however, tell the difference in taste of a vanilla milkshake and a chocolate one.

I remember when I was little, being expected to try a variety of foods. I could never understand this because I could tell by smell if I wasn’t going to like something. But taste was far more intense. I used to think to myself – and may have actually said it a few times – that some things had too much taste in them, so I didn’t like them.

Cooked broccoli was one of those things. Of course, we didn’t have broccoli much, if ever, since my dad didn’t like it. Ours was a household where corn, green beans, peas and carrots were what anyone was talking about when vegetables were mentioned, and there was also salad. Special occasions, like Christmas and Thanksgiving, had asparagus. My mother and one brother ate spinach. Baked beans, and beets also made an appearance from time to time. I would eat salad or celery, and corn. I even liked radishes, and would eat one on its own. But anything else had too much taste.

While I liked spaghetti sauce, trying to pick out all of the tiny, diced pieces of onions and peppers my mother insisted on putting in before the sauce got cold was an Olympic event. To this day bell peppers of any color cause me actual digestive pain, and I detest the fact that raw onions will not leave. I hate waking up the day after consuming something with raw onions with the taste of onions in my mouth. No amount of scrubbing my tongue until I gag will rid me of that awful, left-over taste. Talk about something with too much taste!

Oddly, though, cooked onions, while I generally don’t care for them, don’t present the problem their raw counterpart does. And inexplicably, I actually like French Onion soup, and onion dip with my potato chips. Of course, this is something that came with maturity. I couldn’t have eaten those things as a child. (I didn't even like pizza until I was 10.)

Even broccoli, which I now like, is something I can only eat in small doses – like a half a cup maximum – if it’s cooked. More if they're raw.

All of the vegetables I don’t like are because they have too strong a taste to me – except baked beans, which are simply too disgusting in that brown slime they’re served in – and beets, which taste like dirt, no matter what you do to them. I was never one to eat mud pies as a child.

What could have mitigated my picky eating habits as a child is the fact that raw vegetables are much more palatable to me. Raw broccoli and cauliflower, even raw peas if they’re fresh, are preferable to the overpowering taste they have once cooked.

My mother came from the school of belief that you couldn’t simply eat vegetables raw. They must, unless they were salad, be cooked. Otherwise, they would give one a stomach ache.

I have eaten an entire raw potato without ill effects, and no other raw vegetable has ever come back to haunt me except peppers and onions.

I do have ones I prefer to eat cooked: zucchini, eggplant, spaghetti squash, acorn squash and butternut squash. Anything else is fair game either way, although I do prefer cauliflower raw.

Carrots are the one exception. I don’t care for them raw unless they’re shredded in a salad so as to have no taste, and can only eat them cooked if they’re in a stew or mixed in mashed potatoes to disguise their bitter flavor. Or as carrot cake. Why can’t all vegetables be cake?

When it comes down to it, I actually do eat a fair variety of vegetables; I just can’t handle them if they’re spiked with onions and peppers, as people so often do to them.

For the things that I can’t eat, it does no good to say, “Eat it anyway!” As I try to swallow something I don’t like, my throat closes as if I’m about to take poison, and the thing won’t go down. It takes huge quantities of liquid to entice it down my throat, and that’s no guarantee that I won’t gag or that the offending item will stay in my stomach.

Fish is another thing that often comes with too much taste. I’ve often said, only half in jest, that I believe fish should be served square and breaded, as God intended. And it needs a fair amount of either ketchup or cocktail sauce – and never, ever tartar sauce. Fish sticks are the French fries of the fish world.

As a child, I didn’t like shell fish, which is good because they’re often at the pricy end of the food chain. I would eat crab cakes, provided there weren’t pieces of shell lurking in them (and I've had that experience, even in pricey restaurants). At some point after puberty, I developed a taste for shrimp, lobster and scallops.  I’ve always liked clams and oysters, provided they’re completely cooked. None of that slime on the half shell, thanks. 

I suppose I could never get on with the rich and famous because I can't stand caviar. That tastes like a dead fish that's been rotting on the shore for several days smells. I do not like raw fish. Period. End of story.

My preferences in fish tend toward flounder, cod (only in the UK, breaded, from a chippy), haddock, tilapia and tuna fish from a can, packed in water, not oil. And those fish had best not have a single bone in them. If I get the slightest piece of bone in my mouth, I’m done. I would gag on any other attempt at that same fish from my plate. I don’t consider it a good presentation to have head, tail or skin on a fish you expect me to actually eat. Fish with bones, head, tail and skin belong in an aquarium, not on a plate. As you can see, I’m more comfortable at a fish and chips shop than a fine dining restaurant if fish is on the menu. And I absolutely can't swallow any form of salmon. I think I may truly be allergic to it.

I’m much less picky about meat. I like chicken and turkey. Duck is okay, but it’s greasy. I like pork, including ham, beef as long as it doesn’t have a lot of marbling to have to pick through, and Bambi steaks are okay, although I don’t care for ground venison. I used to be able to eat veal, but I was once served undercooked veal, and haven’t been able to wipe that taste from memory, so all subsequent attempts have tasted like that undercooked baby.

One meat I can’t eat is lamb, and presumably mutton. Aside from the thing tasting the way it smells in the barnyard, it’s very hard to breathe after I eat a piece of lamb, as if the meat sucked all of the air from my lungs.

Of course, I don’t eat organ meats. I know what those organs do inside the body, and I wouldn’t want to put things that perform those functions in my mouth. Besides, they have too much taste, which hurts my taste buds.

Nonfood smells frequently bother me, so it’s not just picky eating. Usually, the offending smells are not those that occur in nature, but those invented in a lab.

While I detest the smell of lavender in soaps, perfumes or air fresheners, I’ve never noticed that lavender in the field is offensive. Essential oil, air freshener, etc., are just horrible. 

I also don’t like the smell of most detergents. Just walking down the laundry detergent aisle at the store sets me coughing and sneezing. My laundry detergent is unscented or the “Sensitive skin” variety. To have something washed in regular detergent near my face is simply asking for problems. For my own protection, I have started bringing my own pillowcase with me whenever I’m staying overnight anywhere, just in case I need it.

If I’m buying floor cleaner, I’ll get the lemon scent. “Fresh Scent,” “Spring Scent” or “Citrus” that isn’t specifically lemon, are too risky for my nose.

It goes without saying that I don’t use plug-in air scents. I’ve tried a few, and none are breathable. I also don’t like headaches they cause.

So those who have always accused me of being a picky eater now know, it’s not just food; it’s tastes and smells. I’d be happy to find a vegetable with no taste, just a crisp crunch. Oh, yeah -- celery.

Springsteen Revisited

 

In my December blog, I discussed Christmas songs that I love and hate. One song I mentioned not liking was Bruce Springsteen's version of "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town."

Yeah, so what? Right? Everyone's entitled, eh?

Well, no. I live in New Jersey, home of Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi. 

It's almost a rule in NJ that you have to like one or the other, if not both. Stating a preference for one, you still don't diss the other. It's like being asked in the 1960s whether you liked The Beatles or The Rolling Stones. (I liked both, but I liked the Beatles better.)

Since I'm not from NJ -- I spent my first 39 years in PA -- I never felt like I was required to like either of them, although I have several Bon Jovi CDs.

I don't hate Springsteen, although apparently some people came to that conclusion because of my dislike of one Christmas song. I don't mind his songs. In fact, one year, when we were vacationing in Spain and Portugal, we spent July 4th in Madrid, where we had dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe with a group of other Americans. When the song, "Born in the USA" came on, our entire table (including me) stood up and sang the song with the record, so I even know the words to his songs.

I just don't have any of his records. But I don't mind hearing his songs on the radio.

I am, however, a radio button pusher in the car. If I'm not in the mood for a song that comes on, I will click through my six Serius XM stations looking for something better. And sometimes a song -- no matter whose -- is just not what I want to listen to at that moment.

But apparently I put some people off by criticizing a song -- even a seasonal one -- by the Boss. He just doesn't sing the kind of music I usually prefer to listen to. That's my taste, not his singing.

However, even the bands I love have songs I don't like.

I loved the Monkees back in the late '60s, and still do. I had the first seven of their albums. But I hated Head. It wasn't what I wanted for the Monkees, just like Sgt. Pepper wasn't what I wanted for the Beatles.

It probably helps to understand that I was a little kid, or at least not at Middle School level at that point, and they were adults. My tastes were not theirs, nor were my experiences. In my head, I wanted to one day be in the band, and I was very good at pretending. I was a good bit less skilled at growing up. (I still like watching Pretty in Pink and Dirty Dancing.)

With the Monkees, even in the first seven albums there were songs in the other six (besides Head) that I didn't like. I tended not to like Mike Nesmith's rockabilly songs, and absolutely abhored "Aunty Griselda". I couldn't believe Peter Tork could sing so off-key. 

Lest the Mike Nesmith fans shoot hate thoughts at me, I did like "Different Drum," a song he gave to Linda Rondstadt and the Stone Poneys.

A Welsh band, The Manic Street Preachers -- a band eons away from the Monkees -- is a more recent favorite of mine. I have all of their albums exept the most recent one. While I like almost all of their songs, they have an entire album -- actually the one dedicated to a former band member who disappeared and has since been declared dead -- that I like nothing on. I don't care for the cover design, and the songs are simply not my cuppa. An entire album! But they're still  my favorite 90s band.

There are some bands I used to like, but usually because of being overplayed on the radio, I can't stand to listen to anymore. Billy Joel is somewhat like that.

What?

I do like his, "Always a Woman" and almost everything on Nylon Curtain, but those songs rarely, if ever, get played on the radio.

"I Love You Just the Way You Are" has been so overplayed on the radio, as well as being center stage for almost every wedding reception I've been to since it came out, that I can't stand it anymore. "Piano Man" and "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" ( Y'know, "bottle of Red, Bottle of White...) are two others that will make me change the station when they start playing. They're just overdone, and I'm just over them.

The Carpenters were never a favorite of mine, but their songs on the radio didn't much bother me. Then I joined the Glee Club in high school. For four years I had to sing "Close to You" and/or "Rainy Days and Mondays" -- the choral versions, which are devoid of any emotion you might have been able to pretend to hear in Karen Carpenter's voice. And that  definitely dimmed me on the Carpenters.

Then there are the earworms.

I loved Air Supply when they came out. Apparently so did everyone else. Now I can't bear to listen to them. It isn't that I no longer like them. I still do. But their songs are the kind that, if you hear one of them, it will linger in your brain on constant replay for days, if not weeks.

"Miracles" by Jefferson Starship is another earworm for me. Beautiful melody, if somewhat raunchy lyrics. But something about that song just burrows into your brain, and it's not even the, "Are they really singing what I think they're singing?"

I once went for a month where every time I relaxed or was about to fall asleep, the chorous of  "Miracles" would play in my head. It kept me from falling asleep, and generally annoyed the heck out of me. I would have to actively start thinking of some other song -- ironically, it was often "White Rabbit" or "Go Ask Alice" from Jefferson Airplane -- to dig it out of my brain.

Eventually, that worm died, but I don't ever want to hear that song again in case it resurrects itself.

I'm not generally superstitious, but there are actually songs that I don't dare listen to because -- probably coincidentally -- every time I listened to them in the last century, something bad or at least unpleasant has happened shortly after hearing those songs. Two that I can think of are "Tempted" by Squeze and "In the Air Tonight" by Phil Collins. I happen to really like both of them -- even though I'm not quite sure what the  Phil Collins song is about -- but I spent years switching the station if they came on the radio. Just in case.

Recently, since it's been a few decades, I've started tempting fate and listening to these two songs if they're played on the radio. Dangerous, I know, but so far, once I entered the 21st century, nothing bad has happened as a result of hearing either song so perhaps the jinx is over.

Music is a huge part of my life. As a singer and guitarist, I try to improve my performance skills. I spent years learning that piano isn't my instrument (I really need to be able to play something I can sing along with, and with two separate staffs to pay attention to, I just can't). I hope to be able to resume taking violin lessons soon, even though I know I won't be able to sing to that.

But singing is my  primary talent, and I like listening to songs I can sing to.

On Being 70

 In a few days I will begin my journey into the 70s. Not the 1970s, the ages between 70 and 80.

It sounds so old!

I don’t look in magnifying mirrors anymore. Not that I ever did. I had no use for them. But they truly don’t reflect who I am. I’m not just a set of wrinkles, under-eye bags, dark circles, and a scar here and there. Those things are the result of weight gained and lost, sleepless nights and being clumsy.

And I am clumsy, both in movement and the things I say.

When my husband and I were first dating, I mentioned that I tend to fall up the stairs. He laughed and said no one does that. A few weeks later I did just that, and he never again doubted when I said something that didn’t appear to make sense on the surface. I can also trip over nothing.

I’m clumsy in conversation, too. While not everything that enters my brain falls out of my mouth, occasionally that happens, and I think, “Did I say that out loud?”

While I generally engage brain before opening mouth, sometimes something I want to say sounds fine in my head, but when it comes back and hits my ears, I realize I didn’t phrase it quite right. Or it sounds insulting or rude when that wasn’t the intention at all.

Sometimes someone will take offense at something I’ve said, and even if they tell me they’re offended, they never bother to tell me what offended them. Usually, that’s something written, and when I look it over, I can’t find a thing that would be offensive. But perhaps that’s because I know what I meant, and I get the intention even if it’s not on the page.

I’m especially bad at written word multi-tasking.

I spend entirely too much time checking in on Facebook. Occasionally, either something to do with my computer or with Facebook causes things to stall. If I’m in the middle of something, I know I’ll never be able to find it if I simply close the window and start over. So, I leave the window open and open another window with Facebook on that as well. 

Sometimes I completely forget about the first window, but I have been known to go back and forth between two. On a few occasions, I wrote something on the wrong thread.  That’s embarrassing. Once, I even wrote something on one thread, thought I pushed the send button (I may have, but it was an evening of glitches, so it apparently didn’t go through) and went to the other window. I typed a reply to what was going on there, hit send and closed that window. Unfortunately, the second reply didn’t go where it was intended, but was merely added onto the first reply. When I hit send, both answers were on the same comment, and went through as one. That happened to be the window that closed. It turned out that the snarky comment meant for the second thread, went onto the first thread, but because the window was closed, when I returned to Facebook, I couldn’t find it anywhere. A whole bunch of people reading the thread between me and someone they don’t even know, got offended. Some of them never ever comment on what I write.

They did that night, and some haven’t spoken to me since. People tend to only see the offense and never the apology or explanation afterward.

That’s one of those things I think, if I could go back and undo it…

Needless to say, I no longer try to multitask on Facebook. I also don’t worry about people who unfriend me – especially the ones who have to make a big announcement to make sure I know.

Regrets, I have more than a few.

I think my clumsiness in what I say is the reason I have had many friends disappear throughout my life. I’ve watched a few people get twitchy when I say things like, “I’ll be friends with most people as long as they let me. Then they leave.”

Friends and acquaintances fall into two camps. One group thinks I’m very quiet. The other wonders if I ever shut up.

The ones who think I’m quiet are either those who don’t know me, or people who talk over me.  Why do I think they do that? No idea in the world. Rudeness, maybe? Or perhaps I’m just invisible.

The second group are usually people I know well. We have commonalities. If the conversation is something I’m passionate about, like books or being left-handed, I can go on and on. It can be quite noisy in my head, what with the ideas I have cooking for novels, blogs or what I’m planning for a vacation.

In a group, I often find myself trying to fight my way into a conversation. I’m there. I have an opinion or something to say about the conversation, and I’m supposed to be part of it, but it’s often like trying to learn how to jump in when other people are turning a jump rope.

I’ve only recently realized I do this – slow learner, I guess. Now, when I recognize it happening, I just stop. They just don’t want to hear what I have to say, so why say it? Unfortunately, when I withdraw from participation, I have difficulty continuing to follow the conversation, and I start thinking about something else, like what I want to add to whatever story I’m currently writing. If there’s a paper napkin around and I have a pen, often I’ll jot it down so I don’t forget. This is when people usually tell me I look bored. I’m not. I’m just not where they are.

I’ve tried in the past to make up my mind beforehand to just remain quietly on the sidelines unless someone directly asks me a question. Often, when I’ve decided to do this, it somehow opens the floodgates and I end up talking. A lot.

I admire people who can be laid back and calm, taking in things and then being able to quietly deliver non-judgemental, pithy observations. I think of them as hippies. Some people are just so sedate. I used to think you eventually got to that point when you got older. I’m still waiting.

I’m more like the bull in a china shop when it comes to self-expression. It’s not that I’m forcing my way in to conversation where I don’t belong; I simply tend to verbally knock things over while I’m waiting my turn.

When I do express myself, the hippies often “maturesplain” things to me as if I couldn’t possibly see the other side of the subject. I see it. I also know that, just like them, I am entitled to my own opinion. Their explanation usually begins with the words, “You don’t understand…”

I hate that. Generally, all it means is, “I don’t agree with you, so let me tell you what to think.”

No point in arguing. They don’t want to know. So I go back to my mental conversations with my characters.

Still, I keep trying to improve myself. I would like to be that calm person – without being condescending to people they don’t agree with.  It’s just so hard to pay attention when you’re not part of the conversation. And I’m usually not calm.

It’s difficult to sit still. I’m the one in the crowd chewing my pen top or bouncing my foot. I’m not impatient. I usually don’t even realize I’m doing those things. Often those things are all that stand between me and falling asleep.

My 10 year (assuming I live that long) goal is to learn how to be the calm person, the one taking it all in – which I’m usually doing – but not commenting – which I’m usually not doing.

Well, that and losing the 40 pounds I gained when I changed careers.

Thanks for the Memories?

 

 

Memory is a funny thing.

I have very clear – if few—memories from when I was three and four, albeit long ago in a village not-so-terribly-far-away, but I don’t remember the 1990s.

I remember clearly all of the intervening decades, but the 1990s – indeed the first decade of the 2000s as well – escape me.

Don’t interrupt – at this point in every story, someone interrupts with a fact that I know. Just wait.

Yes, I remember that near the end of the 1990s Princess Diana died. That’s my “Do you remember where you were when” moment. The people who eventually bought our townhouse came to see the house during the televised funeral.

Overshadowing the keen desire to move out of a townhouse and move into Oz – I mean Hopewell -- was the week or so of news video of the crash, theories of what – or who – caused the crash and my personal surprise of, wow, she was dating? She dated that guy? I never heard of him, but no matter how rich, I think she could’ve done better. Shows how little I paid attention to rag journalism.

But that death is simply a reminder that I do remember the ‘90s.

I met my husband at the beginning of the ‘90s. We married mid-‘90s, and Diana died at the end. But what I actually mean is I don’t remember the music.

Music has always been important to me. My earliest memories are set to a background of my mother singing Doris Day songs while she was doing housework or “Baby of Mine” when I was sad. She had a beautiful voice, and her relatives often said they had expected to hear her sing at Carnegie Hall one day – if only the depression and her working class upbringing hadn’t made that impossible. (Not to brag, but I’m the one who ended up singing at Carnegie Hall.)

I remember once rounding up my relatives, who were at our house for some occasion, and singing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling”, and basking in their applause when I finished. Not bad for a shy four-year-old.

The bottom edge of the ‘50s and pre-Beatles ‘60s were musically all about Ricky Nelson for me, as well as “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” and Alvin and the Chipmunks.

Then there was the British Invasion in my formative eight-year-old brain. Figuring out math problems and learning to spell were set to the music of my youth.

I relied on the Monkees and Herman’s Hermits to keep the psychedelic late ‘60s music away. When I learned that the Monkees introduced the world to Jimi Hendrix, I was furious. How dare they? Of course, Jimi, Janis Joplin and the Doors, etc., were the worst thing that could happen to music as far as I was – and am – concerned, although, oddly, I liked Jefferson Airplane.

I’ve always considered the ‘70s as the worst decade of music, starting as it did with the drug-induced psychedelia, and ending with disco. But on closer inspection, it wasn’t all bad.

I liked folksier aspects of ‘70s rock: Three Dog Night; Peter, Paul and Mary – and no matter what anyone says, “Puff the Magic Dragon” was a song about a dragon, not drugs – Crosby, Stills and Nash; Carly Simon; Joni Mitchell; The Moody Blues and Dan Fogelberg made the decade worth living in for me.

I also discovered what was being called alternative rock: Emmerson, Lake and Palmer, King Crimson, David Bowie and Renaissance, among others, and love it.

Of disco, the less said, the better. I did like the Bee Gees, but I liked them before Barry Gibb discovered his falsetto.

For me, the ‘80s came as a relief. Bell bottoms, body suits and leisure suits went away – as did the acid rock performers – well, many of them died of drug overdoses.

Music exploded into the kinds of songs I craved: OMD, Duran Duran, The Thompson Twins, Tears for Fears, The Fixx, Wham, and so many others, especially from the UK, that it was basically a second British invasion.

People would say my music should be ‘70s, since those were my high school and college years. While I liked the folk and alternative of that period, I liked the ‘80s music better.

Although I graduated from college in the ‘70s, the career I’d trained for failed to materialize under the guise of Catch 22 – you can’t get a job without experience, which you can’t get without a job. So I experienced a rather elongated adolescence,working in my 20s in jobs my peers had done in high school.

As I worked on a variety of short-term jobs for which I was desperately overqualified, my peer group became increasingly younger. My interests simply didn’t correspond with my married-with-children friends from high school, and my wages weren’t even enough to allow me to buy a decent car.

By the late ‘80s, I’d held most of the jobs I said I never wanted to do – except become a parent – and I returned to college to train for a career that I was not that keen on, but that I could actually get upon graduation, and make a decent salary into the bargain.

Having just emerged from a 2-year course of study that caused me to lose track of most of the music from the final two years of the ‘80s, the ‘90s appeared.

Yes, stuff happened in the ‘90s. I returned to fencing, joined a writing group for the brief few months that it lasted, met my future husband, and got my first computer. I know there was music, but I was still listening to the ‘80s stuff I’d so loved.

There was also a lot of personal chaos for me in the ‘90s. I discovered there was no dearth of backstabbers and gas lighters in my job, making me feel constantly on the defensive.

On top of that, I had to dodge blind dates. People tried to convince me some guy I wouldn’t have shared the answers to a quiz with was “perfect” for me. Translation: you’re single; he’s single. One girl told me she personally thought the guy she introduced me to was a jerk. (I guess I learned what she thought of me!)

Fortunately, I met my future husband when I wasn’t looking (well, I was looking. It was across three feet of steel, and I managed to get the fencing touch while he was posing in his lunge.) Until a few weeks before he proposed, I hadn’t entertained the idea that he ever would.

 Of course, people asked all the preposterous questions based on my age at the time. What marriage was this for me? (First, last and only. If it didn’t work, it would’ve been the universe’s way of saying I shouldn’t be married.) Why did you wait so long? Geez, I married the first guy who asked!

But through all of that, while there was music, I’m not sure what it was. There wasn’t a British Invasion. There was no singer I combed gossip magazines for pictures of. There was nothing to hang the music on. Instead, I began following certain actors' careers.

There was one song: “All for One” by Sting, Rod Stewart and Bryan Adams. It became our song. Why? It was the theme song for a swashbuckler film. My husband I are fencers, and we both like the Middle Ages and Renaissance periods of history.

So, wracking my brains, I’ve come up with artists I think were from the ‘90s: The Manic Street Preachers, Tokio Hotel, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Five for Fighting and The Goo Goo Dolls.

I could be wrong. They might be from the early 2000s. I’m not sure. I’m no longer on the cutting edge of pop music. I know I have their CDs, whenever they were.

Maybe it’s just that current music doesn’t interest me. Most things seem to be (C)rap, hip-hop or Cher sounding like she’s singing under water (“Do You Believe”). The couple of Taylor Swift songs I’ve heard are pretty good.

So, I guess I’ll just go back to my ‘80s music and try to figure out what, exactly, Simon le Bon is singing in “Union of the Snake” and leave the next era of music to someone else.

Parents

 

It’s often said that teenagers think their parents know nothing, and suddenly, when those teens reach their 20s, their parents become intelligent again.

That was not my experience.

I wasn’t the kind of kid who got into trouble. Most of my school friends didn’t live near me, so I didn’t get to hang out with them. Those who did live near me had jobs. I couldn’t get a job, even after I got my driver’s license because people didn’t believe I was old enough. In those days there was no photo on the driver’s license. When I was 16, most people thought I was about 13, if that.

The people I spent the most time with were the other people who were in the church guitar group with me. We had an adult who ran the group. We met at the church on Tuesday evenings to rehearse. Occasionally, we went somewhere afterwards, or had a Saturday afternoon outing. In those cases, the leader told the parents and gave them a time to expect us home. On school nights, other than Tuesdays, I was home, doing homework or watching TV.

I wasn’t terribly burdened by peer pressure. I didn’t do things simply because someone else did it. Smoking was one of those things.

My father smoked. There were ashtrays in nearly every room of the house. The stench of smoke was usually somewhere, except in the daytime, when my father was at work.

Whenever we went to Philadelphia for the day by train, we would meet up with my dad, who worked in the city, and after dinner, take the train home. Traveling with him meant spending the entire ride in the smoking car, with its persistence of concentrated smoke that not only clung to clothes, but also burned the eyes and made breathing difficult.

I’d had summers filled with getting cigarette ash blown into my eyes and onto my clothes when my father flicked cigarette ashes out the window during drives in a car without air conditioning.

In addition, every morning I awoke to the sound of my father coughing long enough and hard enough to make me expect to hear a thud on the floor from his fall, bereft of breath. That it never came was a daily wonder to me.

My eldest brother was exposed to the same thing for longer than I had been. That he had started smoking himself at 14 or 15 was beyond belief.

His friends smoked. They all thought it was cool or sophisticated or simply grown-up. While my friends and I pretended to smoke when we were given those disgusting chalky mint flavored candy cigarettes at the corner store, I never would have considered ever taking up smoking. And I made that decision when was only seven or eight.

While this was the early ’60s, before the Surgeon General’s warnings on cigarette packets, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that weeds wrapped in paper, lit on fire and the smoke inhaled into your lungs wasn’t going to be good for you. That was an eight-year-old’s conclusion. What was wrong with the adults?

My parents had forbidden my brother to smoke. He was apparently not able to figure out that he would eventually have the same cough as my father. Or that my mother, who didn’t smoke, could smell the smoke on his clothes and his breath. It apparently never occurred to him that if he was going to sneak smoking, he should at least use mint gum or mouthwash to hide the fact. He thought he was getting away with something, even though on at least one occasion he was careless enough to leave a lit cigarette on the windowsill in the bathroom. I found it.

My mother tried bribing him, promising that if he didn’t smoke and waited until he was 16, she would buy him a pipe.

I never understood what was so magical about waiting until age 16, or how a pipe was any better than a cigarette. A more treatable cancer, perhaps?

My father eventually overruled my mother, perhaps recognizing that my brother was simply sneaking cigarettes and lying about it. Why else would he suddenly be interested in walking the dog every night?

When my brother was a few months shy of 16, my father told him he could smoke. It took him until his mid-60s to finally succeed in quitting.

When my peers tried to pressure me into smoking, I said, “No thanks,” and made no secret of how stupid I thought anyone who smoked was.

At the cusp of my teen years, I had two friends I chose to let go. Each, at different times demonstrated that they thought shoplifting was cool. I was not about to be a party to that. Even though I wasn’t participating in the theft, I didn’t want to be caught with either of them and be tarred with the same brush. In each case, the girl wouldn’t listen to me, so I walked away, and that was the last time I had anything to do with them.

I wasn’t some goody-two-shoes. My non-smoking brother and a friend had decided several years earlier to try stealing something out of the local grocery store, just to see if they could get away with it. They, of course, were caught.

In those days, the store manager called your parents rather than the police. I well remembered what my father had done to my brother once they got home, and assumed it would go worse for me if I ever tried it, having not learned from my brother’s mistakes. Besides, both girls’ behavior was so far from my moral compass that I didn’t think they were worth remaining friends with.

Where my parents and I were at odds during my teen years was my not being allowed to do things they let my brothers do, for no better reason than that my father had failed to give me a Y chromosome. The double standard rankled.

What I didn’t know when I was a teen was that women in the U.S. at the time didn't have a lot of rights. They weren’t even allowed to own their own credit cards. Married women had to have their husbands co-sign for credit cards, and banks could refuse to issue a credit card to an unmarried woman up until 1974, the year after I graduated from high school.

While I was still in college, I was sent an application for my first credit card, which was, I believe, from Macy’s. I applied simply because I could. Once I received that, I had my entre into the world of the credit cards I actually wanted.

I was always good with finances. I didn’t spend simply because I had plastic. I only bought what I needed and could pay for.

My parents tried to instill fiscal responsibility in the three of us kids. They succeeded with two of us. The other, not so much.

My parents didn’t buy us just anything we wanted. If one of my friends got something I dreamed of having, I might ask for one. We generally only got gifts for birthdays and Christmas. It was rare, indeed, if I got some inexpensive toy if there was money left after the grocery shopping was done. First of all, such toys were often cheaply made, and wouldn’t last. Secondly, we had no reason to expect a gift if it wasn’t a birthday or Christmas. There were poor children whose parents could only afford such toys, and they should really be left for them.

If I pointed out that one of my friends had something I wanted, my mother would flippantly suggest I go live with that child’s family. My other option was to save up for what I wanted.

In our family, once we started school, we were given an allowance. At that age (6) I received 25 cents a week. My brothers were older, so they received more.

Allowance was originally meant to be a payment for doing specific chores. My mother never ended up liking the way I did any assigned chore. I made too much of a mess washing dishes, didn’t dry the silverware sufficiently, and did a dreadful job making the bed. She didn’t trust me to dust her breakable knick-knacks, and I always ended up setting the table backwards (cutlery on the wrong sides)because I was left-handed.

My incompetence in chores I wasn’t interested in doing wore her down. Eventually, none of us did chores, but we still received our allowance. My parents wanted to teach us how to handle money.

I remember the excitement every four weeks when I could exchange my four quarters for a dollar bill.

We each had a Band-Aid tin to keep allowance in, in the top drawer of the buffet in the dining room. Each was slightly different, so everyone knew their own. My parents had zero tolerance for thieves, so no one had to worry about anyone touching an allowance box that wasn’t theirs. 

For those who think I'm giving too much away, my parents are both dead, the house sold, the furniture elsewhere. I don't even have a buffet in my dining room, so you won't find money there if you come to rob me.

We each had piggy banks in our rooms, and I don’t know why our allowance wasn’t kept in those. Mine was a silver plated pig given to me for my Christening. I kept money that other people gave me in that, but never my allowance.

If we wanted something our parents weren’t going to buy us, we could save up for it.

I’ll never forget my first allowance purchase. I was six. There was a doll in Woolworth’s that I wanted. I asked my mother if I could buy it with my own money, and she said yes. It was $1.97. By my reckoning, I needed $2, and I’d get 3 cents change.

I had to save for two months.

Each time I was in Woolworth’s, I’d check to see if the doll was still there. Fortunately, it wasn’t a popular doll, a no-name in the age of Barbie.

Finally, I received my eighth quarter, and begged my dad to take me to get the doll. (My mother didn’t drive at the time). It was Friday night. I’m sure he was tired from working all day, but he drove me to Woolworth’s.

When I got there and claimed the doll, I took it to the cashier. I was excited. I had the self-control to save for something I wanted, and this was my first big purchase.

I put my money on the counter while the cashier rang up the sale. I was all set for my three cents – maybe some penny candy? – when my world fell apart.

“Two dollars and six cents,” the cashier said.

What? The sticker said $1.97! Why was she charging me more? Was it because I was a kid? My dad was right there.

I turned to him, tears starting in my eyes,

“I don’t have enough money. She charged me extra,” I said.

He chuckled. No one had mentioned sales tax.

He could have made me leave without the doll, but he’d made the trip. I’m sure he didn’t want to make it again the following week for six cents. After all, no one had explained sales tax to me. He reached into his pocket and pulled out some spare change. He handed the extra six cents to the cashier and I went home happy, even if feeling as if an injustice had been done.

“They charged me extra,” I said once we were in the car.

On the way home he explained about taxes. I still didn’t think it was fair, but I had my doll.

My next project was saving up $10 to open a savings account. I had to save for nearly a year to do that, but I was determined, and when I opened my first bank account, every cent was mine.

When I wanted to do a semester abroad in college, my parents couldn’t afford to send me. They told me I’d have to pay for it myself if I wanted to go, so I got a job in the dining hall, and squirrelled away the money I made for two years.

My mother surprised me by giving me the money she normally would have paid the university for my dorm fees, since I wouldn’t be in the dorms that term. She still had to pay the tuition because of the way the program was set up. But the dorm money helped tremendously, and they’d taught me to work and save for what was important to me.

Even though most of the students I went abroad with had parents who could afford to send them and give them a summer in Paris as well, I knew mine couldn’t. I never thought it was unfair that I had to save my own money. My brothers had never been given trips to Europe, and I had no reason to expect it. All I ever asked for was permission.

I had friends whose parents bought them brand new cars when they graduated from high school. My own parents never owned a brand new car themselves, and wouldn’t have been able to give me a used one – nor did I need a car in college. When I graduated, my gift was a set of suitcases so I could get my clothes back and forth to college. Those friends had gone to public school, so perhaps what they saved on Catholic high school tuition allowed them to be able to afford cars.

Still, those friends didn’t get to experience the accomplishment of doing things on their own.

My mother and I had the usual mother/daughter skirmishes of teen life, but I also tried to improve her life.

As a young teen, I tried to convince my mother to wear miniskirts and more makeup so she’d be trendy. I was unaware until years later how ridiculous she would have looked had she taken my advice. But I was trying to modernize her and make her look pretty so people wouldn’t think she was old. She explained why she wouldn’t do that, but I thought she was just being stubborn.

I suppose I’m lucky that I was able to mainly get on with my parents and not lose respect for them. I didn’t say the things about my parents that I heard some of my peers say.

Of course, having always expected my parents to be the wiser heads, at least in most things, it was a shock when, at the end of her life, my mother was unable to make choices that, a few years earlier, would have been obvious to her. The ravages of some diseases are far more disrespectful to parents than some teens can be.

About Books: What Inspires Me?

 

 

Some time ago a friend asked me to write a blog about where I get my inspiration for my novels.  This set into motion my mid-month series of blogs on writing. I’m not sure whether or not I got the assignment right.

Many of those, while they discuss where my inspiration came from for individual novels or series, are more of a summary of the story.

I’ve now covered every series and individual novel not in a series that I’ve written so far.

So, what’s left? Until I finish another novel, not much, really. But I don’t think I really addressed where my inspiration comes from.

I’m not sure I understand how my mind works any more than anyone else does.

Frequently, the image of my mother shaking her head and saying, “I wish I knew what was going on in your head,” comes to mind. She clearly didn’t understand me. In fact, my summary of my relationship with my mother has always been, “She wanted a daughter, and got me instead.”

My thoughts that lead to stories come from all sorts of places. In the case of the Nicholas Keating stories, they started as a single short story that grew into seven. Those seven short stories morphed into two novels, and the other three grew out of a desire to continue to play with those characters a bit longer.

The inspiration for the first of those short stories was simply walking down the main street of my town on a December afternoon after we’d had what is now an early snow. The snow was the dirty shade snow gets several days after a storm. 

The day was overcast, and as I walked along, letting my mind wander, I slipped on some black ice. I didn’t fall; it was just one of those near things. But it reminded me of a pair of high-heeled boots I had in the ‘80s. They were perhaps the most ridiculous things I ever bought.

By the time I returned home, I had the beginnings of the story. A simple thing.

The Dark Faery series had its inception with Stephanie Meyers’ Twilight series. I thought some of the changes she made to the vampire trope were just wrong. But they allowed me to make some interpretations of my own.

While she didn’t inspire me to write a vampire novel, a discussion of her novels with a teenage friend did. I hadn’t considered writing a vampire novel until my friend suggested it. She thought I could do a good job. Personally, I needed a different hook from any I’d seen.

The idea of vampire fairies just kind of flew into my mind. It was one of those things you throw out to see if it sticks to the wall.

And it stuck for 5 novels.

The Schism novels (still unpublished) grew out of my reading two books: The Front Runner, a novel, and And the Band Played On, a work of non-fiction documenting the early years of the AIDS epidemic.

When I was in college, my core group of friends happened to be a group of gay men. They saw me as an ally – or perhaps just a beard, I don’t know and didn’t worry about labels – and wanted me to understand their culture, so they directed me to the novel.

I read it and was furious with the ending. Once again, for absolutely no reason, the author killed off the gay guy, for no better reason than that he was gay. I decided I could write a better gay novel, and there would be no killing off the gay guy.

Then I read And the Band Played On. That book affected me personally, since I knew people who died of AIDS.

The non-fiction piece was the ultimate push for me to write Schism, which begins during the early years of the AIDS epidemic (back when it was still called gay cancer), but – spoilers – the person in the stories who ends up with AIDS isn’t gay. It’s part of my twisted thought processes that I don’t make things easy.

The Unicorn novels started out as a single story about a day in the life of my childhood, which is why The Snow Unicorn, while the blueprint for the subsequent novels, doesn’t exactly follow the idea of the other novels being about a weather event that frightens the main character.

I Think I Will Have to Eat You Now started out as a joke. I wanted to play with children’s novels, but I didn’t especially want to be a children’s book author. I just wanted to see if I could do it.

As it turns out, there’s a formula for writing children’s books. I didn’t know that, and consequently, I didn’t follow the formula. I only knew children’s books needed pictures. I couldn’t afford an artist, since my books aren’t “really” published; they’re only on Amazon, so I drew my own.

Of all of the things I could imagine doing, drawing is the one for which I have the least talent. I was barely able to complete assignments in art class. There was certainly no talent involved.

Well, once, in 5^th grade, I had an art project that was good enough that my teacher actually hung mine up. That was a lucky fluke, and the only time an art project of mine was ever hung up. I was in high school before I could color in the lines – more or less. And my family made no secret of laughing at my attempts at artwork – as they laughed at most of my ideas of what I wanted to be when I grew up.

My 9/11 story, Love of my Life, came naturally from the idea of what it would be like if you were supposed to be in the towers on 9/11.

I heard stories of people who called out sick that day, were running late, or who had just stepped out for coffee right before the planes hit the towers.

There is also a sub-theme of being the favorite child, as well as what if you have a child you simply don’t like. For as short a novella this story is, it tackles a variety of subjects. In a way, it’s as ADD as I am.

Probably my least favorite novel is Fiona Finn. Ostensibly a story about the challenges of being different, it hits close to home.

I spent elementary school being bullied by different people at times, and often simply being excluded. I took that memory and expanded it to include people with challenges.

The fin is a metaphor for any reason others have to not accept you, so anyone can feel included by what Fiona goes through.

I think just reliving the indifference of the adults in my life made me want to get away from the novel. However, I felt it was an important message to put out there.

Wolfbane highlights my weird bent. I had read the Thomas Covenant novels and hated them because I thought the main character was both a drama queen and stupid. He waited until the last possible second to save the day. It didn’t heighten the excitement; instead, his lack made the reader do an eye roll, sigh and say, “Oh, come on!”

So I wrote one in which my character also enters an alternate universe, but who uses whatever he has at hand to accomplish his mission -- without becoming McGyver. While he doesn’t have magical powers, he actually thinks about things. He just doesn't take the alternate universe seriously.

The Search came from my love of things medieval, and is kind of a combination of the renaissance fair and Dungeons and Dragons. And none of these things.

It’s also pulls from the British Royal Family. There was some media hype about Charles being single into his 30s, mainly because at that time the royals still clung to the idea that the heir had to marry a virgin, even though the common man had long since abandoned that notion or caring whether or not the monarchy did. Later, Prince Edward apparently had some words with his father about being single.

While my story has nothing to do with the British Royal Family – or, in fact, with this world, per se, it does involve a young heir who thinks all he needs to do is be the heir and be popular to get on in life.

He knows nothing of the things he’s supposed to study, and has been the cause of more than one scullery maid being dismissed.

It isn’t until his father threatens to disown him that he is forced to buckle down and re-learn things his younger brother and his twin sister can do with ease.

In the course of his study of weaponry he is injured, and on recovering, decides he needs to go on a search, a wandering alone into the deep forest, to prove himself.

Few ever attempt a search, and fewer still return. No heir to the throne has ever attempted it, and his father, the king, is inclined to refuse permission. But he sees that the search is the first thing that has ever kindled any sort of passion in his son, and finally allows him to go.

Usually my current novel is my favorite.

The Invisible Twin, my current novel, is near and dear. I used a lot of information I have about twins from having a mother who is an identical twin, as well as having known many sets of twins in my life. I also enjoy novels where the main character is trying to work out life, since that’s what most of us do on a daily basis.

But my all-time favorite is the Nicholas Keating series. I’ve read those novels several times, and I enjoy them. It actually amazes me that I wrote them. I always feel like I’m reading someone else’s novel.

Until I write another novel, I won’t have any comments on writing to make, so this is my final "About Books" blog for the time being. It’s back to a once-a-month blog. But if anyone has an idea on something you’d like me to write about, let me know.