Prologue

I cannot go on avoiding some of the unpleasant perceptions of my childhood.  I refer to them as “perceptions” to allow forgiveness to those involved on the chance that my childish self erred.  Since those perceptions permeate and distort my perceptions in my adulthood, and since I will soon be sixty years old, I must stop to deconstruct those perceptions and clear the path for the next twenty years or so.  To that end, the anecdotes begin with The Time She Laughed at My Book.

            I don’t actually remember when I began writing, but I think it must have been shortly after I learned to read fluently.  I was about five when I could pick up a children’s book and clearly see the movie in my head, even when I read without moving my lips.  My earliest memories involve books, reading, and storytelling, just like those of millions of other biblio- and logophiles.  I had plenty of time to read because I was often ill with asthma, bronchitis, allergies, and whatever childhood disease of the month was floating through the late 1950’s.  I remember reading under the blankets with a flashlight, only to have both the flashlight and the book confiscated by a frustrated parent.  I remember lying in the darkness of my bed retelling the stories to siblings who shared the bedroom but did not yet read.  I exceeded the maximum number of books every week when I went to the library check out desk, but continued to try to take home more than just five volumes.

I especially remember the two weeks when I was seven lying in a darkened room while measles took its turn in my spindly body.  I was desperately bored and wanted to read while confined to the cave of a bedroom off the kitchen.  “If you read when you have red measles, you will go blind.”  As I couldn’t think of anything worse, I gave up the blue cloth-bound copy of An Illustrated Book of Children’s Literature that I had tucked between the twin bed and the wall.  I entertained myself instead by making up my own stories.

            Like all the other eight-year-old girls I knew then and many of the eight-year-old girls I’ve met subsequently, I was crazy about horses.  I read every book that mentioned horses, both fiction and nonfiction, that could be found on the shelves of first the classroom and then the school library.  I don’t remember if National Velvet first entered my world as a book or as a film, but either way I whipped my imaginary Pie over every jump and along every backstretch of the Grand National whenever I was outdoors.  I sometimes rode in the house while watching television (Walt Disney Presents had some great horse stories back then) or when I was so inspired by the words on the page that I was no longer able to be still.

            My book began, “’Sal, Sal!  Come in for supper now!’  Mrs. Masson called from the open screen door.”  I had spent hours at my parents’ little black manual Royal typewriter. I remember typing every word laboriously, frustrated that my fingers didn’t know their way around the keyboard fast enough to keep up with the images in my head.  I knew I was writing a book, and to that end, I used carbon paper to capture a second copy for my future readers.  It took forever.  In fact, Sal’s family name became Masson instead of Mason because of an early typographical error. Erasing both the original manuscript and the carbon copy would create a mess, and I had already started over once.  Books didn’t have mistakes in them.  I didn’t know about double-spacing, but I did know about indenting and proper punctuation, including in dialogue, and I knew that each paragraph had to tell its own little story.  We hadn’t mastered those mechanics in school; I knew them because I had seen the pattern repeated dozens and dozens of times in books.  Since all the different authors used the same patterns, I knew that to be an author, too I must use them.

            I distinctly remember walking into the kitchen with its clear birch cabinets and trendy turquoise oven and cook top and handing the first chapter of my book, all three pages, to my mother to read.  I have no recollection of what she said after she stopped laughing, nor do I know why she laughed.  As an adult, I have played through that particular perception repeatedly, inserting my mature knowledge into the situation: she was delighted; she didn’t know how painful ill-timed laughter could be; she was caught off-guard by this precocious skinny child with asthma and couldn’t help herself; she was mocking.  My perception at the time, and to this day, is the last.  From that time on, I only shared my work on demand.  I don’t recall writing any more stories after that except for those required for school assignments, although I might have.  I wrote funny poetry later on, things that were intended to rouse laughter, including a self-published collection of silly rhymes based on our fifth grade study of A Child’s Garden of Verses.  The collection was called, “A Birdseye View of Vegetables.”

A mushroom is really a kind of a fungus

A fact you know doubt have been told,

However, I’ve found there are many among us

Who think it’s a kind of a mold.

But I’m glad they are called what they are

Because of a dish that some people make,

For it’s nicer to say, “On your meat you have mushroom sauce,”

Than, “Hey, you have mold on your steak!”

There were some about broccoli, peas, and one about asparagus that was already self-censored because I wanted to write about how it made your pee smell, but I didn’t dare.

            I wrote a few short stories between marriages (there were three), and

I began writing again in earnest during my third husband’s premature and drawn-out death by cancer.  During that hellish time, I wrote what would later be referred to as a blog, a series of nightly email messages to a list of dozens who forwarded it around the world.  For a while I filled journal after journal with observations that reek of grief, self-pity, and booze.  I have gone through periodic dry spells when I am either struck wordless by depression or else too undisciplined to get to work on time, let alone something as demanding as writing.

            These last several weeks, however, as I begin to comprehend that I’m on the last leg of my steeplechase, and as I grieve the slow leave-taking of the witty father I love, and as I read the wonderful words of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, I know that it is time for me to write.  It has always been time for me to write.  This time there is a book, and this time people will laugh when I want them to laugh.  My writing will be faithful to all of my perceptions, mundane, triumphant, and tragic, because they are the only truth I know.