Me, in a more hopeful 2024
Hello.
We’ll start here . . .
When I was seven years old, I was reading probably my 15th book that week, in my cozy bed in my idyllic childhood home. I taught myself to read at age four, and never looked back. I don’t remember what I was reading that day (or night, way past bedtime, sorry mom), but I had a sudden vision.
It was as real as day, and when I saw it, I knew it was what I wanted more than anything in the world, I pictured myself on a stage of sorts, in what looked like a television set of a talk show. It was the early 1970s so it certainly could have been the Merv Griffin Show. The colors were very harvest gold-ish and there was a distinct mid-mod feel to it all.
I was in one of those guest chairs, and Merv or whomever I had manifested was behind the desk. And he was interviewing me about my best-selling book. I, of course, lived in New York and was stylish and impossibly cool. The conversation was never fleshed out and there’s no ending to this fantasy, but the thing I knew for sure was this was no fantasy. This was and is who I am and who I was always supposed to be.
So let’s get to it, shall we?
It’s 2025 and I’m 57 years old. I’ve got 6 mostly grown kids, a pretty terrific husband, and two bothersome cats. I’m still working in my career, but upon my glorious retirement from the corporate (cooperatives are hardly corporate, but you get the idea) world, I shall embark full time on the career that will lead me, like Jo March, to something heroic, astonishing, and wonderful.
My pen (keyboard) hasn’t been silent these 50 years. In fact, they rarely stop. When I was younger, I read voraciously and consumed plenty of television and movies. As a very young teen, I fell madly in love with Tom Selleck, and proceeded to write myself into several episodes of “Magnum P.I.” where I was sometimes the heroine and sometimes the damsel in distress, but always the leading lady.
During those growing up years, I filled dozens of spiral notebooks with nonsense and stories and dreams of boys that would never like me, and words of angst against my mother, and all my hopes and dreams of being a writer and moving the hell away from home and straight to New York City. I excelled in English and writing classes in school, and majored in English Literature in college. My dad, the brilliant civil engineer, said “you’re going to college to read books?” And I replied, “yep, and then I’ll write about the books I read.” My parents made it clear that a university degree was non-optional, and thankfully they let me choose my major. At least my brother was sensible enough to follow in Hank’s footsteps
When I ditched my short career to stay home and produce six children. I taught them from the books I loved, homeschooled for 18 years, and kept a little flame of freelance writing on the side. Foot in the door, as Hank would say.
And here we are, still after that dream. Where are those notebooks, you might ask? Well, that’s a story for another day.