Sim Carter: Past Tense Imperfect

IT WAS A TIME OF TANS, BLONDS AND HOT PANTS, WHEN THE ENDLESS SUMMER WAS JUST A SHORT WALK DOWN A HOT SIDEWALK Beach Music, originally published in the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, is really a tale of two cities: San Juan, Puerto Rico and Santa Monica, California. File it under On the Street Where I Live     Beach Music We came to California from Canada, with a detour to Puerto Rico that lasted one endless summer of a year. A year in which I turned 15, and my hair turned blond from living in the sun. “Psst,” the boys and men would call after me in the blue-cobbled streets of San Juan. “Psst! Hey, blondie. Psst! Hey, cutie pie.” I was devastated when my parents said we had to go, that it was time to leave the island so that my older brother, Russell, could get a first rate education. The plan was to drive cross country from Miami and settle in San Francisco so that my brother could finish high school before going on to UC Be...

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...

Throwback Thursday: One Second of Fame  The set was the interior of an appliance store plucked right out of the 1960’s. As usual on a movie set there was a dull whirr of background noise, crew hammering, people yammering. There were a lot of people milling around, associate producers and set assistants who didn’t need to be there. Hair and makeup artists, the prop master, the gaffer, the script supervisor, who did. Oh yeah. And the director, the director of photographer, and the lead actor.  I was so nervous, they were all a blur to me. I tried not to stare at Tom Hanks conferring quietly with his DP, Tak Fujimoto. I knew Fujimoto was a fairly big deal, he’d worked with Tom on  Philadelphia , shot Jodie Foster in  Silence of the Lambs , Molly Ringwald in  Pretty in Pink  and Matthew Broderick in  Ferris Bueller’s Day Off . And now, he’d be shooting me and Russell, for our one second of fame, in  That Thing You Do. [ Read the rest ...

Waxing nostalgic on Facebook this morning, thinking about the package of Christmas prezzies we used to get in the mail from our British grandmother, this old post about a trip to Grandma's house in the 70's came to mind. And that's why call it FlashbackFriday. I was waiting for my sister to come and join me in London, as if, instead of being on vacation, I was being held hostage, waiting for someone to rescue me while the yellow ribbons tied around the old oak tree faded and turned to tatters and the days disappeared. As though my grandmother and uncle had kept me locked in a squalid room, or hidden me under the stairs like I was Harry Potter. The reality was that I'd been spending a few weeks at their absolutely lovely house in Chorleywood on the outskirts of London and I was miserable. I'd come down with a simple case of old-fashioned homesickness, made worse by a touch of social anxiety. I felt so lonely I wanted to die but I wasn't dying. I was perfect...

For six years in the nineties we lived in a little house on a hill on the west side of Los Angeles.  We always bragged that while the house might be small,  we had a million dollar view. O n a clear day we could see the Hollywood sign from our backyard.  The house was something of a gift. We inherited the place when the current tenants, our good friends Mike and Judy, found a house they wanted to buy and recommended us to the landlord. When they moved out, we moved in. We signed  the lease that dropped 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. Our son spent his entire elementary school life in that little old house, going from kindergarden through fifth grade in the same house, going to the same school, with the same friends. I call it a little house because it was. Just 1050 square feet. Two bedrooms, one matchbox sized bathroom, a kitchen so tiny that there wa...

I can get a little nostalgic writing memoir—you might say it ’ s the nature of the beast—but there ’ s probably no place or time I get more soppy about than growing up in Niagara Falls. Niagara Falls was  where I spent most of my elementary school years; it was where I learned to swim in the pool at the Cyanamid plant; it was where I broke my arm when I was ten; it was where my period came for the first time in the girls room at Princess Elizabeth Middle School and Niagara Falls was where I cried serious tears when we moved away when I was fourteen. But before that, Niagara Falls was where I had my first boyfriend, a boy named Randy Tuck. I was eleven and it was the same year the Name Game song came out. Remember? The name game!  Shirley!  Shirley, Shirley bo Birley Banana fanna fo Firley  Fee fy mo Mirley, Shirley!  It was a huge hit all over the world but no place more so than in our schoolyard. We stood in our little clique circles and sang a...

Throwback Thursday. I sometimes use the day as an excuse to look back, pull up some older piece from the past. I don’t have the energy to do that today, not after  the monstrous mass murder of 17 people in Parkland, Florida yesterday. I’m not just heartbroken and heartsick, I’m sick and tired of it.  If I do look to the past, I know nothing will change. Nothing changed after the Sandy Hook massacre in December 2012, when twenty—mostly small children—were killed in cold blood. Nothing will change this time.  Especially not with the current administration in place. Trump actually just rolled back an Obama era law that put those who  received Social Security checks for mental illnesses and people deemed unfit to handle their own financial affairs to the national background check database. [ NBC: Trump signs bill revoking Obama era law ] Trump basically said that even if you have mental health issues, go ahead buy a gun. Better yet. Buy an AR-15. Why kill one p...

Photo by Adam Kloketka via My Modern Met I love the snow. As long as it’s out and I’m in. Despite the romantic appeal of the sound of the crunch of snow beneath a pair of brand new leather boots on a starlit Christmas night, snow is cold. Too cold for me. Growing up in Canada, winter days could get so cold that not only did the freezing temps blanket the ground with two feet of white fluff, a severely cold winter could cause the falls to freeze over completely. That's happened this year, the cold snap transforming the falls into something from a sci-fi flick. Back in my day, along with those snowfalls came some painful cases of popsicle toes. As a child, I’d hobble in from outside and stand next to the radiator, pain stabbing at my feet, tears pricking my eyes while my mother gently unbuckled my snow boots so she could rub my numb feet back to life.  Living in Southern California my snow days, thankfully, are far behind me. Winter—real winter—has just never been my season....

I don ’t know how my son went from being my own teeny tiny beany baby to the smart, sweet, funny, handsome millennial who is just about to turn twenty three. All I did was blink. What the what!  I wrote today’s #ThursdayThrowback piece back when he was in elementary school and I could see time spinning out of control. Published in Childrens’ Magazine, here in L.A.  I had no idea the years would move so fast. What I Like Doing Best is Nothing!   "What I like doing best," said Christopher Robin, "is doing nothing" "How do you do nothing?" asked Pooh after he had wondered for a long time. "Well, it's when people call out at you just as you're going off to do it, 'What are you going to do Christopher Robin?' and you say "Oh nothing' and then you go and do it" "Oh, I see," said Pooh. "This is a nothing sort of thing that we're doing now." "Oh, I see," said Pooh again. "...

It’s #ThrowbackThursday and I don’t think I could throw it back any further than this,   my earliest memory.  Turkish Delight  There's darkness everywhere, shapeless black all around except for a blur of wavering yellow light in the distance. Something has woken me up. Muffled voices in the darkness; a man's—deep, hushed, whispering. Then another—higher pitched, a lady's? My mother's? I hear my name, "Simone" but I can't make out the rest; just sharp, staccato sounds. A shadow crosses the yellow light, so huge it blocks the brightness, and there's nothing but blackness again. The dark shadow, darker than the darkness, is moving fast, coming closer, heading towards me and I'm too terrified to move or breathe or close my eyes. If I stay perfectly still maybe it won't get me. I watch as the black blur moves towards me, growing larger as it comes closer and closer and just as it reaches under the blanket to scoop me up with its big hands, ...

When I say Niagara Falls you probably think cheesy honeymoon destination, ‘slowly I turned’ and tourist trap. But Niagara Falls is where I grew up. Coming of age in Canada 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. Keep reading ... 

Last week’s Ben Ghazi hearing put Tripoli, Libya on the tip of my tongue and the forefront of my mind. Today’s #TBT post is a piece  about the time I spent there as a small child in the 1950’s. It was  first published in 1993 in one of those local freebies, the throwaway newspapers you used to find tossed on your front walkway. And I was thrilled to make it into its pages. That ’s me on the back of the camel,  cowering behind my big brother Russell  The Arab Boy Who Took Out His Eye When I was five years old we lived in Tripoli, Libya just outside Wheelus Air Force Base. We weren't military, we weren't even American but my father, formerly with British Intelligence had been hired to infiltrate the PX as a manager and investigate the cause of the store's outstanding financial losses. My dad was a great manager, in fact he was responsible for bringing the hoola hoop to North Africa, holding a big promotional party with hoola hoop demonstrations, ...

October used to find me wishing I could be a witchy woman. But that flew out the window when I became a mother and the holiday wasn ’t  all about me anymore. Have Broom, Will Travel

As a tour guide at Universal Studios in the mid-1980’s I loved visiting the backlot with my fellow guides. Except for that time that guy screamed on the set ....  Read the rest of this post

Anyone else grow up wanting to be just like Sandra Dee? You might dig my #ThrowbackThursday post about Gidget over at Chapter1-Take1 , including a clip of James Darren AKA Moondoggie singing to Sandra Dee aka Gidget. SWOON!