Lesson 5 - Assignment 1

Assignment 1

Developing your unique voice

Exercise: Scan back over your life, think of times, things, places, etc. you remember for no apparent reason. Write the memory as you remember it, and start the rendering. This is an exercise in using your own personal voice.

{no deaths or births, use the small seemingly unimportant events}

Begin the essay with the phrase, "I don't know why I remember."

If necessary use a smell, sound, taste, or object that triggers a memory





         “I don’t know why I remember our first year in New England.  We had moved from a suburb of New Orleans to a small, rural town in Connecticut the summer I was ten, and my brother, Reed, was six. 

         In Metarie, we had lived two-thirds down a block of small one-story houses built on what had more than likely been a swamp ten years before.  There were blocks of these cookie cutter houses—a sprawling sub-division springing up everywhere to meet the needs of expanding Baby Boomer families. 

         Monroe, Connecticut was a different world—make that a different planet.  My mom would probably have laughed, if she could have stopped crying long enough to see the humor in it.  But, alas, that was not to be. 

         Poor Mom…she had been born and raised in New Orleans.  She had grown up taking buses, and cabs and streetcars, shopping in large department stores, eating in some of the best restaurants in the world and, having her family and life long friends around her.  Even Metarie had grocery stores and restaurants.  Monroe had ‘a’ grocery store—somewhere, a hardware store and a gas station. 

         About the only thing it had going for it was a number of ‘package stores’ (the New England euphonium for liquor stores) along the edges of town.  Monroe was a ‘wet’ town—an oasis, plunked down in the middle of a dessert of ‘dry’ ones.  Now, New Orleanians enjoy their cocktails, so this did help make up for things a bit.  But it was a very little bit of consolation to Mom.

         The original ‘plan’ (back in February, when Daddy had started his new job) had been that he would RENT a house until we moved up after school was out, and then they’d find a house together.  Somewhere along the line, however, the plan had been modified—only Mom had not been consulted.  Not a wise move on Dad’s part.

         He had informed her, on a hit-and-run trip to NOLA, that rents were very high and he’d purchased a house instead.  He had had to fly to New Orleans to sign the papers about selling the house.  Because even though Mom had his Power of Attorney—as a woman, she did not have the legal authority to buy or sell property under the Napoleonic Code.  (Yes, even though Louisiana was purchased from France in 1803, it is still governed by the Napoleonic Code.  Change does not come easy to my people.)

         This Chauvinistic persecution already had an eye twitching effect on her (and that was a decade before the ‘Women’s Lib’ movement).  She was not happy, and did not hesitate in telling anyone unfortunate enough to come within hearing distance of us about how unhappy she was.  She’d bitched about it to my brother and me the entire four-day drive from New Orleans to Connecticut.  And that was before she saw the house…

         To be fair to my dad, it wasn’t a ‘bad’ house—but it wasn’t a great one, either.

         It was a small Cape Cod house on a corner lot.  The good news was it had a dining room and sun porch.  The bad news (and this is just concerning the house-remember) was there was only one bathroom (downstairs—a long trip in the middle of the night for Reed and me—but we were young and didn’t have to pee every forty minutes—ah to have those kidneys again…but I digress!) and there was no dishwasher.  Or at least I thought there was no dishwasher.  I turned out to be mistaken—I was the dishwasher.

         The…ah…neighborhood, for lack of a better term, was grim.  Our house was at the bottom of a small hill, about halfway along a dead-end street.  Technically, our house was on a corner—since our driveway was off another dead-end street.  It stopped at our driveway.  The builder had been forced to abandon plans for more houses further along because of ‘ledge’.  (For those you not familiar with this term allow me to explain.  Connecticut is basically a thin film of soil on top of a lot of really, really big rocks.  These rocks are so big they can’t blast them out, if they did the state might sink.)

         The new living room had a big picture window—which over looked a swamp.  Not a majestic cypress tree filled swamp populated by egrets and green turtles.  This was a shallow mud pit, filled with clumps of high grass and small, dead trees.  I had thought Mom had been depressed before she actually stood in the living room and peered out.  The crying started up again and continued for several more weeks.

         The summer came and went, and school began.  Now I had about a hundred cotton dresses, (All of them red plaid—because Mom and Grandma loved red plaid.  I do not.) but no sweaters or skirts and blouses.  About mid-September, a station wagon (for you young ones, these were low SUV’s) pulled into the driveway and a guy knocked on the door.  Mom went out and pulled out about half a dozen pleated woolen skirts. 

         I had thought that the red plaid was bad.  These were even worse.  The worst one had to be the avocado green and lemon yellow one.  Never, before or since, have I had those colors in my wardrobe.  I wore those skirts until I graduated from high school—since as I grew taller, the style grew shorter.  Lucky me.

The people on the street were…ah…(what was it Lincoln said about the common people?) simple.  They barely spoke in sentences and my mother had a theory that there had been a lot of inbreeding in the area.  They thought we were strange, which was okay because Mom thought of them all as ‘Damn Yankees’.  She’d even started calling Daddy, a New Yorker, one as well. 

         We had a lot more days off from school in Connecticut—Jewish holidays and National holidays and weeks off in the winter and the spring.  In New Orleans you got off Halloween and All Saints Day, the Thursday and Friday of Easter week, and a week off at Mardi Gras.  (Well, there were a lot of parades the day before and the day after was Ash Wednesday, and then you needed time to get over all the parties from the first part of the week—although I’ve always suspected that this was for the grownups and not us kids.)

         We got through the Jewish holidays pretty easily—since we just stayed home. Then we hit Columbus Day.  For some reason, which she has never been able to explain, Mom offered to take us all to the movies—all the kids on the street.  It was to be the first and last time she acted so magnanimously. 

         She had crammed about ten of us kids into our 1960 Cadillac and driven to the nearest movie, three towns over.  It had been a beautiful fall day when we went into the theatre.  There was six inches of snow when we came out three hours later.  Mom had never even seen snow before, let alone drive in it. I still don’t know how we got home that night.

         After, what came to be known as, the ‘snow incident’, Mom got a little crazy.  Well, crazier than usual.  She started buying huge quantities of food—storing it on shelves in the cellar.  She was determined to not have to go to the grocery store if there was even any chance of snow.

         Now there were a total of seven houses on our street, which was a side road from a bigger road at the top of a huge hill with no other houses for at least one-mile in any direction.  I don’t know what Mom was thinking about, but she came home with one dozen boxes of Hershey bars.  That’s like a gross of candy bars.  Needless to say, she didn’t even pass out one box.

         The remaining eleven boxes were stacked precariously on the top of Mom’s drop leaf desk in my parent’s bedroom.  Once Reed and I had eaten out Halloween candy—such as it was—Mom would ceremoniously dole out a candy bar to each of us when we came home from school. 

         Now, there was other ‘goodies’ around over the holidays, so we were still working our way down through the boxes of candy bars.  Well, sometime in February, we came home from school and Mom opened the top box—a new box—and took out two bars.  The only problem was that the papers were empty.  The chocolate brown sleeve part of the Hershey’s wrapper was there, and the white inner wrapper was neatly folder and slipped in it—but there was no chocolate! 

         Mom took out two more—the same thing—and two more after that.  The entire box was filled with crisp white papers folded and inserted into those outer wrappers—but they were all empty.  Mom decided that the machinery at the factory had hiccuped and wouldn’t it make a funny story.  She put the box aside to show Daddy later and moved on to the next box.  But the next box was just the same, as was the third and the fourth.  Mom no longer believed that this had been an accident. Then she looked at my brother.  Reed had started shifting from one foot to the other and at one point had tried to back out of the room.  But he wasn’t quick enough.

         An arm reached out, grabbed him by the collar and yanked him to her.  She didn’t even have to ask.  He was laughing too hard for anyone not to realize what had happened.  Because as Mom was working her way ’down’ through the stack of boxes, my dear brother had been sneaking in at every opportunity and working his way ’up’ from the bottom. 

         As I recall, his bottom was tender for a few days.