Sim Carter: Past Tense Imperfect

This story begins in the bedroom I shared with my sister in the apartment we lived in with our parents  on Twelfth Street in Santa Monica. It's  #13 of my   " On the Street where I Live Stories ."  Yep, I've got many miles to go.    Miss Mouse Goes to Work  I woke to the ringing of a far off phone; I knew without opening my eyes that the light beyond my bedroom window was still grey, the sky and the sidewalk matching shades of slate. Too early to even think about waking up. I burrowed deep into my pillow, desperate to stay in that sweet half-sleep state when the morning can be anything you want it to be. I’d stay in bed until about ten, then, like most days that summer, I planned on hitting the beach with my best friend.  It wasn’t just the ringing phone barging in uninvited from the living room of our apartment or the daylight’s insistence on pushing past the window, my mother’s voice was breaking through too, the musical ton...

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...

I'm heading back to my apartment, carrying my plastic laundry basket, heavy with 2 loads of freshly washed whites. The basket itself is pale green, only because I couldn't find turquoise. I am absolutely crazy about turquoise. So there I am, walking down the path, when I'm startled by a glimpse of turquoise at the top of a neighbor's stairs.  My eyes dial in and I see it's a girl, a girl with bright aqua-colored hair, the very same Katy Perry blue I yearn to dye my own hair . The girl, talking to her boyfriend (my assumption from how close to each other they stand) catches my eye, we smile. "I love your hair," I call out as I pass. "Oh, to be young again, I'd love to have hair that color." At which point she peels away from her boyfriend and heads down the stairs. "You should!" she says. "And I'm not that young, I'm thirty."  "Ha! You're a baby!"  But  I'm glad I haven't called h...

It was the top of the 80’s when Max Factor Cosmetics was still based in Hollywood, and I was working as their in-house copy writer. The job meant coming up with promotional shade theme events, nail polish color names, package copy, brochures for the sales department and the like. While I once wrote a radio ad for Jaclyn Smith  to record, it was mostly the less than glamorous creative work too lowly for our ad agency, Wells Rich Greene, to bother  their big apple heads over .  When my boss was assigned to the company’s London office for six months we were both thrilled. She got to go to London —LONDON!— and while my new business cards said Associate Creative Director, I essentially jumped from in-house copywriter straight into her Creative Director shoes. Suddenly I was in everybody’s Rolodex; the girl to call if you were working the freelance beauty market in L.A. in the very early 80’s. Along with other writers who came out of their introverted shells to offer ...

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...

You may have read this before, just recorded it for the podcast. We all want a life filled with satisfying, meaningful work but most of us go through periods when a job is just a job. " If you must have motivation"  Noel Coward reportedly said " think of your paycheck on Friday." My mum got me my first job . It lasted all of a morning. I scored the second one myself, saw the Help Wanted sign sitting on the counter of the snack bar at the grocery store and walked over and applied. But nothing lasts forever. Job number three came via my dad. He was the chatty type. He told jokes to the tellers at the bank, spoke Arabic to the guys down at the Chevron station and toted up friendly acquaintances wherever he went, the dry cleaners, the post office, the grocery store. As luck would have it, he extended his bonhomie to the ladies at the drug store across the street from our apartment, where Joanie, the manager of the cosmetics department, thought he was ...