Perspective

As a couple of commenters pointed out yesterday, we do tend to change our perspective over the years, and it seems that we’re better able to see things through other people’s eyes.

I think we’re also able to see ourselves in a new light, if we’re willing. It’s so easy to get caught up in mulling over the past and feeling regret, sometimes even painful helplessness over things that we’ve said or done. I’m not one to say “Oh, just forget the past…there’s nothing you can do about it anyway.” I think taking a thoughtful look at our past can actually help us get free of those nagging regrets.

I’ve found that writing this book is helping me to feel more compassionate toward myself and other people, both in my past and my present. When you write something down you have to deal with it. There it is on the computer screen and now you have the chance to see it from several different angles. I’ve even been able to forgive a few folks who “done me wrong” by writing my story, and myself along with them.

Me and Ma

My mother, whom I called “Ma,” and I were often at odds with each other. Funny how you get a different perspective on these things many years later.

(A slightly altered passage from the book)

A few weeks before my eighth birthday, Ma, Bertie and I were walking through McCrory’s Five and Ten, and I saw a cute big boy doll sitting on a counter. As we walked by I said, “Oooh, what a cute doll!” I was just running off at the mouth, as I often did when we went to stores together. When my birthday arrived, I was amazed and chagrined that Ma had bought the boy doll for me. I hadn’t really wanted him, and I felt cheated because she had never asked me what I actually wanted. I felt like she was just clutching at straws to figure out what to buy me, because she really didn’t know me or care about what I might really want. I named him Robby, but soon tired of playing with him. One day I tore his clothes off and carelessly threw him on my bed. Later on Ma came into my room and saw him lying there in the nude, legs akimbo.

“Look at the way you treat that nice doll I gave you!” she yelled. “Don’t let me catch you leaving him like that ever again!”

After that I put Robby away in the closet and didn’t play with him any more. Many years later, recalling the Robby fiasco, I realized that Ma had really thought I wanted him, and she had filed that thought away in her memory, making a special trip back to McCrory’s to buy him just for me, ungrateful little wretch that I was.

A journalist? Me?

I’ve been a musician for as long as I can remember. I started playing jazz piano professionally at age 15. In my book I describe my “rite of passage” when I joined the Danbury, Connecticut Musicians’ Union in 1957, as probably their youngest member ever, and certainly their youngest female member. I played in different kinds of groups, usually trios or quartets, sometimes solo, for many years until I created my 10-piece band, Brass Tacks, in 1985.

So how did I end up working as a journalist for twelve years? I had never taken a journalism course, and I hadn’t even graduated from college. This was back in the middle 70s, and I was living in Boston. I had separated from my husband and was trying to raise two daughters on my own. I’d already gotten a few jobs at the Christian Science Center, as an office worker, a security guard and a gardener, and I was in the habit of going to their personnel department whenever I needed work.

Well, one fine day I trekked over there, asked them what they had, and they offered me a job as a copy kid in The Christian Science Monitor newsroom. Even though I was only in my thirties, I was probably the oldest copy kid they’d ever had. I took the job and enjoyed it…I liked the atmosphere of the newsroom with all the bustling, noise and deadlines, and one day it occurred to me that I could write something for the paper, maybe a record review. With some trepidation I approached the Arts and Entertainment editor, and to my surprise he said, “Sure, go ahead,” but with no guarantee that it would be published. Well, it was published, and then I wrote another, and another, and another…and that led to writing an article and another, and another…and before I knew it, I was the popular music critic for The Christian Science Monitor.

How I met Marilyn Monroe

(Abridged excerpt from the book)

When I was fifteen years old I got a wonderful job working for the poet and anthologist Louis Untermeyer and his wife Bryna Ivens, who was fiction editor for Seventeen Magazine. Louis and Bryna lived within walking distance of our house. They needed someone mostly to help out with the frequent dinner parties they held at their home, a small, unpretentious blue house located close to the edge of a country road.

Bryna, a diminutive, feisty woman undaunted by her husband’s height, bulk and vociferous ways, did all of the cooking herself, and I helped her. She taught me how to make delicious dark chocolate cake with raspberry filling and a scrumptious pie made from pitted peach halves filled with butter and sugar, snuggled into a cookie dough crust. She was meticulous and careful about everything, and I tried to follow her instructions and not make a mess of things.

Louis and Bryna let me play the piano at a couple of their parties, and even though the two of them intimidated me, I felt at home on the piano bench and did just fine. One night they had a party and told me that there was going to be a surprise guest. I begged Bryna to tell me who it was, but she just smiled and said I’d find out soon enough. I guess I must have been nervous trying to imagine who the mystery guest could be, because I spilled a whole pot of coffee on the kitchen floor. I was on my hands and knees wiping it up, when Bryna came into the kitchen and said, “Amy, I’d like you to meet Marilyn Monroe.”

Oh, come on! What?! I thought Bryna was kidding until I looked up. Somehow I managed to compose myself, crawl out from under the table and extend my hand to one of the loveliest creatures I’d ever seen. Marilyn seemed taller and slimmer than in the movies, and she was shy and sweet-mannered. She had come to dinner with Arthur Miller, who was her husband at the time, and his two children, Jane and Robert. I was thrilled beyond words, even though she seemed kind of sad and ill-at-ease, sitting on the sofa by herself most of the evening and saying practically nothing. I wished I could grab her by the hand, take her off to some quiet place and pick her brains to find out what she was really like. That wasn’t to be, of course, but I comforted myself with the thought that I could soon go home and tell Ma and Bertie that I’d met Marilyn Monroe.

Disclaimer…and my sister

Not everything in my book is historically accurate. It’s impossible to remember details of things that happened long ago, as we all know. My sister Bertie, who had a wonderful memory, helped me fill in a lot of blanks, but sometimes her memory of something that had happened differed from mine. Not to mention the fact that our take on a certain situation, incident or person might be quite different from someone else’s, because our ways of looking at the world are subjective and colored by our own individuality and sense of things. So the story that emerges, although based entirely on fact, is my own view of things, what I alone see when I look into the mirror of my soul.

The two photos here are of Bertie at age 6 and with her dog Teddy, just a few months before she died in 2010. She was a writer, editor and linguist who spoke fluent French and taught ESL classes. I was happy and grateful to have her help with the book.

Putting words in their mouths…

Here’s a little introductory bit from the book, just to give you an idea of where I’m coming from…

I was born two days before the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 5, 1941, in New York city, while my Pop has having a bout of the delirium tremens. They named me Amy (after a crabby old aunt on my mother’s side) Hildreth (a family surname). I was an unexpected child, a second daughter, and that, along with Pop’s condition at the time, may explain why there were so few baby pictures of me in the family album. There were tons of photos of my sister Roberta, whom we called Bertie, who had been born nearly two years earlier, before Pop’s drinking got totally out of control.

When I started the book, I thought it would be better to make it an “autobiographical novel” rather than just a straight memoir. I wanted to include dialog, so that the reader wouldn’t have to confront page after page of straight text.

To do this, I had to try to remember conversations, sometimes from a long time ago, which is, of course, next to impossible! Consequently, I had to put words in the mouths of some of my characters, and I apologize to anyone  I may have misquoted (not that they would remember the conversation, either)!

Why the blog?

In reply to friends who have asked, yes, I am writing an actual book (well, an e-book, to be more exact) and not just blogging here about my life. The blog is to let people know about the book, and also to spur me along as I wrestle with the last couple of chapters.

I’ll post a few samples here from time to time, and probably some photos, too, so stay tuned!

Getting down to brass tacks…finally

Over 15 years ago a friend said to me, “You really should write your autobiography…you really should!” Finally, after all this time, I’m writing it. Why was my friend so emphatic? Well, I’d told him quite a bit about my adventures and misadventures over the years, and he thought it would make an interesting story…
I said, “You mean a memoir? You know, like a ‘vanity book’?” And he said, “No, no, not at all…your story is interesting enough so that lots of people would enjoy it, I’m sure.” So here I am, with 118,258 words written and the end not in sight…quite yet.