Tell
me about your children or your grandchildren. That’s a tempting invitation we
don’t often get, but your Personal History is an opportunity to expound on
their intelligence, good looks, and talents. You can even include a note they
wrote to you when they were in first grade telling you how much they loved you.
If you’re anything like me, you kept all those treasured notes.
The
point of writing your Personal History is to tell them who you are – and who
you were during the years before they were born. Times were different and so
were we. You might have been raised before television. What did you do for fun
after dinner and before you went to bed? Read
a book or play a board game with your sister? Maybe you listened to the radio
with your family. Did you walk to school – and were your parents concerned
that you would be molested or kidnapped along the way? You probably did walk to school, and your parents never imagined that
anything would happen to you along the way. What did you and your friends do
on a weekend? What “naughty” things did you hope your parents wouldn’t find out
about?
Your
answers to these questions will probably read like a history book to your
grandchildren – and to great-great grandchildren you’ll never know. But that’s
the point. Make yourself a three-dimensional being in your Personal History. If
you don’t think they’ll appreciate it, think about everything you’ll never know
about your grandparents. Don’t you wish you had had the foresight to ask them
when you had the opportunity?
True Confessions. If my
friend Caroline reads this, she will certainly remember our decadent past when
we visited her grandmother’s beach house at Atlantic Beach, New York. We were
about ten or eleven, I think (Caroline can correct me if she disagrees) and we
had active imaginations and plenty of time to ourselves. Caroline’s mother,
Adeline, visited with her mother at the house while we were supposed to go to
the beach. Our detour on the way to the beach at the end of the block was our
little secret. We headed the other way to the stationery store on the corner
where we dug into our pockets and pulled out enough change to purchase a stack
of romance and movie magazines and two bags of roasted pumpkin seeds. We
wrapped our purchases in our beach towels in case someone saw us, and we went
to the beach.
It was a small piece of beachfront where few
people visited. The sand was very clean and soft, and the ocean waves visited
the shore with each wave. But we weren’t interested in the beauty of nature. We
retrieved our treasures, tossed our towels down and sat on them. After a short
decision-making session, one of us would open the most seductive-looking
magazine and read the first story aloud. Now, before you say, “Oh, my, Judy. I
never knew you were one of THOSE girls,” let me tell you about the magazines.
This was in the sanitary days of the early 1950s. We were awed when we read the
word “kiss.” Nobody in those stories ever went further than that. But they were
beautiful women with equally beautiful men and they “wanted” one another. Once
they actually got together, they apparently didn’t know what to do with their
victory.
But we ate it up as we
chomped on our pumpkin seeds and giggled. Of course we dumped the magazines and
the empty pumpkin seeds bags in a garbage pail before we went back to grandma’s
house. “Yes, the water was nice,” “No, there weren’t many people there,” “Yes I
put on suntan lotion before we went” we reported. If they noticed our sly
smiles, they never questioned us.
Talking about the
stories when we got home kept the memory alive for several days. As far as we
knew, nobody was ever the wise. Ah, the innocence of youth in mid-century Long
Island.
No comments:
Post a Comment