I really want your feedback on this work-in-progress.
If you would prefer to receive this content in a word document, I'd be happy to send it to you.
RIDING IN THE BACK SEAT: A TIME TRAVELOGUE: 1929--SOMETIME IN THE 21STCENTURY
This is the first, actually rather small, section of the much longer book I'm working on. I've asked people who don't know me from Adam to just tell me if they find the content interesting. A couple of others, who do know me, have expressed an opinion, and I enjoyed almost an hour of free evaluation at Beavers Pond Press.
Opinions have ranged from, "It's boring," to "You asked the right person. I have really enjoyed it." Some have liked beginning with the dream sequence; another person wanted me to get directly to a description of the content. The folks at Beavers Pond Press emphasized the difference between memoir and autobiography, the latter -- unless one is famous, which I'm not -- of interest only to one's own family.
Because of the memoir/autobiography distinction, I've changed the title and rewritten the prologue some to emphasize my intention just to report on my witness of the world -- the part I lived through. In other words, I'm trying to avoid being an autobiography in favor of producing a memoir.
At this point, I want help in figuring out which way to go. That's why I'm putting this initial manuscript out for your opinion. What you have here is just the intro part. I'm not looking for evaluations of the writing style. Just, do you find any interest in anticipating what will follow this intro? You can let me know your reactions, comments, and suggestions by clicking on the "Contact Dr. Affinito" button. (That sounds weird. To most people I'm Mona.)
I'll be putting more content here after I see whether this first part leads to any commentary. My only request -- please keep it clean.
PROLOGUE
I stopped fearing death at the age of 13 at my grandmother’s funeral. That has made all the difference
RIDING IN THE BACK SEAT
I’m riding in the back seat; suddenly I realize I’m alone in the car. There’s no one in the driver's seat; there’s no one in the front at all. My ribs stab my lungs; my stomach does the witches dance; my eyes swing in the wrong direction; my brains slosh against my skull. The fantasy speed staples my body to the seat even as the car swings from side to side. Fences bow and flap to avoid being hit; trees blow aside and spring back in panic; people fly about like cartoon characters. The right rear seat traps me. No matter how hard I struggle I can’t make my rigid arm reach far enough to push down on the brake in the front. I want to move my body into the driver’s seat to take over the steering wheel. I can’t. In fact, I can’t control my movements at all. The vehicle carrying myself is completely in control as it runs out of control. I save myself by waking up.
As bad as it is losing control of the car, it’s even worse on other occasions when I see it from outside bursting into bright red flames.
I save myself by waking up.
I did wake up. I did get control. Those dreams are emotion-free memories now, as are those of octagonal rooms filled with ancient debris. Over time I cleaned them out and created a bright, white, sun-lit, fragrantly airy space for myself. Even the dreams of a royal octagonal table standing atop long legs under which is rushing a brown, fetid stream are gone. The water was purified. The dream was no longer needed.
I know other people have ridden in the back seat of an out-of-control car. I know because they’ve told me so. Eventually we’ve recovered to take over the direction of our own lives. Some of us have endured the passionate, fiery explosion of the vehicle that carries us through life. Many of us, I think, have discovered the bright new parts of ourselves after cleaning out the old, untended debris in our hidden rooms, or removed the personal pollution that contaminates our life energy.
Dreams do tell a story, but besides being a creator/utilizer of wild dreams, I am a walking history book. Even my dentist found joy in examining my teeth – old techniques surviving in a living creature. You will find glimmers of your own history in the snippets of stories I tell here. I hope it will resonate with your memories and challenges.
If ancient history seems boring for you, let me entice you by pointing out that there was a time when you could have had a nice apartment in Boston for a monthly rate of $85.00, or a crummy one in a former red-light district (as I did) for $55/month. You could’ve earned $3000/year and saved $1000 (especially if you found a boyfriend with a car – and he’d definitely be in the driver’s seat.)
If you are female, you would have had a wide choice of occupations – teacher, nurse, or secretary. Oh, and your boyfriends might have chosen to be teachers, but not in the elementary grades. Their families and friends would have given them grief (maybe even called them “fairies”) if they wanted to be secretaries or telephone operators, or, god forbid! – nurses. Besides, they knew they were destined singlehandedly to support a wife and family – if you were middle-or-upper class white, that is - so they had to go for jobs that would pay “real” money.
If, like my daughter, you wanted a woman physician when you turned 13, you would have been out of luck, because women weren’t allowed residencies at local hospitals. And, unless you lived in Connecticut in the 1970s, you wouldn’t have dreamed it might be possible to be on a basketball team that people would pay to see. “No one wants to watch women play sports,” said one of SCSC’s athletic coaches with sneering confidence. Men in my neighborhood agreed that no woman could do a fireman’s or a policeman’s job, or even be a postman. (“postman:” antiquated term for “mail carrier.”) Those women you see as part of a male/female team on the nightly news? No way. Women’s voices would never have the power to elicit belief from listeners, and certainly not as foreign correspondents.
But then, if you go back far enough, TV was nothing more than an imaginary game to be played when pretending you could see what the actors and actresses were doing on Lux Radio Theater. Or maybe you might see yourself on the TV of the future at the 1939 world’s fair. Skype? Forget it. You were lucky if your radio could capture one overseas program.
That handheld app-filled phone? Think a renovated classroom crammed with the basic computer which ground out a quick and accurate result after your turn came to insert your perfectly error-free hand-punched stack of cards – maybe in less than a few hours if you were lucky.
You’ll be riding in my vehicle with me if you remember things like pulley lines, ration books, victory gardens, getting black ink on yourself from the mimeograph machine- and the smell of the ink, diaper pails, French phones, or princess phones, or running out to design your own play in the neighborhood with no organized little league to put you on schedule, or blue books, TV test patterns, or the expectation that your life may come to a rapid disintegrating halt when the atomic bomb drops. Or how about classes, exams, and proms cancelled in protest, or being locked out of your office because of a bomb scare. Or proms that you don’t go to if you don’t have a date? Cars the men in your life could repair if they were car savvy? Do you remember hats and gloves in church? Five and dime stores, corner drug stores where ice cream was more important than drugs. Remember when you had to get out of bed to turn off the TV, or to change the channel?
I’M JUST THE PHOTOGRAPHER/REPORTER
Sometimes – not always – I like the back seat, reviewing memory snapshots of the goings-on around me, in me, to me, and because of me on my journey through time. I don’t intend for this album to be about me, but I am the filter through which the pictures are recorded. Photos must, of necessity, reflect the photographer, not only for the places visited, but also because of the choices made along the way. I’m counting on the personal stories to give warmth to this verbal slide show.
Even as I write this I am looking at my wedding photo – a small wedding on October 3, 1955. Bright autumn colors, coat-free warm sunlight, twenty-three of us standing in front of St. Stephen’s in Winooski, Vermont. Seven of us are still living. But no, this is not a tale of tragedy. Nor is it a story of survival against great odds. In fact, there is so little I can claim as my own victory considering the gifts I’ve been given from the beginning. There is no expose of violence, except for that exploding constantly in the world around us as we dodge our way through. And stop reading right now if you are looking for great or sensational sex.
Thoroughly familiar with the excruciatingly painful lives of so many people here and abroad, I suffer occasional bouts of guilt for my good fortune – irrational guilt I have tried to assuage with various efforts toward social justice and occupational usefulness. Trying to help others gain some control over their lives, even as I work at controlling my own, reflects in my rear view mirror, remembering the view from the driver’s seat, as well as the role of navigator from the passenger seat. (Riding Shotgun?)
I hope you’ll join me in viewing these verbal photos/snippets, one at a time. If you like detective stories, see if you can figure out the divorce after twenty years of what the outside world thought was an ideal marriage. The clues are there very early in the journey and in the culture of the time. Consider my college roommate’s wise mantra, “Five years from now… “ Better to translate it, “Twenty years from now, looking through the rear view mirror, today’s chaos will make sense.”
I’d provide a strictly chronological sequence, but that’s not the way life goes. It’s more like an eddy swirling with greater or lesser chaos as energy bursts in from all sides, occasionally calming to a level that deceives us into thinking it will remain as it is, only to activate again.
I’ve viewed the passing landscape from the back seat, from the passenger seat, from the drivers seat, and now very often from Grandma’s back seat. What I offer are snippets of observations, verbal photos sometimes focused on a single event, sometimes a series, and occasionally a montage.
It’s about what I saw as a participant observer: telephone party lines, neighborhoods, friendships, ethnicity, wars, fallout shelters, “mixed” marriage and divorce, parenting, gaining and losing honorific titles, life in academia, defying gender expectations, “A Healthy Woman is a Crazy Person,” growing up finally somewhere around the age of 45 (or maybe not yet), alcoholic families, death by fire – in buildings and at the ends of cigarettes, happy times, depression, and more.
As for me, I stopped fearing death, but I didn’t stop fearing roller coasters, roller skating, ice-skating, downhill skiing, heights, down escalators, physical pain, humiliation, causing an accident, hurting other people, losing control. When my children were young I had an almost neurotic fear of leaving them behind in the hands of people I didn’t really trust to care for and encourage them, but now they are nearly eligible for the 55-plus menu and I’m not worried about their getting along without me. I don’t fear departing sometime later than the age of 86. Actually I’m aiming for 104. That would be a good time for the journey to end.
My early shots/verbal snippets, are kind of square --- well, rectangular really, like the Kodak box camera I was so excited finally to get when I was a kid – so much begging and hinting went into the accomplishment. So much excitement waiting for the negatives to turn into prints at the local drugstore! They are only a bit yellowed with time in their old-fashioned album.
Then there’s the Kodak 35 millimeter with its film in round canisters. I was so careful to preserve them until I got home from my journeys so they could be developed. The nice thing about those slides is that they could be and have been scanned into the present.
I left my devotion to Kodak when I got that quick-acting instant Polaroid. Currently it sits in my closet with its rotting film, unused and unloved, as I enjoy my digital. Now I can snap every possibility and delete it instantly if I don’t like it. And I can spread any photo of my choice far and wide through e-mail and social media. A much faster pace – like life. Every year that passes, time (quick shots at life) goes more quickly.
I occupy a back seat now, reviewing memory snapshots of the major events happening around me, in me, to me, and because of me on my journey through time. I am finding my journey exciting -- sometimes not so much. I hope you'll enjoy leafing through it with me.