Sim Carter: Past Tense Imperfect

So proud to march with my husband & my family in Santa Monica Wow! What an amazing moment in our country’s history. Just got home from the March for Our Lives event in Santa Monica and turned on the TV to see the massive numbers of people who marched in Washington—as many as a million—and millions more who marched around the country and the world. Including my sister in law Susan and her husband Dave, marching in Riverside. Not exactly the liberal bastion Santa Monica is. A question for the politicians: Can you count the votes? I love Eva’s sign “Arms are for Hugging’’ While there was a much larger march planned for downtown Los Angeles we chose to go to the smaller community of Santa Monica because it’s where my brother, sister and I went to high school. No matter where else I live, it’s the city I’ll always consider home.  Thousands marched in Santa Monica We met my brother Russ & my sister in law Eva at their place—they’re lucky enough to still live in ...

The V&A Chandelier by Dale Chihuly at the Victoria & Albert Museum* Watching the new season of Victoria , the young queen played the beautiful Jenna Coleman and Prince Albert by the equally gorgeous Tom Hughes, I find myself wondering how it all ends. How does this tender young queen, seeking out her own voice, come to spend so much of her life in widow’s black? When does Jenna Coleman’s lovely Queen Victoria turn into Judi Dench’s aging powerhouse? Albert lives until 1861, at which point he dies at the age of 42, of what was probably stomach cancer. Victoria, who herself said she ‘moved not a finger, didn’t put on a gown or bonnet if he didn’t approve it,’ was devastated.  According to HistoryInAnHour.com the whole of England went into mourning, sharing the queen’s pain in an outpouring of grief that wouldn’t be seen again until the death of Princess Diana 136 years later. “The Blue Room in which Prince Albert died remained unaltered for the rest of Victori...

I submitted my first piece of writing when I was seventeen, a story about my first job, working at the employee cafeteria at General Telephone where my mother was a dispatcher. Rolling the 20# white bond backed by a sheet of thin blue carbon paper into my Smith Corona, I typed it out slowly, carefully, on a piece of erasable paper—and mailed it off to Cosmopolitan along with a cover letter. Not just to any editor at Cosmo, by the way, I sent it directly to Helen Gurley Brown.  The piece itself, meant to be comical, was full of clumsy attempts at self-effacing humor.  I strived for a similar tone in the cover letter I addressed to Brown, completely clueless that the high powered editor in chief wasn’t the one reading unsolicited manuscripts. After I signed off I added the following PS. I could have said I was Joyce Carol Oates. What I thought that would accomplish I can’t imagine. That an unsatisfactory submission would get published because of a lame joke?  No surp...

My dad, on the right.   I woke up this morning thinking about my father. He died 26 years ago today, and since it’s British Isles Friday I thought I’d share a few pix of my very British old man. I also have a question about the old family photo above. I believe it was taken sometime in the 1950’s when we lived in Tripoli, Libya. There is another photograph somewhere of the larger group at what appears to be some sort of professional gathering or meeting, a handful of men and one woman sitting on chairs at either side. My father, ex-British Intelligence, fluent in Arabic, was working for the American government at the  AFEX, the Army & Air Force exchange store at Wheelus Air Force base in Tripoli  at the time. I don’t know the exact nature of his work but while he was investigating some unusually large financial losses he learned that an American he became close friends with turned out to be  embezzling funds. That must have been one helluva an awkward frien...