We meet again...

High school reunion time...

Before we begin…

What’s your experience with high school or any other kinds of reunions? Do they spark anticipation, dread, detachment? If you’ve gone to one or more of these events, how did it go and do you have any advice? And if you’ve got a reunion story to tell by all means share it with us!

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A boy, a garbage can, and me

I write to you on the eve of my departure on a trip east to see family and friends. Tucked into the middle of this trip with all the physical and emotional logistics that come with these annual visits is my high school reunion. I have no idea what to expect but I do know that at some point I will be coming face-to-face with the guy who stuffed me into a garbage can in fifth grade. Maybe he’ll remember, maybe he won’t. I will report back. 

In the meantime, I will share an older post about that memory, published when Spark was young and our group was much smaller. Reading it again has primed me for the reunion not just with “Buddy” but to see what other stories rise to the surface when I meet my former classmates, not just of how things were “back then” but how they’ve been since, and how they are now. Somewhere in all of that should be some amazing material. 

Right?

The View From the Garbage Can

‘We all grew up with this thing that my mother said to us over and over, and over and over again, which is ‘Everything is copy.’ You’d come home with something that you thought was the tragedy of your life – someone hadn’t asked you to dance, or the hem had fallen out of your dress, or whatever you thought was the worst thing that could ever happen to a human being – and my mother would say ‘Everything is copy.’’ - Nora Ephron

My old school is closed now but my memories are wide open for business. About a year ago, I began to think about my first days at Jefferson Elementary School and this is what emerged:

In the summer of 1966 my parents sold our house right out from under my four siblings and me, piled us into the station wagon, and drove north about 300 miles until they reached Jefferson, New Hampshire. We went from living in a Connecticut town within easy commuting distance to Manhattan to a town of less than a thousand people, less than two hours from the Canadian border. I went from being the winner of the courtesy award at Our Lady of Fatima school, to the girl “Buddy Nickerson” (not his real name) stuffed into a garbage can outside the lunch room at Jefferson Elementary. 

 We were in fifth grade. I was the new girl. He was the biggest boy in my class. In fact, he was bigger than most of the sixth grade boys and girls who occupied the other side of our shared classroom which is why I heard every question the teacher asked of them and began to mouth the answers. I made sure the teacher saw me. She made just as sure to ignore me which couldn’t have been easy because there were only 12 of us on the fifth grade side of the room and there I was twitching in my seat, sending messages to her with my eyes, because for the first time in my brief academic career I felt really smart. 

I was not smart. I just knew stuff because I dove into books to escape the world and, until a few months earlier, a convent full of wimpled nuns with high expectations had been in charge of my education. 

Now Buddy was. 

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That’s the beginning of a short essay I drafted about a year ago when I needed to take a break from the novel. It’s a true story even though I’ve changed the name of my one-time tormentor and his friend (below). One of these days, if and when the essay is ready, I’ll reach out to him and ask if it is okay to use his name. I know where he lives.

Right now, I’m still trying to figure out why I wanted to write this story down in the first place. Even now I can still feel the faint heat of humiliation despite all the years — decades — that have since passed. Still, I need to go there.

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He spied me and my new friend Debby on the playground a few weeks into the school year while we were all waiting outside for the bus to come bring us home. For reasons that escape me, Debby and I strayed from the pack of fifth grade girls by the swing sets. Buddy swooped down on me like a peregrine. His brown eyes glinted above his high cheekbones, his ten-year-old arms already had muscles which rippled as they powered him towards me. Glen, his shorter, blonder, chubbier sidekick was right behind him. They raced after us as we ran to hide behind our brick school building. They cornered us next to a garbage bin, a brown barrel sitting lidless, gaping at the sky. Debby edged away but they weren’t interested in her. They’d known her since first grade. It was me they were after and it was me they grabbed first. Then they spied the barrel and immediately grasped the possibilities. 

Each boy grabbed an arm and a leg and hoisted me above the rim of the barrel. They did it so quickly I couldn’t land a kick or a punch. They kind of folded me into a “V”, shoved me in, and watched as I sank, ass-first, into the papers, pencil shavings, that red saw dust used to mop up the cafeteria when someone puked, scraps from the school lunch, and whatever had come out of the trash receptacles in the bathroom. I couldn’t reach the rims with my hands. My feet kicked uselessly above me. My skirt hiked higher with every move I made. I don’t remember what I yelled or if I yelled at all. All I knew for sure is that I wasn’t getting out of that barrel by myself and as long as Buddy was there, no one was going to help me. 

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Something interesting happened when I started to set these words down — I realized I was glad for the minutes I spent in the garbage barrel. There was a story in there and maybe now I was ready to tell it. Whether someone will want to read it is another thing altogether. That will depend on whether I’m able to turn this scrap of memory, this material, into story that connects with at least one other person or at least entertains her for a few minutes. I stopped paying attention to the things that have not happened in my extraordinarily ordinary life and began to look more closely at the things that did happen, how they hurt me, helped me, showed me who I was — who I am.

It’s all material, right? Every writer says this, from Nora Ephron to Robert Greene to Garrison Keillor to Alice Munro. Writers are said to be thieves, scavengers, collectors of material. We are only original in how we stitch the scraps of material together. Writers of fiction can blend pieces of truth with imagination to write anything from Sense and Sensibility to paranormal romance.

Writers of memoir are not as free. I can’t, for example, lie about being in that garbage can. If I am not in the garbage can, there is no way out, no lesson learned, no possibility of change. Even though I love fiction first, I am drawn to memoir, especially at certain times of my life. Memoirists mine their experiences to create stories that inspire, amuse, touch, or challenge. They must observe their own lives with the same attention of a writer of fiction who strains to eavesdrop while standing in line, say, at the DMV. They must sift through the scraps to find patterns, loose threads, to see what they have missed. Although they can choose which facts to share and how to write about them, they cannot lie.

I haven’t finished the essay about me, Buddy, some others, and the garbage can. although I recently condensed the events into a three-minute piece I read at a local prose-reading series called Dimestories. Still, there are parts I continue to sift through and try to figure out. More and more it’s not about that one incident but the years that followed and how they shaped me. I feel like I’ve opened a bit of a Pandora’s Box and I’m not sure where trying to write things like this will take me. I’ve got a kind of ending though it I’m sure it will change:

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I left Jefferson the summer I turned seventeen. I’ve moved further away with every decade until I finally stopped in California. I’m a visitor now to Jefferson now, a flatlander, an outsider. But then I always was. Maybe Buddy and his friend understood that. They knew I was going to leave. So they gave me something to remember. 

What about you?

How do you decide which, if any, memoirs you want to read? Which ones have you read that have stayed with you?

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Books!

Am reading…

A Coin in Nine Hands by Marguerite Yourcenar, a book I first learned of from Mike over at

Books on GIF

. His take on this novella prompted me to get it. I am halfway through and can say that Mike got it exactly right. Structured around a coin that passes from one person on a single day in Rome, this story is simple on the outside and full of depth on the inside. The narrator reveals the lives of those touched by the coin with insights as devastating as they are beautiful as in this passage:

“His farmers who knew him from birth; his daughters; his wife, who, after all, had loved him when he was still young — none could picture him any way but old. Old age seemed the natural state of this man – he was important only as the end product of the past.” - Marguerite Yourcenar, A Coin in Nine Hands

Just finished…

In the weeks after announcing to the world that I have struggled more and more lately with “big” books, I have finished three whoppers in a row: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn  by Betty Smith, David Copperfield  by Charles Dickens, and Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. I followed these with Bobi Conn’s memoir, In the Shadow of the Valley which is not as long as any of the other three but was a natural segue from Demon Copperhead, the re-telling of David Copperfield  in modern-day Appalachia. Each had a singular voice and a singular view of what it is like to grow up poor in a certain place at a certain time. All of them together reveal how little change there has been when it comes to the rich, the poor, the seen, the unseen, the powerful, and those who have no power but have something – maybe some talent, maybe some intelligence, but always a stroke of luck. I’m looking forward to organizing my thoughts more fully around these books and talking about them with you. 

Up next…

Who knows? I’ll be on the road and have my Kindle all loaded so I guess I’ll be playing Kindle roulette. Here are some of the books in the lineup. Where should I start? 

Reunions as material

Bookriot put together a list of books by authors who found high school reunions to be the perfect setting for their novels. Just click on the photo below to go right to it.

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Ciao for now! 

Gratefully yours,

Betsy

P.S. And now, your moment of Zen…summer

I stole this photo from Katrina Kenison’s Facebook page. Can you blame me?

Photo by Katrina Kenison

Calling for Your Contribution to “Moment of Zen”: 

What is YOUR moment of Zen? Send me your photos, a video, a drawing, a song, a poem, or anything with a visual that moved you, thrilled you, calmed you. Or just cracked you up. This feature is wide open for your own personal interpretation.

Come on, go through your photos, your memories or just keep your eyes and ears to the ground and then share. Send your photos/links, etc. to me by replying to this email or simply by sending to: elizabethmarro@substack.com. The main guidelines are probably already obvious: don’t hurt anyone  -- don’t send anything that violates the privacy of someone you love or even someone you hate, don’t send anything divisive, or aimed at disparaging others. Our Zen moments are to help us connect, to bond, to learn, to wonder, to share -- to escape the world for a little bit and return refreshed. 

I can’t wait to see what you send!

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