LETTER FROM MOLLY LAIRD TO ME AT CAMP GOLDEN ARROW - DATED AUGUST 22, 1978

I was eleven years old and spending my second summer at Camp Golden Arrow in Georges Mills, New Hampshire. I had become close to two girls, Sarah Clift, and Molly Laird. Unlike most of the kids at camp, Sarah and Molly lived in Massachusetts, and therefore, we held some hope of seeing each other after camp ended for the summer. Apparently, Molly left after the first camp session, and was writing to me at camp from the family vacation that occupied the second half of her summer. What is most remarkable to me about this letter, at first glance, is what I don’t remember. For instance, I don’t remember calling Molly “Mobbie,” although that’s how she signed the letter.

How about that stationery? Standard fare for girls my age in the 70s. Probably always. What is it about little girls that makes them like drawings of little animals doing stuff, like writing letters? Its like a law of nature that every little must go through a phase of craving insipidly cute crap. Some of them never grow out of it, and thus Walmart manages to sell A LOT of Winnie the Pooh and Looney Tunes clothing in adult sizes. Fortunately, I did grow out of it. I even tried unsuccessfully to get my daughters never to grow into it. I dressed them in a lot of black and bought them realistic looking stuffede jungle animals. Unsuccessful. Some laws of nature just ain’t for fighting.

I’m sure I was desperately jealous of this stationery, once upon a time. Or maybe I had some. I seem to remember some kind of stationery swapping in my cute rabbit and mouse years. And why does every cute animal stationery or other drawing have mushrooms in it? In addition to not being cute, mushrooms are generally poisonous. But they crop up in every cute animal drawing, looking like so many gnome penises.

Back to Molly’s letter. I don't remember Matt Morse and his droolworthiness, but I'll take Molly's word for it. Barri was a girl who played the male lead to my female lead in the 1978 CGA production of HMS Pinafore - my character’s name was Josephine (I think). I remember Harold. I remember my costume, I remember my friend Karla playing Buttercup, and I don't remember much else. I can remember snippets of two songs but that’s about it.

I do remember doing everything with Sarah and Molly for a lot of my time at camp that year. Sarah and Molly and I made up a song for a talent night at camp, to the tune of Eleanor Rigby, which we replaced with the name “Gina Ciavolino,” a counselor at camp. I didn’t get what the Beatles song meant then. I just pictured a formaldehyde jar with a preserved head in it next to someone’s front door. We also made up new lyrics to Yesterday, that I remember a little better, about being sent to camp for being a nuisance at home:

Why I had to go, I don’t know, Mom wouldn’t say.
I did something wrong (“That’s the sixth time you’ve stepped on the cat!”)
Now I’m stuck, at CGA-a-a-a.

Sarah used to say she could come up with a song for anyting we could say. For example, commenting on the temperature of the lake water would win you a rendition of “Cold As Ice.” Sarah was stumped only by Molly’s statement that she hated sawdust, which she said she claimed not to have said just to stymie Sarah, but I knew that was the real reason she said it. Because Sarah was one of htose kids who always knew so many things we didn’t, and every once in awhile, it felt right to find something she couldn’t do.

Months after we got home, Molly and I were invited to Sarah's birthday party. Sarah was two grades ahead of me, and one grade ahead of Molly, but Molly and I were from the suburbs. Sarah was a city girl, a true seventh grade sophisticate. And my mother didn't like her at all, possibly because she told me what rubbers were and told me that I should check around the house because my father probably had some. Anyway, I was excited to go to the party but also scared. These kids were older, and bigger, and Sarah had intimated that the boys in her grade thought about sex a lot, and would think it was great that I was so much shorter than they were, because my face would be that much closer to their crotches. I had no idea whether she was serious, and what I would do if she was.

This is a good place to interrupt my story about Sarah Clift’s birthday party to say that I have a particular penchant for both the backstory and the tangent. So, while I don’t think I will stop, I’ll at least try to raise an alert to the fact that something is a tangent, and not part of the narrative. For example, the following tangent is absolutely essential to understanding the reference in the following paragraph to the middle school girls‘ bathroom at Weeks Junior High. So, first to the tangent, then back to the story.

TANGENT: When I was in sixth grade, in an effort to scare the crap out of us, our teachers tried to “prepare” us for middle school by warning us that if we went into the bathrooms, there might be tough girls in there who would try to make us smoke. Nancy Slotnick and I figured that if that happened to us, we would blow into the cigarette rather than inhale, in order to fool them into thinking we were really smoking by making the cigarette tips light up. Geniuses, we were, no? No one ever asked me to smoke in the girls’ bathroom, so I never had the opportunity to try it out. Thank god. END OF TANGENT.

Anticipating Sarah Clift’s party was like anticipating the middle school girls’ room. I was terrified of what could happen, knew I wasn’t quite up to it, but still harbored some slight fantasy that I would prove myself to be every bit as cool and interesting as I thought Sarah’s friends would be.

I remember Sarah, on her birthday, getting ready before the party and putting on pantyhose (sooo fancy and grown-up), and bemoaning the fact that they didn’t cover a big scrape on her knee (the acrylic cable knit tights I was likely wearing would have). Sarah’s parents were divorced and her dad was throwing the party. We had been getting ready in Sarah’s mother’s apartment. Sarah went to say good-bye to her mother, and maybe to ask for a ride, and her mother started to kind of yell at her. I can remember what she said exactly: “I hope you don’t expect any present from me. I don’t understand why people should be congratulated just for staying alive for another year.” It was awful, and the embarassment poured off of Molly and me as clearly as the hurt registered on Sarah’s face. In retrospect, I suspect it had something to do with being resentful about Sarah’s father throwing the party and thereby getting audience with Sarah on her birthday, but I doubt I knew that then. When we left her mom’s apartment, Sarah asked us not to tell anyone at the party about what had happened with her mom.

Truth be known, I barely remember the party, although I’m pretty sure I was dressed like Heidi, including the two braids twisted up on my head and flowered dress with lace collar, an outfit that saw more than one bar mitzvah in its day and, I believe, was what I wore in my fifth grade school picture. I remember feeling scared and out of place, and clearly too young to be there. We slept over afterward and I just know that lonely dread feeling was in my stomach. Uncomfortable, I wasn’t sure whether the feeling was about wanting to be home or about wanting not to want to be home. That night Sarah taught me about blow jobs by explaining that a boy takes out his schlong, and you blow on it. Thank god I had someone to teach me the ways of the world back then. Oy.

I never saw Sarah again after that, I don’t think. I didn’t drive yet. My mother didn’t like her. It was not a relationship destined to last.

Despite the invitation in her letter, I never did go to Molly's house for the night. Both Molly and Sarah are way up there on the list of people I’m sorry I didn’t stay in touch with. I remember years later, when I was living in Cambridge, not far actually from where Sarah’s mother had lived. I was driving through Porter Square and saw Molly standing outside the Porter Square T station. I pulled the car over in the middle of traffic. Molly saw me and walked over. After all those years she knew me right away, just like I knew her on the drive-by. I would probably still know her on sight. I would love the chance to talk to her about that summer, about the party at Sarah’s. I wonder if she remembers it the way I do. I wonder if she remembers the words to the songs we made up. If she could fill in some of the blanks - memories I know I enjoyed then but can’t remember now.

My two oldest daughters are now the ages we were back then. They are not nearly as dorktastic as I was. They would never wear a lace collar or braids woven up on their heads. They seem so much more at home in their own skin and their own personalities than I ever remember feeling. And when I remember Molly and Sarah, I remember us all as awkward, not quite fitting correctly into whatever it was into which one was supposed to fit correctly. But we fit in with each other at that time in our lives. And its the ease we had with each other, if not with much else, that this letter brings to life for me. Without this letter, I would have remembered the awkwardness, the inaccurate sex education, the fear of older kids, the braids, but perhaps would not have preserved in memory so much the ease and the comfort, even with ourselves, borne of how well we knew and loved each other.

What Not To Write

So here’s a stumper. You’re trying to be honest. You’re trying to tell your story with authenticity, which means being honest. Reeeeaaaaallllly honest. It means facing the things that are embarrassing. In embarking on this project, I will, I’m sure, struggle with putting all my ugly out there for people to see. I’m already having trouble even imagining it. According to my kids, I’m constantly embarassing. Like, every time I say “butt” in public or dance and sing while I’m making dinner. But see? That’s easy to admit, “I say BUTT in public! BUTT BUTT BUTT!”

Some things are hard to put out there because they really are private, or were at the time they were first written. And some things are just embarrassing because they reveal things about me I don’t ordinarily think of as ‘reveal’ material, or because I was (am) such a dork when I wrote a lot of this stuff that I am reading. And even if I’m not as big a dipshit as I once was, at least sometimes, like everyone else, on some level I will always think of myself as the dorkiest, lamest, most insecure version of myself. And its just a tad counterintuitive to take that part of me and swing it around like undies up a flagpole after a panty raid.

Some things are weird to write about because they are unquestionably boring for everyone except me. And I can get caught in the tension between wanting to write what’s important to me, and wanting people to like me and think I’m fascinating. And then there are things that are just the opposite. What do I do with things that might include someone else? I didn’t grow up locked in a trunk with my thoughts and a legal pad, after all. If I write about a love letter I got from someone before I met my husband, will I hurt my husband? Will I cause problems for my ex? If I write about something that I saw, or experienced, that impacted me but that really is part of someone else’s life that might be private to them, what do I do with that? What about unflattering things about people I adore and admire? What about the privacy of other people? I don’t want to violate confidences, even stale ones, but I don’t want to leave things out of this undertaking that are important in my life. When in doubt, I could always redact last names, I guess, but for the people who know who they are anyway, would that make them feel less invaded? Is my incessant overthinking of things that aren’t problems yet a sincere effort to do this right, or merely a stalling tactic?

With one exception, I’ll have to punt on establishing any real rules of engagement, in favor of a case-by-case approach. The exception? I won’t do anything misleading or dishonest. I’ll tell the truth. (Which reminds me - I’ve been trying to remember the name of that “You can’t handle the truth!” movie so that I can put it on my Netflix queue and show it to my daughter. Too bad there isn’t some kind of website where you could go to search for answers to questions like that on the internet!) And being honest is less a rule than a promise to myself and to the undertaking itself. To wax serous for a moment, I think being honest is another way of letting go of the things that aren’t important so that you can more fully experience the things that are. Its the decluttering of conscience. That would be a good title for a book. The Decluttering of Conscience: Ridding Yourself of Your Karmic Chachkies.”

And finally, what of those things that I remember but that were lost in the fire? How about the things that I am relieved are gone? Like the blue corduroy diary I kept in my ninth grade year. For years (decades) before the fire, I had been unsuccessfully trying to convince myself it was okay to throw it out, but, as I’ve mentioned, I was a saver, and therefore I found myself unpersuasive on that point. Suffice it to say that some of the thoughts in my life of which I am most ashamed were recorded there. And I was thrilled that it was burned up - problem solved. But I have managed to resurrect the dilemna, if not the diary itself. Do I tell the story of that diary as I remember it, in all its humiliating glory? Or do I allow it to be lost. Do I try to convince myself that things happen for a reason, and that there is a reason the diary burnt up and I shouldn’t try to tell the story? Or do I admit that I don’t really believe that “everything happens for a reason,” and write about the diary the way I remember it, shame flag flying? Or maybe I punt by deciding that writing about the diary is off-mission, as its destruction removed its artifactitude.

So, apologies in advance to those I take down the embarrassment rabbit hole with me. Remember, its not humiliation, its liberation.

xoxo
Jen

Wherein I Write Things Down Where Everyone Can See

Hello invisible people of the interwebs!

I was trying to write these essays by myself. But when I write for myself I'm super boring, like someone trying to sound casually brilliant. ZZZzzz. As of this moment, I haven't shared the existence of this blog with anyone, but I think I need the notion of an audience to actually find my voice. So, to introduce--

After the July 2010 fire (that burned up my house and ruined all my stuff), everything in the house was gross. Wet, sooty, charred, burnt, molding, and really smelly - fire smelly, which if you've spent any significant time in your burnt up house, you would be smelling right now just because I said it. I really can't describe it. It just smells like burnt house. In the weeks after the fire, the inventory guys came in and inventoried everything for the insurance claim. They did it quickly because the company that was trying to mitigate the damage to our house had to get everything out of it so that it would dry out and the mold would stop growing. So we had a short window of time in which to go through every single item that was still go-through-able and figure out what we wanted to try to save. And by "save," I don't actually mean that we would be able to pull out furniture or clothing that we could use, I mean salvage enough to store in a plastic bin somewhere so that we could keep it and peek at it every once in awhile, but not have to smell it. And really, most everything was not even in that category.

I went in with a few particular objects to look for - favorite stuffed animals, a shirt my daughter (for some reason) had folded up and put it in a little plastic box in her desk drawer that she thought might have survived (it did - and thanks to the box, only took dry cleaning to get rid of the smell), a Ginny doll and doll clothes that had been given to my mother on her 6th birthday (1951), then to me on mine (1973), and to my oldest daughter on hers (2004), my second daughter's journals, my third daughter's lucky silver dollar, the Playmobil set my son got for his 5th birthday eleven days before the fire. I mostly found those things. The stuffed animals were sent out for cleaning and were never seen again. The Playmobil set was too gross, the silver dollar was nowhere to be found. Went through thousands of ruined books, which was incredibly sad, and tried not to think of them as okay (as in "really, I think they'll be okay") and tried only to "save" what I felt couldn't be replaced.

Then I got to the third floor. Before the fire, my husband was ready to photograph so that he could submit the pictures to Hoarders. The whole floor was pretty burnt. Lots of holes in the floor, the walls, the roof. The smell was almost unbearable. And it was August, so it was hot. It was also very wet from the firefighters' hoses and the rain coming in through the roof. I was mostly hoping to find certain important papers - birth certificates, marriage certificate, passports, transcripts, documentation of my husband's name change, basically things it would be a pain in the ass to replace. My purse was lost in the fire, which had in it a variety of things that I thought would be hard to replace with absolutely no paperwork to my name. I was also hoping to find some of the kids' artwork, which had been unceremoniously tossed up there for years. I got through those things. Grabbed what I felt I would regret not trying to de-smell, but the truth was, it wasn't much. It was easier than you would think to let go of everything you own. When push came to shove, so little of it was genuinely meaningful. It was sad, but not sad in the desperate way that makes you want to try to make things salvageable that really aren't. Just sad and hard, but one of those things you just have to do anyway.

And then I got to the last room in the attic. This is the room where all the "to save forever" boxes were - not only things for my kids, but from my whole life. The boxes of stuff I took when my parents sold my childhood home, everything I had collected and dutifully carted from apartment to apartment to apartment to apartment until they found a permanent (I thought) home in the third floor of my house. I should note that I am a saver. So there was a lot that was stored up there. And the worst of the whole weeks-long process of going through all of that stuff was that room. Because as I was digging around looking for kids' artwork, and finding boxes and bins filled with paper and water, I started to find some boxes that, while damp, were not soaked, and while dirty and a little charred and sooty and smelly, were not burnt to nothing. I opened one and saw a red plastic folder. I hadn't seen the folder in years but my deep memory instantly knew that it held letters and notes I had written and received in high school. And pulling out that box revealed a whole little enclave of boxes in the same condition, containing the same sorts of things, that were pieces of my life from my childhood, even my husband's things that I felt like I wanted to save for him (though at the time I put them up there, he said he didn't care).

And all of a sudden, I had this primitive gatherer (of hunter/gatherer fame) urge to just keep and save all of this stuff, as much as I could that wasn't destroyed beyond recognition. Paper. Letters, notes, papers I wrote, programs of shows, some photos (most of the photos had been pulled out and saved by other people, but that's a story for another post), cards, journals, planners. And I knew that these were the things that I had to save, because they told my story. And a lot of the story would have been lost if I had let those things go, and probably a lot was lost in the fire, but these pieces of paper, like so much flesh, were the record of my life and who I have been. So I pulled them out, sent them to be "ozoned" (stuck in a big pod with a lot of oxygen pumped in - don't ask me, I have no idea why that is supposed to help) to try (unsuccessfully) to make them less smelly and (successfully) to dry them.

Months later, back come the boxes from the ozone pods. Filled with these pieces of my life, like artifacts of some dead pre-house fire civilization. In all the years before the fire that I had them I just left them sitting in the boxes (I really did intend to get around to sorting them and pasting them into books) and didn't look at them or read them or even think about them much. And now they are as valuable to me as anything that could have been saved from the house. The magnitude of the loss of my own history threw me. Granted, its a little self-absorbed, but I don't want to lose my history to the foibles of memory or fire or neglect. So I decided to write about the pieces, one by one, that tell my story. Essays about each one. What it was. Context. Reflection. Maybe what it means in light of its near loss, maybe that it means little or nothing. There are things in there I don't remember, letters from people I can't place. But they are all pieces of a whole. So, while they will be randomly assembled here, I will be keeping them in chronological order in hard copy, because I'm curious to see the story they tell all together. So, self-absorbed though it might be, you are invited to share in this story as it unfolds.

Yours in pieces,
Jen