Sim Carter: Past Tense Imperfect

Laughing with my baby sister. Izmir, Turkey/ 1957 My sister, in an adjacent dressing room at Ross, is as doubled over with laughter as I am. We're trying on dresses and as we both squeeze into outfits designed with her twenty-something daughters in mind, there's plenty to snort about. She's taught me a word I wish I didn't know. Gunt. The kind of fat that goes from your gut to your—ahem, I can't even say it. But that's Nancy, my younger sister. Brash, a little bit bawdy, she's always been the one that's more out there, unafraid to teeter on the edge of conventional good taste and expressing herself like a modern day Wife of Bath. Unafraid of being herself, while I shrink back, the good girl, wrapped up in gentility. Unless I've had a glass or two of wine, that is. Wine and my sister have always had a way of bringing out the naughty in me. Don't get me wrong; we're not the kind of sisters who talk on the phone every day. We don...

I couldn’t let Alzheimer’s Awareness Month pass without sharing something about my mother. I wrote this Throwback Thursday piece in 2010, my mother, once so full of life and fire, passed away in 2012. “ Hi Enid ”  I say, spotting her sitting by the window, calling my mother by her first name. Sometimes when I call her Mum, she just looks at me, confusion and accusation mixed in her eyes.  “ Why are you calling me Mum? I’m not sure I even know you, ”  she seems to say. Some days are better, she may not know who I am exactly but she ’ s cheerful enough for the company. A change from the caretakers with their pale turquoise uniforms, cheerful little bears or angels dancing across their chests. Today my softly whispered  “ Hi Enid ”  gets nothing but a blank look. I try again. “ Hi Mum. It’s me, Sim. ”   Her expression doesn’t change. Not a blink, not a flicker. Nothing. I notice a book in her lap. Next to Die or something. A mystery. She a...

I sit staring at my toes, aware of the incongruity of the turquoise nail enamel on a woman my age. I’m 62, almost 63. What I really want is turquoise blue hair, Katy Perry style. Sitting there in the examination room, bare legs dangling from the paper covered table, the blue toe nails are my concession to propriety, even if they are in desperate need of a retouch. I'm aging, I can't get away from it. I'm too old for aqua colored toe nails, let alone bright blue hair, and too young not to know it. My doctor doesn't mention my turquoise toes but I can't help but wonder if the shade colors her impression of me. "So what are we seeing you for today?"  She gives me a glancing smile before turning her attention to the computer screen. Annoyed that I have to go through the litany of aches and pains and the "I don't know, it's just kind of a nagging pain, right about there, you know?" thing twice, first with the nurse, and then re...

Are you here for my usual virtual Friday walk Above Ground on the London Underground ? I have a birthday coming up at the end of the month and I find myself in the mood to rant about that instead so I’m skipping the walk this week.  What’s the deal with birthdays anyway? They keep coming whether I want them to or not. And I don’t.  I’m turning sixty three. Despite the fact that my hubby continues to buy me cotton panties from Victoria Secret—the pair I’m wearing as I write this are black with the words Invitation Only  written in silver glitter across my backside—it is definitely not the same backside he married twenty something years ago when I was a mere slip of a girl. If you can call a woman of almost forty a ‘slip of a girl'.  I blame him. For most of the duration of our marriage—24 years in October—along with the Victoria Secret undies, he’s been buying me one pound boxes of See’s bordeaux chocolate for every gift buying holiday there is. Chri...

“Is that Lorena?”  My husband is half-in, half-out the front door, screen bumping at his back. “Lorena?”  “You know, the woman in black. With the boots.” I look over his shoulder and he’s right. It is Lorena, standing on the corner across from our apartment building in the dying light.  From a distance, standing still, she’s a fashion plate in her black Michael Kors trench coat. It’s slim cut and cinched at the waist, hitting her legs just above the knees. She has black knee high boots with chunky heels that she wears year round, spring, summer, winter and fall. Up close her black dyed hair is grey at the roots, her raincoat is streaked with grime. When she walks she totters along like those Chinese women with their bound and tortured feet used to do, inch by painful looking inch. Standing on the corner now, she has her purse open on the sidewalk at her feet. Her head spins from side to side, looking up and down the street. I know her to say hello...

I’m sick to death of writing about myself. I’m sick to death of my writing. It’s one and the same. I can ’ t write fiction. I ’ ve tried. It ’ s just another story about me, supposedly incognito as a brunette instead of a blonde—a bottle blonde, at that.  That ’ s this week ’ s excuse for not carrying on with my story about Derek. But really, do you even know or care who Derek is? Some boyfriend I had when I was twenty? Or was it nineteen? Is there a point? Right now I ’ m feeling like Richard Harris singing McCarthur ’ s Park — MacArthur's Park is melting in the dark All the sweet green icing flowing down Someone left the cake out in the rain I don't think that I can take it 'Cause it took so long to bake it And I'll never have that recipe again Oh, no I  usually relish  disappearing into my girlish headspace, settling  back  into the mushy comfort of memory but I ’ m feeling too old and too cranky to even try. The cosmetics company th...

Governor Jerry  ‘   Moonbeam’  Brown with Linda Ronstadt  From left: Don Henley, Don Felder, Linda Ronstadt, Glenn Frey, Governor Jerry Brown, Randy Meisner, Dan Fogelberg, Joe Walsh, and Jackson Browne circa 1977. When  I read Friday ’ s  news that the California legislature had passed the right to die legislation, I thought maybe  my husband was going to be able to throw the pillow away . We have a deal, you see, if Alzheimer ’s comes to strip me of my brain, and with it the lifetime of memories I’m penning feverishly here in this space, he’s going to off me with a pillow. A nice big fat puffy down pillow. It’s only half in jest; my mother died after living with Alzheimer’s for over a dozen years, each one more and more debilitating, each one leading her down a rabbit hole I have no desire to dive down into. It’s dark in there, and dank. I’d rather die while it’s still light. While I can still look at my son and know his face, say his ...

How sweet it is! The Good Men Project ran my piece Seven Reasons Older Women Love Older Men ! A response to their Seven Reasons Men Love Older Women. When I turned sixty my one thought was, wow, sixty is shitty!   Really! I wished I felt like rocking some sort of 'sixty is the new sexy' tattoo except for me, sixty sucked.  But I've had a change of heart. Looking back at some photos of younger self, I know exactly how critical and self-loathing I felt at the time. I could fill a page at least, listing all the things I've hated about my inner or outer self at one time or another. And I know that while the dreaded sixty isn't pretty, it's perversely going to look a whole lot better when I'm sixty four. While sixty four, in turn will feel even worse if I continue to focus on the lines gathering like a perfect storm on my face. What a waste of perfectly good time that would be! The inexorable march of time moves on, what are you doing to embrace it? •••...

Living in the little house on the hill for six straight years was a gift. That's not quite hyperbole. We got the Mountain View house - #33 in the list of places I've called home -  when our good friends, Mike and Judy, found their dream home and moved out of the Mar Vista bungalow they'd been renting. They recommended us to the landlords as the perfect tenants; that perfection being a bit of a stretch considering the house was going to cost us a challenging $300 more every month than what we were paying for our townhouse. We signed the lease with the owners, dropping us within the boundary lines for our school of choice just days before the deadline to register for a coveted kindergarden spot in the fall. It had happened organically, inevitably; exactly as I'd laid it out on my treasure map. A couple of years before then, back when Mike and Judy were only dreaming of homes, I was dreaming too.  Using a photograph Judy had taken one afternoon of Mark, Russell and me st...

#33: Mountain View Avenue, Mar Vista, California Next door to our little house on the hill in Mar Vista there lived a very old couple. Among the first to move in during the post war building boom in the early 1950's, Bob and Helen saw little three bedroom bungalows springing up all over Los Angeles. Back then you could still see the Pacific coast from their front yard, and behind them the orange groves spread clear to Los Angeles.  Their love story isn't a story at all, it's the real deal. Untitled Love Story The coleus under Bob and Helen’s front porch window are looking a little scraggly, nothing but tall leggy stems bending in their bed of dry cracked earth. I think how the gardener wouldn’t let them go like that if Bob hadn’t been so sick. If he’d been up and around, those plants would be standing tall, their leaves firm and perky, the ground blanketed with a soft, moist layer of mulch. Well tended, that was the best way to describe Bob’s garden, and come to thin...