During Bouchercon week, It is the custom here on MIE to repost an oldie but goodie while almost all of us are off enjoying one another's company in person and meeting mystery fans. Since I am such a new kid in this "town," none of my previous posts seem old enough to rerun at this point. So I am placing here a blog entry from my parallel life on The Crime Writer's Chronicle. Stan Trollip had advised me that the best blogs were personal. Here is one about my life.
Annamaria - Monday
There used to be shop on Third Street in Greenwich Village where
you could buy a cotton t-shirt and have the store clerks write anything you wanted
on it. I bought several during the years when making a statement that
way was considered cool, even in the Village, the World Headquarters of
Cool. With the sale of our country house, a few of those shirts that I
hadn't seen in years emerged from my unjustly extensive collection of
memorabilia. Somehow, the six shirts shown here wound up in one pile on
my closet shelf. They tell my story, not the whole tale of my life, but
some of the significant bits. The first two were on sale, as is, from the
store. The others show personal messages. Here is what they say
about me:
I went to Catholic school for 17 years, all of my formal
schooling. That experience was largely a blessing for a poor, working
class girl like me. The quality of my education was for the most part
excellent, if rule bound. On that score, a passage in The Once and Future King really
spoke to me. In that book, to teach the young Arthur about life and
leadership, Merlin turns him into various animals. When the future king
is transformed into an ant and approaching the ant colony for the first time,
over the entrance he reads, "Everything that is not compulsory is
forbidden." I could relate to that! On the other hand, I went
to a women's college on scholarship. There I met brilliant nuns dedicated
to educating the minds of women. I revere them. They gave me my college
degree as a gift. And showed me that women could be gifted. And
take charge.
I emerged from college right into the transformative experience
of the feminism of the 1960's. I have written elsewhere on this blog (Crime Writer's Chronicle) of my
participation in what I call The Pink Collar Wars. The nuns of my college
primed my engine so that I might zoom right into the movement and have it
broaden my horizons and multiply my possibilities.
When New York City was on the verge of bankruptcy in the 1970's,
the real estate market wobbled for a few months, making a small house on 12th
Street, badly in need of renovation, affordable for me and David. A
beloved friend whom we greatly respected for his real estate acumen and
financial prowess, begged us not to buy. "Buy near us in New
Jersey," he said, pointing out New York's state and city income taxes, the
city's sink-hole-of-depravity reputation, and the leafy beauty of the swanky
suburban town where he lived, where we could have bought a mansion for the same
price. We agonized. We even did a financial analysis that told us
that, in the long run, it might cost us $10-20K extra per year to live in New
York. But we were in love with our city, warts and all. We decided
to buy that house on Twelfth Street. During its chaotic renovation, while
staying in New Jersey with my father, we drove in and rummaged around the dusty
construction site to find clothes suitable for a friend's wedding. When,
in duds relatively filth free, we boarded a taxi to go to the church, David
said, "We are more like a track team than a married couple."
The next week, when our daughter was still commuting through the Lincoln Tunnel
to the 4th grade, I moseyed over the Third Street to get us team shirts.
Staying in New York was the best decision we ever made, in many ways,
especially financially.
This shirt has more to do with my daughter's education than
mine. Brilliant as she is, she qualified for the ultra-prestigious Hunter
College High School, a public institution where the 200 most brilliant New York
kids, by a rigorous testing process, attended. Because of the heady
milieu where she had been studying, by the time she was ready to apply to
college, she considered herself average or a little below. She fretted
that she would never get into a decent institution of higher education.
No amount of reassurance on my part calmed her fears. "You're just
saying that because you are my mother," she said. I went to Third
Street to get shirts that spoke about where her parents attended college.
I chose sayings to communicate that one did not have to go to Harvard to have a
good life. Her parents both started out just this side of destitute, and
we both had jobs we loved that we're quite financially rewarding. We
were, after all, living in our own Greenwich Village townhouse. Mine is
the shirt you see here. David's said, "Unimpressive State
University." Even having parents wearing such billboards did
not calm her down much. She got into the top four small liberal arts
colleges in the country. She went to Swarthmore!
I wore this shirt to Luciano Pavarotti's first free concert in
Central Park. I learned to love the opera, literally at my grandfather’s knee.
Music of all sorts of, including opera, brings me enhancement of my joys,
solace in sorrow, companionship when I am lonely, help concentrating on any
task at hand, and especially inspiration when I am writing. I consider
making music the highest calling for humans on this planet. I can’t play
a lick myself, but I am so very lucky to have been born into a family of people
who can experience ecstasy when listening to music.
Most New Yorkers used to call that Pharaoh of old two-TANK-ah-men.
But when the first big exhibition of artifacts from King Tut’s
famous tomb came to The Metropolitan Museum, Philippe de Montebello, the museum’s
president, made sure we all learned how to pronounce the ancient name properly,
with the accent on Tut (long o sound). I got this shirt to wear to the
show. But I also keep it as another talisman of how lucky a person I
am. The photos of ancient Egyptian artifacts in my fourth grade text book
were the first taste I got of the breath of history and the existence of exotic
locales where one can see the art of the centuries. I have lived to see Karnak
and Abu Simbel and to celebrate my 60th birthday at the Great Pyramids of Giza
under a full moon. Not bad for a little girl from Our Lady of Lourdes School in
Paterson, NJ.
I am keeping the shirts. I don't ever want to forget any
of this.
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