Sim Carter: Past Tense Imperfect

It was Martin Luther King Day in LA, January 17th, 1994. It was a Monday.  We’d moved back to LA with our not-quite-one-year-old son after a year of living in Redondo Beach, in an apartment just across the street from the Pacific. It’s where our son was  born and I spent my days taking him on long, quiet walks along the Esplanade that bordered the oceanfront. During the week, the sand and the sea were beige and blue stripes that stretched forever with only the seagulls, and a stray beach goer here and there, breaking the pattern. Riviera Village, a few blocks inland was full of sleepy stores, hushed boutiques just out of my price range, and cafes where I had no one to join me for a cup of latte.  In the early days right after my son’s birth, my friends found their way down to Redondo to pay their obligatory baby visits. After that it was mostly just the baby and me, and often my mother who  was in the habit of visiting a couple of times a week. My father had di...

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, “Simmy” but I can’t make out the rest; just sharp, staccato sounds.  A shadow crosses the yellow light, so big 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, I want to cry because I can tell from the smell that it’s my father.  “It’s Daddy” he says, pulling a blanket around me, a...

I haven ’ t lived in England for years and years. And years. Basically a very long time. The kind of time you cough into your hand over, trying to hide the exact humungous number of years. Long enough ago that any reasonable person could be forgiven for calling me an American. But beware, should you say anything negative about the UK or Queen Elizabeth, my British roots will start showing and my British blood will start boiling. I ’ ll start flapping my British passport in the air, and put on my best True Brit voice. While I ’ m very much an American, I ’ m British by birth, born in 1953, in —as I ’ m fond of saying and saying—a scene right out of Call the Midwife. I ’ ve got a thing for the Queen from being born so close to her coronation day that my parents gave me Elizabeth for my middle name. Just a few days shy of being named Elizabeth Simone instead of the other way around. A few days shy of being a Liz versus a Sim. Liz, Lizzie. I don ’ t mind the sound of that. Growi...

Tristram & Islolde: N.C. Wyeth  I ’ve been taking you back to Bandol with me lately. First came The Walk , then came Le Kiss. Here’s the final part of the story. The whole story is now available here and on Soundcloud and iTunes so you can start at the beginning if you like. Garlic & Gauloises It felt like we’d left Bandol and the beach far behind us. We had to be very close now, close to this place out in the middle of nowhere where Michel was going to take me dancing. Finally I could hear voices, shouts and real laughter; a boy’s hoot, a girl’s bell-like tinkle. Someone called out Veronique, Veronique, Vero! There was an answering cackle and something else, something in French that I didn’t understand. Whole words, snatches of sentences, floated through the still night air, loud enough for me to hear except that they were in French, and so, much like the sea breeze on this hot summer night, they fluttered and fell away before I could grab hold of...

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...

The past is just another word for something I ’ ve left behind, and while it ’ s filled with omissions—like the Instagram I meant to post yesterday—mistakes and missed connections, it ’ s also filled with an ever expanding array of amazing memories. So many memories we file away in our personal storage systems. Memories that fill up your headspace until that warning beep, better dump that stuff in the trash or archive that old data, transfer it to the iCloud where it can float freely, the barest whisp of a thought, until you decide to access it again. That ’ s how the days pass, we live in the now, or we try to, but the past is always there, getting larger and larger. It ’ s not all good. Some of that past should stay locked in that ancient old-timey journal you secretly keep hidden under last winter ’ s sweaters, to be taken out only on rare occasions, when the house is empty and no one ’ s around to see you looking at it. Unless you ’ re some weird inhuman humanoid you ’ v...