Cindy on September 22nd, 2009
A book signing event and readings from Writing Home”
Long before recorded history, families gathered around the fire to share tales of their ancestors, achievements, life lessons, and dreams. Please join me for coffee and an informal reading of a few favorite stories from my essay collection, Writing Home. This special event is sponsored by Wayne State University Press and Java Hutt Coffee House. Following the reading, we’ll have a discussion on how you can begin to record and share your own family stories and memories.
When: September 24, 2009, 6:30 – 8:00 P.M.
Where: Java Hutt Coffee House, 207 S. Old Woodward, Birmingham, MI 48009
Phone: (248) 642-7569
Admission: Free. Please bring extra cash if you’d like to purchase a signed copy of Writing Home for yourself or a gift.
Cindy on September 18th, 2009
There’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.” — Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Somebody once said that high school is “the mouse race that prepares you for the rat race,” and I suppose there’s a glimmer of truth in that. Like a pair of cruel shoes, my high school days were among the most painful in my life.
I attended a public high school in the early 1970s. In those days, especially if you lived in a small Midwestern town, conformity was key. So there I was, a flat-chested drama club nerd and closet poet in a school where accomplished jocks and curvy cheerleaders ruled. Social life typically revolved around Friday night football or basketball games — but I had to fake any interest in sports. Trying to fit in, I tried out for the drill team but was chosen as an alternate, which meant I had to make all the practices and learn the routines, but I didn’t get to perform at the games unless another member was ill.
Come to think of it, I felt like an imposter throughout most of high school.
My real definition of “teamwork” was shopping for props and costumes for the school plays. And I adored the drama teacher. Not surprisingly, a lot of kids snickered behind his back, secretly questioning his sexual orientation. I still credit him and my humanities teacher for making high school bearable and interesting.
But the English teacher took a serious dislike to me. Of course, it didn’t help that I sat with chatty classmates and talked too much in literature class. Regardless, this teacher doubted my budding writing skills, and wrongly accused me of plagiarizing a term paper on the subject of medieval chivalry — a subject I loved and read about voraciously. She nearly flunked me out of senior English, which pulled my GPA down a peg or two. Not to mention my pride.
In other words, in high school I received little encouragement for the things I truly loved and excelled in. To their credit, my parents had tried early on to send me to a private school that specialized in the arts. I had been courted and accepted by the arts school, but chickened out at the last minute.
Before I go on, I need to insert here that I met some of my very best friends in junior high and high school. I also began dating Doug, the sweet guy who’d later become my husband (and still is), in my sophomore year. You’d think I would consider those years The Best Ever. But they were not.
Twenty years after graduation, I remained so embittered by my high school experience that I wrote a downer of an essay for the Detroit Free Press Sunday Magazine. The essay chronicled the awful time I had at the high school reunion Doug and I attended in 1992. Unfortunately, the reunion took place a mere three weeks after the sudden death of my beloved father, and I was in no mood to party with anyone.
Reading between the lines now, I realize that the Free Press essay (which is reprinted in my book, Writing Home) really wasn’t about the 20-year reunion. Though I wrote about feeling awkward in a roomful of grown-up classmates, my unease had little to do with them — and everything to do with repressed grief and the ghosts of my own insecurities. More than anything, I think I was trying to explain how sorry I felt for the creative girl inside me who had struggled to emerge in high school.
So it might come as a surprise when I tell you that lately I’ve been reconnecting with former schoolmates on Facebook — and genuinely enjoying it.
It all began last year when I found Robert, the free-spirited guy who played opposite my lead in the all-school play in 1971. My favorite memory of Robert is the time he and I staged a protest after one of our dress rehearsals got canceled on short notice; we’d been told to move our entourage elsewhere, since the school auditorium was needed for an athletic event. Enraged, Robert and I led a small march (I think there were four of us) to the local school board, ranting all the way about how sick we were of playing second fiddle to the basketball team. On Facebook, I was thrilled and proud to discover that Robert had moved to Chicago, where he became an award-winning journalist and author with several fine books to his credit.
Of course, once you crack open a few pages on Facebook, it’s hard to stop.
Before long, I started hearing from other schoolmates. Earlier this summer, Colleen contacted me to ask why I had stopped writing my column in the local newspaper. I was flattered to learn she’d been reading it for years. When she “friended” me on Facebook, Colleen said she wondered if I would remember her. As she explained it, she’d been “a rebel” in high school, and we didn’t hang with the same crowd. But I did remember. And even though I was a drama nerd, I’d always secretly admired the “rebels.” Unlike the jocks, who were too frigging cool to dress up in costumes, some of the rebels had the guts to try out for the school plays.
From beauty queens to band nerds, my classmates are a fascinating bunch now, and I’m proud of them. Their profiles and family photos reveal that they’ve crafted rich and interesting lives over the past 37 years. One is a psychotherapist; another is a fitness instructor; several work in education, finance, and medicine. Some even share my political opinions, and it’s been fun airing our views in private messages. Others, having been through their own share of medical crises, are at the ready to help with mine. Last week, when I mentioned in my Facebook status that I was struggling to find a neurologist for my mother, several friends sent recommendations — complete with addresses and phone numbers.
All said and done, midlife is a lot more fun than adolescence. It makes us kinder to each other. It sharpens our perspective and thickens our skin — wrinkles and sags be damned.
Like my classmates on Facebook, I’ve endured several crises and turning points, and these have shaped the woman I am. I’ve given birth to an amazing son, come to terms with the loss of my father, and, more recently, watched my only uncle die a slow death from pancreatic cancer. I’ve survived two hip replacement surgeries and learned to walk again. I’ve driven my elderly mother to emergency rooms, and watched my son graduate from college. I’ve happily celebrated nearly 30 years of a nurturing marriage.
But it’s been years since I’ve cared enough to keep score. Grades, trophies, contests, degrees, salaries, and other so-called measures of achievement or popularity no longer mean much to me. Best of all, I’ve finally made peace with my inner drama queen, who now finds expression through writing and the visual arts. I give her free reign now. – Cindy La Ferle
Painting at top: “The Lady of Shalott,” by John William Waterhouse; The Tate Gallery
Cindy on September 15th, 2009
“The foliage has been losing its freshness through the month of August, and here and there a yellow leaf shows itself like the first gray hair amidst the locks of a beauty who has seen one season too many.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes
Returning from a family visit in Chicago, I realized this morning that I’ve fallen way behind in my blogging. Since early September, I haven’t had much time to visit favorite blogs — nor have I had a spare minute to edit a new post I wrote about “rediscovering” high school classmates on Facebook. While I was away, my mother’s dentist called to ask if I noticed that my mother is showing additional signs of dementia — so dealing with that prickly issue remains a priority. Coincidentally, a column I wrote about caring for my mom during another health crisis appears in the current issue of Michigan Women’s Forum. Meanwhile, I’m preparing for some local writing events that start up next week. The blogging will have to wait while real life unfolds. Please don’t think I’ve forgotten you … I’ll be back soon! – CL
Cindy on September 7th, 2009
Grace must find expression in life; otherwise it is not grace.” — Karl Barth
On vacation in northern Michigan two years ago, I visited a secondhand bookstore and stumbled on a copy of Home Edition, a collection of “Experience” columns by Nancy Brown (a pseudonym for Anne Louise Brown). One of the first advice columnists in the United States, Brown launched her column in The Detroit News in 1919 and kept at it until 1942.
Unlike most advice columnists of the era, Brown wrote “Experience” from the seasoned perspective of middle age, counseling her readers on everything from financial worries to marital woes. Her responses were always compassionate — and considerably longer than the bite-sized paragraphs spooned out in newspaper columns today.
Having been a columnist several times in my own writing life, I’ve always taken a special interest in the work of other columnists, past and present.
Until recently, though, my yellowed copy of Brown’s Home Edition simply occupied space on my bookshelf, a quaint reminder of how column writing has changed over the decades.
Then, one morning last week, I was somehow drawn to the shelf where I’d placed Brown’s book. At that very moment, I was thinking about a recent talk radio program on our country’s financial crisis. The show’s host had focused on the emotional (and spiritual) aspects of losing a job, asking her unemployed callers to share how they’ve been forced to redefine the meaning of success. Their answers were humbling — and inspiring.
So, grabbing Home Edition from the shelf, I felt my heart race when the book fell open to a letter from a desperate middle-aged man who identified himself as “Crowding Fifty.”
Writing in 1938, Crowding Fifty told Nancy Brown that he was once employed by “a large Detroit outfit” that had been forced to liquidate during the Great Depression. Before the bottom fell out, he said, he had enjoyed a life of relative prosperity that included Saturday night dances and a golf club membership. (He added that he and his family had lived within their means — albeit comfortably.)
When “the large Detroit outfit” went under, Crowding Fifty scraped together his remaining resources and tried to start his own small business. But despite his hard work and determination, that business failed, too. He’d nearly hit rock bottom. Describing his own financial crisis, Crowding Fifty wrote: “The present so-called recession has raised havoc with my plans….By the time my insurance premiums are paid, my car expense of $25 monthly and other incidental items are cared for, there is just about enough for food and a few clothes.”
Worst of all, Crowding Fifty’s wife began shaming him in front of their kids — and soon withdrew her emotional support. His whole family, as he put it, “belittled” him.
Crowding Fifty went on to say: “It is beginning to look to me that perhaps I am a washout and a detriment to my family and, looking at it from a bystander’s viewpoint, that to avoid all future scenes and arguments and to promote content to my family, it will be the proper procedure to quietly arrange to cease living — to have my wife collect that $20,000 insurance before it is lost, too.”
While the letter was written more than 70 years ago — and its style seems formal or wooden now — the pain it expressed is still raw on the page. I fought a wave of tears while reading it. It was, if not an official suicide note, a plea to the columnist to convince him that his life still mattered; that there was some way out of the private hell that had swallowed him.
In 13 paragraphs, Brown gave Crowding Fifty a heartfelt answer, which contained some practical solutions as well as words of encouragement and comfort.
“Take a firm hold of yourself,” Brown wrote. “Square your shoulders. And tell yourself that you — are — going — to — make — good — again — and you will. I know it.” Concluding her response, Brown asked Crowding Fifty if he would please send another letter — “ten days from now” — telling her that he had decided to start over instead of taking “the desperate step that would bring nothing but unhappiness to those who love you best.”
For several days now, I’ve been wondering if he ever wrote back.
– Cindy La Ferle
– The photo of Nancy Brown working in her office is from The Detroit News archives –
