Sim Carter: Past Tense Imperfect

On any other Sunday that summer of 1992, on location up in Oregon for the filming of Free Willy, I ’ d be digging shamelessly into a steaming stack of blueberry hotcakes, purple compote oozing out all over the place. The Pig’n P ancake in Astoria was famous for them, and I usually couldn ’ t wait to wade in. I didn ’ t need—and didn ’ t want—the calorie breakdown  to know  the pancakes were pound packers, all buttery and crazy delicious, the kind of food I would  normally  eschew in favor of leaner fare like two eggs scrambled, cottage cheese on the side, one piece of rye toast.  The rules are different when you ’ re on location. When you ’ re on location, stressed to the max working as production coordinator on a big Warner Bros. movie like Free Willy, you ( me ) reward yourself ( myself! ) with a guilt-free weekend treat. My fiancé and I had  walked the half mile from the Red Lion Inn where the film crew was housed and we planned on walking ...

I’m taking a virtual walking tour ‘above ground’ on the London Underground. Using  my Tube guide and my fitbit® device, my goal is to walk at least 10,000 steps a day roughly following along the Underground route, reporting back here on Fridays with my findings. This is Day 11. I feel like one of those quasi-detective types in a old-fashioned book. On the cover there’s a group of three people—two men and a woman is the usual mix—all leaning over an oak table covered with historical documents. A lamp casts its glow on a map, a few old photos, identity papers. A mystery is afoot! After getting that initial email from my cousin Sean last week —up to now, a virtual stranger—suddenly I ’ m diving into my family ’ s British history, pulling old photos and clippings out of worn manilla envelopes. Trying to piece the past together. Last week I learned that my grandfather, who I was vaguely aware had served in World War I, was wounded three times in the Great War. At Ypres, Flers...

Halloween 1995, Batman and me My history is littered with Halloween fails. Before I became a mother the question of what I was going to be for Halloween terrified me. 1958:  Halloween on a blazing hot afternoon in Tripoli, Libya. Age 5 All the military brats from Wheelus Air Force base were going to a Halloween party  in an airplane hangar just outside Tripoli.  Lots of civilian kids—mostly Brits and Yanks—whose parents worked on the base in various capacities were invited which meant my brother and I got to go too.  Our dad, who spoke Arabic fluently and had been with British Intelligence during the war, had something to do with managing the PX on the base. My brother went dressed as a hobo, his cheeks smeared grey by my mother with a piece of burnt cork, while his friend, the older boy who lived next door, dressed up as a woman—a pillow stuck down his sweater shaped into clownish balloon-sized breasts and big red sticky lips. I went as Minnie Mouse i...

We didn't celebrate the Fourth of July when I was a kid growing up in Canada in the Sixties. But that doesn't mean we didn't have fireworks. And the Sparklers' Red Glare July 1st and in Niagara Falls we were celebrating Dominion Day just a few days before the Americans right across the river celebrated their independence. As a kid I didn't separate the two concepts. Fireworks were fireworks, explosive charges that burst into beautiful fiery lights, zapping our sleepy summer skies with noise and color and a dash of danger. The nuance that the Americans were celebrating their freedom while we were celebrating the 1867 union of the provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Canada into one country, the Dominion of Canada, under the governance of British rule was lost on me. It was 1963; the maple leaf flag was yet to be, the Union Jack still waved. God Save the Queen! Like the American kids across the river, all we cared about were the burgers being g...

I dug this one up out of my archives, a two time nominee for a Throwback Thursday. First, because it's about my high school graduation which seems right for the times. Second, because it's a piece I was able to place in the Daily Breeze, a Pulitzer Prize-winning local newspaper, in their 15 Minutes column. So called because everyone—even the general public, even introverted writers with social anxiety—could have their 15 minutes of fame if the editor liked their submission. Translation: I didn't get paid but I got to put another publishing credit in my file drawer.   My baby boy was two, my mother watched over him while I drove to the newspaper office to have my picture taken. He's twenty six now, and she passed away six years ago. Here's this week's Throwback Thursday bit of memoir, packed with reminders of personal pain for yours truly.  Class of '71 We were the class of '71 and believed that graduation day really was the threshold. Bold new ...

Pretty French Postcards My trip to France with Mindy in '89 was very different from my visit with my sister Nancy, sixteen years earlier, when I was twenty and she was just sixteen. When Mindy and I stayed in Paris, we stayed in a newish hôtel in the business district, an area called la Defense. Modern, comfortable, the kind of place that catered to business travelers. We could have been anywhere. Paris, France. Paris, Texas. New York City. What the hôtel lacked in character it made up for in amenities. A real front desk. A fax machine. A bar off the lobby. A bidet. The place that Nancy and I stayed at in the Pigalle had a fading painted number on the crumbling wall outside, a round black bell you pushed so the cranky old concierge, a French woman straight out of a novel, could open up and begrudgingly show you to your room, eyeing you suspiciously all the while. We barely knew what fax machines were in 1973 but if we had, our little no-name hôtel wouldn't have h...

Last year author, Mary Catalina Vergara Egan  a new follower over at Chapter1-Take1 invited me to join in something called the A to Z Challenge.  Here’s how last year’s challenge began for me: Today's letter is A and the whole alphabet theme of the challenge brought me back to my days as a single working woman, subbing in elementary school classrooms in the latter half of the 1980s. Those days came to a screeching halt when the teachers went on strike in May of 1989. A is for Apple Me? A teacher? I couldn't believe that all it took to go from Universal Studios tour guide to card-carrying substitute teacher was a bachelor's degree and a passing grade in the C-Best, California's emergency credential exam. I was pretty damn sure that you had to be a whole lot more qualified, a whole lot smarter than I was for the Los Angeles Unified School District to put you in charge of a classroom full of elementary school kids. But I was wrong. There I was, not one minute of ...

Women were burning their bras and sticking up posters proclaiming "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." Billy Jean King and Bobby Riggs were fighting it out on the tennis court in the Battle of the Sexes at the same time that Marabel Morgan was advising the females of the species  to greet their husbands at the door with a cocktail in hand, clad in nothing but Saran Wrap. As a young woman of twenty in 1973, working my way through college, it wasn't always easy to know where on the line between those polar opposites to plant one's flag. While I planned to work after graduation—some vaguely formed notion of a writerly job, in publishing perhaps or advertising, I thought, flipping through my glossy copy of Mademoiselle on my break, devouring the ads for Wind Song with as much fervor as I did the magazine's short stories—I assumed at some point I'd fall in love and marry, raise a family. It was what women did. Not to marry wouldn't be a...