Sim Carter: Past Tense Imperfect

My daily three-mile walk in the morning keeps me in passable shape, clears my head, and gets me going. I start each day, after coffee but before breakfast and writing by heading out to the park where I walk in circles. As a writer, I'm seeking inspiration for my novel, working out plotholes. As a human being, I sometimes need to blow off steam. The Jacarandas shading the pea gravel pathway are a beautiful distraction, stunning in springtime when they bloom in deep blue purples, and mandatory in the summer when Los Angeles heats up early. Today as I near the patio sitting on the perimeter of the park, I see the gardeners have hosed down the cement. The entire surface is still wet and puddled. Slick. Without my permission, my heart starts pounding, bringing me crashing to a halt. Wimp, I think. That's in the past. Shake it off. I can't. I’m afraid. I'm fifteen years old again, walking along a sandy road near the beach in San Juan with my best friend. We're both

Can you find George Clooney standing to the right of Stacy Kiebler in their last trip to the Oscars together? What are you doing Sunday night? Please don't say live-tweeting the Oscars! I know we live tweet everything, share our every thought with the world but I won't be doing that.  I'm not putting it down— I’ve tried in the past and it was an epic fail—I just don't have the capacity to watch and tweet. Even though I reserve the right to insist that as a woman, YES! I can do two things at once, I can multi-task— and bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan, I am woman, W-O-M-A-N  but  maybe it's time to leave the live-tweeting to you crazy kids under 30. Not to be a whiner but arthritic hands don't tend to fly across the tiny telephone screen with any kind of accuracy . I'm always missing the best things—the JLaw  stairway fall, Alec Baldwin bungling Idina Menzel's  name—as I'm stuck staring at my phone, furiously trying to correct auto-co

# 9.1    Cherry Grove Road, Niagara Falls, Canada We hopped about quite a bit once we ’ d arrived in Canada from England via Turkey and Libya. We moved from Montreal to Toronto to Niagara Falls where we lived in a big old two-story house with a grassy lawn, surrounded by ancient maple trees.  Until my parents bought a house in Cherrywood Acres, a new development on the outskirts of town.  This is # 9.1 of the  “ On the Street  Where I Lived ”  stories. It ’ s a close up view of one day in particular.   Snow Day It was only a few miles from our gloomy old house on Ryerson Crescent to our family ’ s new split level across town in Cherrywood Acres but it could just as easily have been light years away. It was a whole different world out there in the barely built development where the cherry orchards used to be, everything bright and shiny and newer than new.  We moved to the new neighborhood in the middle of fifth grade, in the middle of winter. I hated Niagara Fal

It was Martin Luther King Day in LA, January 17th, 1994. It was a Monday.  We’d moved back to LA with our not-quite-one-year-old son after a year of living in Redondo Beach, in an apartment just across the street from the Pacific. It’s where our son was  born and I spent my days taking him on long, quiet walks along the Esplanade that bordered the oceanfront. During the week, the sand and the sea were beige and blue stripes that stretched forever with only the seagulls, and a stray beach goer here and there, breaking the pattern. Riviera Village, a few blocks inland was full of sleepy stores, hushed boutiques just out of my price range, and cafes where I had no one to join me for a cup of latte.  In the early days right after my son’s birth, my friends found their way down to Redondo to pay their obligatory baby visits. After that it was mostly just the baby and me, and often my mother who  was in the habit of visiting a couple of times a week. My father had died the year before

Diamond Girl by Sim Carter Meg wouldn’t stop calling so I finally stopped trying to fend her off and muffling my impatience, told her to come on in and I’d take a look at her book. Her portfolio. She said she just got back from Milan and that she’d shot all this stuff for Italian Vogue she wanted to show me. Well, not me, necessarily. She wanted to show her stuff to whoever was doing the hiring of freelance photographers at the company. I wasn’t sure how she even got put through to me as I wasn’t officially the person doing that. All I was doing was sitting in for my boss, technically I was ‘acting creative director’ while the real Creative Director, capital letters on her business card, was in New York working with the advertising agency on a long-term strategy to keep the century-old cosmetic company relevant in the current market. I could have just told her no. I should have. I knew the look of magazines like Italian Vogue, languid-faced metrosexual men pouting like they wanted to s