Sim Carter: Past Tense Imperfect

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 ...

Throwing it back to the Summer of 1970 We were living on Tenth Street in Santa Monica, California when I turned seventeen in 1970,  my friend Trixie  was visiting from Canada, and boys were on our minds. It's #12 of the  On the Street Where I Live stories.  I was a 17 year old high school senior, he was a 23 year old Vietnam Vet. Delaney & Bonnie (and Friends) Jailbait We were sitting on the sand watching the water when they walked by the first time; three long-haired guys who could just as easily be rockers, roadies or bad ass bikers, smiling up at us from the shoreline. The one in the middle - I'd already decided he was mine -  looked like Cat Stevens or the guy from Delaney and Bonnie or really, any of those musicians who had a beard, mustache and dark wavy hair skimming their shoulders. From behind my sunglasses I followed his faded green baggies as they disappeared in the shadows under the pier. Just before they faded to black completely...

Originally posted January, 2015. Watching Downton Abbey, I find myself weeping, homesick for a country I barely lived in. I was born in London at the end of May, 1953 in a scene right out of Call the Midwife. Princess Elizabeth was officially crowned Queen on June 2nd and my parents, who had been hoping my birth would come a few days later — thereby entitling them to a year's worth of free nappies— named me Simone Elizabeth in her honor. But we left England when I was three. In my 60's now, I haven't been 'home' to England in 25 years; with both my British parents dead, I know some of my tears are for them. I feel bereft, my British heritage vanished with the passing of my parents and the few aunts and uncles I ever knew. Watching top British actors like Benedict Cumberbatch, Helen Mirren, and Eddie Redmayne in the films I write about on   Chapter1-Take1, my book-to-movie blog makes me ache with longing. All the episodes of Downton Abbey, Broadchurch, Las...

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...

Living in Niagara Falls in the 1960 ’ s, my parents cooled their itchy feet long enough to buy a house. Here ’s a piece I dug up out of the cellar about those years.  Of Brasso and Brownies It’s daunting to move into a new house and make it yours. A never before lived in house seems more than new as it stands before you, untouched, immaculate, strangely virginal. The difference between new and brand new can be an almost empty hollow feeling. No ghosts live within those walls. No child’s smudged fingerprints have been wiped away. I was ten years old when we moved into our new house in Niagara Falls. We moved in the spring of 1963, the season of change in what would turn out to be a decade of change. In a house without history it fell to us to write the first page. Real the rest here.     

I fell down the stairs when I was two or three years old and somewhere along the line I got the idea that my brother was the culprit, that he shoved me down the steps from the landing. Was I standing at the top of the stairs, tottering around, out of my mother's sight? I have no idea.  I have no memory of the fall at all, the landing I create in my imagination is dark oak or sometimes it's simply depression-era brown paint on cheap floor boards, a thin and faded floral carpet tacked down over it.  That's how memory works, a vague haze that we color in with details from other times and places; most of the landings I've seen have been the ones in old movies.   None of it can actually be true, certainly not that my brother, the naughty little devil— one of the epithets my mother would call him — did it. What is true—according to my mother—is that my grandmother had to push my loosened teeth back into place. Russell would have been no more than five or six at th...

She was a blonde back then, and young, very young. Now here she is, thirty years later, her picture on a bus bench, advertising her appearance in the Los Angeles run of a Broadway play. "I went to acting class with her" I tell my husband as we wander down Third Street, thinking about where to get lunch. "Betty Buckley?"  "The other one. Rachel York. I remember the day she came to class. 18, 19. Really pretty girl. Aaron told her she needed to go to New York" Aaron is Aaron Speiser, my acting teacher for a couple of years in the mid-80's.  These days Will Smith graces Speiser's website, Virginia Madsen credits him with turning her career around, while Jennifer Lopez, Gerard Butler, Marion Cotillard and many others have turned to Aaron for coaching.  But back in those 1980's days, Speiser held class in a small black box of a theater, under 50 seats in total, on a ratty corner of Santa Monica Blvd. General Hospital's Jack Wagne...

Early summer means Wimbledon when millions of us—our rackets long outdated, zipped into cases, stuffed into hall closets—tune back into the game of tennis. I used to love tennis, or the idea of it anyway. Tennis whites bringing out the brown on arms and legs, the players and their idiosynchratic grunts and groans. The 70's were the heyday of my tennis ardor, Breakfast at Wimbledon a yearly tradition. The romantic possibilities of Chris Evert and Jimmy Connors. Billy Jean King and Martina Navrátilová. The sex appeal of Ilya Nastase. Arthur Ashe followed by the long-haired Bjorn Borg looking like Peter Frampton. McEnroe and his anger management problems. Those were the days I played it too, poorly, the sweet spot of victory ever elusive.  Eventually I let it go, but still Wimbledon calls every year. The names familiar with year after year of victories, Pete Sampras, Roger Federer, the Williams sisters, Novak Djokovic. This year the name on everyone's lips is the Californi...