Author: sandrashart

Welcome to my world! I have always loved to write, but I have spent most of my adult life in front of either a television or film camera. First as a Romper Room Teacher, then in television series and movies where writing took a backstage place in my life. I am now over 50 and have the freedom to get back to expressing myself through writing. I muse about my life and thoughts and just about everything under the sun. The only order to it is life itself as lived. Natural chaos! I am married and have three grown children who are interested in breeding horses, flying and creating. My youngest is the lead singer/songwriter of the Grammy nominated band, Tonic, Emerson Hart. So here I am, wanting to read about you and at the same time bringing you along with me to mine. I hope you will find me just as interesting as I do you! Hop aboard for the ride.

Who Knew?

My husband and I have often talked about our childhoods and about our years growing up and we both have come to the same conclusion. We had, in our opinions, the ‘luck of the draw’ to be born and live through the best years so far in our American history. Who knew?!

August 1957…….

The wings of Capitol Airlines were carrying me far away from the mundane existence in the steel town where I grew up. I was eighteen and I was never coming back. I was free. At last! Free to live my own dreams, on my own terms. I never wanted to think of those fourteen wasted years of my life in Ohio again.

Youth. Oh my. Youth! Such hubris. How could I have known then that those early formative years on my grandfather’s farm in Bloomingdale and later, the good fortune to live and be educated among an ethnically diversified community like the steel town of Steubenville, Ohio during the 40’s and 50’s would, in hindsight, be the best thing that could have ever happened to me.

I grew up having no fears. I can’t remember ever being afraid of anything, except maybe disobeying my parents. We never locked our shiny new blue Plymouth in the garage out back. Not even when good times brought a powder blue Cadillac convertible in its place. I knew the front door would always be unlocked when I arrived home from the YMCA Swing Haven at night and I easily traveled by myself everywhere on the bus at all hours and walked the two blocks from the bus stop to my home. I felt safe. I was safe.

Our neighbor’s doors were always open to all and it seemed we were always either delivering or on the receiving end of casserole and cake exchanges from one to the other. We genuinely cared about one another. Neighbors were extended family in our blue collar neighborhood. If ever needed, help was just next door at the neighbors house.

High school jobs were easily found for us. My first was in Denmark’s, a family owned department store, where the owner knew my name. I started at Christmas as a wrapper and worked my way up to sales in lingerie. Customers didn’t seem to be agitated during the long wait for the canister carrying their money being sucked up the vacuum tube to accounting and back again with their receipt and correct change. People had patience. We all seemed to take life in stride.

Our high school had our great football team and marching band that gave our town additional purpose and pride beyond the fact that we produced steel that was helping rebuild the country.

We didn’t have to worry about drugs back then. The worst worry for us girls was not having a date to the prom because we had to wait to be asked. The worst whispers were about the boys and ‘wild girls’ who would go to the coal pits outside of town to smoke cigarettes, drink beer and fool around or the girls that would go to “visit” their out-of-town relatives for nine months.

We studied, jitterbugged, ate square pizza and Coke, went to the drive-in and necked and had swirled ice cream with the curl on top at the local Dairy Queen and watched Ed Sullivan on our RCA televisions Sunday nights with our families.

Our parents earned a good living and were prosperous. They had hopes for the future. We as teenagers never had any doubts that we could reach and achieve our dreams. The world was ours if we were willing to work for it.

And the reality of it is, it was all true. Our generation was afforded the best environment for achieving and witnessing the greatness of the American people and their dreams. We were a town of all nationalities, all colors and I never thought or was taught there were any differences between us.

I do believe, though, that our diverse community along the Ohio River was not unique. It was a softer and more gentle time of hope for the future in America. No one thought that it would disappear. Not here.

How were any of us to know we were so very fortunate living in those special times and that this recipe for living would never be duplicated ever again.

Through A Child’s Eyes

The further we get from our past, the kinder and more forgiving we become of our memories. Haven’t you had someone pass from your life, that has either moved on or really moved on from this earthly life? Looking back on that relationship isn’t it easier to see both sides and be more forgiving now that enough time has passed to retain more of the good memories involved in that relationship than the bad?

I loved my mother. I left home when I was eighteen to attend college , and although I never lived at home again, Mother was the constant force that kept me moving forward in my life, no matter how many miles separated us, or how hard my circumstances became. She was always my best cheerleader. In my heart, she was always someone I wanted to emulate.
A perfect woman.

She pushed me to audition for Romper Room when I had little or none of the required background that the other’s seeking the job had. She had a ‘feeling’ about the man I married, yet when he was diagnosed with schizophrenia, she was there emotionally, a pillar of support when I thought I would not survive mentally or financially through it all. My mother walked through the fire with me. She was my rock. And it was this super strength and will that allowed her to love me unconditionally. No matter what stresses I brought into her life, she never abandoned me. And never a day goes by, that I don’t think if her and wish I could pick up the phone to hear her assuring voice again.

New Jersey…..1987

Studies reveal that as we get older our personality traits become more pronounced. Because I left home at such an early age, the impressions I had of my mother were established through immature eyes. And until I brought her to live with me after my father died in 1987 that is the unrealistic image I had of her.

But it did not take me long to be able to see my mother within an adult’s perspective. I soon came to realize that Mother’s strength actually was a form of control over everything in her environment. As a child, I welcomed the attention, but in my 50’s I needed to breathe on my own. My childlike view that Mother was a saint and could do wrong would slowly erode throughout our remaining years together.

Little things like hiding candy under her chair so she wouldn’t have to share, I attributed to her life as one of ten children where sharing would have left little for her. That never really bothered me, but her strong will finally became quite problematic when she stubbornly refused to give up driving even after mistaking the gas peddle for the brake causing her to break through my double front gates and land in the middle of my side lawn closest to the ocean cliff. She was late for a ride to a wedding, so she walked away leaving the car with its wheels dug into the dirt of what remained of my torn up lawn. A wonderful present for me when I arrived home from New York two days later. Somehow she ‘forgot’ to tell me before I came home.

Mother had a mild stroke later that year and under doctor ‘s orders, she entered a rehabilitation facility for physical therapy after that stroke. This was only temporary, but one would think we had sent her to Siberia. What was I thinking!

Had I been clairvoyant I would have prepared myself for what followed. Just three days into her stay at the facility, I got a call in New York close to midnight from the center saying my mother was missing. My husband an I jumped into the car and sped through Lincoln Tunnel back to New Jersey. I was a wreck, thinking the worst.

Well, we finally found her. There she was, nestled cozily back at my house, looking so innocent. She had talked a friend into taking her out on the guise that she would be returning.

But, in the end, I really should have known better to think she would stay there, because she pulled that stunt once more a few weeks later. She remained totally defiant until we decided to let her do what she was determined to do, forget rehab, and remain master of her own fate.

I was not strong enough to go against her, but I knew we had to somehow make her life safer. Whether she liked it or not. She had to accept that living alone in my big remote house was not good nor the best lifestyle for her. The only thing we could do to keep her somewhat independent was to move her down the hill into our small borough where she would have neighbors to check on her and walking ability to all of the comforts of her day. That was the only concession she allowed me, but I don’t think she ever forgave me, either. And on top of that, made sure she told the world how her daughter had betrayed her.

Mother died two years later of another stroke, but she left me, the way she wanted. Living on her own terms. She asked her nurse for her lipstick. Then, a force greater than her’s came and she slipped off quickly and quietly.

In the end, Mother was in control as much as she could ever be facing the unknown powers greater than herself. And I was left with an overpowering, overwhelming loss. Loss of her, her touch, of her strength.

My having to let go of my childhood vision of who she was, was a hard revelation. Probably the hardest lesson I had to learn. I was faced with the reality that she was indeed only human after all.

Utopia Turning

Utopia Turning.

Utopia Turning

My paternal grandfather loved dogs. He used to show English Bull dogs at The Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. The only memento I have of him, other than a few family photos, is the Westminster trophy he won for one of his dogs, Lady Carabantis, in the early 1900’s.

Grandfather died of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever before I was born, and although fate kept us from never knowing one another, what he did leave me was his love for all creatures great and small. I have always loved animals and I believe this genetically came directly from him. This trusting affection for animals I have had my whole life and I only have one memory where perhaps this gift got me into trouble. Just once did it come back to bite me, literally.

When we first moved to Ohio, I was just under six, and I decided it would be fun to give the next door neighbor’s big fuzzy St. Bernard a great big hug, well, just because. Before I knew it he had my head in his mouth and his canine lower insisor clamped down catching my left upper lip through to my gum. The other jaw incisor pierced my right temple.

I was shocked, I guess, because I didn’t feel a thing when I pulled away. Just warm blood trickling from my temple and coming into my mouth.

My stunned cries brought my mother running and the fear I saw looking at her when she saw me, scared me more than just what had happened.

I don’t remember much more than that during the long ride to Steubenville. Only Mother holding my lip together for fear that I would wind up with a hair lip or something disfiguring like that.

But in the end even this event did not make me afraid of dogs, nor stop my wanting one of my own.

Reeds Mill, Ohio 1947

His name was Tippy. He was my first dog. A yellow-haired dog with a white tip at the end of his tail. He just wandered out of the woods one day behind our house in Reeds Mill in Ohio, his long tail wagging with glee as he honed in on my peanut butter sandwich on the picnic table on the back porch. We knew he looked mighty hungry and since he had no collar, Daddy assumed he also had no owner and, miracles of all miracles, he allowed me to keep him.

That summer Tippy and I would adventurously roam through the woods, twigs snapping beneath my sandals as I searched for jack-in-the pulpits to put in my playhouse. Tippy would stick his nose way inside the white flower’s hood and always managed to come away with most of the yellow pollen on his nose. He would shake his head wildly from side to side, ears snapping against his tight jowls, trying to rid himself of the foreign invaders inside his nostrils.

Down the hill next to our house was Reeds Mill Creek where in the summer I would use a huge rock as a diving board and cannon ball into the icy water. Tippy would be right behind me with his long tail in canoe paddle position and tongue hanging aside.
Jump after jump he would loyally pretend he was having great fun. But after awhile, he usually gave up his guise and remained atop the rock, sunning and licking himself dry.

“He must have run away,” Mother said while stirring stew over the gas stove, her fine auburn hair frizzing from the steam swirling and rising around her. She didn’t look my way. Tippy had been gone for two days and that had never happened since he came to us.

“Why would he do such a thing?” I scuffed the open toe of my sandal along a crack in the linoleum floor.

“He’s my best friend and wouldn’t do that.”

Fighting hard to keep back my tears I dug harder into the worn floor covering lifting a small corner. My six-year old heart was breaking because I knew Tippy would not leave me. He and I were the best of friends.

I suspected some adult mischief was afoot, but I was too afraid to ask. Too afraid to hear adults and lies about dogs and things like that.

That night Daddy went out into the woods to look for Tippy. He eventually found him lying under an oak tree not too far from the house. He had been bitten by a copperhead snake in the very same woods we had often fearlessly played together. How my poor Tippy must have suffered. The poison from the snake that struck his testicles had done its terrible job. He was trying to come home. He was.

Daddy carried his limp yellow body to the edge of the woods where he buried him just off of the path to the back porch. I can still hear the rhythm and sharp scraping of the metal shovel eating through the dense forest floor opening a space for my Tippy to rest.

In the morning I made a wooden cross with “Tippy” written on it with a black crayon and I easily pushed it down into the soft mound of earth at the top of his grave. My tears splashed onto the small mound of loose forest dirt.

I vowed on that day. That terrible day of loosing my first very best friend that if I ever got another pet I would never have an outside dog again. He would live right inside the house with me, and that no one except me would care for him. Ever.

So, when I was seven I was already exposed to death and the heartache that comes from losing some living thing I loved. How could I know then that life through the coming years would bring to me the loss of many things, but at that moment, in my memory, Tippy’s death was the beginning of my childlike Utopia turning.

Memories Lost

I have such vivid memories of my childhood that have remained with me throughout my life. I never thought it was unusual, pondering events of a life lived, and to be honest, as a writer, I have often found a certain degree of comfort reconciling my days here through those memories. Sometimes I think it is as though our lives have been a movie in which we are the spectator.

Washington D.C. 1943…..

The bed was so big my brother and I could stretch out our arms and only our fingertips would touch. The lights were on, but I was scared. My parents were hurrying to pull down the long dark blinds to cover the high windows in our bedroom because the sirens started to blare outside breaking the silence of evening. The noise was deafening and was coming in waves, over and over again.

Then, when I wanted the safety of the night lights, my mother shut the switch. We were swallowed up. Darkest of darkness. My brother and I lay there in that black hole, sheets over our heads, with the sirens wailing in waves and I shook. I shook in fear of what it could be. I had seen those awful scary pictures of war in the movies about the bombs and broken houses like ours.

My brother and I knew this was an air raid because we had been through them before, but each time our fears were real. Maybe this time. Maybe this time real bombs were coming.

To this day, I remember the fear. I can still hear those sirens. And I still remember my relief when after the sirens stopped nothing happened to us. We weren’t dead.

In conversations I have had with my older brother throughout the years about our childhood, he remembers very little. He, for some reason, has scant recall of our lives as children. Was it so unimportant that he walked through our past without holding on to it as I did? Or is his mathematical mind wired differently than my creative one? I have always been highly sensitive and aware of my surroundings. Sherman always seemed absent. So smart. There, but not.

Sherman’s one standout memory of our childhood in Washingon is of when the large cement urn at the top of our outside steps crumbled and fell, pinning his leg, the inner steel stake plunging through his calf. A traumatic incident that left a permanent scar and for some reason his recollections are only made of this one terrible event. Perhaps this is Sherman’s emotional event that allowed his short term childhood memory to transfer to his long term memory.

Dr. Rudolph Tanzi, co-author of Super Brain, tells us that within our hippocampus in our brain our short term memory attaches it to something emotional so that it will transfer to long term memory. But where all of these memories are stored we don’t know. The neuroscientists don’t know either. Not yet anyway. On the other hand, Deepak Chopra, the author and holistic/New Age guru, takes the Eastern view that they are stored in the soul.

Whichever theory you want to believe, since we really don’t know, one truth we all can agree upon is that we each store memories that are our own. So when the sirens stopped and the war was over, my brother and I got our own beds and I traveled unknowingly alone with my memories.

A GIRL WITH MOONLIGHT IN HER EYES

Her white hair was pulled tightly away from her face knotting on top of her head, stretching her wrinkled skin so that it morphed her face into something scary. Her high collared black dress disappeared into the colorless quilted cover that fell to the floor from the high four poster bed. I stood there looking at her, not moving. I was afraid. She looked like the witch I had seen in Snow White.

This is the only memory of my father’s mother that I have stored. Wherever those things go that are catalogued in my brain, I’m not sure, but that is all I have saved. That one experience, that one moment in time, the snapshot saved of my grandmother when I was four. Interesting. Maybe she was not at all what I remember but somehow I am convinced that a child’s insight can be right on the mark, more often than not.

Things I have learned since about my grandma fortify that perhaps I was able to see things through a child’s eye more clearly than the adults around me.

Mother said I came into the family one cold Sunday night exactly one week af- ter the New Year rang in joyously. Evidently my arrival was less spectacular. There was no bassinet waiting for me. I was placed in a dresser drawer that was lined with a blanket and then placed on my parent’s bed. Why there was no bassi net was quite curious since my
parents could afford better. The answer seemed all to clear. Perhaps it was the presence of my father’s strong-willed mother. She ruled the house, so I am told, and deemed that such foolishness for a cradle or such non- sense was a waste since a drawer would do just as fine!

And thus my life began with memory-erasing visions and events relative to my father’s mother.

When I was about the same age, four or five, remember sneaking up behind the family cat and pushing it out the third story window, wondering if it would fly. I hope it did. But the finale of that event has been erased from my memory for whatever reason.

But I do remember playing house in cardboard boxes with the janitor’s daughter and Daddy paddling me all the way home when he found me. I was having such fun. How could I know, my southern father’s prejudices were hard to die and well ingrained.

I remember the best of days was when the garbage out back near the alley got full up and we would look for treasures in the barrels and cans. I don’t remember the smell or the treasures, if there were any, but I do remember what fun it was just looking through the mess.

But try as I might, I can only remember that one frame in time about my paternal grandmother. And thus, begins the embryo of my story. Memories that I have been able to imprint beyond today from my past.
I have written several books about my life and journeys that I have taken, but this book, A Girl With Moonlight In Her Eyes, is more about those lived memories and those experiences I have unconsciously filed away and which have strong emotions attached to their recall.

(A Girl With Moonlight In Her Eyes will be published late summer of 2014)

Life’s Pollution

We all know both genetics and environment play an important part in who we are and what we become. It is not the complete story, of course, but important enough to give us the life tools that we eventually use to live up to our potential or, on the other hand, sabotage, or destroy it.

Genetics we can’t control, not just yet anyway, and the reality is that we and our children have no control over our environment until we are either old enough, or strong, or smart enough to make independent choices to remove ourselves from any negative situation that life has caught us in, or that others in our bag of marbles have created. Even if we lived alone on an island, our environment matters because our mental and physical survival depends on our outlook. Survivor or Victim.

If someone would have given me a book while raising my children and said, “This is how you do it.”, it wouldn’t have mattered. The reality of the adage,”It does take a village”, is so true. But if there is a dysfunctional human force within that unit, the environment becomes polluted and all goes awry.

My children and I were caught in just such a vortex, not of our own doing. As those of you who are familiar with our story, my late husband was diagnosed in his late forties with acute paranoid schizophrenia. As a result, my children and I were caught in his distorted mental web, resulting in extreme dysfunction within our “family village.”

At the time, my mind was always in the torturing present and I had no thought about what it was doing to my children who were innocent bystanders to the chaos. I have often wished I had done things differently, but, unfortunately, I had not the skills to handle what was being thrown at me. Just the genetic strength and faith to get us through it all. I know now, that without that, I could have easily crumbled.

All of this has been on my mind this past year, because the older I get I seem to think of my children a lot, feeling so blessed that they have walked through the fire whole and are giving back to others in a good way. They are great parents, have strong moral values and healthy work ethics. I do feel grateful, because, under the circumstances, it could have gone another way.

This blog post has come about because I have been thinking lately of all of the terrible acts of violence by young people in this country with undiagnosed, untreated mental illness. Schizophrenia shows up in brilliant, achieving youngsters in their late teens or early twenties. Unfortunately, they can go under the radar until it is too late for them to silence the demons in their heads.

If this country can do anything to stop the violence that is happening too often, it is education about and treatment of mental illness. Let us erase the stigma. It is not guns in the hands of responsible citizens, but the mentally ill people who have access to them. The first thing the police did when my husband’s mental illness was diagnosed, was to remove his hunting rifles from our home.

Let us parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, teachers, religious leaders and grandparents in our “villages” be educated and aware of mental illness and the reality that, truly, mental illness knows no social level.

Putting our heads in the sand concerning mental illness, and not recognizing that in this country it is a growing threat to our way of life, is inexcusable. With the stresses all around us, it is not going to get any better any time soon unless we act.

Please check out my charity of choice: THE BRAIN AND BEHAVIOR RESEARCH ORGANIZATION.
http://www.bbrfoundation.org
enews@bbrfoundation.org

OH THOSE ’70’S

I received a photo and text from my oldest daughter on Tuesday that at first made me laugh, then whisked me down memory lane forty-two years and just as quickly, jerked me into the present and just on the cusp of shedding big whopping mama tears on my iPhone.

Maybe it was because it has been raining for three weeks, or maybe it was because my husband inadvertently forgot how to read labels and put a lethal amount of pepper in our spaghetti sauce, or maybe it was because I had a milestone birthday last week, or maybe it was because I am beginning to have unexpected moments of mourning my youth. I don’t know and, honestly, really can’t explain the sanity of a picture of sheets putting me over the edge. Sheets!

But something real definitely triggered emotions within me seeing those “oh so 70’s” psychedelic sheets. The very same sheets that I bought for the girls’ twin beds when we moved to New Jersey. The ones that the pink and orange crazed decorator in me loved so much. And you guessed it, I just had to continue the theme by buying extras to make curtains.

Maybe those sheets reminded me that I was once young, hip and full of surprises. They reminded me that the children are gone, grown and on their own. No more bedrooms to decorate, clothes to pick up, or beds to make. How fast it all went. And where oh where did that 70’s girl go?

P.S. Yes, I still do have one. I use it to carry leaves to the leaf pile in the fall.

STICKY STAMPS

He looked so tired, as if his last burst of energy had left his body a long time ago. His physicality reminded me of the elegant Nubians I had seen in Egypt.

Last Sunday Arthur and I had hopped aboard the jitney that would take us to Lincoln Road for a stroll along the shops, flea market stalls and farmers markets. It is on this jitney that I encountered the weary traveler.

He sat sideways, giving me a view if his hard hat. Small stickers of butterflies and turtles were placed in childlike angles on his hat. Stickers that I recognized from those my grandchildren would stick all over anything that was not moving.

Hesitant to invade his space on the almost empty bus, I couldn’t help but eject myself into his silent space because he looked so weary, so alone.

“Did your children put those stickers on?”, I asked just a little above a whisper, hoping I wasn’t offending him.

He turned and looked a me and in a quiet recognition of my interest in his hat, shook his head up and down.

“You know they love you, don’t you?”

My words seemed to float into the empty space between us. Hanging. Silence.

And then in his weary voice he lowered his head looking at his weathered hands in his lap and replied so quietly, “I hope so. I hope so.”

I wanted to assure him, but I just smiled in reply. I wanted to tell him I know so. This grandma knows when your children or grandchildren put their precious stamps on your things, it makes you theirs to keep. Each time you look at those stickies, a part of their little souls will travel with you no matter how far. Smart little critters. All of them!

STAR CROSSED LOVE

It is really true when it is said youth is wasted on the young. When I was 17 I was emotionally arrogant with selfish dreams of leaving my hometown and my life there far behind me. I achieved my goal by going far away to college and saying goodbye to everything, including my boyfriend. My shame in this is that I didn’t tell him. I neglected or maybe just didn’t have the heart to tell him, my dreams were beyond a life in Steubenville. He thought I would be back.

But that is not the worst of it. I wrote him a “Dear John” letter from college about six weeks into my first semester. I didn’t know he had already bought a ring to surprise me at Christmas.

Hindsight eventually allowed me the privilege of seeing that I was young and just plain selfish and really, really stupid and above all, extremely insensitive. And that is not the worst of it.

A few weeks after that letter I awoke from a horrible dream that my boyfriend was driving at night down Market Street Hill, the main artery into our downtown, and was hurt in a terrible accident. The dream was so real, it was hard for me to shake off, so when my brother came to visit me from his college the next weekend, I told him about my dream.

“Sandra. It happened. I didn’t want to tell you, but he was drinking and had an accident just like you described.”

And so, my guilt about my letter and breaking this nice boy’s heart with my careless attitude about our relationship began and has never left me to this day – of being responsible for his physical and emotional hurting.

I did see him that Christmas, but only once and never again. I was told that he owned a business and finally married a local girl and had two children. Knowing him, he probably forgave me. I am sure I was the farthest thing from his mind two minutes after he met and fell in love again. But I have never forgiven myself.

This morning I got a message from my cousin that my high school boyfriend died this week. On my birthday.

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5	6	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16	17	18
19	20	21	22	23	24	25
26	27	28	29	30	31

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